Douglas Jehl and David Johnston of the New York Times report that George Bush signed a directive that gave the CIA authority to outsource torture.

The Bush administration's secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency under broad authority that has allowed it to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments, according to current and former government officials.

The unusually expansive authority for the C.I.A. to operate independently was provided by the White House under a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.

Jehl and Johnston talk about "interrogation," but Bob Herbert says "It's Called Torture."

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen with a wife and two young children, had his life flipped upside down in the fall of 2002 when John Ashcroft's Justice Department, acting at least in part on bad information supplied by the Canadian government, decided it would be a good idea to abduct Mr. Arar and ship him off to Syria, an outlaw nation that the Justice Department honchos well knew was addicted to torture.

Mr. Arar was not charged with anything, and yet he was deprived not only of his liberty, but of all legal and human rights. He was handed over in shackles to the Syrian government and, to no one's surprise, promptly brutalized. A year later he emerged, and still no charges were lodged against him. His torturers said they were unable to elicit any link between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was sent back to Canada to face the torment of a life in ruins.

According to Jehl and Johnston, "since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A. has flown 100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another, including to Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan."

Isn't Syria the nation we're self-righteously ordering to vacate Lebanon? Not that I'm not happy for a free Lebanon, but ...

Bob Herbert continues,

How many other individuals have disappeared at the hands of the Bush administration? How many have been sent, like the victims of a lynch mob, to overseas torture centers? How many people are being held in the C.I.A.'s highly secret offshore prisons? Who are they and how are they being treated? Have any been wrongly accused? If so, what recourse do they have?

President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, "the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity."

Even worse, I bet Bush doesn't see the discrepancy.

On the Italian front, Giuliana Sgrena is telling her homies that the car she was riding in was not speeding, and the shots that wounded her and killed an Italian agent were not fired from a checkpoint, but from a roadside patrol.

Note that I'm not assuming Sgrena's version of the story is true, any more than I'm assuming the official U.S. version of the story is true. We'll see.

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Now it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn. California's nurses have got him rattled, and it's already costing him. A February 23 Field Poll showed his approval ratings declining ten points since last September, a significant drop. It should have been a no-brainer to realize that kicking Florence Nightingale's butt is not a surefire way to the public's heart. But the Governor is so used to browbeating the press that he thought he could do the same to the California Nurses' Association (CNA), one of the most militant unions in the country. Schwarzenegger has been trying to roll back the union's gains on nurse/patient ratios, safety standards and kindred issues.

Schwarzenegger's version of Howard Dean's scream came in December in Long Beach. As the nurses barracked him during a speech, he denounced them as one of the "special interests" and said, "I'm always kicking their butt." This witty response from the breast-grabber got plenty of play, and did the nurses nothing but good. [The Nation, March 21, 2005]

A few days later a CHP investigator called. DiGiacomo asked why she should be considered a threat. The investigator replied, "Well, you were wearing a nurse's uniform." "Oh, sure, the international terrorist uniform," DiGiacomo scoffed.

US military forces have killed innocent Iraqi civilians at such checkpoints on a number of occasions, and, indeed, statistics for spring-summer 2004 show that the US was responsible for killing more Iraqi civilians than did the guerrillas. I cannot remember interim PM Iyad Allawi reacting as stiffly to such incidents as Berlusconi just did

Sgrena was a left-wing journalist. It is interesting to note that many journalists abducted in Iraq (French Jacqueline Aubenas is stil being held) are communist (or close) reporters very sympathetic to the so-called insurgency. One can wonder whether they are very naive, or if they fake the kidnapping with "insurgency" groups because they know what effect it has on the home opinion.

Leftist media already blaming US of interfering with hostage release, as if stopping at US checkpoint was more dangerous than, say, her time with the alleged terrorists. London Times:

Ms Sgrena was wounded when US troops opened fire on a convoy carrying her to safety, and an Italian negotiator who help negotiate her release was killed, her newspaper Il Manifesto said.

What Il Manifesto forgets to mention is that Sgrena was taken by the evil American forces to a US Army hospital for treatment. Right, very unafe.

Stupid leftist Italian bitch Giuliana Sgrena has been "freed" from the Islamic terrorists who pretended to hold her hostage in order to release a bunch of anti-American videos. Fortunately, the stupid bitch's stupid driver was too stupid to slow down at an American checkpoint, and some righteous U.S. soldier winged her good. Plus the stupid Italian secret service agent who must've been in on the phony kidnapping plot got killed. Score one for us.

Sgrena works for Il Manifesto, an Italian newspaper that is leftist and probably Communist, and which opposed the invasion of Iraq, which shows they hate democracy and want the whole world to be run by Islamofacists who are also Communist sympathizers.

US troops took Sgrena to a hospital for world-class American health care treatment in spite of the fact that the bitch didn't deserve it.

I dunno. Maybe that's too subtle for 'em.

Speaking of journalism in Iraq, there's a good article in the current Columbia Journalism Review that says not much journalism is actually going on in Iraq, because it's too dangerous even for Arabic reporters.

History is still being made in Iraq as the country struggles toward independence. But Al Jazeera isn’t there to watch it unfold. Last August Iraqi officials closed the station’s Baghdad bureau and barred it from operating in the country. Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera’s closest competitor, drastically cut its Iraqi operations after insurgents bombed its offices there in October, killing five employees and injuring fourteen. And Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the two largest pan-Arab dailies, shuttered its Baghdad bureau in December after insurgents threatened to blow it up. A number of Arab journalists have also been detained, some even killed, by jittery American troops.

In a war where the various factions seem to want everyone — including the press — to choose sides, the Arab media have found themselves under attack from every direction. That has far-reaching implications. Western reporters, faced with the threat of death, began retreating to fortified compounds months ago. Now, with pressure mounting, Arab journalists, along with Arab translators and fixers employed by international news organizations, are retreating, too. The result is that firsthand reporting is getting squeezed out. When it comes to covering the Iraq conflict — one of the most important stories of our time — even the Arab media are finding themselves increasingly reliant on secondhand accounts and official reports from Washington and Baghdad, and less able to gauge how events are playing out in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. “We can no longer get close to people’s suffering, people’s hopes, people’s dreams,” says Nabil Khatib, Al Arabiya’s executive editor for news. “We no longer know what’s really going on because we can no longer get close to reality.”

The CJR article doesn't mention Eason Jordan, but Majikthise does.

David U. Himmelstein, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and three colleagues reviewed 1,771 personal bankruptcy documents in five federal judicial districts in 2001, and conducted follow-up surveys with 931 of those debtors to determine how illness contributes to bankruptcy in America.

While the number of overall bankruptcies was 3.6 times higher in 2001 than in 1980, the number of health-related bankruptcies increased 23-fold over the same period, which suggests that high medical bills were a major contributor to the growth in the number of individuals seeking federal bankruptcy protection.

“The medical debtors we surveyed were demographically typical Americans who got sick,” Himmelstein says. “They differed from others filing for bankruptcy in one important respect: They were more likely to have experienced a lapse in health coverage. Many had coverage at the onset of their illness but lost it. In other cases, even continuous coverage left families with ruinous medical bills.”

Among the survey’s findings:

—Between 1.9 million and 2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) were affected by medical bankruptcies in 2001
—Three-quarters of the debtors had insurance at the onset of the bankrupting illness
—Out-of-pocket costs for those bankruptcy filers since the onset of illness or injury averaged $11,854
—Medical debtors were 42 percent more likely than other debtors to experience a lapse in health insurance coverage
—As they experienced financial trouble, 61 percent of the filers failed to seek medical treatments they needed

Debtors’ narratives painted a picture of families arriving at the bankruptcy courthouse emotionally and financially exhausted, hoping to stop the collection calls, save their homes, and stabilize their economic circumstances. Many of the debtors detailed ongoing problems with access to care. Some expressed fear that their medical care providers would refuse to continue their care, and a few recounted actual experiences of this kind. Several had used credit cards to charge medical bills they had no hope of paying.

The co-occurrence of medical and job problems was a common theme. For instance, one debtor underwent lung surgery and suffered a heart attack. Both hospitalizations were covered by his employer-based insurance, but he was unable to return to his physically demanding job. He found new employment but was denied coverage because of his preexisting conditions, which required costly ongoing care. Similarly, a teacher who suffered a heart attack was unable to return to work for many months, and hence her coverage lapsed. A hospital wrote off her $20,000 debt, but she was nonetheless bankrupted by doctors’ bills and the cost of medications.

A second common theme was sounded by parents of premature infants or chronically ill children; many took time off from work or incurred large bills for home care while they were at their jobs.

Finally, many of the insured debtors blamed high copayments and deductibles for their financial ruin. For example, a man insured through his employer (a large national firm) suffered a broken leg and torn knee ligaments. He incurred $13,000 in out-of-pocket costs for copayments, deductibles, and uncovered services—much of it for physical therapy.

(*David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler, "Marketwatch: Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy," Health Affairs Web Exclusive, February 2, 2005.)

 

Most middle-class Americans have a faith that, if they work hard and play by the rules, they won't end up living on the streets in a cardboard box. Before the New Deal they might have, but since then falling from middle-class grace into the perdition of poverty and homelessness became nearly unimaginable, even though it still happened. But, many figured, those people who fell must have deserved it somehow.

 

And if reality came knocking in the form of catastrophic medical bills, there was always bankruptcy. That's still not a great solution -- it stays on your credit report for a decade and may prevent you from renting a new home or getting a mortgage -- but at least you probably can keep the home you've got and go on with your life.

 

Well, folks, that's about to change. The GOP's beloved Compassionate Conservative Bankruptcy Bill  is expected to pass in the Senate next week.

 

The bill doesn't eliminate bankruptcy altogether. However, it applies a means test so that people who make at least the median income in their state will be put on a repayment plan.

 

Senator Edward Kennedy proposed two amendments that the GOP (and some Democrats) shot down. The first would have exempted from the means test people forced into bankruptcy by medical bills. The second would have protected $150,000 of the value of patients' homes from being seized to pay creditors.

 

But the GOP doesn't see anything wrong with people having to choose between paying for mom's chemotherapy or keeping their home. The Kennedy amendments were voted down.

 

Other amendments brought forward by Democrats would have provided some protection for the elderly and people who are victims of fraud.

 

Nope. Can't have that, said the Republicans. "The only way we are going to change bankruptcy is by passing this bill. And the only way to pass this bill is to pass it without any amendments," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).

 

Hatch doesn't say why that's true, but by damn, he is one resolute sumbitch. That bill is gonna pass.

 

Of course, American's big corporations and the extremely wealthy won't have to worry. According to Jonathan Chait, the bill doesn't address long-time loopholes that permit the rich to stash millions away in "asset protection trusts" that are out of bankruptcy's reach. "States actually compete with one another to offer the most generous trusts so they can lure businesses and affluent individuals to park their money in that state," says Chait. 

 

Chait points out that Delaware is the most popular state for setting up asset protection trusts. Delaware is also the home state of many credit-card companies. Delaware is also the home state of Senator Joe Biden, who joined with the Republicans to vote down the amendments.

 

It has truly been said that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. It's also often true that you don't realize what you're missing until you need it. Millions of Americans are about to learn those lessons the hard way, thanks to the GOP (and Joe Biden).  

 

The credit card companies complain that bankruptcies force customers with good credit to pay the bills of deadbeats. The bigger picture is that medical bankruptcy is one of our strategies for not dealing honestly with health care. We've turned paying catastrophic health care costs into a game of musical chairs played by patients, doctors, hospitals, and employers. When the music stops, somebody gets stuck with the bill. Insurers and the pharmaceutical/medical supplies industries, for some reason, get to stay seated. And when nobody is left standing, the bill gets passed to banks and credit card companies, and from there to the rest of us. And no, tort reform will not fix the problem.

 

Can somebody explain to me again why we don't have national, single-payer health care?

 

But now I'm supposed to be posting about the bankruptcy bill, so I'll try to stay focused.

 

Even as more and more people are being forced out of health insurance plans, and the White House plans to cut Medicaid, the Senate merrily rips to shreds one of the last safety nets left between the American middle class and ruin.

 

This is betrayal. And it's one more illustration of the fact that we left government "of the people, by the people, for the people" behind somewhere in the 20th century. I don't know exactly where we lost it, but it's sure as hell not here now.

 

My only question is, how many lives will be destroyed before the middle class catches on and fights back?
 

Relevant Links:

 

"How Bankruptcy Saved My Life"

 

"Bankruptcy Bill Targets the Wrong People"

 

"Taming the Medicaid Monster"

 

Update: David Corn writes,

Last month, Congress passed legislation that could end most multi-state class action lawsuits—essentially handing a get-out-of-court-free card to manufacturers of defective products, negligent HMOs, sleazy credit card companies and other less-than-honorable residents of Corporate America—and the debate came and went in what seemed to be seven seconds. The deal was done by the time the talking heads had a chance to shout at each other about it. The Social Security debate has sucked up all the oxygen.

Update update March 5: Ian Welch has another take on the bankruptcy bill at BOP News.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday that Congress must confront Social Security's problems this year, dialing back comments earlier in the week that action might have to wait.

``We need to do it this year. Not the next year,'' Frist said Thursday on the Senate floor. ``We are working towards this goal.''

Two days ago, Frist noted intense Democratic opposition and suggested he might not be able to move a bill to the Senate floor this year, as Bush has pushed for. ``I want to be realistic,'' Frist said on Tuesday.

I only wonder why Frist took two days to retract. He must've put up some tough resistance. No broken fingers that I can see from photos.

... two new public opinion polls found Bush losing ground. One, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People & the Press, showed mounting disapproval for his overall handling of the Social Security debate and, in particular, his proposal to allow individual to divert contributions into investments in stocks and bonds.

The poll found that only 46 percent like the idea of creating private accounts, down from 54 percent last December.

Social Security has become Bush's weakest policy area in terms of public support, the poll found, with only 29 percent of respondents saying he was handling the issue well and two-thirds saying he has not explained his overall plan clearly enough. The poll surveyed 1,502 Americans from Feb. 16-21.[Minneapolis Star Tribune]

Americans say President Bush does not share the priorities of most of the country on either domestic or foreign issues, are increasingly resistant to his proposal to revamp Social Security and say they are uneasy with Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the retirement program, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

... On Social Security, 51 percent said permitting individuals to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts, the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's plan, was a bad idea, even as a majority said they agreed with Mr. Bush that the program would become insolvent near the middle of the century if nothing was done. The number who thought private accounts were a bad idea jumped to 69 percent if respondents were told that the private accounts would result in a reduction in guaranteed benefits. And 45 percent said Mr. Bush's private account plan would actually weaken the economic underpinnings of the nation's retirement system.

And yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Frist said he'd rather delay the Social Security vote until 2006, which must have displeased the White House mightily. So far I haven't seen a retraction from Frist.

Nevertheless, Bush is charging ahead with what Josh Marshall calls the Bamblepalooza Tour. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in today's Washington Post,

President Bush plans to intensify his campaign to win public and congressional support for restructuring Social Security, warning that it would be a bad idea to delay action as the Senate Republican leader has suggested and politically unwise for lawmakers to oppose private accounts, White House officials said yesterday.

Despite polls showing support for the plan slipping, Bush is confident he is winning the first phase of the public debate over Social Security and has no plans to significantly alter his strategy for enacting the most dramatic changes ever to the venerable system, said senior White House officials who have talked to Bush.

I'm wondering if those senior White House officials had the nerve to tell Bush he is losing in the polls.

Bush and action figure Dick the Dick are embarking on a "60 cities in 60 days" tour to sell the privatization scheme to a skeptical public by talking to "town meeting" audiences made up exclusively of people who already agree with it. (And you must read what Dan Froomkin said about that in yesterday's WaPo.)

Why isn't the Rove Playbook working for Social Security as well as it did for selling the war in Iraq? Shakespeare's Sister says,

I think the GOP is starting to discover some interesting things about their supporters. First they found out the churchly types in the red states actually are the religious nutjobs Bush & Co. only claim to be, so even though gay marriage might be little more than a wedge issue as far as Rove is concerned, Dobson and his minions aren’t about to be satisfied with mere lip service. (Wow—ever since Gannon, it really is impossible to talk about gay issues and the White House without everything becoming a double entendre.)

Now Bush discovers that lying to them about his reasons for killing some dirty Arabs isn’t the same as lying to them about their checks. Lying about the Iraq War, well shit—when the half-assed, badly concocted tale of national security using dubious intelligence was revealed as a fairy tale, sure red America shrugged. Such careful posturing had been an unnecessary political formality as far as they were concerned; they were quite happy to go along with bombing the ragheads for no reason at all. Lying about their checks, though—hold on a second now. They’re sitting up and paying attention on this one, and they don’t like what they’re hearing. Go figure. Each week, the figures look worse for the pres.

I'm afraid that second paragraph is more true than I wish it were.

It's important to remember that all is not won. Because Bush himself has offered very few specifics, he'll be able to take credit for just about any legislation that claims to save Social Security even if that legislation is written entirely by Democrats. For example, a majority of people surveyed by NY Times/CBS favored raising the payroll tax cap, which would make the program solvent for many more years without furthering tinkering. Even though raising the tax cap is heresy to rightie true believers, if Bush signed such a bill and claimed it as his own idea it might win him more support points than he would lose.

Just yesterday, Treasury Secretary John Snow said (according to some accounts) the White House was willing to consider a Social Security overhaul that does not divert the program’s payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts. But Reuters says that what Snow proposed was establishing private accounts that are separate from, rather than carved out of, the payroll taxes they pay. Whatever the proposal, I think the Dems must be extremely careful not to give Bush the appearance of a victory. Because, politically, that's all he needs.

 

What he wants, however, is to destroy Social Security.

 

Rightie blogger Orrin Judd quotes a Bob the Lizard column in which the Reptile points to a proposal from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that would, among other things, change indexing to the inflation rate rather than the wage rate and establish a means test to end benefits for the rich. Mr. Judd, correctly, writes, "This has always been the ace in the hole, though folks don't seem to grasp it: any system that combines personal accounts and means-testing effectively ends SS."

 

The Left Blogosphere on the whole grasped that a long time ago. Let's see if the Dems in Congress have caught on. 

 

Update: Must read Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.

The US has one of the highest rates of relative child poverty among the world's wealthiest countries, according to a report by the UN.

The US, which is second only to Mexico in the UN children's agency report, is nonetheless one of few countries to see a recent decline in child poverty.

Unicef looked at child poverty rates in 24 of the wealthiest countries. The US had the second highest rate of the 24, saved by Mexico from being number one. But here's the mystery: poverty rates increased in 17 of these countries and fell in only 4. The United States was one of the 4.

What might have caused a decline in child poverty in the US? Look at the time frames on the table: "Recent" means "over the past 15 years." We're looking at the Clinton/Bush II years versus the Reagan/Bush I years. The Clinton economic boom might account for a decline in child poverty in that time period. We're not yet seeing the full impact of the Bush Administration.

Also note that Unicef's numbers are of relative poverty, defined as households with per capita income below 50% of the national average. Denmark and Finland have child poverty levels of less than 3 percent, meaning that only 3 percent of children live in households with a per capita income below 50% of the averages for Denmark and Finland.

The US has a child poverty level of 22 percent. Mexico tops the charts at 28 percent. These levels are relative to the national averages of the US and Mexico, not to all the other countries.

Much of the difference comes from the fact that some countries provide more benefits to children than other countries. Also, seems to me, nations with higher child poverty rates as measured by Unicef must have bigger income gaps between rich and poor.

And it's also a measure of how much we really value our children.

With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.