Why? Because we see a lot of problems with what we’ve been told so far. We’ve been disappointed that the media have failed to demonstrate healthy skepticism while passing along, unchallenged, the (self-serving) assertions of “the authorities.”

It is the job of journalism not only to report what authorities say, but also to confirm their claims, and address anomalies, errors, inconsistencies, outright lies, and cover-ups, large and small.

When it comes to falsehoods of all types, we’ve seen plenty of doozies, and you don’t have to go all the way back to the Tonkin Gulf incident—which helped pave the way for the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Most people now understand that circa 2002-2003, the George W. Bush Administration knowingly exaggerated and deceived in order to justify a desired invasion of Iraq.

Things have not markedly improved with the Obama Administration. The 2011 “raid that killed Bin Laden” at Abbottabad, Pakistan, went a long way toward bolstering Obama’s “toughness cred,” and was probably a factor in his being re-elected. Yet staggering inconsistencies in official accounts of the raid have never been properly reconciled. The current scandal du jour is over the Obama Administration’s putting out fake story lines on Benghazi to divert attention from how it handled facility security in that troubled location.

Yet even partisans on the attack in each of these cases typically fail to get at the real story – which, in the case of Benghazi, has to do with how the entire “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was, as we reported, a cover for a deadly geo-strategic gamble that has opened a can of worms from which have sprung untold Al Qaeda types.

***

So what about the Boston Marathon bombing, in which innocent people died seemingly at the hands of anti-American monsters?  While some insist that under these circumstances everyone, including the media, should prove their patriotism by shutting their eyes and ears, we hope you agree that especially at such times it’s important to ask the tough, even unpopular questions. The Boston story, as we previously noted, is full of question marks and high-stakes implications—all the more reason to dig beneath the screen of official handouts. And, in the coming weeks, that’s just what WhoWhatWhy plans to do.

For now, here are some examples of the things we wish to better understand:

Race Security

 We have been told—and see evidence—of a security presence unprecedented at such athletic events. This includes the claims by Alastair Stevenson, a college cross-country coach and frequent marathoner, that he heard announcements of security drills that day and saw beefed up security. It also includes the presence of personnel from the private contractor Craft International, first in the crowd watching the runners, then, after the bombs went off, actively involved in the crime scene investigation. Is there an explanation for this? What exactly were these security people deployed against?

The JFK Library Fire

We’re told that a fire broke out at almost exactly the same time as the Marathon bombing, a short distance away at the JFK library. Although initial reports indicated a possible explosion, we have since been told that it was just an “accident.” We’ve had very few details since then, though the museum did reopen after a number of days.

MIT Cop

We originally heard from reporters that a police officer from MIT was killed during a confrontation with the Tsarnaev brothers. Later, around the time of a highly publicized funeral for the “hero cop,” the authorities quietly revised their story; in the new account, the officer was shot while sitting in his car, perhaps during an attempt to take his gun, though we’ve seen no evidence of this. No explanation of why the Tsarnaev brothers would even have been on the campus, or wanted or needed his gun, nor has hard proof been produced that the brothers were in fact the cop killers.

7-11

In the midst of the manhunt, we were told that the suspects robbed a 7-11 convenience store to obtain cash for a getaway. But later, that scenario vaporized. How did the initial wrong story come about?

How Tamerlan Died

On the night Tamerlan Tsarnaev was reportedly shot by police, then accidentally run over by his fleeing younger brother, CNN broadcast a video showing a crime scene teeming with police, in which a handcuffed man who looks quite a bit like Tamerlan—having been made to strip naked—is being hustled into a patrol car. The reporters speculated at the time that it might indeed be the bombing suspect.

Later on, the police issued a statement saying it was someone else, a case of mistaken identity. Fine. But who was it? Surely by now we can be told the name of that person—and presumably that person would have no problem recounting his harrowing evening. Perhaps the police are withholding his identity at his request—but given all the wild online speculation that the man in the video might have been Tamerlan himself, why not make more of an effort to clear up the matter? (While the original CNN video does not appear to be available online, numerous people copied and posted versions onto YouTube—and can be found there with a search on “naked man Watertown CNN.”)

Missing the Crucial Block

Somehow, the police managed to comb many blocks in Watertown, but not the block on which Dzhokhar was eventually found. As a result, police did not find him. A homeowner, David Henneberry, did—and that story is rather strange. As soon as the governor relaxed the order that everyone stay indoors (why would the police do that if a deadly terrorist was still on the loose?), Henneberry came out to his driveway, took a look at his boat and noticed, according to the Boston Globe, that

something was amiss. The straps weren’t quite right. The pads seemed somehow askew…. Henneberry, a former telephone company technician, climbed a ladder and peeked inside. There was blood. A lot of blood. And on the other side of the boat’s engine box there was a body.

The Dzhokhar Capture Story

Originally, we were told that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev held police at bay during a lengthy and formidable gun battle from the boat where he had taken shelter. We later learned that he was unarmed, and the hail of gunfire had all come from police. We did not learn what the basis for this deadly torrent was—especially because there’s no evidence that police even knew that the body Henneberry glimpsed on the floor of the boat was Tsarnaev’s, or that this bloodied body, which put up no resistance, was an imminent threat.

From NoBos to Rambos

 We were told that the brothers demonstrated great bravado and confidence with firearms, yet there’s no evidence that they possessed either the experience or skills for such a hypercharged performance. Ordinary people usually only turn into Rambo types in the movies. (Early stories that the brothers practiced at a firing range appear to have fizzled.)

FBI Monitoring

We were originally told that the FBI had no awareness of the brothers. Later, after reports surfaced that the Russians had warned the Americans about the brothers, the FBI admitted it had monitored them. Why the delay in admitting this? And if the FBI knew the brothers were potential problems, why did the bureau dismiss them as of no interest? The FBI has shown the capacity to be interested in, and a willingness to monitor, almost anyone, including peaceful anti-war protesters—so why the purported lack of interest in these two brothers, given the Russian concern?

How Radicalized Were They?

 It was widely reported that in 2010, Tamerlan declared that “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.” But in a call to local radio station WEEI shortly after Tamerlan’s death, a good friend of his since 2005—an American—disputed this: “It’s not true—all of his friends were American.” Describing Tamerlan as “happy go lucky,” this American friend said he was “completely shocked” by the turn of events. He said there were no indications of anything amiss or afoot. In fact, he said, Tamerlan had called him just two months ago, and asked him to go skiing, and had been at his house in the past month.

Also, we are told that Tamerlan became more active and radical after the Russians and FBI took an interest in him. What’s this about? Blowback in response to what he felt was bullying by the feds?

Equally dubious is the evidence of his purported conversion. To wit, an article in which the New York Times interviewed some friends of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and concluded that during a trip last year, as the headline put it, “Suspect in Boston Bombing Talked Jihad in Russia.”

But if you read the report carefully, and think about it contextually, it’s pretty thin gruel. Imagine that you were looking into most any young person who went back to the “homeland”—where the homeland was the scene of war and unrest. Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Kurdistan, etc. How shocking would it be that the young person might discuss his enthusiasm for the “cause” or even professions of interest to “suit up”? Would that be so unusual? Would it point to a probability of someone wanting to kill and maim a large number of innocent people in his adopted country—especially when the adopted country was not the enemy of the people in the homeland?

 Brothers in Arms?

For two brothers to become accomplices in this astonishing crime requires enormous bonds of trust, loyalty, and shared values. Yet friends of the brothers indicate no great closeness between the two. The younger one was apparently not influenced by his brother, and had virtually no interest in Islam or Chechen nationalism. Friends of the older brother barely knew his sibling. And when the older brother was in Russia being ”radicalized,” the younger brother was back here, doing normal kid stuff. How did Tamerlan bring Dzhokhar into this dastardly plot?

Burial

The whole story of Tamerlan’s burial is odd. First, police announced that the body was being entombed in an undisclosed location thanks to a “courageous and compassionate individual” who had come forward to cover the costs. What was courageous about that? Courageous to buck public sentiment? Why was it even necessary for a private individual to do this?

Another thing: We later learned that it was the Tsarnaev’s “Uncle Ruslan” who had claimed the body.

This was surprising because of the uncle’s poor relationship with his nephews, and his crucial early role in incriminating them. Within days of the bombing, the uncle had declared Tamerlan “a loser,” implying that he found it totally believable that his flesh and blood would commit this astonishing atrocity. We later learned that he hadn’t had contact with them for years. We also later learned (although not from mainstream news sources) that Uncle Ruslan worked in the oil and gas business and had intriguing connections—and that his ex-father-in-law was a high CIA official with ties to Chechen operations.

Will the burial of Tsarnaev near Richmond, Virginia, 550 miles from the scene of the crime, hinder any potential efforts to exhume his body and learn more about how he died?

Dead (and Almost Dead) Men Tell No Tales

 We have a case where one of the suspects was killed, and the other was nearly killed and literally silenced up to this point. Obviously, the key to this case would be to get Dzhokhar into a place where he could speak freely and without fear or coercion. What is happening on that front? There’s been a near blackout of information.

Anonymous Sourcing

 This story has seen constant leaks by “sources close to the investigation.” Assuming those leaks are authorized, what is the purpose? Assuming everyone is entitled to a fair trial, these leaks make it harder for Dzhokhar to get one—and consistently advance a hostile narrative.

 Kids with Cars

 There’s an awful lot of money and fancy cars around this story. Tamerlan had a Mercedes; Dzhokhar’s foreign friends had expensive cars. And the unnamed “carjacking victim”?  A 26-year-old engineer who had recently gotten his Masters, he had a brand new $50,000 Mercedes SUV and was “out for a spin” at the time of the alleged carjacking. Remember the classic journalistic advice: “Follow the money?” Maybe it should be Follow the Mercedes.

Qui Bono?

What motivations could anyone have to manipulate this tragedy in which three innocents were killed and hundreds were injured and maimed? What role does international jockeying for access to the tremendous mineral wealth in the republics on Russia’s southern flank play in the actions of terrorists at an iconic American sporting event? As we are reminded time and again, with Iraq (see this and this) with Libya, with Afghanistan, with just about any deep and complex story with global ramifications, you probe a little and pretty soon you’ve struck oil—or some other precious resource. Find a big story that doesn’t have money at its root, and it will be an unusual story, to say the least.

Also, in a time when our civil liberties are eroded and the security state expanded every time terrorists strike, we’d do well to always take a closer look.

GRAPHIC:  http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/mtkang/mtkang1109/mtkang110900159/10599209-spider-web-illustration-for-background.jpg

The half-century mark since the assassination of John F Kennedy was supposed to be some kind of event. Lots of books were in the offing. Broadcasters were primed. We were going to get some really huge revelations, some kind of major step forward in coming to terms with this event that has so affected America and so divided its population.

And guess what? Eh. Basically, eh. Nothing so amazing (to be really generous), and, sorry to say, hardly anyone is paying real attention.

Hollywood and the media have produced and are producing a body of work that by and large perpetuates the official story of 1963 or threatens to further muddy the waters, while ignoring the massive amount of research—and general consensus by most researchers, the public and a congressional committee—that there’s far more to the story.

At WhoWhatWhy, we think the public has a right to something better. To real inquiry that follows fact trails wherever they go. To a kind of fearlessness in search of explanations that might not be “wise” in a conventional journalistic career but that distinguish the only kind of journalism truly worth its salt.

Over the past few years, we’ve published a number of articles on JFK (and on the equally problematical official account of his brother’s death and that of Martin Luther King).

We’re determined to do more. But it’s hard when you’re a small outfit with limited staff and financial resources. Nevertheless, we’ll keep at it.

In the meantime, here are links to relevant articles we’ve already published over the past several years. See which ones are of interest. And please spread the word by using social media and email lists to alert others.

2010

Letters to Jackie, But What About Jack? How to Avoid the Heart of the JFK Assassination

The media can’t get enough of those Kennedys. The more banal the better. No depth, please!

**

Peculiar Posner

Gerald Posner, a leader in claiming Lee Harvey Oswald had no CIA ties, back after all these years, representing the Afghan president’s brother—and claiming that man has no CIA ties either.

**

What Obama is Up Against

Ongoing threats to presidents who buck the system.

**

Covering up: A tale of two autopsies

The New York Times is suspicious of a government coverup, involving an autopsy! (Er, in Russia, that is.)

**

2011

Roads Not Taken: John F. Kennedy, Patrice Lumumba and George H. W. Bush

One dead African nationalist, one victorious Western puppet, and two very different American presidents.

**

The NY Times’s Ostrich Act on JFK Assassination Getting Old

It’s not easy being the Grey Ostrich. Fifty years is a long time to keep your head in the sand.

**

Comedy and Reality Break: Bill Hicks on 11/22/63

Sometimes, only a “comedian” can tell the truth. Bill Hicks on the Kennedy assassination.

**

NY Times’s Umbrella Man Exposed

The New York Times has a good laugh about coincidences in the Kennedy assassination. See if you buy their reasoning.

**

JFK Umbrella Man—More Doubts

More on the Umbrella Man—and some thoughts on the cover he provided.

**

The Military and Those Strange Threats to Obama

Are these “reminders” to Obama about who really is in charge?

**

2012

The Deaths of JFK, RFK and Silence of the Lambs

Here’s how Hollywood and the media establishment package stupidity for easy pouring into our heads.

**

The JFK Factor: Bill O’Reilly on the Assassination, Then and Now

Back when he was a reporter, Bill O’Reilly was hot on the trail of the JFK assassination—and he bravely reported evidence of conspiracy and intelligence connections. Now that he’s a Fox zillionaire, well…..

**

Someone Would Have Talked? Someone Would Be Crazy

Those who could tell all know to keep quiet. And those who know pieces of the story get ignored.

**

A Closer Look At the Secret Service

Those wacky Secret Service agents are at it again!

**

Secret Service Vet With Very Strange JFK Story

You’ll want to hear what Abraham Bolden has to say.

**

 The RFK Shooting: Eyewitness to Second Gunman

What if an eyewitness came forward with evidence of conspiracy? What would happen? NOTHING.

**

Is the Government Holding Back Crucial Documents?

Why, yes! And that’s none other than Barack Obama withholding JFK assassination records. A Democrat.

**

The Right Thing: The Abe Bolden Petition

Very belatedly, a modest effort to right a wrong done to one Secret Service agent who did try to halt the unthinkable.

**

Dallas Diminishes JFK, His Legacy, and Those Who Care About Democracy

When it comes to covering up its disgraceful history, the city of Dallas is just tops.

**

2013

 RFK Assassination Legal Case Update

Growing evidence that Sirhan Sirhan was not acting alone—and was not the primary shooter of Robert F. Kennedy.

**

Outside the Box Video Series: The Men Who Killed Kennedy

A classic, popular in England, squelched in the USA.

**

TVWHO: Obama Admin Bottles JFK Assassination Records

For those who like their news spoken not typed—Russ Baker on TV, discussing the Kennedy assassination and the government’s ongoing efforts to block crucial records releases.

http://whowhatwhy.com/support-whowhatwhy/

To get to San Francisco from where I live, I usually drive through the hamlet of Nicasio. It’s just a scattering of wooden structures around a community baseball field. The hills beyond are mainly ranches, not much changed from a century ago.

 Recently, a sign appeared by the road there. “SOON TO BE BUILT ON THIS SITE,” it said, and my insides went code red. I thought of bulldozers, asphalt, a mange of houses with glandular disorders.

 Then I saw the [sign’s] smaller print: “Thanks to your help, absolutely nothing.”

 That story makes me smile, because it so Jon Rowe. A close friend and idea co-conspirator, Jon tirelessly challenged the American anthem, “more, faster, bigger, louder.” For years, in one article and column after another, he asked that we pause our relentlessly self-centered, materialistic spree long enough to consider where it might be leading us.

If one thing most defined Jon’s work, which appeared in The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Monthly and other publications, it was his ability to help us better see ourselves, our lives, and our culture—with clear, simple, oddly beautiful prose.

Life was once rich in occasions for spontaneous interaction. People shopped on Main Streets, visited on front porches, attended political events in public venues. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had their famous debates in county fairgrounds and town squares all over Illinois, and farmers and townspeople sat for hours in the heat and dust to hear.

 Today most Americans live in suburbs conceived as staging areas for consumption. They move about in the enclosure of cars and shop in the anonymity of malls from which community activities are largely excluded. Politics consists mostly of negative ads shown on television screens. Then people wonder why they feel lonely and depressed, and why the sense of community has vanished.

 Over the course of his life, Jon was and did many things—he worked in government, in journalism, he lived in several of the nation’s biggest East Coast cities and ended up as an activist and radio host in a tiny West Coast town. Along the way, he discovered that our definition of “progress” was seriously misleading, because our statistical indices, such as the Gross Domestic Product, count almost everything business does as progress: i.e., each tree cut down is counted as a plus, while the downside of all those trees lost is not taken into consideration.

He also saw that what we share in common is more important than the things that divide us or put us into constant competition. This wasn’t just some abstract notion. It was about real things you inhale, stand under, stroll upon.

I remember whenever Jon visited me in New York, he would register genuine joy at all the things that make this metropolis seem so human-scaled: the small businesses with the owner on the premises, the vest pocket parks, the walking, the corner interactions—how I could descend from my apartment onto a street teeming with opportunities to eat, read, and immerse myself in the passing parade.

Jon died unexpectedly before he had a chance to fully explain and implement his ideas concerning the little-understood concept of “the commons”—and certainly before enough people got to learn of them and of him. Indeed, when I looked up “The Commons” on Wikipedia, I found a number of commons advocates listed (including Peter Barnes, Jon’s close friend and collaborator), but Jon’s name was not even included. That’s why a group of his friends got together after his death in 2011 and pledged to help spread his ideas in his absence.

The result is Our Common Wealth, a collection of his writings from 1993 forward.

Commons: An Uncommon Concept

The commons, simply put, is everything not claimed as private or governmental property. It is the multitude of wonderful things we all share, but rarely consider. The commons includes things you can see and touch, as in beach and mountain, but it is also conceptual. It exists when we decide to work together for a common interest rather than in pursuit of individual gain. Some of us, in our own battles in our communities, have long been fighting for the commons—and didn’t even know it.

The term “commons” dates back to medieval England, when it referred to certain rights that everyone had, even on land owned by the aristocracy, for example, to graze their animals. Over the years, the term has evolved. The basic notion, though, is much older—Roman law actually declared certain things intrinsically common property, notably air, wildlife, and navigable waters. As Jon noted:

Government does not own these and therefore cannot privatize them, even if it wants to. Much like trustees of an estate, governments are legally obliged to maintain these assets for the benefit of all, including future generations.

But the commons is under constant assault.

Inch by inch, Jefferson’s vision for America is turning upside down. Centuries ago the concept of private property emerged as a means of liberation. It helped break the shackles of royal power and served as a bulwark against the state. But as Jefferson intuited, taken too far, private property becomes another version of what it once opposed.

 In fact, we’ve become so enamored with the promises of privatization that we’ve permitted it in almost every sphere, no matter how illogical or inequitable. Take water, “a gift of nature” traditionally available to all save the drought-stricken. This common resource is now under threat from developments like the disappearance of public water fountains and the growth of a humongous bottled-water industry.

Meanwhile, the very gene pool we share with all life is being divided up into patentable tranches, like the corporate seeds that have drawn the ire of both small farmers and consumer groups.

 ***

 We scarcely discuss the injustice and inutility of large corporations taking what we all own and doing whatever they want with it, without compensating us. Consider the Earth’s atmosphere,

a prolific source of value that protects us from ultraviolet rays, keeps temperatures stable, delivers oxygen, and replenishes fresh water. No human-made product comes close in terms of usefulness. Yet corporations have been using the atmosphere as an unlimited waste dump, and the damages consequently accrued are both enormous and ignored.

 It really is remarkable when you think about it (alas, most of us don’t think about it) — this corporate seizure, cannibalization, despoliation of things that we all own communally. Such takeovers are blessed by a government that corporations increasingly own. Yet if we take the time look more closely, we can see a state of affairs that violates the most basic principles of the social contract. Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the first polio vaccine, understood this. When asked who would own the drug, he replied: “There is no patent….Could you patent the sun?”

Well, six decades later…..almost.

… Corporations now claim ownership of everything under the sun, if not the sun itself: body parts, business practices, DNA. They even claim ownership of the English language. McDonald’s has asserted trademark claims to 131 common words and phrases, such as “Always Fun” and “Made For You.”

 The Cost of Market Mania

The Internet has promised something different—information abundant and free. It has spawned an atmosphere of exuberant creativity and generosity. In the early days of the Web, a fellow named Jimmy Wales had an idea that probably sounded crazy to many at the time: create knowledge online for free, using volunteers who got paid nothing at all. Today, that idea is called Wikipedia. It is the ultimate commons—and how many of us would want to do without it?

But if the Web presents new opportunities for sharing, it also presents opportunities for corporations to fence off profitable chunks of cyberspace. These days, corporations are trying to block municipalities from offering their citizens universal free wi-fi. The reason? The corporations can’t make a buck off it. So they employ an army of influencers to convince us that something as innocuous as this is somehow harmful.

Jon Rowe was outraged by this power play.

 Municipal wi-fi isn’t a step toward socialism any more than free sidewalks are. Free sidewalks mean more business, not less, for enterprises that connect to them. Just so, city-provided wi-fi is good for enterprises that do business via the Web, as opposed to those that sell connections. The argument that municipal wi-fi is bad for free enterprise is totally specious.

 When FDR’s co-ops extended wires to isolated farms, private enterprise did not suffer. To the contrary, it had new customers for light bulbs and refrigerators and many other things. Even markets benefit from a world in which some things aren’t run for private profit.

 The alternative is to put everything on the market. Yet the market is not quite so wonderful and majestic in all its aspects as we are constantly told. Jon Rowe was particularly struck by the enormous burden placed on befuddled consumers to sort through the endless and deliberately confusing “options” offered by health insurance providers, cell phone services, banks and the like, making it punishingly difficult to figure out what is in our interests and what is a rip-off.

Indeed, part of Jon Rowe’s brilliance was to see our “market mania” as itself largely the creation of marketing—and to see that the commons could use a little of the pixie dust.

 A few centuries ago, people looked at economic life and saw many seemingly unrelated things. They saw factories and farms, shipping firms and theaters, and so on. Then, in 1776, Adam Smith came along and said, “These aren’t separate things. They are different aspects of the same thing—the market.” His insight gave mental shape to the whole, and the idea of the market with its beneficent “invisible hand” has dominated public imagination ever since.

 It has certainly made life easy for the Wall Street Journal. Without the market to cast a devotional glow upon private transactions, the Journal would be left with just a welter of deals to report. The market ties those mundane transactions into a larger narrative of uplift and grace. The editorial writers do not have to articulate this, of course; it is embedded in the magical word market.

 We need to do something similar with the commons—to embed it not with myth but with truth, possibility, and morality. The true part is, The commons is real, huge, and invaluable, and it belongs to all of us. It’s also being destroyed—not by itself, but by too much privatization. The possibility part is, We have the capacity to save the commons, though time is short. The moral part is, It’s our right and duty to save the commons.

 For the growing number of militant and outspoken Libertarians, for whom “Austrian economics” is the Kool-Aid of choice, Rowe has a cautionary note. For this, he relies on no less an authority than Wilhelm Ropke, an Austrian economist greatly influenced by Ludwig von Mises.

Ropke, according to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, “devoted his career to combating collectivism in economic, social and political theory.” Yet in a book he wrote called A Humane Economy, Ropke confessed that his beloved market was not to be entirely trusted. “The highest interests of the community and the indispensable things of life have no exchange value and are neglected if supply and demand are allowed to dominate the field,” he wrote. “The supporters of the market economy do it the worst service by not observing its limits and conditions.”

 Besides, anyone who thinks that private riches and possessions are entirely self-earned is willfully blind. As Rowe noted:

Virtually all “private” wealth emerges from collaboration among individuals, society and nature. The most “self-made” men and women draw upon a vast pool of knowledge and natural gifts they did nothing to create. They also benefit from schools, roads and other public services, including enforcement of contracts and property rights. Warren Buffett, whose candor is in the same league as his wealth, says that society is responsible for “a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.”

 In fact, the vaunted market economy as it actually works in the real world is replete with private interests eagerly accepting taxpayer subsidies. This ranges from our buying roads for private timber companies harvesting public land—more than we get back in fees from them—to media conglomerates getting free access to public airwaves so they can bombard us with ads.

We do not question the mantra of “private over all,” in part, because we have elevated economists to quasi-deities, and abdicated the responsibility to ask: does the creed of “selfish is best” really make sense for our lives?

 [F]or most economists, context barely exists. They fixate on a hypothetical molecule of economic action called homo economicus. This is the imagined creature who inhabits the economics texts and computer models that are the silent dictators of analysis and policy. He or it seeks only and always to maximize his “utility.” He has no social affinities, no lapses of judgment, no capacity for thinking about anyone beside himself. He goes through life with a relentless calculus of personal loss and gain. Basically he has the emotional development of a three-year-old, only with better math skills.

 ***

It is of course easy to dismiss Jonathan Rowe as a naïve sentimentalist, irrelevant to the “march of progress.” But as we more rigorously calculate the costs associated with that march, we see that this is no longer simply a philosophical discussion. Increasingly, we see that we are running out of space, and resources, and time.

As Rowe noted, where once commons were abundant and products scarce, today we have the reverse. As a result, the quality of our lives is greatly diminished..

 For this reason the commons is not a relic. It is a parallel economy that does real work, a counterpoise to the market that provides antidotes to many pathologies of the modern age.

 Some aspects of the commons are intangible, but no less vital. Here’s one: quiet. Studies show that sleep is essential to high performance in work and school, that it improves health and increases energy.

 The market’s answer is drugs for sleeping and concentration—more products for sale, in other words. But does not quiet get better results at less expense? Critics say noise controls are obstacles to the economy. In reality they are economic measures that meet a real need.

 Even more intangible: childhood itself.

 Not long ago, kids played their own games. They were weaned on centuries-old stories that spoke to them at a deep emotional level. Storytelling in families established a bond between generations and provided a window to the adult world. Today this cultural ecosystem is dying. Kids are immersed in narratives constructed for the purpose of making them want things. They play games devised by corporations, and their toys are expensive devices in which the content lies in the product rather than the child. It is not coincidental that kids are petulant and overweight and have trouble focusing their attention.

What’s Wrong, and What Could Be So Right

It turns out that, as Jon noted, neither the market nor big government work so well that we cannot find plenty of areas in which the commons produces results as good or better–like the ad hoc community self-help associations that sprang up after Hurricane Sandy.

In fact, throughout the United States and the world, we see examples of innovations in the commons, from the opening of downtown public spaces to the spread of farmers markets to the enlivening of neighborhoods where families voluntarily tear down back fences to create larger shared spaces.

One of the ideas that excited Jon was ‘time banking.” Individuals “bank” good deeds in a central repository from which they themselves may later “draw” benefits. This kind of “pay it forward” exchange could be especially useful for our aging population, encouraging people in their prime to help others and then get the help they need at a later stage in life. And that’s just for starters.

In the American West, there is a growing movement to tear down dams so that water can flow back to its most beneficial uses. In much the same way, there’s a need to release time back into the commons. To put it another way, more flexibility to the workday, and more time off, does not mean a slackening of work effort.

 Rather, it means a shifting of work time from the market to the commons. The best thing Bill Clinton did as president may have been the Family and Medical Leave Act, which enabled parents to spend up to four months with newborn children before returning to work. Business lobbyists predicted economic disaster. Instead, we had an economic boom, and parents got a few months to be real parents.

 Time is the basic human resource and the starting point of freedom. To use more time for commons work could be the next freedom movement, the one that truly claims the promise of the Industrial Revolution.

 In short, Jon Rowe thought that shared innovations, interests and spaces had an intrinsic value warranting at least the same protections and encouragements afforded the private and the governmental. Thus we would see measures to limit the ability of behemoths like WalMart and shopping mall companies to blithely destroy Main Street, and measures to stop big corporations from hijacking the Internet by imposing two-tiered pricing benefiting big users. As defenders of the commons, we must assert our shared interests by saying, “Here, but no further.”

 Steps like these would not mean more government intrusion into economic, environmental, and social space. Rather, they would make it possible for something besides corporations to occupy these spaces.

 Indeed, more and more, non-corporate activities are occupying our spaces. As I was finishing this article, I took a walk down to New York’s Lower East Side for the Ideas City Festival. Though small local for-profits also participated, the event was defined by the presence of innovative and joyously free or inexpensive concepts and enterprises, there for everyone to enjoy. I saw people collecting junked electronics for recycling, a bus that brings mobile gardens to green-starved inner cities, a lending library of sketch books prepared by strangers from all over the world, people teaching others how to fix objects, on and on it went.

After all, sharing really isn’t so bad, once you get used to it. If you can just get over the bad words with which it is unfairly associated.

(You can learn more about Jonathan Rowe, a founding influence at WhoWhatWhy, here)

Barrett Brown lounges in his Dallas apartment, courtesy of D Magazine

Several new developments in the Barrett Brown case suggest that the playing field between the cyber-activist/journalist and the government may be starting to even out—at least a bit. But the feds aren’t giving up anytime soon.

On April 28 it was announced that Brown—currently facing upwards of 100 years behind bars for a slew of felonies ostensibly unrelated to his work as a journalist—had retained new defense counsel, including heavyweights certain to draw more attention to his case than ever before.

Brown’s new team will consist of attorneys Ahmed Ghappour and Charles Swift.

Swift’s name should be familiar to legal junkies in the post 9/11-era. A former Lt. Commander in the US Navy’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, he represented Salim Hamdan in his successful bid to gain Supreme Court recognition of habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Swift now focuses on national security and military litigation as a partner in his private practice.

For Brown, the change came not a moment too soon. As the target of what feels like an establishment pile-on, Brown will need the best defense money can buy—that is, if they’ll let him buy it.

On April 17, Magistrate Judge Paul Stickney had ordered the seizure of thousands of dollars in defense funds, solicited and held in an outside account with no connection to Brown. Although the funds were apparently listed in a still-sealed financial affidavit provided by Brown’s former court-appointed attorney, it remains unclear how the money could be legally seized._­

However, in a hearing on May 1, Judge Stickney essentially reversed himself, denying the government’s motion to transfer the funds to the court for remuneration to Brown’s original public defender. Stickney then accepted that the cash reserves be used to retain Ghappour and Swift.

The prosecution had seemingly hoped to hobble Brown by depleting his war chest and therefore his ability to defend himself. With the new ruling however, which allows him to spend the money on counsel of his choice—one not overburdened by a public defender’s typically heavy caseload—the court has dealt the prosecution a serious setback.

***

The hearing came about a month after the Department of Justice (DOJ) dusted off a tried-and-true tactic in its war on dissent in the digital age: the viral subpoena.

On April 2, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records and personal information on one of its clients, a research wiki known as ProjectPM.

The brainchild of Barrett Brown, ProjectPM—it should be noted—is entirely legal.

PM is a crowd-sourced research effort to study an online trove of emails. They reveal the dirty tricks cooked up by US intelligence contractors, to help government and private entities—both here and abroad—battle critics.

The emails were originally obtained by the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous. Brown had nothing to do with the hacking, nor is the government claiming he did.

As we reported in our February piece on Brown’s saga, his stated goal was to create a better picture of the activities of these contractors and to publicly map out the web of relationships between them and the powerful agencies for whom they often work. In short, he sought to shine a light on the dark world of intelligence contracting in the post-9/11 age.

Cumulative evidence suggests that the ultimate goal of the prosecution was not only to head off PM, but also discourage other such net activism. If so, it has certainly succeeded on the first count. Since Brown’s imprisonment last September, ProjectPM has come to a halt. And now CloudFlare will likely be forced to turn over records on third parties who were engaged in constitutionally-protected conduct related to curating or visiting the website.

A Digital Fishing Trawler

“The prosecution of Barrett Brown is an over-prosecution,” attorney Jason Flores-Williams told WhoWhatWhy. A member of the recently-conceived Whistleblower Defense League, he had originally filed a motion to quash the subpoena on behalf of a third party. His then-client—a Dutch national who had built newsgathering sites for Mr. Brown—eventually declined to proceed, paving the way for it go forward. “They [DOJ] use [the prosecution] to go on a fishing expedition to see who else may be out there investigating the activities of their own government. And that is a return to the era of McCarthy.”

The inter-connected structure of the Internet enables such “viral subpoenas,” whereby private information about almost anyone within a particular network—like say, journalists accessing information published by ProjectPM—can be collected under the auspices of a single indictment.

By subpoenaing all records associated with the domain name, the government could know and log the IP addresses of untold numbers of activists, journalists, and others who collaborated at some level on Brown’s work as a journalist.

“We’ve long been worried that broad subpoenas issued to online service providers or even a wiki can have chilling effects on free speech,” says Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—a digital rights advocacy group. “Broad subpoenas and search warrants are clearly a way to gather information about large groups of people and learn about associations and connections.”

Chevron’s Jungle Seine

Activists have long had to contend with such fishing expeditions by authorities and civil defendants. In October 2012, EFF and EarthRights International (ERI), an environmental advocacy group, fought to quash a similar subpoena issued in a civil case against the oil giant Chevron.  A year earlier, an Ecuadorian court had imposed a judgment of over $17 billion against Chevron for illegally dumping into the Amazon rainforest billions of gallons of some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man.

In response, Chevron sought to compel three email providers to turn over emails from over 100 accounts related to participants in the lawsuit, including environmental activists, journalists, and attorneys. Chevron insisted they were part of a conspiracy with Ecuadorian officials to defraud the company. Access to such user data would have enabled Chevron to track the movements and communications of many involved in the action.

“Environmental advocates have the right to speak anonymously and travel without their every move and association being exposed to Chevron,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hoffman, in a press release issued at the time. “These sweeping subpoenas create a chilling effect among those who have spoken out against the oil giant’s activities in Ecuador.”

Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins denied Chevron’s subpoena attempt. But other, non-civil cases didn’t pan out as well.

The State’s Past Hauls  

As part of the Justice Department’s grand jury probe of WikiLeaks in 2010—reportedly still ongoing—a court ordered Twitter to hand over records of users the DOJ believed to be involved with the whistleblowing website, including a parliamentarian from Iceland. The court then sealed the subpoena from public view, precluding knowledge of what the government was seeking and from whom. Meanwhile, another digital muckraker—WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—remains holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for fear of extradition to the United States. Facing trial stateside remains a real threat with the grand jury’s continued operation.

A similar action was taken in a case involving Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists. In early 2012, the New York City District Attorney’s Office asked Twitter for all of its information regarding Malcolm Harris, one of 700 protestors arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge during an OWS action the prior October. Harris contested the subpoena, but was blocked on procedural grounds since technically all of the personal information requested belongs to Twitter.

Thanks to legal grey areas in the age of digital information, the government was able to obtain these records with a subpoena rather than a search warrant, despite Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Stored Communications Act. Harris later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct during the march.

A New Line of Defense

Despite the government’s attempted chill on freedom of association, plus its attempts to hinder Brown from mounting a reasonable defense, his new legal team provides a level of name recognition and experience the feds cannot be happy about. Attorneys Ahmed Ghappour and Charles Swift have worked under far more oppressive legal conditions, and represented far more marginalized defendants in the past. As noted, they’ve both represented perhaps the most disenfranchised and oppressed population currently in American detention: Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Charles Swift—the former defense lawyer for Guantanamo Bay prisoner Salim Hamdan—successfully sued former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the constitutionality of military tribunals and the treatment of GITMO prisoners. Swift won his case in front of the Supreme Court; this led to Congressional passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an attempt to remove restrictions on the government’s ability to hold so-called “enemy combatants” indefinitely without trial. The provision in the 2006 legislation denying enemy combatants the right to challenge their detention was itself declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2008.

In 2004, Esquire chronicled Swift as part of “the next wave of American leaders,” defined by the experience of the Iraq War in a story titled “Best + Brightest: The Iraq Generation.” After noting that he had compared former president “George W. Bush to King George III,” the piece documented Swift’s quest for justice at Guantanamo Bay:

Steeped in the law and in history, Swift is not at all shy about taking you deep into why, last April, he sued not only President Bush but also Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of Salim Hamdan, a thirty-four-year-old Yemeni man who’d once worked in bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan. Swift was assigned to represent Hamdan last December. The more he learned about the new tribunal system, the more uneasy Swift became.

It took him almost two months even to meet with his new client, who was incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was startled to discover that the government had not provided him with a translator. Swift also discovered that the new system of military tribunals was being made up from scratch, ignoring the precedents set by previous tribunals. “The only thing this system gave an advantage to was interrogation, in getting rid of the Geneva Conventions and the rules of evidence,” Swift explains.

“What became clear is that the president had determined to deviate from past practices. They were determined to make up their own rules.” In response, Swift sued the government, charging that the new system of tribunals violates the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The case is now pending in Washington, D. C.

“Historically,” Swift says, “it always depends on whether we make decisions out of fear or out of convictions. When we make them out of fear, we’re rarely proud of them a hundred years later.”

Swift’s colleague in the defense of Barrett Brown, Ahmed Ghappour, teaches at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Formerly of the non-profit advocacy organization Reprieve UK, he has challenged the unlawful detention of more than 40 inmates at Guantanamo. Ghappour has also been a participant in litigation regarding secret detention and extraordinary rendition—the Clinton-initiated practice of shipping prisoners to third-world countries where they can be tortured by allied security services.

According to a press release, his recent work consists of “direct[ing] the National Security Defense Project, an access to justice initiative that raises constitutional challenges in national security and cyber security cases.” Since both men are known for working with some of the most abused and persecuted persons of the last decade, Swift and Ghappour’s decision to take this case should be enough to signal to the media at large that the Brown prosecution raises serious civil-liberties issues.

Shifting the Power Balance

Barrett Brown used the unique ability of the Internet to democratize information access and dissemination, thus shifting the power balance between citizen and state.  For that, he and his family are paying a price.

Brown was seized by the government in September 2012 in response to a YouTube video showing him making vague threats against an FBI agent. Those threats, however imprudent, were explicitly non-violent. While in a state of anguish and opiate withdrawal Brown lashed out against the government for going after his mother– because she had allowed him to stay at her home while the FBI raided his apartment looking for information related to ProjectPM and other hacked data. Now Brown’s mother, Karen McCutchin, is as much a part of the tale as her son; on March 21 of this year, she pleaded guilty to a charge of obstructing the execution of a search warrant.

As relayed by the Dallas Morning News, Swift downplayed the significance of the YouTube video to the prosecution:

“Quite frankly, that’s the less interesting part of the case, but those are important charges from Barrett’s perspective,” says Swift. “My question for the government is: Why are you bringing these charges? Were you really afraid? Did he have real capability? I’ve not mastered the facts yet. But the allegations don’t dissuade me.”

***

The Brown trial has broad implications—for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and may help determine whether and how corporate and security-state interests tame the Internet. Yet, despite its importance, the story still has not reached the mainstream media. It has been limited to a column by civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, a brief segment on Al Jazeera (in which this reporter participated), as well as entries from the non-traditional news sources VICE and Gawker. The failure of the news outlets from which 99 percent of the public gets its information to pay any attention to this case is in itself remarkable, given the consequences. WhoWhatWhy understands the significance of the Brown case, and will continue to report on it as it develops.

Who wouldn’t like, for once, to hear a story of Israelis and Palestinians getting along? Here’s a moving program to help children in this troubled land to bridge the perennial hostility gap—literally, by touching. Put the cynicism aside for a moment and revel in this beautiful documentary trailer.

If you don’t get a little choked up, well, there really is something wrong with you.

Dancing in Jaffa Trailer from kNow Productions on Vimeo.

More info here.

Beyond the initial public spectacle and carefully stage-managed press statements, presidential library openings have a deeper significance for the American people. They represent the ever-permeable frontier where a former president’s need to influence history’s judgment meets the need of the people to understand what happened on each president’s watch.

This week’s dedication gives us a timely opportunity to revisit an important chapter in Russ Baker’s book “Family of Secrets,” which describes what happened when the Bush family got its scion, George W., elected president. Consider this brief quote from the section entitled “Domestic Disturbance” that’s chillingly on point for this week:

“Thus began one of the most extraordinary clampdowns in American history. It culminated in November, 2001, when W. took time out of the frenzied response to the 9/11 attacks to issue an executive order declaring that a former president could assert executive privilege over his papers against the will of the incumbent…The bias was consistently toward secrecy, rather than toward coming clean with the public.” – Family of Secrets, Page 467

At a time when we’re looking to our leaders for more transparency, we are instead confronted with snowballing evidence of what Noam Chomsky calls “manufactured consent.” By connecting the dots for us so expertly in “Family of Secrets,” Russ Baker reminds us to keep asking tough questions and staking our claim to the truths that former presidents are so eager to bury or spin out of sight.

***

Here is Chapter 23 of the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, by WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker:

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Some details have been omitted for space.)

Domestic Disturbance

As we have seen, a perceptual gap is at the essence of the Bush enterprise. The actuality has tended toward wars for resources and the preservation of class prerogative, all abetted by secrecy, intimidation, and the dark arts of both psychological and covert ops. The appearance has been of a genial George H.W. (“Poppy”) and a born-again if bumptious George W.

Their campaign themes played off these perceptions: compassionate conservatism and an ability to work with political adversaries; a patrician concern for the environment and a desire to balance stewardship of natural resources with private property rights; a desire to shrink the federal government but only so as to empower people to control their own lives and destinies; an aversion to liberal—and costly—nation-building exercises abroad. These were the polemical packages; and in their different ways, both Poppy and son conveyed a sense of rectitude and traditional values, even as their campaigns were run with the hard and cynical calculus of political hit jobs.

Poppy, as mentioned, was more discreet and could be persuaded to act in a responsible manner. An example was when Richard Darman, his budget director, convinced him to raise taxes to help control the deficit. The right never forgave him, and W. was not about to repeat the mistake.

What Poppy had done quietly, even furtively, W. often did with the swagger of the entitled prince. The result was a government that in essence was not unlike those of third world oligarchs—a vehicle for military dominance and bountiful favors for supporters and friends. The ruler would preside unchallenged. Dissonant truths would be suppressed, and the tellers of them banished.

Virtually the first order of business after the 2001 inauguration had been to make sure that no nasty secrets came back to embarrass the new occupant of the White House—or his father. Thus began one of the most extraordinary clampdowns in American history. It culminated in November, 2001, when W. took time out of the frenzied response to the 9/11 attacks to issue an executive order declaring that a former president could assert executive privilege over his papers against the will of the incumbent. In doing so, Bush overturned a measure Ronald Reagan had instituted just before he left office. At the same time, Bush’s order allows a sitting president to block the release of a predecessor’s papers, even if that predecessor had approved the release. The bias was consistently toward secrecy, rather than toward coming clean with the public.

There followed a full- scale assault on open- government laws. Agencies that had once been happy to provide documents turned suspicious and at times hostile. Archives were locked up and the affairs of Bush’s father, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney in previous administrations were essentially closed to view. Just one example: the administration began dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s network of technical libraries, which, among other things, made pollution and hazardous substance discharge data available to the public. In 2007, Congress ordered the libraries restored.

For his part, Poppy chose to put his presidential library and papers at Texas A&M University, a hub of military recruitment and one of the few American universities with direct links to the CIA. The head of the library, and later of the university itself, was Robert Gates, who had been CIA director under Poppy. With Gates in charge, the presidential library was built on donations from oil sheikhdoms and U.S. oilmen.¹ No surprise, this. Throughout the administrations of the two George Bushes, and in the period of exile between, we would see the old crew: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gates, and James A. Baker III. When the Iraq situation grew increasingly untenable and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had to go, Gates became his successor. When the clamor for an inquiry into 9/11 became too great, Poppy’s lieutenant Baker cochaired an investigative panel. In charge of evaluating wiretap requests? Baker’s son, James A. Baker IV.²

The extended Bush family, which had helped Poppy write history, now was closing ranks to prevent disclosure of what they had done—and were still doing. The term “library” was turned upside down, and became not a way to make information available but rather a way to bury it. It became about disinformation instead of information. It is fitting that such a monument was funded by oil millions from essentially closed, despotic regimes supported by the United States.

In addition, back in Washington there was an unprecedented effort to reclassify thousands of documents and remove them from public view. Other documents simply disappeared. Data were slanted for political ends, often for the convenience of corporations. “Secrecy in the Bush administration is not limited to one or two individuals,” Steven Aftergood, director of the nonprofit Project on Government Secrecy, told me in 2002. “It is a guiding philosophy.”³

Indeed it was. As we have seen in preceding chapters, governance and spycraft merged under the Bushes, with a cynical and Machiavellian edge. Secrecy, destruction of documents, creation of alibis, control of information flow, and the rewriting of history—these were not occasional exercises but rather operating principles.

During W.’s Texas governorship, Alberto Gonzales had instructed staffers to obtain their own private e-mail accounts for in-house communication. The purpose was to keep the public business from the public. Later, during W.’s presidency, it emerged that Karl Rove and other staffers were using accounts at the Republican National Committee, not the White House, to communicate with each other for a similar reason. Later they claimed that most of those e-mails had been accidentally deleted.⁴

As White House counsel, Gonzales told W. himself to stop using e-mail altogether. Shortly after taking office, the president sent off a good-bye message to a select group of “dear friends” and family members, top aides and key supporters. “My lawyers tell me that all correspondence by e-mail is subject to open record requests,” Bush wrote. “Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”⁵

Dick Cheney was fanatical about secrecy, as noted by the Washington Post in its insightful 2007 series on the vice president: “Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped Treated As: Top Secret . . . Cheney declined to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally released no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel boldly asserted that ‘the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch,’ and is therefore exempt from rules governing either.”⁶

Signs of Intelligence

This obsession involved a double standard of no small proportions. While the administration sought to protect its own secrets at all costs, it wanted to know everything about everyone else, including ordinary citizens. As the extent of the administration’s spying came out, it became clear that the White House had skipped even the modest requirement that a judge be consulted on domestic surveillance cases—modest because over 99 percent of applications submitted for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approval are approved each year.⁷ Bush and Cheney didn’t like that law, so they just ignored it. Even telecommunications companies had been persuaded—or strong-armed—to turn over private records of their customers.⁸

Anyone who had lived in an authoritarian or totalitarian society might have felt a chill of recognition. Few could feel comfortable knowing that a Karl Rove might have access to their personal data. Reassurances from the White House were not helped by the cavalier leaking of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame as retribution when Joseph Wilson, her husband and a former diplomat, blew the whistle on the administration’s falsification of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.⁹ The Plame affair showed the administration’s willingness to effectively shoot one of its own soldiers to advance strategic ends. The White House even covered up the actual shooting of a soldier—hiding the fact that the heroic professional football player Pat Tillman, who had volunteered for Afghanistan duty after 9/11, died not at the hands of the enemy but by “friendly fire.”

Politicization of intelligence was also apparent in W.’s appointments to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a little-known entity with super-high security clearances. W. initially followed the family course and selected Brent Scowcroft, his father’s national security adviser, to be chairman. But he forced out Scowcroft in 2004, after the retired general’s criticism of W.’s Iraq occupation began to circulate publicly. The new chairman was James Langdon, the energy lawyer who played a role in W.’s Texas Rangers deal.

It is common for big donors to get places on the PFIAB, but W. went whole hog.¹⁰ Bill Clinton had appointed a former secretary of defense, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a former Speaker of the House. W.’s picks included his old oil company rescuer and Rangers baseball partner William DeWitt, and also Ray Hunt, the Dallas oil billionaire who was a major financial backer of W.’s. As a member of the Halliburton board, Hunt had played a major role in determining CEO Dick Cheney’s lucrative pay package. The oilman’s former top aide James Oberwetter was appointed as W.’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Hunt, sitting on a gold mine of secret information at PFIAB, would, coincidentally or not, obtain an exclusive drilling contract in the Kurdish parts of Iraq after the invasion.¹¹

The primacy of connections over qualifications was underscored when W. chose his old friend and top fund-raiser Don Evans to join Hunt on the board. After leaving his post as commerce secretary, Evans briefly considered an offer to run a large Russian oil company. In the end, that was deemed too controversial for a Bush lieutenant, and instead Evans became CEO of the Financial Services Forum, an organization representing twenty giant financial institutions from around the world that do business in the United States.

The growing role of the corporate world in spying was underlined in 2007, when the government revealed that 70 percent of its intelligence bud get was contracted out to private firms. In essence, the Bush administration was putting the most secretive part of government into outside hands with little oversight.

Authoritarianism thrives in a climate of fear, and the administration invoked fear continually. Fear justified invading Iraq; fear justified spying on American citizens; fear was the trump card in vanquishing political opposition. In July 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that America’s terrorist watch list had hit one million names. One month later, a congressional investigation concluded that a half- billion- dollar emergency program to retool the flawed watch list was “on the brink of collapse.”¹²

But when it came to security, there was the usual exemption for large corporate entities. Though grandmothers were strip-searched at airports, the Bush team resisted calls for more stringent security at ports, power and chemical plants, and other vulnerable sites. Otherwise, the tattoo of terror was relentless, especially during the political high season. There was a steady stream of warnings, often in the form of so-called orange alerts, in the months leading up to the 2004 election. Even when other nations found potential terrorists, the administration sought political gains, in one case prompting complaints from the British that the White House was pushing for premature arrests before full intelligence gains had been realized.¹³

The psychology of fear tends to seep outward, and to justify ever greater intrusions. It was a short step from perceived security threats to the political inconvenience of oppositional speech. W. made it a pressing objective to put an ideologue in charge of “reforming” the Public Broadcasting Service—not so much for its purportedly liberal bias, but simply because it exhibited independence.¹⁴ In one of many examples of what certainly looks like harassment of critics, Jim Moore, the journalist who first asked W. about his National Guard record, found himself on a no-fly list.¹⁵ And so he joined a long list of people—from Bill Burkett to Bill White to John Kerry—who had challenged the Bush apparatus and suffered the consequences.

The Hackocracy

Bush and Cheney had campaigned on the conservative principle of limited government. But their actions upon attaining office showed that they weren’t interested in limited government, so much as in one that was theirs. This was evident in many ways: the intrusions on basic American rights such as voting; state sanctioning of some religions through government “faith-based” contracts and other policies; the cynical uses of power for political expediency and personal enrichment; the secrecy that withheld the people’s business from the people; the cronyism and self-dealing that treated government and its bounty as a personal entitlement and fiefdom.

Republican National Committee chairman Kenneth Mehlman was not subtle about this: “One of the things that can happen in Washington when you work in an agency is that you forget who sent you there. And it’s important to remind people—you’re George Bush people . . . If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire.”¹⁶ The quaint notion that federal employees are actually responsible to the people who pay their salaries seems to have gone down the drain as well.

To be sure, they continued to invoke the banner hoisted by GOP activist Grover Norquist, who famously declared, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But in practice, the only parts that went down the drain were the ones that were distasteful to friends. The Food and Drug Administration, the agency that monitors the safety of what Americans put into their bodies, faced drastic budget cuts and restrictions in its abilities to inspect products before they went to market.¹⁷ At one congressional hearing, former FDA chief counsel Peter Barton Hutt said the agency was “barely hanging on by its fingertips.” He begged for more funding and skilled personnel.¹⁸

Faced with the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the Bush administration seemed content to pass the buck. Though the Supreme Court provided the Environmental Protection Agency with the power to create emissions standards for motor vehicles, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson found that even his agency’s modest suggestions fell on deaf White House ears. He had his staff write a draft of new regulations for limiting carbon emissions, but once sent to the White House, it “fell into a black hole.”¹⁹

Nearly every federal agency became politicized. The regulated were controlling the regulators, and cooking the books. A few career employees were willing to speak out. At NASA, leading climate scientist James Hansen revealed how the White House had worked to suppress the truth about climate change.²⁰ David Kuo, former deputy director of the office of faith-based initiatives, claimed that the White House used taxpayer funds to plan events that recruited evangelical votes for the Republicans.

Government spending mainly took a hit in areas such as food stamps, energy assistance, community development, public housing, and the like. But once the Bush team had inflicted pain on the needy, they opened the public spigot of largesse for their friends. The well-connected benefited from contracts, jobs, and the indulgence of forbearing regulators. Financial institutions were rewarded for recklessness. Just as Poppy Bush had sheltered savings and loan executives from the consequences of their own greed, W. bailed out big investment houses such as Bear Stearns that had rewarded their executives with giant bonuses for taking even bigger—and ultimately dangerous—risks with other people’s money. These moves violated the bedrock conservative principle that people must bear the consequences for their own actions. Yet these gamblers were taken care of, and W. himself was never made to answer for the policy. Even a measure presented as in the public interest, like the Medicare prescription benefit plan, was essentially a political play, with a Cinderella’s slipper for the pharmaceutical industry thrown in.

In 2007, W. vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which would have utilized an increased tobacco tax to provide health coverage to millions of uninsured children. Bush’s decision reflected his distaste for anything resembling universal health care. “After all,” the president suggested, “you [can] just go to an emergency room.”²¹ As Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, the S-CHIP program would have cost less over five years than the country spends on four months in Iraq. So W.’s opposition to the program was philosophical in nature. After all, if the nation were to experience a federal health care program that worked, what would stop people from demanding universal health care?

Krugman saw this as representing a fundamental Bush doctrine:

He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.²²

W.’s crony statism and his contempt for regulation helped plunge the nation into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Even before the crash of 2008, he presided over the poorest job- creation rate in modern history. And according to a series of USA Today–Gallup polls, only once in Bush’s eight-year reign did even a slight majority of respondents characterize the economy as “excellent” or “good” rather than “fair” or “poor.”²³

The cronyism was rampant, the corruption rife. The name of the GOP’s favorite super-lobbyist and fixer, Jack Abramoff, became a synonym for “business as usual.” If one did not believe in government by the people to begin with—as the Bush crew didn’t—what difference did such behavior make? How can one degrade that which one already holds in contempt? The result was evident in scandals large and small. Every week came new revelations about no-bid contracts awarded to contributors, loyal functionaries hired despite dubious qualifications, regulations and data skewed on behalf of powerful industries, and on and on.

For the cooperative and the connected, lack of qualifications was no bar. It became so evident that the New Republic devoted an entire issue to indexing the Bush “hackocracy.”²⁴ A typical appointment was Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Homeland Security Department.

Ms. Myers is the niece of General Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She had recently married the chief of staff for Michael Chertoff, who was secretary of Homeland Security. This led Frank Rich to label the appointment a “nepotistic twofer.”²⁵ Even conservative columnist Michelle Malkin noted, “Great contacts, but what exactly are the 36-year-old lawyer’s main credentials to solve . . . dire national security problems?” She answered: “Zip, Nada, Nil.”²⁶ Myers’s main qualification: working for Kenneth Starr, the man who prosecuted the Monica Lewinsky case.

Regulatory agencies hung out the sign: Foxes, Report to Hen House Duty. All manner of chemical, nuclear, and coal industry executives and the like rushed in to provide oversight of their former (and future) employers.

Even when the administration seemed to be taking care of ordinary people, there was always a skunk at the picnic’s close. The historic overhaul of Medicare was within a few years marred by revelations of fraud and improper payments to medical equipment manufacturers, to the tune of $2.8 billion.²⁷

All in the Family

It seemed there was always room at the table for contributors and friends. It wasn’t just the occasional Billy Carter or Roger Clinton who regarded the White House as a winning lottery ticket. It was an entire clan that had built its political rhetoric around the need to curb government spending.

The dossier is thick. Back in 1985, while Poppy was vice president, third son Neil Mallon Bush had become a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan. Soon he was embroiled in one of the biggest financial scandals in U.S. history—one that cost taxpayers about one billion dollars.²⁸ In February 1993, a month after Poppy Bush left office, the World Trade Center was bombed. In the wake of that, an American firm with Kuwaiti backing got a contract to provide security to the buildings, and Poppy’s fourth son, Marvin, joined the board, remaining until 2000. W.’s brother Jeb, the one Poppy and Barbara thought would rise highest, set up shop in Miami and established strong ties to the right- wing Cuban exile community. He was quickly brought under the wing of Armando Codina, a real estate developer and longtime political supporter of the family and its staunch backing of the Cuba embargo; Jeb got a 40 percent share of the real estate company’s profits without investing in the firm. The duo were bailed out for a loan default with taxpayers footing the bill, in excess of $3 million.²⁹

With a Bush back in the White House, the process required a bit more subtlety. Neil Bush, brother of the “education president,” backed by money from Kuwait and elsewhere, was busy selling educational software to the Saudis.³⁰ William “Bucky” Bush, Poppy’s younger brother and W.’s uncle, sat on the board of ESSI, a St. Louis–based firm that received multiple no-bid contracts from the Pentagon.³¹ One was for equipment to help search for—and protect soldiers from—what turned out to be Iraq’s non-existent store of chemical and biological weapons.³² Friends of the family also got a piece of the taxpayer’s dollar. Ernie Ladd, W.’s faithful buddy since his days supervising Bush’s community service at Project PULL in inner-city Houston, started getting military contracts for spray-on plastic coating.³³

And then of course there was Poppy. After leaving the White House, he began accepting handouts from grateful past beneficiaries of one generation of Bushes and those hopeful for largesse from the next. In 1998, Poppy addressed an audience in Tokyo on behalf of telecom company Global Crossing and accepted stock in the soon-to-go-public corporation in lieu of his normal $100,000 overseas speaking fee. Within a year, that stock was worth $14.4 million.³⁴

Poppy also became an adviser to, and speechmaker for, the Carlyle Group, a secretive private equity firm that made its name buying low- valued defense contractors, using connections to secure government contracts, then selling the firms at huge profits. Poppy joined Carlyle in 1995 and earns between $80,000 and $100,000 per speech on its behalf.35 As a former president with access to CIA briefings, Poppy is an indispensable asset to Carlyle. “Imagine what a global enterprise, that does large amounts of business with arms contractors and foreign governments, could do with weekly CIA briefings,” wrote business journalist Dan Briody, author of a book on the Carlyle Group.³⁶

Whether or not Carlyle was a direct beneficiary of inside information, the company’s investors have made more than $6.6 billion off the Iraq War. Referring to the beginning of the war, Carlyle’s chief investment officer said: “It’s the best eighteen months we ever had. We made money and we made it fast.”³⁷

The myriad cozy financial deals involving Bushes and their friends and associates have attracted only sporadic media interest. This is in contrast to the frenzied coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in the Arkansas real estate venture Whitewater. The couple actually lost money in the deal, and an independent investigation headed by Clinton nemesis Kenneth Starr found no evidence of illegality. Other Democrats, in particular Barack Obama, saw every aspect of their personal lives scrutinized, often with the most nefarious possible interpretation.

The Bush crew’s political operation required exemption from, and therefore control over, the law. Thus the infamous White House crusade to fire uncooperative United States attorneys—the highest prosecutors, each supervising his or her own regional office. Most of the targets, though loyal Republicans, had refused to pursue prosecutions that were overtly political in nature.³⁸ Even when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stepped down in the scandal’s wake, his nominally independent- minded replacement, Michael Mukasey, declined to pursue charges against the Justice Department. “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said.³⁹ That same approach helped former Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whose jail sentence was commuted after he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case.

In 2005, W. nominated Harriet Miers, his friend and fellow Texan, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court—even though she had never before served as a judge and lacked distinction among her legal peers. Miers’s main qualification was that she had handled some of W.’s most delicate matters in the 1990s. In W.’s gubernatorial campaign, Miers “was deemed to be just the right person to inoculate George W. Bush against any further inquiries into his legal and business dealings.”⁴⁰ As detailed in chapter 18, it was Miers who helped Bush escape scrutiny for his membership in the controversial Rainbo Club. Thus, even the highest court in the land was to house a Bush family enforcer.

Because of their contempt for government, Bush and Cheney ended up flubbing the most essential function of government from a conservative standpoint: security and defense.

The tendentious justification for the invasion of Iraq was only one obvious example. In some ways, an even more striking one was the fiasco of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

The botched handling of Katrina cut deep; and the reason for it was the same as for the other derelictions and misdeeds. Government was to be a honeypot for cronies and supporters, and a grindstone for ideological axes. It did not exist to solve problems—and therefore under Bush it ended up creating more of them.

Partners in Disaster

In late August 2005, what would become one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history—and certainly the most costly—was bearing down on the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans. The warnings from the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center grew increasingly ominous. In charge of preparing a response to this mounting threat was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was run by a little-known figure named Michael D. Brown.

As a forewarned nation braced for the worst, and Gulf Coast residents frantically prepared to weather the storm, George Bush and his top aides showed little concern. The president opted not to cut his vacation short. He had finished the photo ops of himself clearing brush in Crawford, Texas, and by then was in California. A day after the hurricane made its second landfall, the news carried another photo op, of the president strumming a guitar. Vice president Dick Cheney had emerged from his often-bunkered lifestyle to enjoy some fly-fishing in Wyoming. As for the country’s disaster management agency, the only FEMA official actually in New Orleans— Marty J. Bahamonde—was there by accident. He had been visiting on business and had tried to leave but could not because of the clogged roads.

FEMA chief Michael Brown made it to Baton Rouge, a city seventy-five miles from New Orleans, but he seemed out of reach. As Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf states and wiped out one of America’s signature cities, stories of incompetence and disorganization began trickling out. FEMA staff couldn’t find Brown. Brown wasn’t aware of developments familiar to anyone with a television. By the time he was, he couldn’t get through to the governor of Louisiana; he couldn’t get the president of the United States to pay attention.

Worst of all, there was no evidence of advance planning for a disaster of this magnitude, even though such planning was Brown’s primary job. At the peak of the crisis, he was seen working on an organizational chart. As a critical levee collapsed and one of the country’s largest port cities started to slip beneath the water, Bahamonde fired off a series of increasingly desperate e-mails. On August 31, he e-mailed Brown directly: “I know you know, the situation is past critical . . . Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water.” The response came, several hours later. “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner,” it said.⁴¹ Four days after the hurricane hit, Bush arrived to survey the damage and famously proclaimed, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

But two weeks into the disaster, with the Bush administration facing its worst PR nightmare, Brown was finally replaced as on-site manager by an experienced outsider.

When it was over, the Gulf Coast was devastated, and New Orleans in particular. The city’s protective levee system was swamped; 80 percent of the city—along with many of its neighboring areas—was underwater for weeks. Destruction stretched from Louisiana through Mississippi into Alabama. The images of frightened families clinging to rooftops awaiting rescue, of elderly people who died strapped to their beds in retirement homes, of gun-toting vigilantes protecting wealthy areas against looters—these were the legacy of Brownie’s heckuva job.

Despite the fact that the warnings had been more than ample, with accurate forecasts and lots of advance notice from the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, more than 1,800 people died, and damage was estimated to exceed $81 billion. The agency that is charged to act, didn’t. Brown later blamed state and local officials for the slow response, but it was clear to the nation that he and his agency had fallen down on the job.

The state of FEMA under George W. Bush stood in stark contrast to its condition under Bill Clinton. The latter had inherited an agency riddled with patronage. For example, Bush Sr. had appointed as director Wallace Stickney, a former neighbor of John Sununu, his chief of staff.⁴² Stickney, who lacked crisis management experience, presided over FEMA’s inept response to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew during the first and last years of the elder Bush’s term. Many observers believe the administration’s handling of these events contributed to Poppy’s loss to Clinton in 1992.

Clinton, by contrast, appointed a seasoned pro to head the agency—James Lee Witt, who had been in charge of disaster management in Arkansas. Clinton even gave the FEMA director a seat in his cabinet. Morale soared, and a bipartisan group of senators actually sought to keep Witt on indefinitely, drafting legislation to make the FEMA directorship a longer-term, fixed position. Even George W. Bush praised Witt—and then canned him.

In 2001, W. appointed his longtime enforcer Joe Allbaugh. Allbaugh had almost no relevant experience or qualifications, beyond serving as the governor’s liaison to emergency agencies during minor crises in Texas. At FEMA, he would have more than eight thousand employees and a four-billion- dollar budget. Allbaugh was confirmed by the Senate after minimal scrutiny in a 91 – 0 vote. He became head of FEMA in February 2001.

Allbaugh soon embarked on a Nixonian purge and a series of internal investigations into everything undertaken by the Witt administration. Allbaugh’s lengthiest inquiry was into a headdress that used to hang on Witt’s wall, a token of appreciation from a Native American tribe in recognition of his efforts following the Oklahoma City bombing. Someone said it might contain feathers from the protected bald eagle—a federal offense—but the probe, which even involved the FBI, fizzled when they turned out to be dyed chicken feathers.

Abandoning a tradition of placing civil-service professionals in vital posts, Allbaugh quickly staffed the agency with loyalists, many of them political operatives with no professional experience in emergency disaster management. Possessing little experience with large- scale disasters, Allbaugh was happy to embrace the administration’s view of FEMA as a bloated entitlement program in need of drastic cutbacks. “His position was that the states ought to take a bigger role,” said Reid.

At FEMA, as throughout the administration, the foxes had taken over the hen house and were partying up. Out the door, one by one, went the experienced disaster-relief managers, and in came the political opportunists and the industry lobbyists. “Many of their skilled management team left,” said Steve Kanstoroom, an independent fraud detection expert. “You had a train running down the tracks with nobody driving it.”⁴⁵

Cashing In

As Governor Bush’s chief of staff and campaign manager, Allbaugh had pushed the antigovernment rhetoric. Yet the moment he left government, he began finding ways for it to spend more, not less, taxpayer money. Following his departure from FEMA, he quickly formed the lobbying firm Allbaugh Company with his wife, Diane, an attorney, to cash in on his years in government. Newsweek said Joe Allbaugh has “the hide of a rhino” when it comes to criticism of conflicts of interest, and it showed.

Bad news was good news where Joe Allbaugh was concerned. Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, became one of Allbaugh’s biggest lobbying clients. Its then- subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root would get at least sixty- one million dollars’ worth of Katrina business from the federal government.⁴⁸

Allbaugh’s post-FEMA ventures were not restricted to the domestic disaster business. His departure from government and entrance into defense contracting took place precisely as the invasion of Iraq unfolded. September 11 had not only offered a pretext for invading Iraq; it also set in motion a boom for military contractors, which had been concerned about the diminishing demand for weaponry in a post- Communist era. At the same time it justified the creation of a vast new domestic security industry, another lucrative component of the military-industrial complex. Both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security now had endless programs to fund in the name of a new kind of war—carried out abroad and at home, against an invisible enemy, and with no expiration date. The annual corporate reports of government contractors practically gushed over the new opportunities. “I think our shareholders understand why we’re in this business,” said Halliburton chief executive David J. Lesar.⁴⁹

A COG in the Big Wheel

Why did Joe Allbaugh even want to run FEMA? In the first days of the Clinton-Bush transition, amid speculation about who might get what post, Allbaugh’s name was bandied about in connection with a few positions, among them White House chief of staff. No one mentioned FEMA, but then another factor came into play: Allbaugh’s close relationship with Dick Cheney, who saw FEMA’s principal role less as helping Americans during an emergency than as maintaining White House control during one.

Few people realize that Joe Allbaugh even played a role in Dick Cheney’s advance to the vice presidency. In 2000, while Allbaugh was W.’s presidential campaign manager, Cheney was brought in to help research the backgrounds of prospective running mates. When Cheney concluded that he himself was the ideal choice,⁵⁰ the job of vetting Cheney’s qualifications went to Allbaugh. He quickly signed off on the former congressman and defense secretary, which cleared Cheney’s path to the White House. To be sure, given Cheney’s prior security clearances, Allbaugh’s scrutiny was probably less than thorough. In any case, the Allbaughs and Cheneys quickly felt at home with each other—literally so. When the Cheneys moved into the vice presidential residence in 2001, the Allbaughs bought Cheney’s town house in McLean, Virginia, for $690,000. And Cheney put Allbaugh onto his secretive energy task force.

FEMA had been created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter through an executive order; before that, emergency and disaster services were scattered among a host of agencies. From the beginning, FEMA was seen as a vehicle of White House command and control, in times of war more than natural disasters. Samuel Huntington, who drafted the presidential memorandum creating the agency, summed up the basic concept in a book, The Crisis of Democracy. “A government which lacks authority,” he wrote, “will have little ability, short of a cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign policy problems and defense.”⁵¹ Carter’s FEMA director, John Macy, had emphasized that preparation for natural disasters would take a backseat to defense against nuclear, biological, and terror threats.⁵² It was principally under Bill Clinton that FEMA focused on disaster relief.

The Bush-Cheney view of FEMA was an almost pure expression of their underlying philosophy. For all their talk of limited government, Bush-Cheney did everything they could to expand the power and reach of the presidency. Often, this took the form of curtailing basic rights long considered the people’s last line of defense against tyranny. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the case of detainees, the abrogation of the Geneva Conventions on the rights of combatants, the illegal wiretapping, all supposedly instituted in response to 9/11, had in fact been discussed long before that attack. Natural disasters were a minor concern. They were thinking mainly about a vehicle for White House command and control in case of enemy attack, without the constitutional restraints that they considered outmoded and counterproductive.

When the planes hit on 9/11, FEMA was nominally in charge. But off the national radar, that event also represented the first- ever implementation of a concept known as “continuity of government,” or COG. According to a Washington Post report, President Bush “dispatched a shadow government of about one hundred senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington, activating for the first time long- standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack.”⁵³ The Post story, which expanded on material published in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer months earlier, asserted that the plan was “deployed ‘on the fly’ in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11.”⁵⁴

Actually, the plan went back to Executive Order 12656, issued by President Reagan in 1988, which stipulated that the Constitution could be suspended for any emergency “that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”⁵⁵ In his book Rumsfeld, journalist Andrew Cockburn quotes a former Pentagon official who claims that during the 1990s, Cheney and Rumsfeld formed “a secret government-in-waiting.”⁵⁶

Most important for the Bush administration, the Cheney- Rumsfeld group had worked for three decades on preparations to control the American population in the event of a disaster. These included the de facto suspension of the Constitution through a number of steps that became more hotly debated as the Bush administration entered its final months. The administration’s response to terror went far beyond the legal boundaries and reflected a sense that whatever the president wanted to do, he could do. Cheney backed what author Ron Suskind dubbed the “one percent doctrine,” in which if there is even a 1 percent chance of something coming true, it is important to treat it as a certainty.⁵⁷

A key part of continuity of government was control of segments of the population during periods of unrest. In a 1984 “readiness exercise” implemented by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who also coordinated the secret and illegal contra supply effort, FEMA simulated rounding up four hundred thousand “refugees” for detainment. This was cast as preparation for a possible “uncontrolled population movement” from Mexico to the United States. In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root for building “temporary immigration detention centers.”⁵⁸

The implications are obvious. Yet they penetrated only to the furthest edges of popular culture, where paranoia becomes entertainment. In The X-Files movie of 1998, Agent Fox Mulder is warned of FEMA’s ability to “suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency.” According to a Washington Post article written just after the movie’s release, officials at FEMA were not amused by what they claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of their mandate. “The history of this thing is serious,” said FEMA spokesman Morrie Goodman. “We’ve tightened security at all our facilities because of this.”⁵⁹

It is necessary, of course, for the government to have a contingency plan for worst-case scenarios. But in focusing on an all- out response to a hypothetical aggressor, the “Cheney doctrine” paid little mind to the kinds of emergencies that, based on prior experience and study, were certain to come—such as major hurricanes—and to affect the largest numbers of people.

Preparing the Turkey Shoot

Whatever leading role Joe Allbaugh might have anticipated in this kind of “national security” activity vanished after 9/11, when Congress mandated that FEMA be absorbed into a new Department of Homeland Security. FEMA insiders say that the merger was a principal factor in Allbaugh’s decision to leave—and to turn the agency over to Michael Brown.

Allbaugh had initially hired Brown, an old friend from Oklahoma, as FEMA general counsel, presiding over a legal staff of thirty. Allbaugh included him in all key deliberations, and even named him chief operating officer. Brown’s influence was apparent to all. Within six months of his arrival, Allbaugh was ready to promote him. First, though, he had to oust his current acting deputy director, John Magaw—a former director of the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom Clinton had placed in charge of coordinating domestic- terrorism efforts for FEMA.

“One day, Mr. Allbaugh came in and said, ‘I know you’ve got these other things to do. I’m going to ask Mr. Brown to be deputy,’ ” recalled Magaw, who promptly returned to the subordinate position assigned him by Clinton.⁶⁰ The timing was remarkable. Just a week before September 11, 2001, Allbaugh replaced a key anti-terrorism official with a crony who had close to zero relevant experience.

Before Brown could take over permanently as deputy director, he had to face the Senate. In June 2002, he presented a résumé that was full of exaggerations about his experience and serious omissions about his financial and legal problems. Nevertheless, as with most presidential nominees, Brown was confirmed without ado.

Later, after the Katrina disaster, Michael Brown’s incompetence, and Bush’s pronouncement that “Brownie” was doing “a heckuva job,” would turn him into a laugh line. By and large, the media treated him that way. We learned of his prior job with the International Arabian Horse Association and that his prime qualification was that he had been Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. CNN even handed him its “Political Turkey of the Year” award.⁶¹ Yet as it turned on the hapless Brown, the media got its facts wrong. Brown and Allbaugh were not in fact college roommates, and did not even attend the same university. Instead, Michael Brown’s rise to prominence—and therefore the bumbling of the Katrina disaster—tracked back to the Poppy Bush organization.

The Right Stable

Before he joined FEMA, the pinnacle of Brown’s professional experience was as an inspector of Arabian-horse judges. His highest governmental executive position had been as an assistant to a city manager in Edmond, Oklahoma, decades before. (Brown had told the Senate that he was an “assistant city manager,” responsible for police, fire, and emergency services. In truth, he had been “more like an intern,” the town’s PR liaison told Time.)⁶²

After passing the Oklahoma bar in 1982, Brown moved to the oil boomtown of Enid, where he was hired by the law firm of Stephen Jones, the flamboyant, nationally known defense attorney. When the firm broke up, thirty- four staffers found immediate work. Brown was one of two not offered employment by the successor firms. “When I saw Brown up there at FEMA, I had a premonition of bad things to come,” Jones recalled when I visited him at his Enid office.⁶³

Like Allbaugh, Brown appeared to have well-connected angels looking after him. His bumpy career was punctuated by timely assists from his self-described “longtime friend and family attorney,” Andrew Lester. An Andover prep-school mate of George W.’s brother Marvin, and onetime employee in the Washington office of the Bush-family-connected Dresser Industries, Lester pops up at crucial points in Brown’s life. When Brown lost his job with the Jones law firm, Lester brought him in for a brief stint as his law partner. When horse- association problems engulfed Brown, Lester rushed to his defense. And on September 27, 2005, at a House Select Committee hearing investigating the Katrina blunders, there was the pin-striped Lester conspicuously whispering legal advice in Brown’s ear.

Lester, a regional director for the Federalist Society, an association of rightward lawyers, represented the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 2002 reapportionment battle. He was also short-listed for a federal judgeship under George W. Bush. Over lunch at an Oklahoma City steak house, Lester told me that his support for Brown arises merely from their friendship. He continued to maintain, even in the wake of the Katrina debacle, that Brown was eminently qualified for FEMA.⁶⁶

After 9/11, with pressure building for coordinated antiterror responses, it was evident that FEMA could not remain independent. Bush initially opposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, but eventually he caved to congressional demands, and Joe Allbaugh began to look for an exit strategy. The moment Homeland Security swallowed FEMA, Allbaugh departed for the private sector, leaving Brown in charge.

Initially, Brown seemed to be a better FEMA director than Allbaugh. This was because Brown realized that he didn’t know much about the job and was smart enough to turn to whatever experts remained on staff. He also was a welcome relief to staffers after the fearsome Allbaugh. “I was pretty impressed with him,” said Trey Reid. “He was articulate, bright, a quick study. I didn’t have to spend much time going over things with him.” In terms of disaster management, there were two possibilities FEMA lifers always worried about: a really big California earthquake and levee breaks in New Orleans. But worrying and fixing were two different things. Brown, on the advice of aides, asked for more money for levee improvements and catastrophic planning, but neither the Republican-controlled Congress nor the White House would agree.

If Allbaugh had been disinclined to press Bush for strong remedial action, the inconsequential Brown lacked even that option. He didn’t really have a relationship with the president, his diminutive nickname notwithstanding, and the Department of Homeland Security was focused almost exclusively on terrorism. “I don’t think any of the bud get requests we submitted went through,” said Reid. “Everything went for terrorism.”

With the defections of several senior managers and the firing of others, compounded by the denial or reduction of bud get requests, FEMA’s staff was left paper thin. “At this point, there’s only one person in the building who knows how to do certain things,” Reid told me in our 2005 interview. “If that person gets sick or dies, you’re shit out of luck.”

Despite the cuts, however, there was always money for political purposes. Ever mindful of avoiding his father’s mistakes—among them the disastrous handling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992—Bush was not about to lose to John Kerry over disaster relief. Under Brown, the response to a series of hurricanes that battered Florida during the 2004 presidential campaign was as choreographed as Bush’s landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln the previous year. Agency staffers were everywhere, in FEMA T-shirts, and Brown was especially visible. An investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel later found that FEMA had handed out tens of millions of dollars following Hurricane Frances to residents and businesses in the Miami- Dade County area, where no deaths and only mild damage had occurred. There was much less assistance to areas that were harder hit but less politically crucial.⁶⁷

Contracts

Like most federal agencies under George W., FEMA received little attention until disaster struck, and the attention vanished soon thereafter. But there were warning signs at the agency well before the hurricane. One such example was FEMA’s abrupt decision in 2003, not long after Brown had taken over, to award an exclusive contract for emergency water supplies.

Over the years, FEMA had entered into water contracts with a variety of companies. One, not surprisingly, was Nestlé Waters North America, easily the continent’s biggest producer. Then, after W.’s inauguration, without explanation, FEMA went sole-source, and picked a little-known, family-run firm called Lipsey Mountain Spring Water. The company, based in Norcross, Georgia, had just fifteen full- time employees, no production capacity, and no distribution network.

Lipsey Mountain Spring Water may have been new to the world of federal water contracts, but its principals were not new to politics. The Lipseys are part of a politically connected family that gives regularly to both political parties and owns one of the country’s largest gun wholesalers. The gun lobby is among the nation’s most powerful, and a group whose events both Cheney and Allbaugh attended with regularity.

The Pentagon later confirmed that its inspector general was investigating Lipsey in response to complaints from truck drivers, trucking brokers, and ice producers, who did much of the actual work under Lipsey’s FEMA contract. These said Lipsey had not paid its bills or even answered its phone calls. (In 2005, following my request for an interview, company president Joe Lipsey III asked to see a list of questions, then never responded.) In 2007, Department of Defense auditors determined that the company owed the government $881,000 in overpayments in cases where the company erroneously received multiple duplicate fees.⁶⁹

By August 2005, Brown was already rumored to be preparing his own exit into the private sector. And just as Allbaugh had a reliable understudy in Brown, Brown was readying his own—Patrick Rhode, his chief of staff, whom he elevated to deputy director. Rhode was a former Bush campaign advance man; and while he too lacked experience in emergency management, his PR and media skills had been sharpened as a former television news anchor and reporter. Perhaps they’d been sharpened a bit too much: it was Rhode who, several days into the Katrina disaster, would call FEMA’s performance “one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country’s history.”

[For the entire book, click here.]

Here is Chapter 17 of the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, by WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker:

W. was not quite the baseball player his father and grandfather had been—but he was the master of a certain kind of pitch. In the days leading up to the 1988 election, W. was on the phone constantly making sales calls, though not for his father’s candidacy. As Bush family adviser Doug Wead recalled: “It was interesting to sit and listen to him pick up the phone again and again and say: ‘Well, we’re gonna buy a baseball team. Want to buy a baseball team?’ ”

Maybe George W. Bush felt that his father’s election was in the bag. Or maybe he was in a hurry because he thought it was less unseemly for the son of a vice president seeking the presidency to be soliciting funds for personal reasons than for the son of a sitting president to be doing so. Whatever his reason, at that particular moment, baseball was on his mind.

W. has genuine affection for “America’s pastime,” but his decision to acquire the Texas Rangers baseball team was not just about fun. He was creating a legend that would set him on the path to the presidency. How could a man with so few accomplishments be made into an impressive public figure? How could a fellow who had few prospects of honestly earning a fortune be set up in the sort of lifestyle he and his friends expected?

Such questions were certainly on the mind of his informal political adviser Karl Rove. Although the Bush forces would claim that W. had not seriously thought about running for higher office until well into the 1990s, as far back as Poppy’s inauguration Rove had been letting reporters know that there was another Bush waiting in the wings. In fact, W.’s name was floated as a possibility for the 1990 Texas governor’s race, but W.’s mother publicly opposed his bid because of concerns that a loss would be seen as a referendum on Bush Sr.’s presidency.

Even back then, Rove was envisioning a path for him and his friend straight to the White House. The Texas governorship would give W. a base, and a bucketload of electoral votes to start with. So in the final days before his father’s victory over Democrat Michael Dukakis, George W. Bush was looking toward his own future—first, a brief baseball “baptism” as a public figure, then political office. “Mostly he was talking about his plan with the Rangers and governor, back then,” recalled Wead. “It was Rangers and governor, Rangers, governor, Rangerrrrs . . .”

Anyone seeking a path to the big leagues could do worse than owning a ball team. George W. Bush and his cadre well understood that a winning sports play, like a steady spot in a forward church pew or an art museum with one’s name on it, accorded instant points—and went a long way toward ameliorating deficiencies (particularly moral ones) on other fronts.

The Bushes and their friends had ownership stakes in a lot of teams—the Reds, the Mets, the Tigers, and other favorites. It all started with W.’s greatgrandfather George Herbert “Bert” Walker, who was a force behind professional golf’s Walker Cup and, in fact, the introduction of golf itself into America. He was also a prominent booster of the New York Yacht Club, professional tennis, and premier horse racing. This family legacy culminated in George W. Bush’s successful effort at capturing a new constituency known as the NASCAR voter. Of course, being associated with sports offers obvious benefits in terms of pleasure and ego, but there is little question that the Bush group was adept at leveraging yet one more beloved American institution.

As would be demonstrated by the Supreme Court that would decide the 2000 election in W.’s favor, getting a “fair break” for oneself begins with knowing the referee. Peter Ueberroth, the baseball commissioner at the time W.’s group acquired the Arlington, Texas–based Rangers, was known to be looking for opportunities in politics as he left baseball in 1989, the year Poppy took office. One source close to the negotiations told the New York Times that after W. had failed to persuade the wealthy Texan Richard Rainwater to join the investment group, Ueberroth himself had approached Rainwater and suggested that he team up with Bush, at least partly “out of respect for his father.” As commissioner, Ueberroth was succeeded by Bart Giamatti, an Andover alum who became president of Yale; he was succeeded by Fay Vincent, another old friend of the Bushes who had roughnecked in the oil business in Midland, and even lived at the Bush house briefly when W. was growing up.

W. was relentlessly optimistic about his plans to get into baseball. “He’d get off the phone after somebody said no, and there was not even the slightest disappointment or discouragement,” recalled Doug Wead. “You couldn’t even see a whiff of self- doubt. I thought, man, he’d be a great salesman, he doesn’t even have any [sense of ] rejection.”

Not that there was too much rejection. Smart men—and it was virtually only men who invested—knew that this was a good moment to be in business with George W. Bush, the president’s son.

Family and friends understood the plan: turn a nobody with a famous name into a “somebody,” and, while you’re at it, use the famous name, insider connections, and the implied glamour of the project to make a bundle.

According to Comer Cottrell, a black Republican hair products entrepreneur who put up half a million dollars to become a limited partner, “George brought a lot to the table just by being the president’s son and running for governor . . . Everybody wanted to know him.”

Bush paid six hundred thousand dollars in borrowed money for a 2 percent stake in the Rangers. However, he secured the generous proviso that his share would jump to 11 percent once the partners had gotten their investment out. Thus, the entire deal seemed designed to benefit Bush.

Inside Baseball

For about eighty- six million dollars, Bush and seventy investors bought the team. Among the investors were William O. DeWitt Jr. and Mercer Reynolds III, the fellows who had bailed out W.’s Arbusto Energy. This new deal was certainly a natural for DeWitt, who grew up around baseball and whose father served as general manager of the Detroit Tigers and later owned the Cincinnati Reds. Other Rangers investors included the much-investigated Nixon administration “Jew- counter” Fred Malek, who managed Poppy Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign. Malek, who by 2008 was making a bid for the Chicago Cubs, has long been a kind of Bush family handyman. It was he who arranged a job for W. on the board of CaterAir, a subsidiary of the secretive global holding company the Carlyle Group.

Typically, sports team ownership is a badge of pride. Yet, as with so many other ventures involving George W. Bush, many of the people who invested in the Rangers with him preferred to remain below the radar. “The city went berserk when I got a list of owners,” said attorney Glenn Sodd, who represented plaintiffs suing the city of Arlington and the team owners over private land seizures to make way for the new stadium that would exponentially increase the value of the franchise. “They got the court order to prevent names from coming out. The team was desperate to keep it secret . . . The list didn’t tell you a whole lot, because there were some partnerships [hiding] who the actual people were. For all you and I know, there were Saudis.”

There certainly were Saudi connections, including the attorney representing Bush as he pursued the Rangers. James R. Doty was a partner with Baker Botts, which represented major Saudi interests, as well as many American companies doing business with the kingdom. Doty had also represented W.’s old friend and Saudi financial agent Jim Bath when Bath sued his business partner Bill White, a saga described in chapter 14. Shortly after handling Bush’s Rangers deal, Doty was named general counsel to the SEC under Poppy Bush’s administration, and though he recused himself, he was there when the agency investigated the possibility of insider trading on W.’s Harken stock sale—and closed the file with no action.

Roland Places His Betts

If Harvard deserves much of the credit for the boost Harken Energy provided George W. Bush on his path to the White House, then Yale deserves some credit for the boost that the Texas Rangers provided. With Yale, however, it was not the school’s money so much as the clubby milieu the school created for private arrangements.

The largest investor in the Rangers deal was Bush’s Yale friend Roland Betts, who put in a hefty $3.6 million. “I’m George’s biggest fan,” Betts once told the New York Times. Betts, who served as rush chairman of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Yale while Bush was the fraternity’s president, would subsequently play a unique role over the years in persuading the media that W. was really quite a moderate fellow. As the Times wrote in 2005:

When people ask Roland Betts how a New York Democrat can be such a good friend of President Bush, he whips out a ready answer. “Which would you prefer: my being close to him, or some rightwing zealot being close to him?” Mr. Betts said in a recent interview. “Who do you want to have his ear? So it’s not a bad thing. Maybe I give him a little balance. . . . I don’t think he’s as conservative a person as the media generally characterizes him as,” Mr. Betts said.

The media loved Betts: not only was he a Democrat friend of Bush’s, but he had also worked for a while in an inner- city school, and he had a black wife. Moreover, Betts was founder and chairman of Chelsea Piers, a popular sports complex on Manhattan’s West Side. After Yale, and after a spell as a teacher and assistant principal during the Vietnam War, Betts moved on to Columbia Law School and then became an entertainment lawyer with the white- shoe Manhattan firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Even better, Betts started his own limited partnership, which cut a deal with the company that is practically synonymous with Hollywood entertainment culture—the Walt Disney Company—and put George W. Bush on the board. Betts’s Silver Screen Management financed nearly every Disney movie made between 1985 and 1991, including Pretty Woman, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. The company also backed The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer as a psycho- killer hitchhiker, which was derided for its “gizzard- slitting depravity.”

Asked why he brought W. into the film- financing business (Bush remained on the board from 1983 to 1992), Betts told the Times it was to benefit from his friend’s common sense. If anyone had common sense, it was Betts himself. Silver Screen got its start- up funding courtesy of the investment house E. F. Hutton. In that period, E. F. Hutton was being run by W.’s uncle Scott Pierce. Before coming to E. F. Hutton, Pierce had worked for the “other” Bush- Walker clan investment firm, G. H. Walker and Company. And the man who preceded Pierce at Hutton and brought him into the company, George Ball, was both a funder of W.’s Arbusto oil venture, and, as noted in chapter 15, presided over Hutton in a period when it engaged in a major check- kiting scheme; the firm later pleaded guilty to two thousand counts of mail and wire fraud.

The Betts family, meanwhile, turns out to mirror the Bushes in many respects: Yale legacy, employment in the Walker brokerage, roots in the spy world.

The most visible Rangers investors, including Betts, were thought of not just in terms of the financial resources they could provide, but also of demographics. “The first time I met George, he came up to my office and wanted to meet me and told me that he was wanting to have a true American diverse team partnership,” recalled Cottrell, one of Bush’s co- investors. “He says, I would be his black partner, Afro- American. Then he had some Jewish people, and he had some European Americans from Yale. Half the guys were from Yale.”

Besides Betts, another strong Yale connection was the Bass family of Fort Worth, famously right- wing heirs to the vast Richardson- Bass oil fortune. The man who is generally characterized as putting the baseball financing deal together, the brilliant Texas investment manager Richard Rainwater, had been the investment manager for the Basses. Rainwater was a Wall Street legend for transforming a Bass inheritance of about fifty million dollars in 1970 to more than four billion dollars by the time he went out on his own in 1986. At the time Rainwater partnered with W., the Basses were involved with W. through Harken’s Bahrain drilling deal.

Bush, Betts, and Ed Bass had all been at Yale at the same time, and Bass Brothers Enterprises—Lee, Ed, Sid, and Robert Bass—would be the fifth-largest donor to W.’s Texas gubernatorial and 2000 presidential campaigns, and ninth among his 2004 presidential campaign donors.

Betts’s good fortune with regard to Silver Screen—and W.’s as well—may have come courtesy of the Bass family, who were Disney’s largest stockholder, having saved Disney from a hostile takeover and selected Michael D. Eisner to run the studio.

The Basses shared the ideological and cultural interests of the Bush clan and their secret society confreres. In 1991, Ed Bass’s brother Lee donated twenty million dollars to Yale, his alma mater, and specified that the money—one of the largest donations ever made to the school—was to be used for revitalizing the Western civilization program. In fact, Bass hoped to limit the growing emphasis on multiculturalism; he was worried that the study of Toni Morrison and Malcolm X was pushing out the “classics.” A controversy ensued, and Yale returned Lee Bass’s money. To some, the problem with the Basses’ gambit was not their ideology, but rather their apparent belief that money, rather than vigorous open debate, should be the deciding factor in a matter of broad public concern. As if to confirm this, when Lee Bass’s effort backfired, Lee’s father, Perry (Yale ’37), offered five hundred million dollars to the school to formally declare that his son had done nothing wrong; Yale president Richard C. Levin refused that deal.

Nevertheless, by the time George W. Bush had become president, Ed Bass was one of Yale’s nineteen trustees, along with Roland Betts. Capping it off, in 2005, the Yale Athletic Department presented Betts with a George H. W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award.

Probably the most interesting thing of all is that the top men at America’s top two universities would have a hand in enriching George W. Bush. W.’s apparent secret friend on the Harken transaction, Robert G. Stone, was the most powerful board member at Harvard, while Betts, the largest single investor in W.’s next enterprise, the Rangers, would become Stone’s equivalent as senior fellow of the Yale Corporation.

W.’s Domain

Financially, the Rangers deal was basically about real estate. By getting the city to build them a new stadium, Bush and his partners increased the team’s book value from $83 million to $138 million. This required convincing the city’s taxpayers that they would lose the team if they did not pay up for the stadium. To raise the $191 million it would cost to build the Ballpark at Arlington, residents were asked to add a half cent to what was already one of the nation’s highest sales tax rates.

According to attorney Glenn Sodd, W.’s group helped egg along Arlington by leaking a story that Dallas was competing for the team and had offered to build them a stadium. “We found out that this was untrue,” said Sodd. In any case, Arlington mayor Richard Greene used the supposed threat to rush a deal through.

Bush put aside his much-touted antitax, free- market principles just long enough to get the city of Arlington to increase taxes on ordinary people there in order to build a stadium for—and then give both the stadium and the land underneath it to—Bush and his partners.

This subsidized land and stadium windfall was engineered at a time when Poppy was president and the savings and loan industry was in a free fall, with real estate being dumped for a pittance. To get the land, the new owners went to governmental agency liquidators and banks handling land liquidations and snapped up property. “Essentially, Bush’s daddy sold him property for pennies on the dollar,” said Sodd. What they couldn’t get on the market, they grabbed with government assistance.

Bush and his partners wanted over two hundred acres of land to develop an entertainment complex around the seventeen- acre stadium. So they used the state’s power of eminent domain to force out landowners without the inconvenience of free market negotiation. As New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston discovered, the Texas Republican Party had already expressed official disapproval of such activity, having stipulated: “Public money (including taxes or bond guarantees) or public powers (such as eminent domain) should not be used to fund or implement so- called private enterprise projects.”

W. would later campaign for governor as a defender of property rights. Speaking to the Texas Association of Business, he said: “I understand full well the value of private property and its importance not only in our state but in capitalism in general. And I will do everything I can to defend the power of private property and private property rights when I am the governor of this state.”

So the Rangers deal was essentially predicated on public funding through a tax increase and the seizure of private land through eminent domain. One attorney called it “welfare for billionaires.” To make money, the own ers needed a new stadium, and they needed someone else to pay for it.

To engineer the crucial land deal, the Bush team found an inside man and an inside- inside man. The inside man was Tom Schieffer, brother of CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer. A former Texas state representative once dubbed one of the “ten worst legislators” in Texas by Texas Monthly, Schieffer had already been involved with a competing group seeking to buy the team, but was persuaded to transfer his allegiance, as well as to bring in a $1.4 million investment. As president, W. would appoint Schieffer ambassador to Australia and then to Japan.

Along with Bush’s lawyer in the Rangers deal, James Doty, the Baker Botts lawyer working for the Saudis, the person who recruited Tom Schieffer also represented both the American oil industry and the Saudis. James C. Langdon Jr. was a Washington attorney who ran the energy practice for the prominent Dallas firm of Akin, Gump.20 Langdon would give $3,500 to Bush during his gubernatorial campaign and become a principal fundraiser in 2000; he and his wife would be overnight guests at Camp David, and Langdon would be named to President George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Again that board. It is not a certainty that Saudi money was involved, but as in past deals, the smoke suggested a fire of some kind.

The inside man was the mayor of Arlington, car dealer Richard Greene. Greene played a key role in the city’s decision to heavily subsidize Bush and his group. At the time he began working to secure a home on favorable terms for Bush’s Rangers, he was in trouble with federal banking regulators working for W.’s dad.

In 1990, at the same time he was talking with the Rangers about a new stadium, Greene was negotiating with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to settle a large lawsuit it had filed against him. He had headed the Arlington branch of Sunbelt Savings Association, which the local Fort Worth Star- Telegram described as “one of the most notorious failures of the S&L scandal.” Sunbelt lost an estimated $2 billion, and the feds (and the nation’s taxpayers) had to chip in about $297 million to clean it up. Greene and the FDIC reached an agreement on the pending suit just as he was signing the Rangers deal.

The Arlington mayor paid just $40,000 to settle the case—and walked away. “George had no knowledge of my problems; there is no connection,” he assured the New York Times in September 2000.21 All of the bank’s key figures were charged except for him. Not only was Greene not criminally indicted, but he also escaped with minimal monetary pain. Ten days before Arlington’s 1991 public referendum on a special sales tax hike to help finance the stadium, Greene, now charged in losses of $500 million, settled all of his civil litigation for a modest $165,000.22

Greene Becomes Green

Greene’s tenure was identified principally with pro- growth and business-friendly policies. Yet after George W. Bush became president, he appointed Greene to be a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, where he oversaw federal environmental programs throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. These states have some of the nation’s most severe pollution problems, most of which are connected to petroleum, and thus of central interest to the Bush political clan—which has typically fought emissions controls.

The announcement of Greene’s EPA appointment, which required no Senate approval, cited no environmental accomplishments or related experience for Greene. It did note that his wife was founder and current director of the River Legacy Foundation, which created trails and a nature center along undeveloped portions by the Trinity River. But it failed to add that she had been named to that post by the city government that her husband ran. In 1997, then- governor George W. Bush appointed Mrs. Greene to the Trinity River Authority board of directors. It all raised the question: Why was a car dealer in charge of environmental protection efforts in a part of the country befouled by some of the most noxious emissions found anywhere? Greene’s EPA appointment was a nice farewell gift from his friends in the White House. He will get a pension equivalent to 100 percent of the highest pay he received at the EPA—this for a man who helped bankrupt two S&L’s at massive cost to the public, and who walked away with just a forty- thousand- dollar fine.

Owning Up to It

It didn’t take special political acumen to see that association with the Rangers would be helpful for anyone with political aspirations. For one
thing, it appealed to state pride. After all, this wasn’t the Arlington Rangers, or even the Dallas–Fort Worth Rangers; it was the Texas Rangers. Not only that, the team was named after an institution dear to the hearts and minds of all Texans. Since its founding in 1823, the original Texas Rangers, heroic upholders of law and order, have attained a near- mythic aura based on exploits that range from routing Comanches and Mexican soldiers to chasing down outlaws such as John Wesley Hardin.

Years later, W. would refer to his Ranger years as simply “a win- win for everyone involved.” But the business dealings that extracted $135 million from taxpayers should have made Bush a juicy media target in the 2000 presidential election. New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof ferreted out the truth behind W.’s baseball bonanza in a front- page article in September 2000. Unfortunately, it took the Times six paragraphs to even hint that the report was more than a puff piece about a successful Texas businessman. Arlington attorney Jim Runzheimer was surprised that rival campaigns dismissed the reporting. “I thought at that point for sure the Gore campaign would have picked up on Nick Kristof’s article,” Runzheimer said. “I mean, they don’t know who some local yokel is, who might be saying certain negative things about Bush. But hey, if Nick Kristof . . . obviously he’s got some stature. He’s a Pulitzer Prize–winner, if nothing else. But they didn’t follow up.” Even if Gore had trouble untangling the thorny financial web of Harken Energy, the story of Bush and Arlington provided ripe material for debunking his supposedly antitax opponent. “The ballpark would have been an easy issue. Kerry didn’t do anything with it either . . . Bush would have been on defense if he would have had to explain, but not once did that come up in either campaign.”

At the very least, voters would have realized that they were dealing with, per David Cay Johnston, “arguably the greatest salesman of our time,” who would end up “having sold not just friends but political opponents on a war costing more than a trillion dollars and thousands of lives with the kind of pay- no- attention- to- that- pool- of- oil- under- the- engine polish that used car salesmen only dream about.”

W.’s public sales jobs thus began with his successful effort to sell the citizens of Arlington on a tax increase—one that ran counter to his stated antitax principles, but also one where the beneficiary would be himself.

A Good Job—If You Can Get It

All W.’s Texas Rangers position really required was for him to show up at baseball games—which, of course, he was eager to do because of the public exposure it gave him. For this he received a salary of $200,000, about $350,000 in today’s dollars—his largest compensation ever—for what was at most a part- time job.

Besides the constant association of his candidate with this beloved team in this beloved sport, Karl Rove loved to promote the public impression that Bush played an important role in the administration of the team. Given his conspicuous lack of experience in running ventures of any size or success, Bush needed to be seen as substantially engaged with the team’s operations in order to ask the people of Texas to elect him governor. Rove would insist that newspapers refer to Bush as the “Rangers owner,” though W. was just one of many owners, and certainly not the principal or most active one. He also was not at all engaged in daily operations. As Glenn Sodd, the opposing attorney on the Rangers’ land seizures recalled: “Bush never showed up at any of the key meetings about the [stadium deal]. If Bush spent two hours a week working on the baseball team, I’d be surprised.”

While he was ostensibly toiling for the Rangers, Bush traveled widely on the company budget and delivered hundreds of speeches. He was building a following throughout Texas—as Bush explained in an exchange of notes with David Rosen, an oil geologist and acquaintance from Midland. Rosen had seen W.’s face on the cover of Newsweek, and an accompanying article in which he said he might run for governor. “I dropped him a letter suggesting that he would be much better suited for the House of Representatives, inasmuch as it’s a gentleman’s club, a lot of Yale graduates there,” recalled Rosen. “Not a rough job. But I think he dropped back this note that he was more interested in what he could do for Texas.”

To be precise, the note read:

Dear David, thanks for the letter and thoughts. I will not run for the House. It is a young man’s seat and you and I are not young. I don’t have any specific plans except to run the Rangers and work hard for candidates and the party—100 plus speeches in 1990.

W. commented on how the Republican gubernatorial nominee Clayton Williams had virtually handed the nomination to Democrat Ann Richards through his intemperate remarks, then added:

Let’s hope she does well. If not there will be some folks after her . . . Sincerely, George.

Having egregiously gamed the system for years without being called to account, W. saw little reason to settle for so meager a prize as a congressional seat.

[For the entire book, click here.]

GRAPHIC: http://www.danvollmayer.com/uploads/4/4/8/3/4483272/4617776.png?295

All those weaselly words politicians use? George Carlin was on the case.

Boston, and the other big explosion—in West, Texas

During a meeting on Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after the bombings at the Boston Marathon, a well-meaning person asked me whether I thought we could assume that the usual suspects were behind the mayhem, or whether there was “more to it.” When I explained doubts about the conventional rush to judgment—and where those doubts came from—I was told I was on dangerous ground. This person, it seemed, was quite steadfast that the culprits must have come from certain well-advertised enemies of America, and didn’t want to even consider anything more complex.

We’re the products of our environment, and, in many respects, the media defines that environment.

Monday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon provides a perfect example of the defects of conventional news reportage—and proof that we urgently need something better. We got “scoops”, “experts”, “updates,” and post-tragedy Kumbaya, but at the end of those days of saturation coverage, we were none the wiser. It’s like what studies find about television news: the more you watch, the worse you perform on knowledge exams.

We ought to care more about the narrative we’re getting, about the texture of what saturates us. The way in which a story is handled shapes our emotions and perceptions, determines priorities, and influences seemingly unrelated outcomes that affect us in profound ways, sometimes transforming our society.

Worry, But Not Too Much

With the bombing story, emotions ran high, of course. The media understand this, and while they talk in reassuring tones and routinely issue sober disclaimers, almost everything they do plays to our irrational sides.

Two elements predominate: danger and reassurance. Some of the talking heads are there to warn about danger, others to reassure us. Some do both. We wouldn’t want just one or the other—it would be too hard to take. But together, they represent, psychologically, an ineluctable offering.

As long as they appear in tandem, we will sit, immobilized, and let the networks’ pronouncements wash over us. We become so anaesthetized to critical thinking that we fail to consider whether we are getting any information of use at all.

Experts

On CBS, a purported expert declared, “It could be Al Qaeda, it could be someone influenced by Al Qaeda, or it could be a domestic lone wolf” –when in fact it could have been anything at all, including a whole bunch of domestic non-Al Qaeda non-lone wolves. This man provided nothing useful in any way beyond conventional stereotypes. What he did do was define the permissible bounds of public conjecture.

Scoops

Speculation and its close cousin, “analysis,” predominate only in the absence of the hottest commodity, “scoops.” News personnel are pressed into service to gather any sort of exclusive tidbits that might put their employer just slightly ahead of the competition. Temporarily, of course, and in the same direction. So, while CBS expert was strongly implying that we might suspect foreigners, CNN went it one better.

Correspondent John King reported:

I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things. I was told by one of these sources, who is a law enforcement official, that this was a dark-skinned male. The official used some other words, I’m not going to repeat them until we get more information because of the sensitivities. There are some people that will take offense even at saying that.

 Well, no wonder. That “dark-skinned” detail turned out to be a false report.

Repetition

In the absence of “scoops” or a fresh trove of “experts,” TV news outfits resort to repetition. Thus, after several minutes, you’re on a loop. They don’t tell you that you are, and because we hear a live anchor slightly rewording things, we hang on, in the vain hope we are about to learn something new.

Another thing that keeps us hooked is the promise of being re-traumatized in as many ways as possible. Show us that bomb going off again, please. Let’s see new pictures of the killed and injured in happier times. Let’s see closeups of gnarled detritus, and, on occasion with disclaimers that young children ought not watch, at least a hint of blood and gore. Let us “empathize,” and feel good about ourselves for doing so.

Kumbaya

How many times do we have to hear the same—literally, almost exactly the same—stories about “our hearts go out to the families”, about how “neighbors displayed yellow ribbons, lit candles and displayed American flags.” A liberal news site sent out an email saying “we are all in this together.”

To what end all this empathy? It may reassure us that humanity continues to shine through at tough times, but don’t we already know that?

Some might say that stoking a “show of unity” is a principal responsibility of the American media. But is that really the purpose of journalism?

The definition of journalism I find most useful is, simply stated, the production and dissemination of news. And what, exactly, is “news”? Here’s one definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.

Is it new or noteworthy when people act in expected ways and say expected and indeed almost identical things in new situations?

Substitute for Substance

In today’s economic and journalistic climate, resources for newsgathering are extremely limited. It’s not surprising that the bosses go for quantity over quality. Much easier to collect a bunch of sterile or hackneyed “public reactions” than to ask the tough questions or do the hard digging.

When an event like the Boston bombing gives rise to wall-to-wall coverage, it fills our bandwidth. It exhausts us. It blocks out our ability to focus on anything else. At least, if we’re going to give up on everything else, is it too much to ask that the coverage contain some useful information?

What Gets Blocked Out

At the same moment that all eyes were on Boston, in Washington, legislation imposing restrictions on assault weapons and ammunition clips, along with efforts to require the recording of sales of murderous weapons, were under merciless assault by the NRA and its allies. Indeed, the proposed laws subsequently went down to defeat. As horrible as the death and destruction at the Marathon, it pales by comparison to potentially avoidable gun violence, with literally thousands of times as much carnage. Put another way, the toll in Boston was a compressed version of that occurring during a single ordinary week around this country.

Call the Senate vote bad timing. Just like the atypical rampage the week before in which a “nut” used a knife instead of the standard-issue assault rifle. How atypical? Very, says USA Today in an article, “Mass Knife Attacks, Like at Texas College, Are Rare.” Yet, at the time of the Senate vote, opponents of stronger gun laws were beneficiaries of this statistically anomalous but dominant news story.

Those who still will not do anything after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown ad nauseum had “cover” from the Boston bombing to not make hard choices.

Of course, a real nut, seeing the kind of coverage lavished on the Boston bombings, would be more, not less likely, to want to generate such a hullaballoo.

Double Standard on Tragedy

We repeatedly fail to see how such media circuses feed the sickness. It’s an uncomfortable topic, but you can be sure that every assigning editor was aware that the Boston Marathon story had all the elements of high ratings: Families gathered. A hallowed sports event. Children. People of all backgrounds. A popular city and site.

Other stories in the news — such as the explosion Wednesday night at a Texas fertilizer plant, resulting in more fatalities than the Boston bombing— lack these compelling elements. How many people were glued to their sets or talking constantly about the Texas tragedy, which involved not “ordinary American families” enjoying a beloved pastime, but blue collar workers in a “right to work” state where unsafe working conditions are hardly considered shocking?  Even when it seemed possible that the Texas explosion might also involve terror, it didn’t capture the same degree of interest. We came to learn that perhaps it was “just” an industrial accident—at a plant that hadn’t been inspected in five years. Such accidents, if that is what it was, are only likely to increase as federal inspection funds are slashed as part of the sequester.

The truth is, some things grab and keep our attention more than others. The people who run the media know this. And because they have to sell ads, they focus on some things more than others.

FBI Missteps

Was there anything else we could have been focused on? There was, but it was just too “distasteful” to broach, at least in the early hours. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it was the Fox brand (admittedly a local station, not the propagandistic Fox News Channel) that dared to raise questions about events that terrorize the public. In this report, the correspondent dares to remind us that the FBI has in the past had close relationships with people who want to blow things up, and has even facilitated these plots up to the point where law enforcement can intervene to thwart the bad guys. Was a similar sting in place at the Marathon – a sting that went horribly wrong?

One veteran marathoner, Alistair Stevenson, the cross-country coach at the University of Mobile, says that he noticed an unusually heavy police presence, including bomb-sniffing dogs and spotters on rooftops, before the race, and that runners were told not to worry—that law enforcement was carrying out “drills.”

Stevenson’s account was reported in an Alabama blog run by a consortium of respectable local news organizations, but it was virtually ignored by the traditional media. Nothing here worth a second-look? Really?

Is it heresy or madness to take a harder look at the metastatic growth of the national security state? History is replete with examples of cynical efforts to create “strategies of tension” in which the public, fearful of growing chaos, turns to the reassurances of those who promise order.

In fact, it so happens that advocates of increasing surveillance are pressing their game on every front. One involves the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which, if enacted, would authorize your web service provider to pass along your real-time personal data to the Federal spooks. There’s been a lot of opposition to this, but something like the Marathon bombing can be a game-changer. Those who monitor public sentiment understand the power of emotion to alter public stances.

That’s not to say there is necessarily anything “more” going on here. But from history, we know that the official story will point to one of two things: either an organized radical (Left or Right or Foreign) group that threatens “the American way of life,” or it will be a “lone kook.”

It could be that by the time you read this, we will “know” the “full story.” At press time, the story was breaking in a new direction, with two young immigrant brothers, Chechens, the identified culprits. Why Chechens, who, though Muslim, would principally have a beef with the Russians, with whom they have been at war, not with the US? And why if they were, as apparently they were, treated well here and given opportunities, including a scholarship?

The upshot will be to bring the US and Russia into closer alignment.

Remember, though, that even the most radical of terrorists can be wound up by infiltrators, or can have links to our good friends, as we reported about those identified as the 9/11 hijackers, and their ties, via a house in Florida, to the Saudi royal family.

Oh, and what about the fire that broke out around the same time as the Marathon bombing, at the nearby John F. Kennedy Library and Museum? Interest in that fire largely vanished as soon as we were tentatively assured that it was (perhaps/probably) unrelated. Talk about symbolism: the Boston Marathon on “Patriot’s Day”—and the repository of records related to one of America’s greatest mysteries, the death fifty years ago of a President who warned us repeatedly of the dangers of tyranny—and who sought peace with the non-hardliners in the Kremlin.

So let’s not settle so fast for the wrong kind of reassurance. Other societies have learned the hard way to be wary of too-easy answers. We simply must be open to the most inconvenient truths—not out of paranoid fantasies, but from a cold-eyed look at history and recent experience.

GRAPHIC:
http://a.abcnews.com/images/Health/ap_boston_investigation_lpl_130417_wg.jpg  and http://media.kmov.com/images/texasexplosion041813.jpg

New York Times boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Originally published January 9, 2012 

Recently, New York Times staffers boldly confronted their institution. In a near outright insurrection, published December 23 as an open letter to their boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., 561 staffers and a few retirees signed a declaration of frustration.

We’ve got our own declaration to those Times folks—a way out of this mess.

But first, here’s the text of that open letter, in its entirety:

Dear Arthur:

We, the Guild leadership and many reporters, editors, account managers and other Times employees, Guild members and otherwise, are writing to express profound dismay at several recent developments.

Our foreign citizen employees in overseas bureaus have just had their pensions frozen with only a week’s warning. Some of these people have risked their lives so that we can do our jobs. A couple have even lost them. Many have spent their entire careers at the Times — indeed, some have letters from your father explaining the pension system — and deserve better treatment.

At the same time, your negotiators have demanded a freeze of our pension plan and an end to our independent health insurance.

We ask you to withdraw these demands so that negotiations on a new contract can proceed fruitfully and expeditiously. We also urge you to reconsider the decision to eliminate the pensions of the foreign employees.

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

One of our colleagues in senior management recently announced her retirement from the paper, which is reported to include a very generous severance and retirement package, including full pension benefits.

All of us who work at the Times deserve to have a secured retirement; this should not be a privilege cynically reserved to senior management. We strongly urge you to keep faith with your words and our shared mission of putting out the best newspaper in the world.

WHY A LETTER WON’T DO IT—AND WHAT WILL

New York Timesians, welcome to the real world. In the end, the problem is the ownership of the media. In the end, you work on a plantation. Granted, it is a plush plantation, and there are many benefits, not the least of which is the status it accords.

But you’re very much working for the establishment. And the establishment is looking out for their interests, chiefly, not yours, or ours, no matter how much they try and tell us otherwise.

Why not, in this new world, take a risk to create a better journalism, one not owned by rich people or corporations? Why not get involved with journalism whose only agenda is to figure out what is really going on, and then say so? That gets right to the point of what you discovered in your reporting, without pretending to be above the fray and reporting what powerful, self-interested “sources” tell you as if it is the gospel?

You can see what corporate ownership (even the kind dominated by single families—think Walmart and the Waltons, not just the Sulzbergers and the New York Times) does to journalists: it causes them to hold their fire. News outlets are really too important to democracy and the public interest to let them nestle in the bosom of the rich.

Think of all the times The Times has been wrong, pressing you toward the establishment consensus on stories where you knew that was not the right place to be, journalistically.

The Times has exaggerated the importance of things like the Iowa caucuses and primaries in terms of giving the public false confidence they actually have a say in what is an increasingly tenuous democracy. It played a central role in the rush to war with Iraq, and a lack of investigative rigor on the real reasons for intervening in Libya. It has been so terrified of being labeled as “conspiracy theorists” that it has ignored important legitimate reporting on 9/11 and the inconsistent government explanations of the raid that “got” Bin Laden.

It has shown cluelessness on Occupy Wall Street. Its columnists defended a friend instead of investigating him for fraud. It has been excessively soft toward “acceptable” candidates like Mitt Romney and rough on those who would ruffle feathers.

The Times investigates the establishment, up to a point. But in the end, it upholds the establishment. It is a wholly owned subsidiary.

Think of the hoary old discredited memes, like the Warren Report, that the spirit of the place keeps flame for some reason. Think of its preference for bland middle of the road candidates who can do nothing to stop this country’s slide to the bottom. And for “order,” when what we may need, in a country increasingly experiencing corporate-driven chaos, is a little more healthy disorder.

Corporate-owned media has been “in charge” of providing the dominant national narrative, helping us understand where we are and why, and what we can do about it. And how good a job, would you say, it has done, overall? Are things much better after this long reign?

Most of you are fine people—some are my friends—and many of you do great work, or at least the best you are able under certain constraints. But in the end you are on the plantation. You may petition your owner, as you have, but he’s got the upper hand. He certainly isn’t going to give up a lot so that you may keep your pension.

I understand you want to keep your job and your benefits. But does it really feel that good being on the corporate plantation?

Come join us. Ask the deep questions, write whatever you learn. No holds barred. Work in an outfit that takes itself a little less seriously—but takes the truth very seriously indeed.

Help us collect the people and the resources, and build a more perfect journalism.

WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support.

Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.

GRAPHIC: http://static8.businessinsider.com/image/4bf1437c7f8b9a660d0e0600/new-york-times.jpg