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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Now!
"But he hasn't got anything
on" a little child said.
Hans Christian Andersen, The
Emporer's New Clothes
Only a politician would have thought
of it and having thought of it, only another politician would
have abandoned it. And who better to have thought of it than
the majority leader of the United States Senate.
While people in this country
are suffering gas pains because of, among other things, its price,
Senator Dr. Bill Frist, (who demonstrated his medical skills
a year ago by diagnosing Terry Schiavo's medical condition from
pictures he saw on television) came up with a prescription to
ease those pains. His prescription was to give every man woman
and child in the country who drives a vehicle with a 33-gallon
gas tank in a town where gas costs $3.00 a gallon or more, ONE
FREE FILL UP. The less fortunate who drive cars with only 16-gallon
gas tanks were not to be penalized for their choice of vehicle.
They were to get two free fill ups.
Many readers thought there
was some kind of a catch as there is with the earned income credit.
That credit is unavailable unless a family's income is below
a certain level. That's not the case with Mr. Frist's proposal.
The only people who would have been disqualified from receiving
the free tank of gas were the super rich among us. Under Mr.
Frist's proposal, single persons were cut off from the free gas
only if they had income in excess of $149,950. Married couples
were cut off only when their gross incomes exceeded $218,950.
That means the great majority of my readers could look forward
to receiving their free gas notwithstanding high incomes.
As welcome as this news seemed
to be, some wondered how much this would cost the federal government
and how it proposed to pay for this extraordinarily generous
gesture. The answer was it would cost next to nothing to provide
this benefit (together with a short term temporary suspension
of the 18.4 cents per gallon retail gasoline tax that was also
being proposed by the Republican leadership). Republican spokespeople
estimated it would cost less than $20 billion for the two programs
and that's not much to pay to, among other things, put one tank
of gas in an entire nation's cars. The U.S. national debt that,
together with the dead and wounded in Iraq promise to be Mr.
Bush's most important gifts to the American people, is $8,368,095,161,215.31
as of April 29th, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock.
According to the Clock, the national debt increases at the rate
of $2.06 billion daily, so an additional $20 billion is only
another ten days added to the debt. That's hardly noticeable.
Furthermore, Mr. Frist had
figured out a way to pay for it that might avoid increasing the
size of the national debt. The money was to come from opening
up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. In addition
to the revenue generated thereby, opening up the Artic refuge
meant increased domestic oil production and more oil production
means lower prices and lower prices help all who buy gas.
A logical question at this
point was, "What about the poor people who don't have cars
and have no use for free gas?" For them there was good news.
Although I said that the Frist proposal was to give everyone
free gas, I just said that to provide an example of how Mr. Frist's
proposal might affect a typical citizen. Mr. Frist's actual proposal
was to send each and every one of us a check for $100. If you
had just filled up your car with gas when the check arrived,
it would be all right for you to take the $100 and buy food for
your family.
The White House doesn't recognize
other people's nutty ideas because it has so many of its own
on which it focusses. Therefore, Mr. Frist's proposal was warmly
greeted by the administration. U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman
said: "It certainly has merit. Whenever you have a proposal
of that sort there's always the question of unintended consequences,
so we will be doing analysis."
Mr. Frist's colleagues went
home for the weekend and quickly learned that it lacked merit.
Their constitutents saw what the White House and Mr. Frist didn't
see. They told their Senators what they saw. What they saw was
that Mr. Frist's proposal made him look more like the Senate's
Chief Fool than its majority leader. Upon returning to Washington,
House majority leader, John Boehner of Ohio said: "I just
think that trying to satisfy voters with a $100 voucher is insulting.
Over the weekend, I heard about it from my constituents a few
times. They thought it was stupid." Senator John Kyle of
Arizona described it as "a silly idea." He got it right.
Mr. Frist got it wrong. That's not a first-at least not for him.
CounterPunch
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