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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT
COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell
recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks"
have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an
"insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians
are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror
stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000
to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque.
As neocons
and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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Gingrich,
"Futurism" and the Abolition of the Office of Technology
Assessment
Political Science
By RALPH NADER
Newt Gingrich has been called a "futurist",
a "policy wonk", an advocate of adapting technology
to human efficiencies, among other less flattering descriptions.
So what did he do the year he took over the House of Representatives
from the Democrats in 1995--the so-called Gingrich Revolution?
He terminated the technical-scientific brains of the Congress
which was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
The OTA from 1972 to 1995 provided
Congress and the public with critical analyses and reports of
the difficult issues interfacing science, technology and society
before Congress. When Gingrich abolished the OTA, its total annual
budget was $22 million a year--a drop in the bucket compared
to the immense Congressional budget of salaries, perks, benefits
and pensions.
At the beginning, OTA was supported
by both Democrats and Republicans. Year after year its skilled,
non-partisan staff generated many reports as an advisory arm
of Congress. With a staff of about 140 specialists, OTA delivered
over 750 public reports to its Congressional overseers, not to
mention responding to thousands of inquiries and testifying before
House and Senate Committees.
OTA had to tackle subjects
that were very controversial, especially in corporate lobbying
circles. They did studies on defensive medicine that the hospital-medical
lobby did not like, on access to public buses by people with
disabilities that Greyhound did not welcome, on the auto industry
that displeased General Motors and on climate change that the
fossil-fuel industry (oil, coal and gas) did not approve. Get
the idea.
When the Gingrich-Republican
darker ages took over Capitol Hill, the princes of darkness determined
that they did not want to know what OTA knew. They did not want
their corporate masters to be impeached by an arm of their Congress.
Too much credibility there.
It didn't even matter that
many of OTA reports were exceedingly important but not directly
addressed to some industrial or commercial derelictions. For
example, given the Katrina debacle, wouldn't OTA have been more
than a little relevant alerting Congress from time to time to
its January 1980 report titled U.S. Disaster Assistance to Developing
Countries: Lessons Applicable to U.S. Domestic Disaster Programs?
OTA, under the leadership of
physicist Jack Gibbons, became such a trusted and professional
organization that representatives from some 25 countries visited
the agency to learn from its example in 1983 alone. The parliaments
of the United Kingdom and Germany established similar science/technology
advisory bodies.
After Gingrich disbanded the
OTA, M. Granger Morgan, professor and head of the Department
of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University
wrote: "Congress had 'chosen' ignorance, and ended the 23-year
history of its best and smallest agency."
It is time to reinstate the
Enlightenment for a Congress besieged as never before with decisions
regarding genetic engineering, missile defense, privacy, citizen
surveillance, nanotechnology, stagnant automotive technology,
global warming and many other perils and promises.
Congressman Rush Holt (D-New
Jersey), a scientist from Princeton, introduced legislation to
start up a similar Center for Science and Technology Assessment
in the form of an amendment to H.R. 4755 in July 2004. It did
not make it, receiving 115 yes votes to 252 no votes. In my judgment,
roughly one third of Congress right now, without any added persuasion
or outside mobilization, would vote for such a capability.
So imagine if the leaders of
the scientific and engineering worlds organized themselves to
mount a greatly needed effort in Congress. Imagine the heads
of our leading universities like MIT and CalTech, along with
scores of Nobel Prize winners and heads of prominent foundations
bestirring themselves, along with people who were prominent in
OTA years ago. Some of these people are close to influential
political figures. It would happen. And not a day too soon.
CounterPunch
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