The Billboard Blocked by Clear Channel 
  ¶ 12:29 PM 0 comments

  "Individuals Looking Out for Their Own Interests." According to "Michael Shires, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University" war profiteering is not an "ethical issue" but simply a case of "individuals looking out for their own interests." Maybe Professor Shires is on to something here, because it seems apparent that the war in Iraq was not in America's interest, particularly with regard to the war on terror. Perhaps Professor Shires has given Bush the one unimpeachable reason for the war that has eluded Bush thus far, "it made a few people a lot of money." Perhaps he could tie it in to one of his speeches about the growing economy. Make no mistake the economy is growing, for some people. As an article by OMB Watch notes, "Economy and Jobs Watch: Corporate Profits at Record Highs, While Labor Compensation at 38-year Lows."

There just might be something to this "looking out for your own interests"

L.A.Times: Advocates of War Now Profit From Iraq's Reconstruction
In the months and years leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they marched together in the vanguard of those who advocated war.

As lobbyists, public relations counselors and confidential advisors to senior federal officials, they warned against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, praised exiled leader Ahmad Chalabi, and argued that toppling Saddam Hussein was a matter of national security and moral duty.

Now, as fighting continues in Iraq, they are collecting tens of thousands of dollars in fees for helping business clients pursue federal contracts and other financial opportunities in Iraq. For instance, a former Senate aide who helped get U.S. funds for anti-Hussein exiles who are now active in Iraqi affairs has a $175,000 deal to advise Romania on winning business in Iraq and other matters.

And the ease with which they have moved from advocating policies and advising high government officials to making money in activities linked to their policies and advice reflects the blurred lines that often exist between public and private interests in Washington. In most cases, federal conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to former officials or to people serving only as advisors.

Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said the actions of former officials and others who serve on government advisory boards, although not illegal, can raise the appearance of conflicts of interest. "It calls into question whether the advice they give is in their own interests rather than the public interest," Noble said.

Michael Shires, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, disagreed. "I don't see an ethical issue there," he said. "I see individuals looking out for their own interests."

The "Own Interest" Club

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country's strategic interests. He left the CIA in 1995, but he remains a senior government advisor on intelligence and national security issues, including Iraq. Meanwhile, he works for two private companies that do business in Iraq and is a partner in a company that invests in firms that provide security and anti-terrorism services.

Woolsey said in an interview that he was not directly involved with the companies' Iraq-related ventures. But as a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm, he was a featured speaker in May 2003 at a conference co-sponsored by the company at which about 80 corporate executives and others paid up to $1,100 to hear about the economic outlook and business opportunities in Iraq.

Before the war, Woolsey was a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization set up in 2002 at the request of the White House to help build public backing for war in Iraq. He also wrote about a need for regime change and sat on the CIA advisory board and the Defense Policy Board, whose unpaid members have provided advice on Iraq and other matters to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Woolsey is part of a small group that shows with unusual clarity the interlocking nature of the way the insider system can work. Moving in the same social circles, often sitting together on government panels and working with like-minded think tanks and advocacy groups, they wrote letters to the White House urging military action in Iraq, formed organizations that pressed for invasion and pushed legislation that authorized aid to exile groups.

Since the start of the war, despite the violence and instability in Iraq, they have turned to private enterprise.

The group, in addition to Woolsey, includes:

• Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and issued repeated public calls for Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq.

• Randy Scheunemann, a former Rumsfeld advisor who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in U.S. aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.

• Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners.

• K. Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress.

Other advocates of military action against Hussein are pursuing business opportunities in Iraq. Two ardent supporters of military action, Joe Allbaugh, who managed President Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr., an aide to the first President Bush, recently helped set up two companies to promote business in postwar Iraq. Rogers' law firm has a $262,500 contract to represent Iraq's Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Neither Rogers nor Allbaugh has Woolsey's high profile, however.

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal saying a foreign state had aided Al Qaeda in preparing the strikes. He named Iraq as the leading suspect. In October 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz sent Woolsey to London, where he hunted for evidence linking Hussein to the attacks.

At the May 2003 Washington conference, titled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq," Woolsey spoke on political and diplomatic issues that might affect economic progress. He also spoke favorably about the Bush administration's decision to tilt reconstruction contracts toward U.S. firms.

In an interview, Woolsey said he saw no conflict between advocating for the war and subsequently advising companies on business in Iraq.

Booz Allen is a subcontractor on a $75-million telecommunications contract in Iraq and also has provided assistance on the administration of federal grants. Woolsey said he had had no involvement in that work.

Woolsey was interviewed at the Washington office of the Paladin Capital Group, a venture capital firm where he is a partner. Paladin invests in companies involved in homeland security and infrastructure protection, Woolsey said.

Woolsey also is a paid advisor to Livingstone's GlobalOptions. He said his own work at the firm did not involve Iraq.

Under Livingstone, Global- Options "offers a wide range of security and risk management services," according to its website.

In a 1993 opinion piece for Newsday, Livingstone wrote that the United States "should launch a massive covert program designed to remove Hussein."

In a recent interview, Livingstone said he had second thoughts about the war, primarily because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But he has been a regular speaker at Iraq investment seminars.

While Livingstone has focused on opportunities for Americans, Scheunemann has concentrated on helping former Soviet Bloc states.

Scheunemann runs a Washington lobbying firm called Orion Strategies, which shares the same address as that of the Iraqi National Congress' Washington spokesman and the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Orion's clients include Romania, which signed a nine-month, $175,000 deal earlier this year. Among other things, the contract calls for Orion to promote Romania's "interests in the reconstruction of Iraq."

Scheunemann has also traveled to Latvia, which is a former Orion client, and met with a business group to discuss prospects in Iraq.

Few people advocated for the war as vigorously as Scheunemann. Just a week after Sept. 11, he joined with other conservatives who sent a letter to Bush calling for Hussein's overthrow.

In 2002, Scheunemann became the first president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which scored its biggest success last year when 10 Eastern European countries endorsed the U.S. invasion. Known as the "Vilnius 10," they showed that "Europe is united by a commitment to end Saddam's bloody regime," Scheunemann said at the time.

He declined to discuss his Iraq-related business activities, saying, "I can't help you out there."

Scheunemann, Livingstone and Woolsey played their roles in promoting war with Iraq largely in public. By contrast, Bartel and Levinson mostly operated out of the public eye.

In early 2003, Bartel became a director of Boxwood Inc., a Virginia firm set up to receive U.S. funds for the intelligence program of the Iraqi National Congress.

Today, critics in Congress say the Iraqi National Congress provided faulty information on Hussein's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and his ties to Osama bin Laden.

Bartel began working for the Iraqi National Congress in 2001. She was hired to monitor its use of U.S. funds after several critical government audits. After the war began, Bartel established a Virginia company, Global Positioning. According to Bartel, the firm's primary purpose is to "introduce clients to the Iraqi market, help them find potential Iraqi partners, set up meetings with government officials … and provide on-the-ground support for their business interests."

Bartel works closely with Levinson, a managing director with the Washington lobbying firm BKSH & Associates. Francis Brooke, a top Chalabi aide, said BKSH received $25,000 a month to promote the Iraqi National Congress, and Levinson "did great work on our behalf."

In 1999, Levinson was hired by the Iraqi National Congress to handle public relations. She said her contract with the congress ended last year. Before the invasion and in the early days of fighting in Iraq, Chalabi and the congress enjoyed close relations with the Bush administration, but the relationship has cooled.

Levinson told The Times: "We see no conflict of interest in using our knowledge and contacts in Iraq that we developed through our previous work with the INC to support economic development in Iraq. As a matter of fact, we see this as complementary to a shared goal to build a democratic country."

Cha-Ching  ¶ 2:04 AM 0 comments

  Avoiding a Florida Redux It seems that Florida may now truly be placed in the battleground state category. What was lost in all the discussion of chads and butterfly ballots in 2000 was the true tragedy for voters in Florida and all those that feel democracy is important, the illegal purge of tens of thousands of voters.

Greg Palast Here's how the president of the United States was elected: In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.

Although Florida officials claimed knowledge about the problems with the list, the list was used again in the 2002 election that re-elected Jeb Bush as Governor.

Greg Palast Originally we thought it was 57,000 people that were purged. Now I got the info from DBT that there were 94,000 people in this list. 91,000 were innocent. If those people have voted, Al Gore would most likely have received the 537 votes that he needed to win. What makes the story so sad and rotten is that the Secretary of State of Florida, Katherine Harris, has agreed that innocent people were removed, but they dragged their feet and have used this same list in this election.

According to the settlement from the NAACP lawsuit, the State has to revise the list and return the voting rights to the innocent ones. But they are going to wait until after the elections to do so.

All does not seem to be lost for 2004. According the Miami Herald, Florida state officials have decided against using such a list for 2004.

Miami Herald Florida election officials conceded an enormous mistake Saturday and abandoned the controversial list the state was using to remove convicted felons from the voter rolls.

After defending the list against mounting criticism as late as Friday evening, the state made an about-face. The reason: a flaw in a database that failed to capture most felons who classified themselves as Hispanic.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood announced at 1 p.m. Saturday that an ''unintentional and unforeseen discrepancy . . . related to Hispanic classification'' had forced the agency to eliminate the entire list from further consideration this year.

The announcement was an embarrassment for top state officials from Gov. Jeb Bush down, and it was enthusiastically lauded by voting rights advocates -- and those on the list.

The Division of Elections had created the list of registered voters with possible felony convictions. It then directed local elections supervisors across Florida to identify convicted felons whose voting rights had not been restored and remove them from the rolls.

Yet of the nearly 48,000 names, just 61 were classified as Hispanics, in a state where Hispanics comprise 8 percent of the population.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way Foundation, who was co-counsel in a lawsuit challenging an earlier 2000 purge list, said: ``This smells to high heaven. It strains credulity to think that Hispanics were somehow left off the list, while African Americans remained on the list.''

Hispanics in Florida register Republican more often than Democratic. By contrast, more than 90 percent of the nearly one million black voters in Florida are Democrats.

Of the 47,763 potentially ineligible voters, a Herald analysis found that 59 percent were Democrats, 19 percent were Republicans and 22 percent were listed as ``other.''

Gov. Bush's administration has repeatedly denied there was any partisan motive in the way the list was developed. Critics, however, say there was no room for error in a state that delivered the White House to Bush's brother George by just 537 votes in the 2000 presidential election.

This change in course is largely attributed to a story that ran in the New York Times. According to an analysis in the Miami Herald:

Miami Herald Sensing a mounting public relations disaster less then four months before what could be another squeaker of a presidential election, state officials Saturday yanked the controversial ''felon-purge'' voter list. It was a concession to the critics who barraged the administration with complaints and data showing that the list was riddled with errors -- this despite Gov. Jeb Bush's vow that the state, after the 2000 debacle, would become a model of election reform for the nation.

The decision to scrap the list, endorsed by Bush, was a deft public relations move by a politician keenly attuned to staying on message and telling all who will listen that he inherited most of the state's voting problems from previous administrations.

The controversy started to blaze out of Bush's control when The Herald reported that more than 2,100 people remained on the list of potentially ineligible voters despite having won clemency -- the right to vote -- after serving their sentences. Many of them were black -- part of the Democratic base that mobilized against George W. Bush's candidacy in 2000 and nearly cost him the presidential election.

Then the discovery this week that Hispanics -- who in Florida lean Republican -- weren't on the felon purge list sent Bush critics and conspiracy theorists into overdrive, considering that the list was prepared by a Republican administration that went to court to block the public's right to review it.

For Bush critics, it all sounded eerily similar to the events of 2000, in which thousands of blacks complained of being denied the right to vote in the state that delivered the White House to the governor's brother by just 537 votes.

''The actions of the state have been either inept or nefarious,'' said Ralph Neas, president of People For the American Way, which challenged the state's similarly flawed purge list in 2000.

The decision to drop the controversial list, following the disclosure of the Hispanic omission Saturday in The New York Times, was said to be that of Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a Bush appointee. And Bush quickly said that he agreed.

''It was the right thing to do,'' Bush said Saturday in Miami. ``The perception of all this begins to become reality. . . .''

But newspapers have continued to focus on the voting mishaps, and the story went national on Saturday with the New York Times piece.

Civil rights groups said the state led by the self-proclaimed ''e-governor'' has routinely failed to deliver an accurate felon-purge list and predicted that more stories about mistakes would emerge.

Bush, though, defended the state's election readiness to reporters, noting that Florida has spent $30 million on voter education programs and millions more on new voting machines.

''We're in much better shape today as it relates to this state dealing with a close election,'' he said.

Democrats said the governor did the right thing in killing the list but added that he must go further.

''It's not enough just to scrap the list,'' said Tony Welch, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. ``This is a red flag for Gov. Bush and the Legislature to review the entire elections process because Florida does not need another debacle on Election Day 2004. That would be inexcusable.''

Further Reading:
New York Times Article
THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the ?felon? voter-purge was itself felonious   ¶ 5:04 PM 1 comments

  Poll Position in Battleground States Kerry has taken a lead in the electoral college. According to WSJ

John Kerry improved his standings in the latest Zogby Interactive poll of likely voters in 16 battleground states, apparently helped by his selection of his onetime rival, John Edwards of North Carolina, as running mate. Of the 16 states, Mr. Kerry now leads in 12, up from the nine states he held three weeks ago. Mr. Bush holds three states, down from seven, and the candidates are tied in one state, Tennessee. The poll, conducted July 6-10, started the same day Mr. Kerry announced his choice for his No. 2.

The latest poll returns Mr. Kerry to the nationwide edge he lost in this poll three weeks ago. Presuming that all the states go to the current leading candidates and that the other 34 states go as they did in the 2000 election, Mr. Kerry would get 322 electoral votes and Mr. Bush would get 205. This tally excludes Tennessee's 11 electoral votes.

BATTLEGROUND STATES POLL
2004 Electoral Vote Tracker Interactive Map  ¶ 4:45 PM 0 comments