Friday, March 31, 2006
http://vitualis.blogspot.com/2006/03/bird-flu-vaccines-fail.html
Bird flu vaccines fail
The H5N1 avian influenza (bird flu) virus continues its steady march across the globe. Over the course of the past year, it has followed migratory birds and spread from South-East Asia into Africa, Eastern Europe and even Western Europe (France and Germany).
Thankfully, there has been no evidence of a mutation to a human-to-human transmissible form and although the number of human victims have been ticking upwards, the feared pandemic has not arrived, yet. On the other hand, treatment options against bird flu are limited, and perhaps even more so than would be expected. Although world governments have been stockpiling neuraminidase inhibitors like oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza) there is increasingly dissent on the usefulness of these drugs. Resistance to these agents have already been found in mutations of the bird flu virus. Furthermore, it does not appear that these agents have improved survival in the victims of bird flu.
Perhaps most worrying of all has been the abysmal failure of the attempts to create a bird flu vaccine. In the event of a potential pandemic, an effective vaccine is in all likelihood the only defence. In February 2006, Australian company CSL Ltd announced that the trial of their vaccine had failed. Only half of those who received two shots of the highest dose had a response comparable to the regular influenza vaccine. In the past several days, French rival Sanofi-Pasteur announced that their vaccine had failed as well. Only at a dose equivalent to 12 times the usual did it provide adequate protection – and then like the Australian trial, only in half of subjects.
Although the obvious answer may seem to be that we should simply use a higher dose of the bird flu vaccine as a standard regimen, this is not feasible. These vaccines need to be grown in a rather laborious method and large individual doses would make it impossible to supply enough vaccine to protect the population.
Research is continuing feverishly though I fear that we may well lose this race against time.
From: New Scientist
Bird flu vaccine trial gives disappointing results (excerpt)
23:00 29 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie
...John Treanor, at the University of Rochester, New York, US, and colleagues tested a vaccine made by the French-owned firm Sanofi-Pasteur. It contained the vaccine “seed strain” of H5N1 created in 2004, grown in eggs, killed and split, the way standard flu vaccines are made.
But like earlier trials with a similar preparation, the vaccine elicited a significant immune response only when given as two doses of 90 micrograms each. This is twelve times the amount needed in standard flu vaccines. And even that worked only in about half the people tested.
Because only limited amounts of vaccine virus can be grown in the short time available at the start of a pandemic, the smaller the dose needed to immunise someone, the more people can be vaccinated in time to benefit...
...Since these results started emerging late in 2005, trial H5N1 vaccines being tested worldwide have included immune-stimulating chemicals called adjuvants, says David Fedson, founder of the vaccine companies’ pandemic task force. But two studies, one in France by Sanofi-Pasteur, and one by the Australian firm CSL announced in February 2006, found that the most common adjuvant, alum, did not help enough...
...Scientists are beginning to suspect that something about the chemical nature of the H5N1 surface proteins used in the vaccine, possibly the strategic placement of a sugar group, keeps the human immune system from responding as it usually does to flu proteins...
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Who Owns the Rights on Tamiflu: Rumsfeld To Profit From Bird Flu Hoax
Who Owns the Rights on Tamiflu: Rumsfeld To Profit From Bird Flu Hoax
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, October 26, 2005
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers this important commentary by Dr.Joseph Mercola.
The fundamental issue is who owns the intellectual property rights over Tamiflu. The media reports suggest that the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche will make billions.
While the drug is produced by Roche, it was developed by Gilead Sciences Inc.which owns the intellectual property rights. Gilead, which has maintained a low profile, has outsourced the production to Roche.
Donald Rumsfeld was appointed Chairman of Gilead Sciences, Inc. in 1997, a position which he held in the years prior to becoming Secretary of Defense.in the Bush adminstration. Rumsfeld had been on the Board of Directors from the establishment of Gilead in 1987.
As confirmed in a company press statement in 1997, Donald H. Rumsfeld assumed the position of Chairman, of GILEAD: :
"Gilead is fortunate to have had Don Rumsfeld as a stalwart board member since the company's earliest days, and we are very pleased that he has accepted the Chairmanship," Dr. Riordan said. "He has played an important role in helping to build and steer the company. His broad experience in leadership positions in both industry and government will serve us well as Gilead continues to build its commercial presence."
According to company statement: Gilead Science Inc "has been active in the development of inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV"
"The Company's research and development efforts encompass three interrelated programs: small molecule antivirals, cardiovascular therapeutics and genetic code blockers for cancer and other diseases. Gilead's expertise in each of these areas has also resulted in the discovery and development of non-nucleotide product candidates, including neuraminidase inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV"
Also find below an article published in the SF Chronicle, which points to the relationship between GILEAD and Roche in relation to the Rights over Tami Flu.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 26 Oct 2005
Who Owns the rights on Tamiflu
by Joseph Mercola
www.mercola.com
Finally, the pieces of the puzzle start to add up. Not long ago, President Bush sought to instill panic in this country by telling us a minimum of 200,000 people will die from the avian flu pandemic, but it could be as bad as 2 million deaths in this country alone.
This hoax is then used to justify the immediate purchase of 80 million doses of Tamiflu, a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick and can actually contribute to the virus having more lethal mutations.
So the U.S. placed an order for 20 million doses of this worthless drug at a price of $100 per dose. That comes to a staggering $2 billion.
We are being told that Roche manufactures Tamiflu and, in a recent New York Times article, they were battling whether or not they would allow generic drug companies to help increase their production.
But if you dig further you will find that a drug was actually developed by a company called Gilead that 10 years ago gave Roche the exclusive rights to market and sell Tamiflu.
Ahh, The Plot Thickens...
If you read the link below from Gilead, you'll discover Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was made the chairman of Gilead in 1997.
Since Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in Gilead, he will handsomely profit from the scare tactics of the government that is being used to justify the purchase of $2 billion of Tamiflu.
TEXT OF 1997 PRESS RELEASE BY GILEAD SCIENCE INC
Donald H. Rumsfeld Named Chairman of Gilead Sciences
Foster City, CA, January 3, 1997 - Gilead Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: GILD) today announced that board member Donald H. Rumsfeld will assume the position of Chairman, effective immediately. Mr. Rumsfeld succeeds Michael L. Riordan, M.D., who founded Gilead in 1987 and has served as Chairman since 1993. Dr. Riordan will continue to serve as a director on the board.
"Gilead is fortunate to have had Don Rumsfeld as a stalwart board member since the company's earliest days, and we are very pleased that he has accepted the Chairmanship," Dr. Riordan said. "He has played an important role in helping to build and steer the company. His broad experience in leadership positions in both industry and government will serve us well as Gilead continues to build its commercial presence."
"In my years with Gilead, I have witnessed the evolution of one of the industry's premier biotechnology companies," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Michael Riordan's founding vision and enormous accomplishments are evident in the VISTIDE® product approval, deep pipeline and talented team that will continue to move Gilead to develop novel treatments for viral diseases."
Mr. Rumsfeld, who joined Gilead as a director in 1988, is currently in private business and is distinguished for his accomplishments in both industry and government. Mr. Rumsfeld served as chief executive officer of G.D. Searle, a worldwide pharmaceutical company, from 1977 to 1985. During this time, his stewardship of Searle earned him awards as the Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the pharmaceutical industry in 1980 and 1981. He also served as chairman and chief executive of General Instrument Corporation, a diversified electronics company and world leader in broadband and all digital high definition television technology.
A graduate of Princeton University, Mr. Rumsfeld has served in numerous positions of public service, including four terms in the U.S. Congress, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, White House Chief of Staff and as the 13th Secretary of Defense. In 1977, Mr. Rumsfeld was awarded the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In addition to Gilead, Mr. Rumsfeld presently serves as an advisor to several companies and as a member of the board of directors of ABB AB; Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.; Kellogg; Metricom, Inc.; Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Tribune Company. Mr. Rumsfeld's current civic activities include service on the board of trustees of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship, Freedom House and the RAND Corporation.
Dr. Riordan will continue to assist the company with strategic direction through his involvement on the board of directors. Since founding the company in 1987, Riordan has overseen Gilead's evolution to a leading biotechnology company with its first approved product and a diversified pipeline of antiviral therapies.
"Michael Riordan's vision and leadership have guided Gilead from a start-up to a commercial company, and we are pleased to rely on his continued counsel as an active board member," John C. Martin, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Gilead said. "Over the past several years, I have enjoyed working with Don Rumsfeld as an active director and look forward to his new role as Chairman as we continue to build the Gilead business."
Gilead Sciences is a leader in the discovery and development of a new class of human therapeutics based on nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. In 1996, Gilead's first product, VISTIDE (cidofovir injection), was cleared by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for the treatment of cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis in patients with AIDS. Gilead has other nucleotide product candidates in human testing for the potential treatment of viral diseases caused by CMV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus, herpes simplex virus and human papillomavirus.
The Company's research and development efforts encompass three interrelated programs: small molecule antivirals, cardiovascular therapeutics and genetic code blockers for cancer and other diseases. Gilead's expertise in each of these areas has also resulted in the discovery and development of non-nucleotide product candidates, including neuraminidase inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV
copyright Gilead Sciences Inc.
link to original press prelease Gilead Sciences Inc
Biotech firm wants to regain control of avian flu drug
Gilead says deal with Roche Inc. threatens Tamiflu's production
Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer
Friday, June 24, 2005
Citing "ongoing neglect of the product," a Bay Area biotech company is attempting to reclaim control of Tamiflu, an antiviral drug it sold to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Inc. that has since emerged as the world's only practical weapon against a potential pandemic of avian flu.
The Foster City-based Gilead Sciences, best known for its AIDS drug Viread, notified Roche on Thursday that it was terminating the 1996 agreement that gave the Swiss company exclusive rights to make and sell Tamiflu.
Gilead executives disclosed that they have been peppering Roche with complaints about its marketing of Tamiflu for five years, and that manufacturing glitches have been responsible for earlier shortages of a drug now deemed vitally important to public health.
Formerly a lackluster seller in the market for drugs to treat influenza, Tamiflu has become a valuable commodity since December 2003, when scientists became alarmed that a new flu strain that primarily killed chickens in Southeast Asia was starting to kill people who lived in close proximity to the birds.
In April, Roche reported its first quarter sales of Tamiflu quadrupled to $330 million.
Copyright San Francisco Chronicle 2005
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2005
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1148
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, October 26, 2005
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers this important commentary by Dr.Joseph Mercola.
The fundamental issue is who owns the intellectual property rights over Tamiflu. The media reports suggest that the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche will make billions.
While the drug is produced by Roche, it was developed by Gilead Sciences Inc.which owns the intellectual property rights. Gilead, which has maintained a low profile, has outsourced the production to Roche.
Donald Rumsfeld was appointed Chairman of Gilead Sciences, Inc. in 1997, a position which he held in the years prior to becoming Secretary of Defense.in the Bush adminstration. Rumsfeld had been on the Board of Directors from the establishment of Gilead in 1987.
As confirmed in a company press statement in 1997, Donald H. Rumsfeld assumed the position of Chairman, of GILEAD: :
"Gilead is fortunate to have had Don Rumsfeld as a stalwart board member since the company's earliest days, and we are very pleased that he has accepted the Chairmanship," Dr. Riordan said. "He has played an important role in helping to build and steer the company. His broad experience in leadership positions in both industry and government will serve us well as Gilead continues to build its commercial presence."
According to company statement: Gilead Science Inc "has been active in the development of inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV"
"The Company's research and development efforts encompass three interrelated programs: small molecule antivirals, cardiovascular therapeutics and genetic code blockers for cancer and other diseases. Gilead's expertise in each of these areas has also resulted in the discovery and development of non-nucleotide product candidates, including neuraminidase inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV"
Also find below an article published in the SF Chronicle, which points to the relationship between GILEAD and Roche in relation to the Rights over Tami Flu.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 26 Oct 2005
Who Owns the rights on Tamiflu
by Joseph Mercola
www.mercola.com
Finally, the pieces of the puzzle start to add up. Not long ago, President Bush sought to instill panic in this country by telling us a minimum of 200,000 people will die from the avian flu pandemic, but it could be as bad as 2 million deaths in this country alone.
This hoax is then used to justify the immediate purchase of 80 million doses of Tamiflu, a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick and can actually contribute to the virus having more lethal mutations.
So the U.S. placed an order for 20 million doses of this worthless drug at a price of $100 per dose. That comes to a staggering $2 billion.
We are being told that Roche manufactures Tamiflu and, in a recent New York Times article, they were battling whether or not they would allow generic drug companies to help increase their production.
But if you dig further you will find that a drug was actually developed by a company called Gilead that 10 years ago gave Roche the exclusive rights to market and sell Tamiflu.
Ahh, The Plot Thickens...
If you read the link below from Gilead, you'll discover Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was made the chairman of Gilead in 1997.
Since Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in Gilead, he will handsomely profit from the scare tactics of the government that is being used to justify the purchase of $2 billion of Tamiflu.
TEXT OF 1997 PRESS RELEASE BY GILEAD SCIENCE INC
Donald H. Rumsfeld Named Chairman of Gilead Sciences
Foster City, CA, January 3, 1997 - Gilead Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: GILD) today announced that board member Donald H. Rumsfeld will assume the position of Chairman, effective immediately. Mr. Rumsfeld succeeds Michael L. Riordan, M.D., who founded Gilead in 1987 and has served as Chairman since 1993. Dr. Riordan will continue to serve as a director on the board.
"Gilead is fortunate to have had Don Rumsfeld as a stalwart board member since the company's earliest days, and we are very pleased that he has accepted the Chairmanship," Dr. Riordan said. "He has played an important role in helping to build and steer the company. His broad experience in leadership positions in both industry and government will serve us well as Gilead continues to build its commercial presence."
"In my years with Gilead, I have witnessed the evolution of one of the industry's premier biotechnology companies," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Michael Riordan's founding vision and enormous accomplishments are evident in the VISTIDE® product approval, deep pipeline and talented team that will continue to move Gilead to develop novel treatments for viral diseases."
Mr. Rumsfeld, who joined Gilead as a director in 1988, is currently in private business and is distinguished for his accomplishments in both industry and government. Mr. Rumsfeld served as chief executive officer of G.D. Searle, a worldwide pharmaceutical company, from 1977 to 1985. During this time, his stewardship of Searle earned him awards as the Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the pharmaceutical industry in 1980 and 1981. He also served as chairman and chief executive of General Instrument Corporation, a diversified electronics company and world leader in broadband and all digital high definition television technology.
A graduate of Princeton University, Mr. Rumsfeld has served in numerous positions of public service, including four terms in the U.S. Congress, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, White House Chief of Staff and as the 13th Secretary of Defense. In 1977, Mr. Rumsfeld was awarded the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In addition to Gilead, Mr. Rumsfeld presently serves as an advisor to several companies and as a member of the board of directors of ABB AB; Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.; Kellogg; Metricom, Inc.; Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Tribune Company. Mr. Rumsfeld's current civic activities include service on the board of trustees of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship, Freedom House and the RAND Corporation.
Dr. Riordan will continue to assist the company with strategic direction through his involvement on the board of directors. Since founding the company in 1987, Riordan has overseen Gilead's evolution to a leading biotechnology company with its first approved product and a diversified pipeline of antiviral therapies.
"Michael Riordan's vision and leadership have guided Gilead from a start-up to a commercial company, and we are pleased to rely on his continued counsel as an active board member," John C. Martin, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Gilead said. "Over the past several years, I have enjoyed working with Don Rumsfeld as an active director and look forward to his new role as Chairman as we continue to build the Gilead business."
Gilead Sciences is a leader in the discovery and development of a new class of human therapeutics based on nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. In 1996, Gilead's first product, VISTIDE (cidofovir injection), was cleared by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for the treatment of cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis in patients with AIDS. Gilead has other nucleotide product candidates in human testing for the potential treatment of viral diseases caused by CMV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus, herpes simplex virus and human papillomavirus.
The Company's research and development efforts encompass three interrelated programs: small molecule antivirals, cardiovascular therapeutics and genetic code blockers for cancer and other diseases. Gilead's expertise in each of these areas has also resulted in the discovery and development of non-nucleotide product candidates, including neuraminidase inhibitors for the potential treatment and prevention of viral influenza and protease inhibitors for the potential treatment of HIV
copyright Gilead Sciences Inc.
link to original press prelease Gilead Sciences Inc
Biotech firm wants to regain control of avian flu drug
Gilead says deal with Roche Inc. threatens Tamiflu's production
Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer
Friday, June 24, 2005
Citing "ongoing neglect of the product," a Bay Area biotech company is attempting to reclaim control of Tamiflu, an antiviral drug it sold to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Inc. that has since emerged as the world's only practical weapon against a potential pandemic of avian flu.
The Foster City-based Gilead Sciences, best known for its AIDS drug Viread, notified Roche on Thursday that it was terminating the 1996 agreement that gave the Swiss company exclusive rights to make and sell Tamiflu.
Gilead executives disclosed that they have been peppering Roche with complaints about its marketing of Tamiflu for five years, and that manufacturing glitches have been responsible for earlier shortages of a drug now deemed vitally important to public health.
Formerly a lackluster seller in the market for drugs to treat influenza, Tamiflu has become a valuable commodity since December 2003, when scientists became alarmed that a new flu strain that primarily killed chickens in Southeast Asia was starting to kill people who lived in close proximity to the birds.
In April, Roche reported its first quarter sales of Tamiflu quadrupled to $330 million.
Copyright San Francisco Chronicle 2005
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2005
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1148
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005
snopes.com: Tamiflu and Donald Rumsfeld
Home --> Politics --> Medical --> Tamiflu and Donald Rumsfeld
Tamiflu
Claim: U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld owns stock in the company that makes Tamiflu.
Status: True.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2006]
"Bird Flu"
Do you know that 'bird flu' was discovered in Vietnam 9 years ago?
Do you know that barely 100 people have died in the whole world in all that time?
Do you know that it was the Americans who alerted us to the efficacy of the human antiviral TAMIFLU as a preventative?
Do you know that TAMIFLU barely alleviates some symptoms of the common flu?
Do you know that its efficacy against the common flu is questioned by a great part of the scientific community?
Do you know that against a SUPPOSED mutant virus such as H5N1, TAMIFLU barely alleviates the illness?
Do you know that to date Avian Flu affects birds only?
Do you know who markets TAMIFLU?
ROCHE LABORATORIES.
Do you know who bought the patent for TAMIFLU from ROCHE LABORATORIES in 1996?
GILEAD SCIENCES INC.
Do you know who was the then president of GILEAD SCIENCES INC. and remains a major shareholder?
DONALD RUMSFELD, the present Secretary of Defence of the USA.
Do you know that the base of TAMIFLU is crushed aniseed?
Do you know who controls 90% of the world's production of this tree?
ROCHE.
Do you know that sales of TAMIFLU were over $254 million in 2004 and more than $1000 million in 2005?
Do you know how many more millions ROCHE can earn in the coming months if the business of fear continues?
So the summary of the story is as follows:
Bush's friends decide that the medicine TAMIFLU is the solution for a pandemic that has not yet occurred and that has caused a hundred deaths worldwide in 9 years.
This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu.
In normal conditions the virus does not affect humans.
Rumsfeld sells the patent for TAMIFLU to ROCHE for which they pay him a fortune.
Roche acquires 90% of the global production of crushed aniseed, the base for the antivirus.
The governments of the entire world threaten a pandemic and then buy industrial quantities of the product from Roche.
So we end up paying for medicine while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush do the business.
ARE WE CRAZY!!? OR ARE WE IDIOTS!!?
AT LEAST PASS THIS ON SO THAT IT CAN BE KNOWN!!!!!!!
Origins: This particular e-mail first came to us in April 2006. As to its claims, rather than take them in order, we'll examine them in two parts: whether the U.S. Secretary of Defense owns stock in the company that produces Tamiflu, and whether Tamiflu is effective against influenza.
As to the first, it is true Donald Rumsfeld does indeed have stock holdings in Gilead Sciences, Inc., the California biotech company that developed Tamiflu (a product now manufactured and sold by the pharmaceutical giant Roche), and so he benefits financially from increases in that company's stock price. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equal to about 10% of sales.) Rumsfeld was a member of Gilead's board of
directors between 1988 and 2001, and he was its chairman from 1997 until he joined President George W. Bush's cabinet as Secretary of Defense in 2001. According to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld, he has Gilead stock holdings valued at between $5 million and $25 million.
The Secretary of Defense is not the only politically-connected person to have ties to Gilead. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead stock since the beginning of 2005. Another Gilead board member is the wife of former California governor Pete Wilson.
Rumsfeld is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position because of his stock holdings, even though he apparently has no say in what Gilead does (he's no longer on its board) and has removed himself from being part of governmental decisions that affect it (he's recused himself). In a statement to The Independent in March 2006, the Pentagon said: "Secretary Rumsfeld has no relationship with Gilead Sciences, Inc. beyond his investments in the company. When he became Secretary of Defense in January 2001, divestiture of his investment in Gilead was not required by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Office of Government Ethics or the Department of Defense Standards of Conduct Office. Upon taking office, he recused himself from participating in any particular matter when the matter would directly and predictably affect his financial interest in Gilead Sciences."
If Rumsfeld holds onto his stock and its share price rises (which one would expect it to do if an avian flu pandemic becomes a reality, or if concerns about such a pandemic continue to grow), he will be seen to be profiting mightily from sales of a product the U.S. government has been buying in large quantities. If he sells his stock and so divests himself of further interest in Tamiflu sales, he will be accused of locking up profits from the rise in share price that has already occurred. (In 2001, shares of Gilead Sciences, Inc. traded in a range between $6.64 and $17.93. Between January and April 2006, its price range has been $53.00 to $65.62.)
As to the second aspect of the e-mail, whether Tamiflu is effective against influenza (especially the specific H5N1 strain now referred to as avian or bird flu), the e-mail's dismissive "This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu" is misleading in that Tamiflu isn't meant to be a flu cure. Positioning the drug as a medicine that flopped obscures that fact.
Tamiflu does not cure the flu, but if taken soon after symptoms appear, Tamiflu can reduce the flu's severity. As to how well it's going to match up against bird flu, that is not yet known and indeed it may well not be knowable until the time comes. However, it is anticipated Tamiflu will have at least some effect against bird flu, and with that in mind, more than 60 countries (including the U.S.) have so far ordered large stocks of it. Such stockpiling is likely going to appear highly prudent if the bird flu pandemic, a worldwide medical disaster the United Nations estimates could kill 150 million people, does materialize.
Influenza is not a straightforward disease, as it is constantly mutating. While media attention has now conditioned us to regard "bird flu" as a particular entity, in truth there are many forms of "bird flu." The one now the focus of so much concern, the H5N1 strain, was first noted in Asian birds in 1997. That first year, 18 people in Hong Kong were diagnosed with the contagion, 6 of whom died. Since 1997, there have been approximately 206 known human cases bird flu (of which 114 died), but as the CDC points out: "It is possible that the only cases currently being reported are those in the most severely ill people, and that the full range of illness caused by the H5N1 virus has not yet been defined."
Viewed from one angle (114 deaths over the course of nine years), avian flu is not worth being much concerned about. But viewed from a more informed standpoint about the nature of influenza, there may indeed be great cause for alarm. Influenza can jump species and move from birds (and other animals, such as pigs) into humans. During the process of that move — and afterwards, as one person infects another — the virus changes form. What at one moment can be a containable and well-understood virus can in the space of hours or days become almost an entirely new virus. For this reason, flus are hard to combat: they change as they are passed along, staying well ahead of science's attempts to contain them.
Most strains of flu are not deadly to humans, save for members of groups especially at risk to all forms of contagion (e.g. the very young, the very old, and the infirm of all ages). Bird flu, however, is a killer, and if it jumps species and mutates on the fly into a form that humans can easily pass to each other, it could take the lives of millions in the space of weeks, ultimately making the United Nations' projected death toll of 150 million worldwide look like wishful thinking.
Barbara "the grim reaper may be Tweety" Mikkelson
Additional information:
Questions and Answers About Avian Influenza
(Centers for Disease Control)
Avian Flu
(World Health Organization)
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918
(Molly Billings, Stanford University)
Last updated: 6 May 2006
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/tamiflu.asp
Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2007
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission.
Sources:
Lean, Geoffrey and Jonathan Owen. "Donald Rumsfeld Makes $5M Killing on Bird Flu Drug."
[London] Independent on Sunday. 12 March 2006 (p. 46).
Page, Shelley. "Pandemic Paranoia."
Ottawa Citizen. 13 November 2005 (p. A9).
Schwartz, Nelson. "Rumsfeld's Growing Stake in Tamiflu."
CNN.com. 31 October 2005.
The New York Times. "Rumsfeld to Avoid Bird-Flu Drug Issues."
28 October 2005 (p. A13).
Tamiflu
Claim: U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld owns stock in the company that makes Tamiflu.
Status: True.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2006]
"Bird Flu"
Do you know that 'bird flu' was discovered in Vietnam 9 years ago?
Do you know that barely 100 people have died in the whole world in all that time?
Do you know that it was the Americans who alerted us to the efficacy of the human antiviral TAMIFLU as a preventative?
Do you know that TAMIFLU barely alleviates some symptoms of the common flu?
Do you know that its efficacy against the common flu is questioned by a great part of the scientific community?
Do you know that against a SUPPOSED mutant virus such as H5N1, TAMIFLU barely alleviates the illness?
Do you know that to date Avian Flu affects birds only?
Do you know who markets TAMIFLU?
ROCHE LABORATORIES.
Do you know who bought the patent for TAMIFLU from ROCHE LABORATORIES in 1996?
GILEAD SCIENCES INC.
Do you know who was the then president of GILEAD SCIENCES INC. and remains a major shareholder?
DONALD RUMSFELD, the present Secretary of Defence of the USA.
Do you know that the base of TAMIFLU is crushed aniseed?
Do you know who controls 90% of the world's production of this tree?
ROCHE.
Do you know that sales of TAMIFLU were over $254 million in 2004 and more than $1000 million in 2005?
Do you know how many more millions ROCHE can earn in the coming months if the business of fear continues?
So the summary of the story is as follows:
Bush's friends decide that the medicine TAMIFLU is the solution for a pandemic that has not yet occurred and that has caused a hundred deaths worldwide in 9 years.
This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu.
In normal conditions the virus does not affect humans.
Rumsfeld sells the patent for TAMIFLU to ROCHE for which they pay him a fortune.
Roche acquires 90% of the global production of crushed aniseed, the base for the antivirus.
The governments of the entire world threaten a pandemic and then buy industrial quantities of the product from Roche.
So we end up paying for medicine while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush do the business.
ARE WE CRAZY!!? OR ARE WE IDIOTS!!?
AT LEAST PASS THIS ON SO THAT IT CAN BE KNOWN!!!!!!!
Origins: This particular e-mail first came to us in April 2006. As to its claims, rather than take them in order, we'll examine them in two parts: whether the U.S. Secretary of Defense owns stock in the company that produces Tamiflu, and whether Tamiflu is effective against influenza.
As to the first, it is true Donald Rumsfeld does indeed have stock holdings in Gilead Sciences, Inc., the California biotech company that developed Tamiflu (a product now manufactured and sold by the pharmaceutical giant Roche), and so he benefits financially from increases in that company's stock price. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equal to about 10% of sales.) Rumsfeld was a member of Gilead's board of
directors between 1988 and 2001, and he was its chairman from 1997 until he joined President George W. Bush's cabinet as Secretary of Defense in 2001. According to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld, he has Gilead stock holdings valued at between $5 million and $25 million.
The Secretary of Defense is not the only politically-connected person to have ties to Gilead. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead stock since the beginning of 2005. Another Gilead board member is the wife of former California governor Pete Wilson.
Rumsfeld is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position because of his stock holdings, even though he apparently has no say in what Gilead does (he's no longer on its board) and has removed himself from being part of governmental decisions that affect it (he's recused himself). In a statement to The Independent in March 2006, the Pentagon said: "Secretary Rumsfeld has no relationship with Gilead Sciences, Inc. beyond his investments in the company. When he became Secretary of Defense in January 2001, divestiture of his investment in Gilead was not required by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Office of Government Ethics or the Department of Defense Standards of Conduct Office. Upon taking office, he recused himself from participating in any particular matter when the matter would directly and predictably affect his financial interest in Gilead Sciences."
If Rumsfeld holds onto his stock and its share price rises (which one would expect it to do if an avian flu pandemic becomes a reality, or if concerns about such a pandemic continue to grow), he will be seen to be profiting mightily from sales of a product the U.S. government has been buying in large quantities. If he sells his stock and so divests himself of further interest in Tamiflu sales, he will be accused of locking up profits from the rise in share price that has already occurred. (In 2001, shares of Gilead Sciences, Inc. traded in a range between $6.64 and $17.93. Between January and April 2006, its price range has been $53.00 to $65.62.)
As to the second aspect of the e-mail, whether Tamiflu is effective against influenza (especially the specific H5N1 strain now referred to as avian or bird flu), the e-mail's dismissive "This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu" is misleading in that Tamiflu isn't meant to be a flu cure. Positioning the drug as a medicine that flopped obscures that fact.
Tamiflu does not cure the flu, but if taken soon after symptoms appear, Tamiflu can reduce the flu's severity. As to how well it's going to match up against bird flu, that is not yet known and indeed it may well not be knowable until the time comes. However, it is anticipated Tamiflu will have at least some effect against bird flu, and with that in mind, more than 60 countries (including the U.S.) have so far ordered large stocks of it. Such stockpiling is likely going to appear highly prudent if the bird flu pandemic, a worldwide medical disaster the United Nations estimates could kill 150 million people, does materialize.
Influenza is not a straightforward disease, as it is constantly mutating. While media attention has now conditioned us to regard "bird flu" as a particular entity, in truth there are many forms of "bird flu." The one now the focus of so much concern, the H5N1 strain, was first noted in Asian birds in 1997. That first year, 18 people in Hong Kong were diagnosed with the contagion, 6 of whom died. Since 1997, there have been approximately 206 known human cases bird flu (of which 114 died), but as the CDC points out: "It is possible that the only cases currently being reported are those in the most severely ill people, and that the full range of illness caused by the H5N1 virus has not yet been defined."
Viewed from one angle (114 deaths over the course of nine years), avian flu is not worth being much concerned about. But viewed from a more informed standpoint about the nature of influenza, there may indeed be great cause for alarm. Influenza can jump species and move from birds (and other animals, such as pigs) into humans. During the process of that move — and afterwards, as one person infects another — the virus changes form. What at one moment can be a containable and well-understood virus can in the space of hours or days become almost an entirely new virus. For this reason, flus are hard to combat: they change as they are passed along, staying well ahead of science's attempts to contain them.
Most strains of flu are not deadly to humans, save for members of groups especially at risk to all forms of contagion (e.g. the very young, the very old, and the infirm of all ages). Bird flu, however, is a killer, and if it jumps species and mutates on the fly into a form that humans can easily pass to each other, it could take the lives of millions in the space of weeks, ultimately making the United Nations' projected death toll of 150 million worldwide look like wishful thinking.
Barbara "the grim reaper may be Tweety" Mikkelson
Additional information:
Questions and Answers About Avian Influenza
(Centers for Disease Control)
Avian Flu
(World Health Organization)
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918
(Molly Billings, Stanford University)
Last updated: 6 May 2006
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/tamiflu.asp
Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2007
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission.
Sources:
Lean, Geoffrey and Jonathan Owen. "Donald Rumsfeld Makes $5M Killing on Bird Flu Drug."
[London] Independent on Sunday. 12 March 2006 (p. 46).
Page, Shelley. "Pandemic Paranoia."
Ottawa Citizen. 13 November 2005 (p. A9).
Schwartz, Nelson. "Rumsfeld's Growing Stake in Tamiflu."
CNN.com. 31 October 2005.
The New York Times. "Rumsfeld to Avoid Bird-Flu Drug Issues."
28 October 2005 (p. A13).
Bird Flu Vaccine Substitute “Better Than Nothing”
Bird Flu Vaccine Substitute “Better Than Nothing”
03:50 PM, February 28th 2007
by Moni Constantinescu
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel urges the approval of the first bird flu vaccine: safe, not enough, but “better than nothing.”
The fright of being faced with a flu pandemic has led federal health advisers to vote for an experimental bird flu vaccine that could be used if worst came to worst and serious measures were needed.
The vaccine is considered a temporary solution, until better, more effective ones are developed.
“I hope we never have to use it,” Dr. Melinda Wharton said, a panel member and deputy director of the national immunization program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this is the vaccine we have now.”
The experimental vaccine is made by Sanofi-Pasteur. During tests it protected only 45 percent of the 91 people who participated in a rushed clinical trial. Reaching even that level of protection required 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical flu shot, and it had to be given in two shots several weeks apart.
Dr. Jack Stapleton of the University of Iowa Hospital Clinic called the vaccine “better than nothing,” referring to its limited effectiveness. Dr. Robert Couch, an advisory panel member from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said members knew of better vaccines still in development, “but this is the only vaccine we had in front of us.”
Another member of the panel, Robert Webster of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, commented that the Sanofi vaccine is an early, clumsy attempt, “very tentative and very necessary to do,” towards better results. “There is a long way to go,” he added.
The panel voted unanimously that the vaccine was effective enough to be used. The American government plans to buy enough bird flu vaccine for 20 million people, including emergency and health care workers. The Sanofi vaccine will not be sold commercially.
A spokesman for Sanofi, a unit of Sanofi-Aventis, described the move as “a positive first step,” adding that the company is currently developing newer ones, including one based on a later strain from Indonesia
The World Health Organization said recently that 16 companies from 10 countries were developing prototype vaccines, and more than 40 clinical trials had been finished or were under way.
03:50 PM, February 28th 2007
by Moni Constantinescu
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel urges the approval of the first bird flu vaccine: safe, not enough, but “better than nothing.”
The fright of being faced with a flu pandemic has led federal health advisers to vote for an experimental bird flu vaccine that could be used if worst came to worst and serious measures were needed.
The vaccine is considered a temporary solution, until better, more effective ones are developed.
“I hope we never have to use it,” Dr. Melinda Wharton said, a panel member and deputy director of the national immunization program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this is the vaccine we have now.”
The experimental vaccine is made by Sanofi-Pasteur. During tests it protected only 45 percent of the 91 people who participated in a rushed clinical trial. Reaching even that level of protection required 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical flu shot, and it had to be given in two shots several weeks apart.
Dr. Jack Stapleton of the University of Iowa Hospital Clinic called the vaccine “better than nothing,” referring to its limited effectiveness. Dr. Robert Couch, an advisory panel member from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said members knew of better vaccines still in development, “but this is the only vaccine we had in front of us.”
Another member of the panel, Robert Webster of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, commented that the Sanofi vaccine is an early, clumsy attempt, “very tentative and very necessary to do,” towards better results. “There is a long way to go,” he added.
The panel voted unanimously that the vaccine was effective enough to be used. The American government plans to buy enough bird flu vaccine for 20 million people, including emergency and health care workers. The Sanofi vaccine will not be sold commercially.
A spokesman for Sanofi, a unit of Sanofi-Aventis, described the move as “a positive first step,” adding that the company is currently developing newer ones, including one based on a later strain from Indonesia
The World Health Organization said recently that 16 companies from 10 countries were developing prototype vaccines, and more than 40 clinical trials had been finished or were under way.
Bird flu vaccine linked to 18 teenage suicides in Japan
Bird flu vaccine linked to 18 teenage suicides in Japan
Justin Norrie in Tokyo
March 1, 2007
JAPANESE health authorities are investigating a flu medicine that is also available in Australia after a teenager jumped 11 storeys to his death after taking the drug. It was the 18th juvenile fatality linked to Tamiflu in 17 months.
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has asked the Japanese importer of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug regarded as the most important shield against bird flu in humans, to collect information about the conditions of patients who take the drug.
The 14-year-old boy's death follows a similar case two weeks ago, when a girl also 14, died after jumping from an apartment building at Gamagori, in central Japan.
It also comes after a warning by the US Food and Drug Administration late last year about the dangers of giving children Tamiflu. The drug is being stockpiled in Australia as the first line of defence against bird flu. In Australia, as in Japan, it is only available by prescription.
The Swiss manufacturer, Roche, says the rate of deaths and psychiatric disturbances among people taking its medication is no higher than for flu sufferers generally. It denies there is evidence of a direct correlation between the drug and the fatalities.
In the latest case the teenager, from Sendai in Japan's north-east, had been prescribed a five-day course of Tamiflu by his doctor. After taking two tablets on Monday, he woke during the evening and told his mother he was going to the bathroom, but went out the front door instead.
His mother followed him and called out when she saw him climbing a 1.3-metre handrail. Police said he did not respond, throwing himself off to the parking lot below. There was nothing to suggest the death was a suicide.
Hakuo Yanagisawa, the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare, urged the public to stay calm. "There needs to be clear evidence," he said.
Drug companies reported that 54 people using Tamiflu died in Japan before November, the ministry said.
Justin Norrie in Tokyo
March 1, 2007
JAPANESE health authorities are investigating a flu medicine that is also available in Australia after a teenager jumped 11 storeys to his death after taking the drug. It was the 18th juvenile fatality linked to Tamiflu in 17 months.
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has asked the Japanese importer of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug regarded as the most important shield against bird flu in humans, to collect information about the conditions of patients who take the drug.
The 14-year-old boy's death follows a similar case two weeks ago, when a girl also 14, died after jumping from an apartment building at Gamagori, in central Japan.
It also comes after a warning by the US Food and Drug Administration late last year about the dangers of giving children Tamiflu. The drug is being stockpiled in Australia as the first line of defence against bird flu. In Australia, as in Japan, it is only available by prescription.
The Swiss manufacturer, Roche, says the rate of deaths and psychiatric disturbances among people taking its medication is no higher than for flu sufferers generally. It denies there is evidence of a direct correlation between the drug and the fatalities.
In the latest case the teenager, from Sendai in Japan's north-east, had been prescribed a five-day course of Tamiflu by his doctor. After taking two tablets on Monday, he woke during the evening and told his mother he was going to the bathroom, but went out the front door instead.
His mother followed him and called out when she saw him climbing a 1.3-metre handrail. Police said he did not respond, throwing himself off to the parking lot below. There was nothing to suggest the death was a suicide.
Hakuo Yanagisawa, the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare, urged the public to stay calm. "There needs to be clear evidence," he said.
Drug companies reported that 54 people using Tamiflu died in Japan before November, the ministry said.
Wine drinkers live more healthily than beer drinkers: study
Wine drinkers live more healthily than beer drinkers: study
Wine drinkers tend to buy healthier food than beer drinkers, according to a Danish study published Tuesday on the website of a weekly medical review.
People who bought wine at the store were also more likely to buy more olives, fruits and vegetables, fish, lean meats and dairy products than beer consumers did, said the study.
Beer buyers were more likely to buy frozen dinners, cold cuts, pork, mutton, crisps, sugary products, butter, margarine and soft drinks.
The study, published in the Danish review Ugeskrift for Laeger, was conducted by four researchers from the National Institute of Public Health over the course of six months.
Alcohol researchers Erik Skovenborg and Morten Groenbaek and two other doctors collected 3.5 million grocery receipts from 98 stores during the period September 30, 2002, to February 2003.
The customers at the grocery stores represented a large sample of the Danish population, they said.
"Our results confirm international studies which show that wine drinkers are more inclined to eat fruits, vegetables and fish and rarely use saturated fats, compared to those who like other kinds of alcoholic beverages," they concluded.
Wine consumers also tended to have higher education levels, higher earnings and be in better psychological health, they added, citing a previous Danish study.
Their interest in consumers' grocery bags followed a series of studies in the Danish media suggesting that moderate wine drinkers ran a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer than beer drinkers.
© 2007 AFP
Wine drinkers tend to buy healthier food than beer drinkers, according to a Danish study published Tuesday on the website of a weekly medical review.
People who bought wine at the store were also more likely to buy more olives, fruits and vegetables, fish, lean meats and dairy products than beer consumers did, said the study.
Beer buyers were more likely to buy frozen dinners, cold cuts, pork, mutton, crisps, sugary products, butter, margarine and soft drinks.
The study, published in the Danish review Ugeskrift for Laeger, was conducted by four researchers from the National Institute of Public Health over the course of six months.
Alcohol researchers Erik Skovenborg and Morten Groenbaek and two other doctors collected 3.5 million grocery receipts from 98 stores during the period September 30, 2002, to February 2003.
The customers at the grocery stores represented a large sample of the Danish population, they said.
"Our results confirm international studies which show that wine drinkers are more inclined to eat fruits, vegetables and fish and rarely use saturated fats, compared to those who like other kinds of alcoholic beverages," they concluded.
Wine consumers also tended to have higher education levels, higher earnings and be in better psychological health, they added, citing a previous Danish study.
Their interest in consumers' grocery bags followed a series of studies in the Danish media suggesting that moderate wine drinkers ran a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer than beer drinkers.
© 2007 AFP
The Destruction of the Khazar Empire
Around the year 960 Sviatoslav assumed the kingship in Kyiv. In 962 he began carefully to plan his initial military venture; it would be against the Khazar Empire in the east. Although this empire was no longer as vast as it had been some 250 years earlier at its greatest extent, it was still a formidable steppe power in the mid-10th century.
The motives for the move against the Khazars have been fairly well established. In 962 the Khazars attempted to subdue the Goths living in Crimea, an incident of which is related in a Greek document of the period, the "Report of a Gothic Toparch."_6_ Unable to withstand the Khazars on their own, the Goths decided to invoke the protection of a "ruler north of the Danube who possessed a strong army and was proud of his military forces and from whose people they did not differ in customs or manner."_7_ Although the name of this ruler or his people is not specified in the document, there is little doubt that the reference is to Sviatoslav and the people of Kyivan Rus'.
A delegation was sent north to Kyiv and a treaty concluded whereby the Crimean Goths recognized Sviatoslav as their suzerain; he, in turn, promised to defend them against the Khazars. On their return trip, the delegates observed an unusual cosmologic phenomenon: "Saturn was at the beginning of its passage across Aquarius, while the sun was passing through the winter signs." According to astronomic calculations, the event could only have occurred at the outset of January 963. This is one of those rare occasions where a historic event can be firmly dated with the aid of astronomy._8_
So it was in the spring of 963, not 965 as given in the PVL, that Sviatoslav first moved against the Khazars by taking Gothia (Figure 1). The larger campaign against the empire itself may have taken a year or two of planning and preparation, and the year of 965 may well be accurate for the main thrust against the Khazar heartland. Before undertaking the this decisive strike, Sviatoslav shrewdly enhanced his chances of success by forging a partnership with the Turkic Oghuz, a people centered east of the Aral Sea, near the estuary of the Syr Darya River, and thus on the other side of the Khazar Empire. The Arab historian Ibn Miskawaihi records the Oghuz as attacking the Khazars in 965, so the allies most likely coordinated their attacks._9_
The PVL records that in 965 "Sviatoslav sallied forth against the Khazars. When they heard of his approach, they went to meet him with their Prince, the Kagan and the armies came to blows. When the battle thus took place, Sviatoslav defeated the Khazars and took their city of Bila Vezha. He also conquered the Yasians and the Kasogians."_10_
From Arabic sources we know that Sviatoslav continued his operations eastward, capturing the Khazar cities of Semender (on the Caspian Sea) and Itil (at the mouth of the Volga). The Khazars were thus totally subdued, and their empire ceased to exist.
6. F. Westberg. "Zapiska Gotskogo Toparkha," Vizantiiskii Vremennik 15 (1908), pp. 71-132, 227-286.
7. The Khazars, on the other hand, were considered different in customs and manners since they had adopted Judaism some 150 years earlier.
8. A. A. Vasiliev, earlier "The Goths in the Crimea" (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), pp. 121, 128-129.
9. Omeljan Pritsak, "The Origin of Rus'," Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1981) p. 446.
The motives for the move against the Khazars have been fairly well established. In 962 the Khazars attempted to subdue the Goths living in Crimea, an incident of which is related in a Greek document of the period, the "Report of a Gothic Toparch."_6_ Unable to withstand the Khazars on their own, the Goths decided to invoke the protection of a "ruler north of the Danube who possessed a strong army and was proud of his military forces and from whose people they did not differ in customs or manner."_7_ Although the name of this ruler or his people is not specified in the document, there is little doubt that the reference is to Sviatoslav and the people of Kyivan Rus'.
A delegation was sent north to Kyiv and a treaty concluded whereby the Crimean Goths recognized Sviatoslav as their suzerain; he, in turn, promised to defend them against the Khazars. On their return trip, the delegates observed an unusual cosmologic phenomenon: "Saturn was at the beginning of its passage across Aquarius, while the sun was passing through the winter signs." According to astronomic calculations, the event could only have occurred at the outset of January 963. This is one of those rare occasions where a historic event can be firmly dated with the aid of astronomy._8_
So it was in the spring of 963, not 965 as given in the PVL, that Sviatoslav first moved against the Khazars by taking Gothia (Figure 1). The larger campaign against the empire itself may have taken a year or two of planning and preparation, and the year of 965 may well be accurate for the main thrust against the Khazar heartland. Before undertaking the this decisive strike, Sviatoslav shrewdly enhanced his chances of success by forging a partnership with the Turkic Oghuz, a people centered east of the Aral Sea, near the estuary of the Syr Darya River, and thus on the other side of the Khazar Empire. The Arab historian Ibn Miskawaihi records the Oghuz as attacking the Khazars in 965, so the allies most likely coordinated their attacks._9_
The PVL records that in 965 "Sviatoslav sallied forth against the Khazars. When they heard of his approach, they went to meet him with their Prince, the Kagan and the armies came to blows. When the battle thus took place, Sviatoslav defeated the Khazars and took their city of Bila Vezha. He also conquered the Yasians and the Kasogians."_10_
From Arabic sources we know that Sviatoslav continued his operations eastward, capturing the Khazar cities of Semender (on the Caspian Sea) and Itil (at the mouth of the Volga). The Khazars were thus totally subdued, and their empire ceased to exist.
6. F. Westberg. "Zapiska Gotskogo Toparkha," Vizantiiskii Vremennik 15 (1908), pp. 71-132, 227-286.
7. The Khazars, on the other hand, were considered different in customs and manners since they had adopted Judaism some 150 years earlier.
8. A. A. Vasiliev, earlier "The Goths in the Crimea" (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), pp. 121, 128-129.
9. Omeljan Pritsak, "The Origin of Rus'," Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1981) p. 446.
On 9/1101 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell
http://www.informationliberation.com/print.php?id=20521
Tuesday February 27th, 2007 informationliberation.com
Another Smoking Gun? Now CNN Jumps the Gun: On 911 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell (Information Liberation)
In an amazing redux, new video has been unearthed of a CNN report on the day of 911 in which a CNN anchor announces they have received word that WTC 7 is on fire and "has either collapsed or is collapsing." The problem with this is that WTC 7 is clearly visible behind the anchor.
This report was carried at "about 4:15 eastern daylight time" (according to the anchor), over an hour before the building actually collapsed at 5:20. Who told them the WTC 7 building "has either collapsed or is collapsing."? Keep in mind he did not say it was going to collapse, he said it either had or was in the process of doing so. The anchor says is "we are getting information now", who is giving him this information? If you pay close attention you can see after the anchor announces this he turns around and sees the building as clear as day still standing, he then proceeds to backtrack on the initial information which informed him clearly the building "has either collapsed or is collapsing."
This report is doubled in significance seeing as it comes on the heels of a report that BBC announced that WTC 7 had collapsed over 20 minutes before it actually fell. Both of the anchors were told the building had collapsed, the question is who told them?
This is just a small sampling of the evidence for those who want to know the truth of what happened that day. For those who wish to avoid the truth I leave you with this quote to ponder...
"People avoid the truth because the first bit of truth uttered and lived would draw more truth into action and so on indefinitely, and this would rip most people right off the customary tracks of their lives. But people, basically, know what is true and what is not, even if they so often render help to the lie. They support the lie because the lie has become a crutch without which life would not be possible. Therefor, in common human intercourse, the truth, and not the lie, is suspected as being phony." - Wilhelm Reich, "The Murder of Christ"
Tuesday February 27th, 2007 informationliberation.com
Another Smoking Gun? Now CNN Jumps the Gun: On 911 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell (Information Liberation)
In an amazing redux, new video has been unearthed of a CNN report on the day of 911 in which a CNN anchor announces they have received word that WTC 7 is on fire and "has either collapsed or is collapsing." The problem with this is that WTC 7 is clearly visible behind the anchor.
This report was carried at "about 4:15 eastern daylight time" (according to the anchor), over an hour before the building actually collapsed at 5:20. Who told them the WTC 7 building "has either collapsed or is collapsing."? Keep in mind he did not say it was going to collapse, he said it either had or was in the process of doing so. The anchor says is "we are getting information now", who is giving him this information? If you pay close attention you can see after the anchor announces this he turns around and sees the building as clear as day still standing, he then proceeds to backtrack on the initial information which informed him clearly the building "has either collapsed or is collapsing."
This report is doubled in significance seeing as it comes on the heels of a report that BBC announced that WTC 7 had collapsed over 20 minutes before it actually fell. Both of the anchors were told the building had collapsed, the question is who told them?
This is just a small sampling of the evidence for those who want to know the truth of what happened that day. For those who wish to avoid the truth I leave you with this quote to ponder...
"People avoid the truth because the first bit of truth uttered and lived would draw more truth into action and so on indefinitely, and this would rip most people right off the customary tracks of their lives. But people, basically, know what is true and what is not, even if they so often render help to the lie. They support the lie because the lie has become a crutch without which life would not be possible. Therefor, in common human intercourse, the truth, and not the lie, is suspected as being phony." - Wilhelm Reich, "The Murder of Christ"
Ukrainian Prince Sviatoslav's defeat of the Khazar army, 968 A.D.
They're not "Jews." They're Khazars (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9)
Ukrainian Prince Sviatoslav's defeat of the Khazar army, 968 A.D. (note the hexagram on the Khazar soldier's shield)
Please credit: Research by Michael A. Hoffman II
Historian and author Michael A. Hoffman II of RevisionistHistory.org has unearthed this photo of a Ukrainian statue depicting "Ukrainian Prince Sviatoslav's defeat of the Khazar army, 968 A.D. (note the hexagram on the Khazar soldier's shield)"
The Magen David was used in Jewish Kabbalistic rituals in the Middle Ages, but only became universally 'Jewish' in the 19th century when adopted by the Zionist movement as their national symbol.
More on ankle bracelets detecting alcohol
November 1, 2006
Ankle bracelets detect intoxication through sweat
Government technology
State & Local Govt
Electronic bracelets aren't just for house arrests anymore. In Illinois, drunk drivers are being fitted with electronic ankle bracelets that will measure alcohol consumption by testing perspiration, according to the Daily Herald.
At least 4,000 people are wearing the gadget today, and another 2,800 are waiting to be outfitted in the 38 states where SCRAM, Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring, is in place.
State's Attorney Joseph Birkett said Tuesday: "We still have to work out a lot of details, but this is going to focus on people who clearly have an alcohol problem and their alcohol use is tied to their crime."
The technology premiered in Michigan and went on the market April 2003. The eight-ounce ankle bracelet checks hourly for traces of alcohol and stores that data throughout the day, according to the device manufacturer, Alcohol Monitoring Systems, of Colorado.
The wearer must stand within 30 feet of a modem in his home once a day for up to 15 minutes so the results can be transmitted through a telephone line to a secure computer system, which is monitored by either the manufacturer, service provider or, in some cases, probation or other court officials.
The privacy issues are of primary concern, however.
"You want to make sure it's accurate and that there's a process in place to appeal a reading if it's in dispute," said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
Added Steven Greenberg, a noted Chicago defense attorney: "The rules they put on people as conditions of bond are unconstitutional because the accused is presumed innocent. You're micromanaging someone's life when they haven't been convicted of anything."
Some predict that technology will make such substantial advances in coming decades that drunk driving may one day not even be an option.
Charlene Chapman, the executive director of Schaumburg-based Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists, attended a seminar where one manufacturer claimed laser technology would gauge sobriety. A drunk driver's car would simply not operate.
"We're kind of just getting the first glimpse at the future," Chapman said. "Technology is going to be the answer to dealing with problem drinkers."
This has to be the technology most likely to be abused by government since e-voting! This is like something from a Philip K. Dick novel. Why does the future look so bleak?
Ankle bracelets detect intoxication through sweat
Government technology
State & Local Govt
Electronic bracelets aren't just for house arrests anymore. In Illinois, drunk drivers are being fitted with electronic ankle bracelets that will measure alcohol consumption by testing perspiration, according to the Daily Herald.
At least 4,000 people are wearing the gadget today, and another 2,800 are waiting to be outfitted in the 38 states where SCRAM, Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring, is in place.
State's Attorney Joseph Birkett said Tuesday: "We still have to work out a lot of details, but this is going to focus on people who clearly have an alcohol problem and their alcohol use is tied to their crime."
The technology premiered in Michigan and went on the market April 2003. The eight-ounce ankle bracelet checks hourly for traces of alcohol and stores that data throughout the day, according to the device manufacturer, Alcohol Monitoring Systems, of Colorado.
The wearer must stand within 30 feet of a modem in his home once a day for up to 15 minutes so the results can be transmitted through a telephone line to a secure computer system, which is monitored by either the manufacturer, service provider or, in some cases, probation or other court officials.
The privacy issues are of primary concern, however.
"You want to make sure it's accurate and that there's a process in place to appeal a reading if it's in dispute," said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
Added Steven Greenberg, a noted Chicago defense attorney: "The rules they put on people as conditions of bond are unconstitutional because the accused is presumed innocent. You're micromanaging someone's life when they haven't been convicted of anything."
Some predict that technology will make such substantial advances in coming decades that drunk driving may one day not even be an option.
Charlene Chapman, the executive director of Schaumburg-based Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists, attended a seminar where one manufacturer claimed laser technology would gauge sobriety. A drunk driver's car would simply not operate.
"We're kind of just getting the first glimpse at the future," Chapman said. "Technology is going to be the answer to dealing with problem drinkers."
This has to be the technology most likely to be abused by government since e-voting! This is like something from a Philip K. Dick novel. Why does the future look so bleak?
Repeat offenders' anklets to detect alcohol
Why does this seem like unreasonable search? Let's see... subcutaneous RFID transmitting whenever you have something in your system that someone feels that you should not have in it..? Wow, this is a slippery slope. And right around the corner. If my kids were required to have SSNs to leave the hospitals they were born in, what about the sure-to-be-upcoming subcutaneous RFID implant? Tell me that can't happen. Because if it can happen, it will happen. Freedom? Ha. Grow up.
Repeat offenders' anklets to detect alcohol
By Craig Gustafson
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
February 28, 2007
With nearly 500 chronic drunken drivers in the region, county supervisors gave the go-ahead yesterday for a pilot program to place alcohol-detecting ankle bracelets on the worst violators.
The yearlong project involving 20 anklets begins in April.
“This county, I believe, must be as aggressive as we possibly can in addressing the devastating problem of drunk driving which continues to cause countless amounts of damage and, more importantly, ruins lives,” said Supervisor Dianne Jacob, who proposed the idea.
The anklets, which detect alcohol through a person's perspiration, are used in 20 states and by more than 200 law enforcement agencies, including the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
Repeat offenders in the program will be required to wear the anklets for 90 days while on probation. The program, which will cost $73,000 in equipment, will then compare their recidivism rate with offenders who did not wear bracelets.
Stacy Adams, a county probation director, said the ankle bracelets will not act as tracking devices and will not submit data in real time. Offenders will be required to relay the information by regularly plugging the devices into a phone line, she said.
The department will select a test group from three categories: chronic offenders charged with a felony; those on probation who fail scheduled alcohol tests; and those who evade arrest while driving under the influence.
If an anklet detects alcohol, the Probation Department canintensify treatment or arrest the person on suspicion of violating the terms of release. Many chronic drunken drivers are prohibited from drinking alcohol while on probation.
The county has the second-highest number of driving under the influence offenses in the state, behind Los Angeles County, Adams said. In 2005, there were more than 13,000 convictions with nearly 500 people having three or more prior drunken-driving offenses.
Supervisor Ron Roberts said the need for such a program was highlighted last week, when a drunken driver was sentenced to prison for 21 years to life for killing a 22-year-old hairdresser in a wreck on state Route 67 last year. The driver had four previous convictions for drunken driving.
Craig Gustafson: (619) 293-1399; craig.gustafson@uniontrib.com
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070228-9999-1m28alcohol.html
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
HI, I’M SENATOR COBURN, AND I DON’T WANT YOUR VOTE
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_5318
HI, I’M SENATOR COBURN, AND I DON’T WANT YOUR VOTE
But I do want you to know that the new Democratic leadership is just as corrupt and irresponsible as the Republicans, and together they’re trying to destroy our country
GQ, February 2007
Tom Coburn doesn’t care about the midterm elections. Sure, he’s a senator. Sure, he’s a Republican. And sure, that means his party lost control of both houses of Congress last fall and will be out of power until at least 2009. But what difference does that make to Coburn?
“I don’t think it matters,” he said on a warm day in December, sitting in his office on the first floor of the Russell Senate building as the annual session came to a close. “It will be my first time in the minority party, but I’ve been in the minority the whole time I’ve been here.”
For Coburn, it’s a minority of one. Since his arrival in Washington, D.C., two years ago, no other senator has paved a more solitary path, butting heads with nearly every member of his own party and most of the opposition. In fact, as the Republican majority has run aground on fiscal issues over the past few years—racking up unprecedented deficits and a soaring national debt while the Democrats mostly kept out of the way—Coburn has often seemed like an opposition party unto himself. In April, for example, he tackled nineteen highly questionable expenses that his colleagues had slipped into the budget at the last minute—money that no branch of government had requested, which would directly benefit Senate campaign supporters. In September, he teamed up with Barack Obama to expose federal waste by putting the national budget on a public Web site—a prospect so alarming to some senators that two of them tried to kill it anonymously. And in December, as his Republican colleagues began cleaning out their offices to make room for the new Democratic leadership, Coburn fired a parting shot: Using legislative procedures, he blocked the GOP from finishing its annual business and pushed many of the most important budgetary decisions for incoming Democrats to make in the New Year.
But Coburn makes no apology for challenging his own party. “The American people want change,” he said with a shrug. “I think they’re wise to want change. The Republicans didn’t do what they said they were going to do. They deserve the wrath of the voters.”
Needless to say, none of this has exactly endeared Coburn to his fellow Republicans. When I asked John McCain, one of Coburn’s few supporters in the Senate, how the GOP has received Coburn, he laughed. “I call him Miss Congeniality,” he said. “A lot of people think he’s a straight-arrow, humorless guy.” Other Republicans were even less charitable. As a senior staffer in the Senate Republican leadership put it, “You know he’s nuts, right?”
But for many of Coburn’s colleagues, what is most surprising is not that he has become a thorn in the party’s side; it’s the issue with which he has made his mark. Back in 2004, when Coburn was first running for Senate, fiscal prudence wasn’t supposed to be his issue. In fact, the last thing anybody expected him to become was a voice of restraint in a body of excess. If anything, Coburn was the one known for his excesses, for making pronouncements so outrageous, so far from the mainstream, that at times he seemed like a cartoon of the fanatical right—declaring his own Senate race “the battle of good versus evil,” calling for “the death penalty for abortionists,” and suggesting that the country was under attack by a secret gay conspiracy that had “infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country.” Back in 2004, Tom Coburn was the last man anybody expected to rise above politics and try to lead us back to common sense.
But he might be the only one left who can.
*****
Coburn’s office in Washington, D.C., has the feel of a boxer’s corner, everyone huddled together in anticipation of a fight. There is a spirit of intense camaraderie inside—every time I stepped through the door, I was met with a sea of smiles and a battery of questions about my day, my weekend, my family, and my overall level of contentedness—while at the same time, there’s also an almost toxic hostility to everyone still outside the door. One afternoon a staffer returning from his first trip to the Senate chamber walked into the office, sat down, and confessed to being somewhat starstruck by the experience, adding quickly, “I mean, I hate all those guys, but it was neat being down there.” Another time, I was sitting with Coburn when his secretary stepped in to announce that a certain Republican congressman had requested a meeting. Coburn became instantly stiff.
“Tell him I’ll be happy to talk to him, but it isn’t changing,” the senator said. “It is a no. It is not going anywhere. It is no.”
“You want me to tell him you’ll call him?” the secretary asked.
“I’d be happy to call him,” Coburn snapped, “but it’s not changing.”
This kind of exchange turned out to be an almost daily occurrence for Coburn—somebody calling to butter him up and back him down from some battle, which only irritated Coburn more. The dynamic had begun almost the day he arrived in the Senate, in January 2005. While fellow newcomers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.
The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like.
Almost as soon as Coburn proposed to eliminate the bridge, Ted Stevens came tearing down to the floor of the Senate with his face red and his fists clenched, bellowing that he would not be treated with such disrespect, that the rest of the Senate would have to rise up and protect his project or he, Ted Stevens, would pack up his bags and quit the Senate and never come back. By the end of the day, eighty-two senators had voted with Stevens. Voted to spend $200 million on a bridge to nowhere, while Tom Coburn could find only fourteen members to agree that the money might be better spent somewhere else—like, say, rebuilding New Orleans.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. Not about the bridge; about the bigger thing. He wants you to know how it works in Washington, how the machine keeps itself running, and the favors get traded, and the deals get struck, and the bridges to nowhere are going up every day. He wants you to know that the United States Congress simply cannot stop itself—that both parties are in on the fix, backing each other and looking the other way, and that in the spirit of bipartisan waste, they manage to blow $500 billion more than they collect in taxes every single year. He wants you to see where that money is going: the 10,000 personal projects and earmarks that senators and congressmen are sneaking into the federal budget every year—like the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative in Michigan. And the Sparta Teapot Museum in North Carolina. And the Appalachian Fruit Laboratory in West Virginia. All paid for with your tax dollars.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. That the members of the United States Congress will spend your money just because they can. That they’ll do it even when they can’t. That every year, they borrow the extra $500 billion from China, raising their own credit limit each time they reach it and then raising it again the next year, for a total of $9 trillion in debt so far. That’s right, nine trillion dollars, a figure so enormous that even if the fifty richest people on earth—including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, along with the richest men in Saudi Arabia and Russia and Hong Kong—got together and sold everything they owned, right down to the last buttons on their last embroidered shirts, and then they donated all their money to the U.S. national debt, they still couldn’t afford to pay a single year of interest at 10 percent. That’s how much $9 trillion is, and that’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know: that in Washington, there isn’t really a party in charge, or a principle, or a leader. What’s in charge is the money. Because at the end of the day, when it comes down to a choice between borrowing $200 million from China to build a bridge to nowhere and taking a stand against government waste, four out of five politicians will blow it on the bridge.
So now there’s all this hullabaloo about the Democrats taking over—Tom Coburn is supposed to care? He’s supposed to get excited now that the peanut butter is on top and the jelly is on the bottom instead of the other way around? This is a revolution? It’s a revolution that Ted Stevens has been pushed aside as chairman of the defense-appropriations subcommittee and that in his place the Democrats have installed…Daniel Inouye of Hawaii? A man who inserted $900 million of his own personal projects into the budget last year—and who happens to be one of Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate? It’s a revolution that the Democrats have cleaned out the subcommittee behind the Bridge to Nowhere and replaced the chairman with…Patty Murray of Washington? A woman who personally led a campaign for the bridge and who threatened revenge against any Democrat who opposed it? It’s a revolution that Thad Cochran has been deposed as the most powerful budgetary overlord in the Senate and is being replaced with…Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia? A man who has single-handedly converted his state into a federally funded monument to himself, with no less than thirty projects named in his own honor, including the Robert C. Byrd Expressway and the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer and the two Robert C. Byrd federal buildings and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism—not to mention the actual statue of Robert C. Byrd that stands in the rotunda of the state capitol?
Robert C. Byrd is going to clean up the government? This is a revolution?
Coburn smiled at the suggestion. “We’ll see how the Democrats vote on the first big earmark boondoggle that comes up,” he said. “I’m gonna try to reserve judgment.”
*****
When the Senate is in session, Coburn lives in a dorm-style apartment with eight other members of Congress, including Democratic representatives Mike Doyle and Bart Stupak. Every Tuesday evening, they gather to hold prayer night, talking about the temptations and pressures of public life, but otherwise they mostly work late and socialize rarely, bumping into one another occasionally in the TV room to watch a game. This is as much of Washington’s social orbit as the 58-year-old Coburn cares to indulge, and every Thursday, as soon as he can break away from his work on Capitol Hill, he jumps in a cab to the airport, flies to Tulsa, and drives an hour south to the small town of Muskogee, where he joins his wife, Carolyn, for a few hours of sleep before waking at 5 a.m. to go to work at his medical practice.
A family-practice doctor for twenty-three years, Coburn continues to see about fifteen patients a week, and on any given Saturday, while his Senate colleagues are teeing off or jockeying for position on the weekend talk shows, Coburn can be found knee-deep in paperwork at his office or patrolling the maternity ward at his local hospital, delivering babies. For his labor, he is paid exactly nothing. Senate rules allow members to maintain almost any business they choose back home—a hardware store, an investment firm, in a few cases even recording contracts—but prohibit doctors and lawyers from continuing to practice. This has posed the single greatest challenge of Coburn’s political life, and not only for economic reasons. As a firm believer in the ideal of the citizen legislator—a member who goes to Washington for a fixed number of years and keeps his full-time job at home—Coburn has tried and failed to convince the ethics committee (some of whom, perhaps coincidentally, have clashed with him over fiscal issues) that his medical practice should be allowed. Having lost that battle, Coburn keeps his office open anyway and simply doesn’t charge his patients. By his own estimate, he loses about $40,000 a year practicing medicine for free.
To say that Coburn could live without the pressure of juggling two high-stakes jobs in two distant cities would be an understatement. He hates it, and it doesn’t take long to get the sense from him that if voters had not elected him to the Senate in 2004, he would have been a happier man. But to Coburn, that’s exactly what makes the job worth doing. “In any election,” he is fond of saying, “you should vote for the person who will give up the most if they win.”
In the era of Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project, when members of Congress are routinely flown around the globe on luxury vacations at the expense of corporate lobbyists, mugging for the cameras at every stop and then rushing to see themselves on the airplane TVs, it can be difficult to keep a straight face when the talk turns to “sacrifice” and “public service.” Yet to spend time with Coburn as he comes alive in Oklahoma, tending to his patients and his forty-acre orchard, and then to travel back to Washington with him, to see the look of defeat as he leaves his family, his medical practice, and the old Yanmar tractor that he maintains himself, it is impossible to mistake Coburn for an eager politician.
One Monday morning last fall, as he made the drive to the Tulsa airport with his suit jacket crumpled on the backseat and his briefcase overstuffed with research papers and faxes, he reflected on the privilege of being a United States senator. “Every Monday I wish I didn’t have to go back,” he said. “But you know, I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it. My dad was born in a mud hut on the plains of eastern Colorado, and he always encouraged us to work. When I was a little boy, he bought the rights to an invention that held a piece of glass onto a metal block so you could cut and grind the piece of glass into a lens for eyeglasses. When I was 5 or 6, he would have us out in the garage, putting the little centers with three points on the back of the block, pounding them in, while he would be making the blocks on the lathe. We’d build about twenty of these machines, and then Dad would go on the road and not come home until they were sold.”
Coburn reached for a bottle of Dasani water and took a sip.
“My first paying job was sorting bolts and nuts for my dad,” he continued. “He’d buy old machines, and we’d salvage the nuts and bolts off them. We’d have to sort them by size. If we could sort through a whole five-gallon bucket, we got a quarter. For a whole five-gallon bucket. After that, I learned how to turn a lathe in a mill. By the time I was 14 or 15, I could do a lot of stuff on a lathe. Then in high school, I sold clothes. Sold shoes. I’ve always worked. I saved my money and bought an old ’28 Chevy…”
Coburn trailed off, looking out the window at the plains where he’d grown up. The midday glare made the landscape white.
“I never gave any thought to politics until I was grown. None. I had my practice, I had my family, my career, and I read the paper, but my only political thoughts were that I had gotten disgusted with the Democrat who was my representative. He wanted to nationalize health care. His positions had nothing in common with our district. And I just said to Carolyn, ‘I’m going to get into this race.’ She said, ‘You’re nuts.’ I said, ‘Well, somebody’s got to try.’ And that’s how I ended up as a Republican. I’m not sure I’m as much of a Republican as I am independent-minded, but if I’ve got to pick between two parties, I’m a Republican.”
As Coburn launched his campaign for the House in 1994, nearly everyone around him watched in silence. They knew him well enough to realize that he couldn’t be talked out of something once he’d made up his mind, but to most of them—even his kids—it seemed like a fool’s errand. The incumbent, Mike Synar, was a sixteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives, well-placed in the Democratic majority, and all but certain to win reelection by a landslide. No Republican from the district had been elected since 1921, and only one had been elected to a second term.
Then there was Coburn: He had no experience at any level of government, no background in political theory or government affairs or anything remotely related to government, and as some of his closer friends pointed out, he was possessed of what you might generously call a stubborn streak, which is not exactly the material from which political success is usually hewn. To run, he would have to put his medical practice, his life, and to some extent, his family on hold for…what? Certain defeat?
But as he hit the campaign trail, something surprising began to happen—not only to Coburn but also to the district he wanted to represent.
In retrospect, the 1994 Republican Revolution can sometimes seem like a foregone conclusion, but at the time it was far from ordained: a grassroots movement that didn’t so much reach into small towns like Coburn’s as it emerged from them. Running as a Regular Guy with No Experience, Coburn tapped into a pervasive frustration with Congress, which had been plagued by a series of Democratic scandals. Painting Synar as a career politician with no roots in Oklahoma, promising to keep his own medical practice open after his election and return home every weekend for work, and making no secret of his deeply held conservative social values, Coburn changed the terms of the debate. By the time voters went to the polls in 1994, Coburn had been so successful in his campaign against Mike Synar that Synar wasn’t even on the ballot. Democrats had chosen a more conservative candidate in the Democratic primary, whom Coburn still defeated.
Entering the House in 1994, Coburn was proud to be a member of the Republican Revolution and was a true believer in its Contract with America, which called for congressional-term limits, balanced budgets, and tougher campaign-finance laws. But unlike many of his new friends in the Class of ’94, Coburn would never drift from those ideals, imposing his own term limit of six years in office, insisting on unpopular budget cuts even when his Republican colleagues begged him not to, inserting anti-abortion measures into unrelated bills, and gradually growing disillusioned with his colleagues who didn’t do the same, most notably Speaker Gingrich, who Coburn believed was learning the art of compromise too well and becoming, like a scene from Animal Farm, the very thing he had been elected to overthrow; or as Coburn said in his 2003 memoir, Breach of Trust, “like a whipped dog who still barked, yet cowered, in Clinton’s presence.”
Not long after Coburn left the House in 2000, I called him at home in Oklahoma. I had never spoken with him before but had been intrigued by his awkward place in Congress, struggling to hold on to something that had been real for him but illusory to many of his colleagues. When I tracked him down in Muskogee, the taste of Congress was still bitter on his tongue.
“The waste I saw every day was incredible,” he said. “Most of our politicians don’t have high self-esteem, so they have to have people doing things for them all the time, telling them how great they are. The system is broken, and the only way it gets fixed is by throwing the vast majority of the incumbents out. One of the greatest things I saw in six years was Arlen Specter and Tom Harkin—this just shows you how callous and brassed these guys are—introducing a bill on the floor naming institutions that already had names, naming them after themselves! I would tell you, in Arlen Specter’s case he’s done a great disservice to the nation. Also Robert Byrd—he knows exactly how to rape the U.S. Treasury and mortgage the future. It’s sad. There are two kinds of members, with two different lifestyles. There’s the guys that come home every weekend, fly in Monday or Tuesday morning for the week, and live a real life in their district the rest of the time. And then there’s the guys that live in Washington. I spent one weekend there in six years, and I don’t ever want to spend another one.”
Now, as Coburn headed back to the Tulsa airport once again, leaving behind his real life—his family, his practice, his home—for the ornate bluster of Washington, he seemed, if not depressed, annoyed.
“Believe me,” he said, “when I left the House I had no intention of running for anything again. I didn’t want to run for the Senate. And I wouldn’t have run if I didn’t think this was what I’m supposed to be doing. I had to pray on it for a long time. I prayed hard, and I just felt like I was supposed to do this.”
*****
Last Spring, I joined Coburn in Washington for a few weeks to observe the latest front in his war on pork: the emergency supplemental budget. Designed to provide assistance to crisis victims—think September 11 or Hurricane Katrina—the supplemental had entered the Senate with $92 billion of emergency funding. But as the bill passed through committee, the Senate GOP had shifted into pork-barrel overdrive, cramming an astonishing $14 billion of additional projects into the bill, including many items that had nothing to do with September 11, Katrina, or any other crisis, items that the House of Representatives had never seen or approved, items that even the president had threatened to veto unless the Senate could contain itself. But the Senate would do no such thing.
For Coburn, this presented yet another opportunity to bring his case to the public. As his colleagues went to work piling expenses and amendments onto the emergency supplemental, Coburn wrote an amendment of his own—but instead of adding expenses, Coburn’s took them away. He identified nineteen specific projects for removal and submitted a nineteen-part amendment, with each part designed to remove one earmark. Then he invoked an obscure rule that would force his colleagues to debate each of the nineteen parts separately—a strategy he dubbed “the Clay Pigeon.”
This allowed Coburn to divide and conquer. Rather than tackling all the pork at once and encouraging his opponents to lock arms in mutual defense, he was isolating each item for individual scrutiny.
“It’s okay if I lose the debate,” he said on the day of the vote. “My goal is to make members go down on the floor and defend these projects. If we can make the American public take notice of what’s going on here, the lack of good work that Congress is doing and how their money is being spent, people will become so appalled that they’ll want change. They will hold members accountable.”
Coburn had chosen his nineteen targets carefully, for maximum effect. Any one of them was enough to make the average citizen laugh out loud; taken together, in a continuous stream on the Senate floor, they promised to be obscene: One section identified a $500 million cash bonus that Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi had slipped into the emergency budget for his supporters at Northrop Grumman, a giveaway that even the Pentagon had identified as “inappropriate” and wasteful. Another section exposed a $700 million care package from Senator Thad Cochran, also of Mississippi, to help CSX relocate a railroad in…you guessed it: Mississippi. And a third section uncovered a $15 million giveaway that Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama had stuffed into the emergency bill to help his friends in the Alabama seafood industry pay for their “promotional materials.”
As all that pork made its way onto the floor, Coburn was visibly excited. “These guys want to pay Northrop Grumman $500 million?” he said, sitting forward in his office chair and rubbing his hands together. “Baloney! Northrop Grumman is a billion-billion-billion-billion-dollar company that makes billions in profit every year! The railroad, I think, is a good idea—for Mississippi. If I were the governor of Mississippi, I’d be doing that, too. I applaud them for wanting to do it. But it isn’t an emergency, number one. And it’s absolutely not something that the rest of the country ought to be paying for! So it’s not about not doing it. It’s about whether it’s our responsibility or theirs. I don’t think the American taxpayers should be paying for it. The very fact that these senators think we can do that, and that the American people will not be upset, is troubling to me.”
Coburn was clearly preparing for a showdown on the floor that afternoon, and this was turning into his debate prep. “It’s okay if I’m not popular around here,” he continued, throwing his hands wide to indicate the entire city of Washington. “It’s okay if I take hits. It’s even okay if I’m not reelected. Because losing advances the ball in the long run. It opens the debate and the conversation. We need to be honest with the American people. And we’re not. We’re terrible. We’re not even honest about the numbers. We put out figures like we had a $300 billion deficit last year when in fact we had a $520 billion deficit. We’ve been lying about it. We use the same accounting tactics as Enron. If we applied the same standards to Congress that we apply to Enron, everybody here would go to jail.”
An hour later, Coburn was on the Senate floor. “At some point, it has to stop,” he cried to a nearly empty chamber. “This is called an earmark. It is placed in a bill to benefit one specific area at the expense of everybody else. It has legitimate value for the state of Mississippi… And it will certainly be paid for through lost opportunities for our kids. What $700 million could do for everybody else [who suffered] in Katrina! If you assume an interest rate on our debt…this $700 million relocation will balloon to more than $4 billion. That is what your grandchildren will have to pay back for what we are proposing today.”
Then Coburn yielded the floor, and one by one, Senators trickled in from their offices to vote. All the old lions staggered to the front desk, holding their thumbs up or down.
But Coburn was defeated, 48–49.
Afterward, Coburn was back in his office, visibly disgusted, but many of his staff were thrilled. A year ago, they’d lost the Bridge to Nowhere by 82–15; this time they’d come within a single vote of success. “It’s an improvement,” one of Coburn’s principal aides said. “We’re getting closer.”
But the thing that nobody could understand, even in the context of politics as usual, was the fact that with the midterms looming, with the Senate hanging in the balance, the Democrats had refused to join Coburn to remove a Republican earmark. Hillary Clinton had voted against him. Teddy Kennedy had voted against him. Robert Byrd had voted against him. To waste taxpayers’ money on a frivolous project for Republican donors.
“The Democrats are amazing,” said one of Coburn’s senior staff. “If just one more of them had changed votes, we would have won, and then they could have claimed it as a victory. But they’re so in love with spending money, they’ll fall on their swords to protect a Republican earmark.”
Coburn looked tired. “Nobody wants to lose their own earmark,” he said. “You have to go back to why people are in Congress. They’re in for one of two reasons: They’re dedicated to making a difference, which means they put themselves second; or they’re here because they want to be in power, and they put themselves first. The first question they ask is ‘How do I get reelected?’ rather than ‘What do I do for the country?’ And it’s kind of like holding a pet bird. If you hold it too tight, you’ll kill it. And if you hold on to office too tight, you’ll kill our republic.”
*****
By the end of the session, most of Coburn’s efforts had taken a beating. Of the nineteen parts in his amendment, just one had passed, and Coburn’s standing among Senate Republicans, never strong, seemed to be slipping further with every battle. But Coburn was unfazed. On the last day of the 2006 session, he sat in his office with the hint of a smile around the corners of his mouth. He had just enjoyed a rare success—postponing the annual budget-approvals process into the New Year and giving Democrats control over many of the most important decisions—and his fellow Republicans were more irritated with him than ever.
For Coburn, the feeling had become familiar. Having entered the public spotlight for his social positions, far from the mainstream and widely condemned for his views on abortion and gay rights, he had long since adjusted to the outrage and indignation he aroused. If anything, his social views had bolstered him for the fiscal fight. In a world as upside down as Congress, where waste is the norm and prudence on the fringe, where a man fighting pork and fraud can be ostracized by his peers, maybe it takes someone who is comfortable with that, and has spent most of his adult life on the fringe already, to speak out in spite of the risks.
This came naturally to Coburn. “You can look at abortion, you can look at all the social issues you want,” he said, “but none of those matter if we’re not good stewards of the nation. I’m not going to be critical of the people who are pro-abortion. They have a different set of values than me. I can see their position, and I won’t demean it. I counsel lots of women—and I love them to death—who have been through abortion. I’ve done two abortions myself, to save the lives of women. When you talk about abortion, emotion gets into it. But you can understand the position of the other side. When you look at what’s happening with the American dollar, it is not as nuanced. The dollar is sliding against all major currencies in the world, because people are losing faith in our ability to repay all these loans. We’re living on borrowed financial time. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Those are the facts.”
Coburn’s face was stark.
“When you’re delivering a baby,” he said, “and the baby’s getting in trouble, and you can see the baby’s heartbeat, which is normally about 130 or 140 beats per minute, going down to fifty or sixty, and you’re standing there watching it go down, you know you’ve got about three minutes to make a decision. You can use a pair of forceps and try to pull it out, you can use a vacuum extractor, or you can leave labor and delivery, put her on the table, put her to sleep, cut a hole in her belly, and take it out with a C-section—but you’ve got to do something, and you’ve got to do it now. That baby’s life depends on what you do in those three minutes. And that’s exactly where we are in our country today. We are in those critical three minutes. If we wait to act, it’s going to be too late. We’re going to lose the baby.”
Wil S. Hylton is a GQ correspondent.
HI, I’M SENATOR COBURN, AND I DON’T WANT YOUR VOTE
But I do want you to know that the new Democratic leadership is just as corrupt and irresponsible as the Republicans, and together they’re trying to destroy our country
GQ, February 2007
Tom Coburn doesn’t care about the midterm elections. Sure, he’s a senator. Sure, he’s a Republican. And sure, that means his party lost control of both houses of Congress last fall and will be out of power until at least 2009. But what difference does that make to Coburn?
“I don’t think it matters,” he said on a warm day in December, sitting in his office on the first floor of the Russell Senate building as the annual session came to a close. “It will be my first time in the minority party, but I’ve been in the minority the whole time I’ve been here.”
For Coburn, it’s a minority of one. Since his arrival in Washington, D.C., two years ago, no other senator has paved a more solitary path, butting heads with nearly every member of his own party and most of the opposition. In fact, as the Republican majority has run aground on fiscal issues over the past few years—racking up unprecedented deficits and a soaring national debt while the Democrats mostly kept out of the way—Coburn has often seemed like an opposition party unto himself. In April, for example, he tackled nineteen highly questionable expenses that his colleagues had slipped into the budget at the last minute—money that no branch of government had requested, which would directly benefit Senate campaign supporters. In September, he teamed up with Barack Obama to expose federal waste by putting the national budget on a public Web site—a prospect so alarming to some senators that two of them tried to kill it anonymously. And in December, as his Republican colleagues began cleaning out their offices to make room for the new Democratic leadership, Coburn fired a parting shot: Using legislative procedures, he blocked the GOP from finishing its annual business and pushed many of the most important budgetary decisions for incoming Democrats to make in the New Year.
But Coburn makes no apology for challenging his own party. “The American people want change,” he said with a shrug. “I think they’re wise to want change. The Republicans didn’t do what they said they were going to do. They deserve the wrath of the voters.”
Needless to say, none of this has exactly endeared Coburn to his fellow Republicans. When I asked John McCain, one of Coburn’s few supporters in the Senate, how the GOP has received Coburn, he laughed. “I call him Miss Congeniality,” he said. “A lot of people think he’s a straight-arrow, humorless guy.” Other Republicans were even less charitable. As a senior staffer in the Senate Republican leadership put it, “You know he’s nuts, right?”
But for many of Coburn’s colleagues, what is most surprising is not that he has become a thorn in the party’s side; it’s the issue with which he has made his mark. Back in 2004, when Coburn was first running for Senate, fiscal prudence wasn’t supposed to be his issue. In fact, the last thing anybody expected him to become was a voice of restraint in a body of excess. If anything, Coburn was the one known for his excesses, for making pronouncements so outrageous, so far from the mainstream, that at times he seemed like a cartoon of the fanatical right—declaring his own Senate race “the battle of good versus evil,” calling for “the death penalty for abortionists,” and suggesting that the country was under attack by a secret gay conspiracy that had “infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country.” Back in 2004, Tom Coburn was the last man anybody expected to rise above politics and try to lead us back to common sense.
But he might be the only one left who can.
*****
Coburn’s office in Washington, D.C., has the feel of a boxer’s corner, everyone huddled together in anticipation of a fight. There is a spirit of intense camaraderie inside—every time I stepped through the door, I was met with a sea of smiles and a battery of questions about my day, my weekend, my family, and my overall level of contentedness—while at the same time, there’s also an almost toxic hostility to everyone still outside the door. One afternoon a staffer returning from his first trip to the Senate chamber walked into the office, sat down, and confessed to being somewhat starstruck by the experience, adding quickly, “I mean, I hate all those guys, but it was neat being down there.” Another time, I was sitting with Coburn when his secretary stepped in to announce that a certain Republican congressman had requested a meeting. Coburn became instantly stiff.
“Tell him I’ll be happy to talk to him, but it isn’t changing,” the senator said. “It is a no. It is not going anywhere. It is no.”
“You want me to tell him you’ll call him?” the secretary asked.
“I’d be happy to call him,” Coburn snapped, “but it’s not changing.”
This kind of exchange turned out to be an almost daily occurrence for Coburn—somebody calling to butter him up and back him down from some battle, which only irritated Coburn more. The dynamic had begun almost the day he arrived in the Senate, in January 2005. While fellow newcomers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.
The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like.
Almost as soon as Coburn proposed to eliminate the bridge, Ted Stevens came tearing down to the floor of the Senate with his face red and his fists clenched, bellowing that he would not be treated with such disrespect, that the rest of the Senate would have to rise up and protect his project or he, Ted Stevens, would pack up his bags and quit the Senate and never come back. By the end of the day, eighty-two senators had voted with Stevens. Voted to spend $200 million on a bridge to nowhere, while Tom Coburn could find only fourteen members to agree that the money might be better spent somewhere else—like, say, rebuilding New Orleans.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. Not about the bridge; about the bigger thing. He wants you to know how it works in Washington, how the machine keeps itself running, and the favors get traded, and the deals get struck, and the bridges to nowhere are going up every day. He wants you to know that the United States Congress simply cannot stop itself—that both parties are in on the fix, backing each other and looking the other way, and that in the spirit of bipartisan waste, they manage to blow $500 billion more than they collect in taxes every single year. He wants you to see where that money is going: the 10,000 personal projects and earmarks that senators and congressmen are sneaking into the federal budget every year—like the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative in Michigan. And the Sparta Teapot Museum in North Carolina. And the Appalachian Fruit Laboratory in West Virginia. All paid for with your tax dollars.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. That the members of the United States Congress will spend your money just because they can. That they’ll do it even when they can’t. That every year, they borrow the extra $500 billion from China, raising their own credit limit each time they reach it and then raising it again the next year, for a total of $9 trillion in debt so far. That’s right, nine trillion dollars, a figure so enormous that even if the fifty richest people on earth—including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, along with the richest men in Saudi Arabia and Russia and Hong Kong—got together and sold everything they owned, right down to the last buttons on their last embroidered shirts, and then they donated all their money to the U.S. national debt, they still couldn’t afford to pay a single year of interest at 10 percent. That’s how much $9 trillion is, and that’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know: that in Washington, there isn’t really a party in charge, or a principle, or a leader. What’s in charge is the money. Because at the end of the day, when it comes down to a choice between borrowing $200 million from China to build a bridge to nowhere and taking a stand against government waste, four out of five politicians will blow it on the bridge.
So now there’s all this hullabaloo about the Democrats taking over—Tom Coburn is supposed to care? He’s supposed to get excited now that the peanut butter is on top and the jelly is on the bottom instead of the other way around? This is a revolution? It’s a revolution that Ted Stevens has been pushed aside as chairman of the defense-appropriations subcommittee and that in his place the Democrats have installed…Daniel Inouye of Hawaii? A man who inserted $900 million of his own personal projects into the budget last year—and who happens to be one of Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate? It’s a revolution that the Democrats have cleaned out the subcommittee behind the Bridge to Nowhere and replaced the chairman with…Patty Murray of Washington? A woman who personally led a campaign for the bridge and who threatened revenge against any Democrat who opposed it? It’s a revolution that Thad Cochran has been deposed as the most powerful budgetary overlord in the Senate and is being replaced with…Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia? A man who has single-handedly converted his state into a federally funded monument to himself, with no less than thirty projects named in his own honor, including the Robert C. Byrd Expressway and the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer and the two Robert C. Byrd federal buildings and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism—not to mention the actual statue of Robert C. Byrd that stands in the rotunda of the state capitol?
Robert C. Byrd is going to clean up the government? This is a revolution?
Coburn smiled at the suggestion. “We’ll see how the Democrats vote on the first big earmark boondoggle that comes up,” he said. “I’m gonna try to reserve judgment.”
*****
When the Senate is in session, Coburn lives in a dorm-style apartment with eight other members of Congress, including Democratic representatives Mike Doyle and Bart Stupak. Every Tuesday evening, they gather to hold prayer night, talking about the temptations and pressures of public life, but otherwise they mostly work late and socialize rarely, bumping into one another occasionally in the TV room to watch a game. This is as much of Washington’s social orbit as the 58-year-old Coburn cares to indulge, and every Thursday, as soon as he can break away from his work on Capitol Hill, he jumps in a cab to the airport, flies to Tulsa, and drives an hour south to the small town of Muskogee, where he joins his wife, Carolyn, for a few hours of sleep before waking at 5 a.m. to go to work at his medical practice.
A family-practice doctor for twenty-three years, Coburn continues to see about fifteen patients a week, and on any given Saturday, while his Senate colleagues are teeing off or jockeying for position on the weekend talk shows, Coburn can be found knee-deep in paperwork at his office or patrolling the maternity ward at his local hospital, delivering babies. For his labor, he is paid exactly nothing. Senate rules allow members to maintain almost any business they choose back home—a hardware store, an investment firm, in a few cases even recording contracts—but prohibit doctors and lawyers from continuing to practice. This has posed the single greatest challenge of Coburn’s political life, and not only for economic reasons. As a firm believer in the ideal of the citizen legislator—a member who goes to Washington for a fixed number of years and keeps his full-time job at home—Coburn has tried and failed to convince the ethics committee (some of whom, perhaps coincidentally, have clashed with him over fiscal issues) that his medical practice should be allowed. Having lost that battle, Coburn keeps his office open anyway and simply doesn’t charge his patients. By his own estimate, he loses about $40,000 a year practicing medicine for free.
To say that Coburn could live without the pressure of juggling two high-stakes jobs in two distant cities would be an understatement. He hates it, and it doesn’t take long to get the sense from him that if voters had not elected him to the Senate in 2004, he would have been a happier man. But to Coburn, that’s exactly what makes the job worth doing. “In any election,” he is fond of saying, “you should vote for the person who will give up the most if they win.”
In the era of Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project, when members of Congress are routinely flown around the globe on luxury vacations at the expense of corporate lobbyists, mugging for the cameras at every stop and then rushing to see themselves on the airplane TVs, it can be difficult to keep a straight face when the talk turns to “sacrifice” and “public service.” Yet to spend time with Coburn as he comes alive in Oklahoma, tending to his patients and his forty-acre orchard, and then to travel back to Washington with him, to see the look of defeat as he leaves his family, his medical practice, and the old Yanmar tractor that he maintains himself, it is impossible to mistake Coburn for an eager politician.
One Monday morning last fall, as he made the drive to the Tulsa airport with his suit jacket crumpled on the backseat and his briefcase overstuffed with research papers and faxes, he reflected on the privilege of being a United States senator. “Every Monday I wish I didn’t have to go back,” he said. “But you know, I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it. My dad was born in a mud hut on the plains of eastern Colorado, and he always encouraged us to work. When I was a little boy, he bought the rights to an invention that held a piece of glass onto a metal block so you could cut and grind the piece of glass into a lens for eyeglasses. When I was 5 or 6, he would have us out in the garage, putting the little centers with three points on the back of the block, pounding them in, while he would be making the blocks on the lathe. We’d build about twenty of these machines, and then Dad would go on the road and not come home until they were sold.”
Coburn reached for a bottle of Dasani water and took a sip.
“My first paying job was sorting bolts and nuts for my dad,” he continued. “He’d buy old machines, and we’d salvage the nuts and bolts off them. We’d have to sort them by size. If we could sort through a whole five-gallon bucket, we got a quarter. For a whole five-gallon bucket. After that, I learned how to turn a lathe in a mill. By the time I was 14 or 15, I could do a lot of stuff on a lathe. Then in high school, I sold clothes. Sold shoes. I’ve always worked. I saved my money and bought an old ’28 Chevy…”
Coburn trailed off, looking out the window at the plains where he’d grown up. The midday glare made the landscape white.
“I never gave any thought to politics until I was grown. None. I had my practice, I had my family, my career, and I read the paper, but my only political thoughts were that I had gotten disgusted with the Democrat who was my representative. He wanted to nationalize health care. His positions had nothing in common with our district. And I just said to Carolyn, ‘I’m going to get into this race.’ She said, ‘You’re nuts.’ I said, ‘Well, somebody’s got to try.’ And that’s how I ended up as a Republican. I’m not sure I’m as much of a Republican as I am independent-minded, but if I’ve got to pick between two parties, I’m a Republican.”
As Coburn launched his campaign for the House in 1994, nearly everyone around him watched in silence. They knew him well enough to realize that he couldn’t be talked out of something once he’d made up his mind, but to most of them—even his kids—it seemed like a fool’s errand. The incumbent, Mike Synar, was a sixteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives, well-placed in the Democratic majority, and all but certain to win reelection by a landslide. No Republican from the district had been elected since 1921, and only one had been elected to a second term.
Then there was Coburn: He had no experience at any level of government, no background in political theory or government affairs or anything remotely related to government, and as some of his closer friends pointed out, he was possessed of what you might generously call a stubborn streak, which is not exactly the material from which political success is usually hewn. To run, he would have to put his medical practice, his life, and to some extent, his family on hold for…what? Certain defeat?
But as he hit the campaign trail, something surprising began to happen—not only to Coburn but also to the district he wanted to represent.
In retrospect, the 1994 Republican Revolution can sometimes seem like a foregone conclusion, but at the time it was far from ordained: a grassroots movement that didn’t so much reach into small towns like Coburn’s as it emerged from them. Running as a Regular Guy with No Experience, Coburn tapped into a pervasive frustration with Congress, which had been plagued by a series of Democratic scandals. Painting Synar as a career politician with no roots in Oklahoma, promising to keep his own medical practice open after his election and return home every weekend for work, and making no secret of his deeply held conservative social values, Coburn changed the terms of the debate. By the time voters went to the polls in 1994, Coburn had been so successful in his campaign against Mike Synar that Synar wasn’t even on the ballot. Democrats had chosen a more conservative candidate in the Democratic primary, whom Coburn still defeated.
Entering the House in 1994, Coburn was proud to be a member of the Republican Revolution and was a true believer in its Contract with America, which called for congressional-term limits, balanced budgets, and tougher campaign-finance laws. But unlike many of his new friends in the Class of ’94, Coburn would never drift from those ideals, imposing his own term limit of six years in office, insisting on unpopular budget cuts even when his Republican colleagues begged him not to, inserting anti-abortion measures into unrelated bills, and gradually growing disillusioned with his colleagues who didn’t do the same, most notably Speaker Gingrich, who Coburn believed was learning the art of compromise too well and becoming, like a scene from Animal Farm, the very thing he had been elected to overthrow; or as Coburn said in his 2003 memoir, Breach of Trust, “like a whipped dog who still barked, yet cowered, in Clinton’s presence.”
Not long after Coburn left the House in 2000, I called him at home in Oklahoma. I had never spoken with him before but had been intrigued by his awkward place in Congress, struggling to hold on to something that had been real for him but illusory to many of his colleagues. When I tracked him down in Muskogee, the taste of Congress was still bitter on his tongue.
“The waste I saw every day was incredible,” he said. “Most of our politicians don’t have high self-esteem, so they have to have people doing things for them all the time, telling them how great they are. The system is broken, and the only way it gets fixed is by throwing the vast majority of the incumbents out. One of the greatest things I saw in six years was Arlen Specter and Tom Harkin—this just shows you how callous and brassed these guys are—introducing a bill on the floor naming institutions that already had names, naming them after themselves! I would tell you, in Arlen Specter’s case he’s done a great disservice to the nation. Also Robert Byrd—he knows exactly how to rape the U.S. Treasury and mortgage the future. It’s sad. There are two kinds of members, with two different lifestyles. There’s the guys that come home every weekend, fly in Monday or Tuesday morning for the week, and live a real life in their district the rest of the time. And then there’s the guys that live in Washington. I spent one weekend there in six years, and I don’t ever want to spend another one.”
Now, as Coburn headed back to the Tulsa airport once again, leaving behind his real life—his family, his practice, his home—for the ornate bluster of Washington, he seemed, if not depressed, annoyed.
“Believe me,” he said, “when I left the House I had no intention of running for anything again. I didn’t want to run for the Senate. And I wouldn’t have run if I didn’t think this was what I’m supposed to be doing. I had to pray on it for a long time. I prayed hard, and I just felt like I was supposed to do this.”
*****
Last Spring, I joined Coburn in Washington for a few weeks to observe the latest front in his war on pork: the emergency supplemental budget. Designed to provide assistance to crisis victims—think September 11 or Hurricane Katrina—the supplemental had entered the Senate with $92 billion of emergency funding. But as the bill passed through committee, the Senate GOP had shifted into pork-barrel overdrive, cramming an astonishing $14 billion of additional projects into the bill, including many items that had nothing to do with September 11, Katrina, or any other crisis, items that the House of Representatives had never seen or approved, items that even the president had threatened to veto unless the Senate could contain itself. But the Senate would do no such thing.
For Coburn, this presented yet another opportunity to bring his case to the public. As his colleagues went to work piling expenses and amendments onto the emergency supplemental, Coburn wrote an amendment of his own—but instead of adding expenses, Coburn’s took them away. He identified nineteen specific projects for removal and submitted a nineteen-part amendment, with each part designed to remove one earmark. Then he invoked an obscure rule that would force his colleagues to debate each of the nineteen parts separately—a strategy he dubbed “the Clay Pigeon.”
This allowed Coburn to divide and conquer. Rather than tackling all the pork at once and encouraging his opponents to lock arms in mutual defense, he was isolating each item for individual scrutiny.
“It’s okay if I lose the debate,” he said on the day of the vote. “My goal is to make members go down on the floor and defend these projects. If we can make the American public take notice of what’s going on here, the lack of good work that Congress is doing and how their money is being spent, people will become so appalled that they’ll want change. They will hold members accountable.”
Coburn had chosen his nineteen targets carefully, for maximum effect. Any one of them was enough to make the average citizen laugh out loud; taken together, in a continuous stream on the Senate floor, they promised to be obscene: One section identified a $500 million cash bonus that Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi had slipped into the emergency budget for his supporters at Northrop Grumman, a giveaway that even the Pentagon had identified as “inappropriate” and wasteful. Another section exposed a $700 million care package from Senator Thad Cochran, also of Mississippi, to help CSX relocate a railroad in…you guessed it: Mississippi. And a third section uncovered a $15 million giveaway that Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama had stuffed into the emergency bill to help his friends in the Alabama seafood industry pay for their “promotional materials.”
As all that pork made its way onto the floor, Coburn was visibly excited. “These guys want to pay Northrop Grumman $500 million?” he said, sitting forward in his office chair and rubbing his hands together. “Baloney! Northrop Grumman is a billion-billion-billion-billion-dollar company that makes billions in profit every year! The railroad, I think, is a good idea—for Mississippi. If I were the governor of Mississippi, I’d be doing that, too. I applaud them for wanting to do it. But it isn’t an emergency, number one. And it’s absolutely not something that the rest of the country ought to be paying for! So it’s not about not doing it. It’s about whether it’s our responsibility or theirs. I don’t think the American taxpayers should be paying for it. The very fact that these senators think we can do that, and that the American people will not be upset, is troubling to me.”
Coburn was clearly preparing for a showdown on the floor that afternoon, and this was turning into his debate prep. “It’s okay if I’m not popular around here,” he continued, throwing his hands wide to indicate the entire city of Washington. “It’s okay if I take hits. It’s even okay if I’m not reelected. Because losing advances the ball in the long run. It opens the debate and the conversation. We need to be honest with the American people. And we’re not. We’re terrible. We’re not even honest about the numbers. We put out figures like we had a $300 billion deficit last year when in fact we had a $520 billion deficit. We’ve been lying about it. We use the same accounting tactics as Enron. If we applied the same standards to Congress that we apply to Enron, everybody here would go to jail.”
An hour later, Coburn was on the Senate floor. “At some point, it has to stop,” he cried to a nearly empty chamber. “This is called an earmark. It is placed in a bill to benefit one specific area at the expense of everybody else. It has legitimate value for the state of Mississippi… And it will certainly be paid for through lost opportunities for our kids. What $700 million could do for everybody else [who suffered] in Katrina! If you assume an interest rate on our debt…this $700 million relocation will balloon to more than $4 billion. That is what your grandchildren will have to pay back for what we are proposing today.”
Then Coburn yielded the floor, and one by one, Senators trickled in from their offices to vote. All the old lions staggered to the front desk, holding their thumbs up or down.
But Coburn was defeated, 48–49.
Afterward, Coburn was back in his office, visibly disgusted, but many of his staff were thrilled. A year ago, they’d lost the Bridge to Nowhere by 82–15; this time they’d come within a single vote of success. “It’s an improvement,” one of Coburn’s principal aides said. “We’re getting closer.”
But the thing that nobody could understand, even in the context of politics as usual, was the fact that with the midterms looming, with the Senate hanging in the balance, the Democrats had refused to join Coburn to remove a Republican earmark. Hillary Clinton had voted against him. Teddy Kennedy had voted against him. Robert Byrd had voted against him. To waste taxpayers’ money on a frivolous project for Republican donors.
“The Democrats are amazing,” said one of Coburn’s senior staff. “If just one more of them had changed votes, we would have won, and then they could have claimed it as a victory. But they’re so in love with spending money, they’ll fall on their swords to protect a Republican earmark.”
Coburn looked tired. “Nobody wants to lose their own earmark,” he said. “You have to go back to why people are in Congress. They’re in for one of two reasons: They’re dedicated to making a difference, which means they put themselves second; or they’re here because they want to be in power, and they put themselves first. The first question they ask is ‘How do I get reelected?’ rather than ‘What do I do for the country?’ And it’s kind of like holding a pet bird. If you hold it too tight, you’ll kill it. And if you hold on to office too tight, you’ll kill our republic.”
*****
By the end of the session, most of Coburn’s efforts had taken a beating. Of the nineteen parts in his amendment, just one had passed, and Coburn’s standing among Senate Republicans, never strong, seemed to be slipping further with every battle. But Coburn was unfazed. On the last day of the 2006 session, he sat in his office with the hint of a smile around the corners of his mouth. He had just enjoyed a rare success—postponing the annual budget-approvals process into the New Year and giving Democrats control over many of the most important decisions—and his fellow Republicans were more irritated with him than ever.
For Coburn, the feeling had become familiar. Having entered the public spotlight for his social positions, far from the mainstream and widely condemned for his views on abortion and gay rights, he had long since adjusted to the outrage and indignation he aroused. If anything, his social views had bolstered him for the fiscal fight. In a world as upside down as Congress, where waste is the norm and prudence on the fringe, where a man fighting pork and fraud can be ostracized by his peers, maybe it takes someone who is comfortable with that, and has spent most of his adult life on the fringe already, to speak out in spite of the risks.
This came naturally to Coburn. “You can look at abortion, you can look at all the social issues you want,” he said, “but none of those matter if we’re not good stewards of the nation. I’m not going to be critical of the people who are pro-abortion. They have a different set of values than me. I can see their position, and I won’t demean it. I counsel lots of women—and I love them to death—who have been through abortion. I’ve done two abortions myself, to save the lives of women. When you talk about abortion, emotion gets into it. But you can understand the position of the other side. When you look at what’s happening with the American dollar, it is not as nuanced. The dollar is sliding against all major currencies in the world, because people are losing faith in our ability to repay all these loans. We’re living on borrowed financial time. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Those are the facts.”
Coburn’s face was stark.
“When you’re delivering a baby,” he said, “and the baby’s getting in trouble, and you can see the baby’s heartbeat, which is normally about 130 or 140 beats per minute, going down to fifty or sixty, and you’re standing there watching it go down, you know you’ve got about three minutes to make a decision. You can use a pair of forceps and try to pull it out, you can use a vacuum extractor, or you can leave labor and delivery, put her on the table, put her to sleep, cut a hole in her belly, and take it out with a C-section—but you’ve got to do something, and you’ve got to do it now. That baby’s life depends on what you do in those three minutes. And that’s exactly where we are in our country today. We are in those critical three minutes. If we wait to act, it’s going to be too late. We’re going to lose the baby.”
Wil S. Hylton is a GQ correspondent.
Jewish Membership in Congress at All-Time High
Jewish Membership in Congress at All-Time High
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 12, 2007
While Democrats celebrated the election of the House's first female speaker, another milestone passed more quietly: The 110th Congress includes more Jewish lawmakers than any other in history, and all but four are Democrats.
About 2 percent of Americans identify themselves as Jewish. But in Congress, the proportion of Jewish members is now four times that. Six new Jewish House members were sworn in last week, bringing the total to 30. In the Senate, the 13 Jewish members include freshmen Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), according to the National Jewish Democratic Council.
Other faith-related facts: This Congress includes its first Muslim member and, in Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), its highest-ranking Mormon ever. Catholics remain the largest single faith group in Congress, at about 30 percent -- slightly larger than their proportion of the U.S. population. Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians outnumber Jewish members, who outnumber Episcopalians.
In making its count, the NJDC, which bills itself as the national voice of Jewish Democrats, counted only those lawmakers who identify themselves as Jewish. (So even if he had won, Virginia's George Allen wouldn't have made the cut.)
"This is a recent phenomenon," said NJDC Executive Director Ira Forman. "Fifty years ago, politics was not a Jewish profession. People would say arts and entertainment, law and medicine, retail and things like scrap metals, but they would never say politics."
Forman attributes this success to the rise of issue-based politics, which has begun to supplant patronage-based party machines in boosting candidates to national office.
What's more, the new Jewish Democrats hail from states hardly seen as Jewish strongholds, including Tennessee, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. The House has one Jewish Republican, Virginia's Eric Cantor. In the Senate, Republicans Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Arlen Specter (Pa.) are Jewish.
"Jewish members used to come from Jewish districts," said L. Sandy Maisel, a professor of government and director of the Goldfarb Center at Colby College in Maine who is co-author with Forman of "Jews in American Politics." "Now they come from wherever they've caught the feelings of people on the issues of the day. . . . That's going to be a continuing trend."
The Republican Party has sunk millions into wooing the Jewish vote, but Jewish voters, traditionally Democratic, have moved ever further from the GOP in recent years. In the midterm elections, nearly 90 percent of Jewish voters voted Democratic, according to exit polls, one of the largest proportions in history.
Pollsters say the GOP failed to counter Jewish voters' opposition to Republican stands on issues such as reproductive rights, stem cell research and the Iraq war. And then there's the Republican Party platform in President Bush's home state of Texas, which has declared the United States to be a Christian nation.
Forman does not believe Jewish members will necessarily vote as a bloc. "They're not lock step," he said. "You have American Jews on both sides of many issues."
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 12, 2007
While Democrats celebrated the election of the House's first female speaker, another milestone passed more quietly: The 110th Congress includes more Jewish lawmakers than any other in history, and all but four are Democrats.
About 2 percent of Americans identify themselves as Jewish. But in Congress, the proportion of Jewish members is now four times that. Six new Jewish House members were sworn in last week, bringing the total to 30. In the Senate, the 13 Jewish members include freshmen Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), according to the National Jewish Democratic Council.
Other faith-related facts: This Congress includes its first Muslim member and, in Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), its highest-ranking Mormon ever. Catholics remain the largest single faith group in Congress, at about 30 percent -- slightly larger than their proportion of the U.S. population. Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians outnumber Jewish members, who outnumber Episcopalians.
In making its count, the NJDC, which bills itself as the national voice of Jewish Democrats, counted only those lawmakers who identify themselves as Jewish. (So even if he had won, Virginia's George Allen wouldn't have made the cut.)
"This is a recent phenomenon," said NJDC Executive Director Ira Forman. "Fifty years ago, politics was not a Jewish profession. People would say arts and entertainment, law and medicine, retail and things like scrap metals, but they would never say politics."
Forman attributes this success to the rise of issue-based politics, which has begun to supplant patronage-based party machines in boosting candidates to national office.
What's more, the new Jewish Democrats hail from states hardly seen as Jewish strongholds, including Tennessee, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. The House has one Jewish Republican, Virginia's Eric Cantor. In the Senate, Republicans Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Arlen Specter (Pa.) are Jewish.
"Jewish members used to come from Jewish districts," said L. Sandy Maisel, a professor of government and director of the Goldfarb Center at Colby College in Maine who is co-author with Forman of "Jews in American Politics." "Now they come from wherever they've caught the feelings of people on the issues of the day. . . . That's going to be a continuing trend."
The Republican Party has sunk millions into wooing the Jewish vote, but Jewish voters, traditionally Democratic, have moved ever further from the GOP in recent years. In the midterm elections, nearly 90 percent of Jewish voters voted Democratic, according to exit polls, one of the largest proportions in history.
Pollsters say the GOP failed to counter Jewish voters' opposition to Republican stands on issues such as reproductive rights, stem cell research and the Iraq war. And then there's the Republican Party platform in President Bush's home state of Texas, which has declared the United States to be a Christian nation.
Forman does not believe Jewish members will necessarily vote as a bloc. "They're not lock step," he said. "You have American Jews on both sides of many issues."
Monday, February 26, 2007
Gov. auditor says fiscal outlook is 'spiraling out of control'
Gov. auditor says fiscal outlook is 'spiraling out of control'
02/26/2007 @ 12:15 am
Filed by Michael Roston
Congress's auditor warned in a monthly update released last Friday that the latest data on America's fiscal outlook shows "a federal debt burden that ultimately spirals out of control."
The January update was based on new data supplied to the Government Accountability Office by the Congressional Budget Office, and identified spiraling national health care costs as the main culprit for the country's budgetary woes. The report also challenged a key assumption about the nation's fiscal future made by President George W. Bush in his release of the 2008 budget.
Using a pair of different simulations of government outlays, the GAO bluntly states that "the Nation's long-term fiscal future is 'at risk.'" It considers different futures in which discretionary spending grows more quickly or slowly, and in which tax cuts are renewed or allowed to expire.
The "bleak" outlook seen by the government's chief auditor results from "primarily spending on the large federal entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)." Growing expenditures on health care are expected to account for the largest share of deficit-raising spending that will present a challenge "not just to the federal budget but to American business and our society as a whole."
While there are other discretionary expenditures, like those on national defense and homeland security, GAO warns that "the growth in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on debt held by the public dwarfs the growth in all other types of spending."
But the congressional agency does not see the path forward as hopeless. Noting instead that things that are unsustainable "will not be sustained," it offers up the possibility that "the sooner appropriate actions are taken, the sooner the miracle of compounding will begin to work for the federal budget rather than against it." Waiting, however, to take serious action to repair the budgetary balance could have results that are "disruptive and destabilizing."
Still, the GAO makes the challenge sound daunting. It explains that, "closing the fiscal gap would require spending cuts or tax increases equal to 3.6 percent of the entire economy each year over the next 75 years, or a total of $26 trillion in present value terms."
Alternatively, they explain that "if we were to invest enough today to pay off these amounts over the next 75 years, the sums needed would amount to about $87,000 to $182,000 per person, or about $208,000 to $435,000 for each full-time worker."
The GAO also challenged a key message offered by the president when he rolled out his Fiscal Year 2008 budget earlier in the year.
"The projected fiscal gap is so great that it is unrealistic to expect we will grow our way out of the problem," the GAO wrote.
President Bush had said in a Feb. 6 address that "low taxes means economic vitality, which means more tax revenues. And so the fundamental question is, what do you need to do to keep the economy growing, in order to make sure the tax revenues keep coming in to the Treasury?" He answered his own question, remarking that "step one to balancing the budget is to keep taxes low. As a matter of fact, not only do I think we ought not to raise them, I think we ought to make every tax cut we passed permanent."
The GAO's full update on the fiscal outlook can be accessed at its website.
02/26/2007 @ 12:15 am
Filed by Michael Roston
Congress's auditor warned in a monthly update released last Friday that the latest data on America's fiscal outlook shows "a federal debt burden that ultimately spirals out of control."
The January update was based on new data supplied to the Government Accountability Office by the Congressional Budget Office, and identified spiraling national health care costs as the main culprit for the country's budgetary woes. The report also challenged a key assumption about the nation's fiscal future made by President George W. Bush in his release of the 2008 budget.
Using a pair of different simulations of government outlays, the GAO bluntly states that "the Nation's long-term fiscal future is 'at risk.'" It considers different futures in which discretionary spending grows more quickly or slowly, and in which tax cuts are renewed or allowed to expire.
The "bleak" outlook seen by the government's chief auditor results from "primarily spending on the large federal entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)." Growing expenditures on health care are expected to account for the largest share of deficit-raising spending that will present a challenge "not just to the federal budget but to American business and our society as a whole."
While there are other discretionary expenditures, like those on national defense and homeland security, GAO warns that "the growth in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on debt held by the public dwarfs the growth in all other types of spending."
But the congressional agency does not see the path forward as hopeless. Noting instead that things that are unsustainable "will not be sustained," it offers up the possibility that "the sooner appropriate actions are taken, the sooner the miracle of compounding will begin to work for the federal budget rather than against it." Waiting, however, to take serious action to repair the budgetary balance could have results that are "disruptive and destabilizing."
Still, the GAO makes the challenge sound daunting. It explains that, "closing the fiscal gap would require spending cuts or tax increases equal to 3.6 percent of the entire economy each year over the next 75 years, or a total of $26 trillion in present value terms."
Alternatively, they explain that "if we were to invest enough today to pay off these amounts over the next 75 years, the sums needed would amount to about $87,000 to $182,000 per person, or about $208,000 to $435,000 for each full-time worker."
The GAO also challenged a key message offered by the president when he rolled out his Fiscal Year 2008 budget earlier in the year.
"The projected fiscal gap is so great that it is unrealistic to expect we will grow our way out of the problem," the GAO wrote.
President Bush had said in a Feb. 6 address that "low taxes means economic vitality, which means more tax revenues. And so the fundamental question is, what do you need to do to keep the economy growing, in order to make sure the tax revenues keep coming in to the Treasury?" He answered his own question, remarking that "step one to balancing the budget is to keep taxes low. As a matter of fact, not only do I think we ought not to raise them, I think we ought to make every tax cut we passed permanent."
The GAO's full update on the fiscal outlook can be accessed at its website.
Dollar Falls as Reports May Show Housing Slump Slowing Economy
Dollar Falls as Reports May Show Housing Slump Slowing Economy
By Chris Young and Ron Harui
Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar traded near the lowest in almost two months against the euro on speculation reports will show a housing slump is slowing the U.S. economy.
The U.S. dollar declined against 13 of the 16 most-active currencies before reports this week that may show fourth-quarter growth was less than previously estimated, new home sales dropped and durable goods orders slipped. The difference in yield between benchmark 10-year U.S. and German debt last week narrowed to the least in almost two years.
``There's more concern about the U.S. economy,'' said Mitul Kotecha, head of global currency research in London at Calyon, the securities unit of Credit Agricole SA, France's second- biggest bank by assets. ``We're going to see renewed signs of softening in the housing market. That's negative for the dollar.''
The dollar declined to $1.3184 per euro at 7:46 a.m. in London, after reaching $1.3199, the weakest since Jan. 3, from $1.3166 late in New York on Feb. 23. It also dropped to 120.87 yen from 121.08. It may fall to $1.36 against the euro by the middle of this year, Kotecha said.
The Fed's target overnight lending rate between banks of 5.25 percent is 1.75 percentage points higher than the European Central Bank's.
The yield premium investors earn on 10-year U.S. Treasuries over similar-maturity German bunds reached 0.613 percentage point on Feb. 20, the smallest since March 2005. It was 0.637 percentage point today.
A survey sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc showed 19 of 47 central banks cut the share of dollars in reserves and 21 have increased holdings of euros. Sixty-nine percent said they were looking for more yield.
Currency Options
The Commerce Department will say tomorrow orders for U.S. durable goods fell 3 percent in January, a Bloomberg News survey showed. Reports the following day will show the economy grew 2.3 percent last quarter, from the 3.5 percent the government reported last month and sales of new homes declined 3.6 percent in January, separate surveys showed.
Losses in the U.S. currency may be limited as some traders buy to protect options that would become worthless should the dollar weaken beyond $1.3200 per euro, said Tsutomu Soma, a bond and currency dealer at Okasan Securities Co. in Tokyo.
``There's talk of buying interest between $1.3190 and $1.3200 to defend options with $1.3200 triggers,'' Soma said. ``These bids may stem the dollar's decline.'' Options give holders the right to buy or sell a currency at a set price at a fixed future date.
Heading South
The euro pared gains against the dollar after a German report showed consumer confidence in Europe's largest economy fell for a fourth month in March.
GfK AG's confidence index dropped to 4.4 from a revised 4.9, the Nuremberg-based market research company said today.
``The euro is heading south after the release of the Gfk report,'' said Noriyuki Kato, head of foreign-exchange at State Street Bank & Trust Co. in Tokyo. ``The move is accelerating, especially after the euro failed to break through $1.32 option barriers.''
Investors trimmed bets on further ECB rate increases this year, to 4 percent from 3.5 percent currently. The yield on the three-month Euribor interest-rate futures contract for December declined to 4.145 percent today from 4.175 percent on Feb. 22.
The contract settles to the three-month interbank offered rate for the euro, which has averaged about 16 basis points above the ECB's benchmark rate since 1999.
Sense of Security
The yen may fall 4 percent to 126 a dollar by the end of June because the Bank of Japan won't raise rates before the fourth quarter, said Deutsche Bank AG, the world's biggest currency trader.
Japan's currency remained higher after minutes of the Bank of Japan's January meeting showed policy makers decided against raising rates, preferring to examine more data.
The central bank voted 8-1 on Feb. 21 to increase its key overnight lending rate to 0.5 percent from 0.25 percent. Governor Toshihiko Fukui last week said the bank will keep borrowing costs ``very low'' for some time.
``There will be no additional rate increases by the BOJ at least in the coming six months,'' Koji Fukaya, senior currency strategist in Tokyo at Deutsche Bank, said in an interview today. ``Interest-rate differentials meantime will provide an environment where investors can sell yen with a sense of security.''
The New Zealand dollar rose the most against the yen today, climbing to 85.70 yen from 85.62. New Zealand business confidence climbed to a three-year high in February and imports unexpectedly gained in January, suggesting the central bank will raise interest rates from 7.25 percent next week.
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Young in Sydney at cyoung12@bloomberg.net ; Ron Harui in Singapore at rharui@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: February 26, 2007 02:48 EST
By Chris Young and Ron Harui
Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar traded near the lowest in almost two months against the euro on speculation reports will show a housing slump is slowing the U.S. economy.
The U.S. dollar declined against 13 of the 16 most-active currencies before reports this week that may show fourth-quarter growth was less than previously estimated, new home sales dropped and durable goods orders slipped. The difference in yield between benchmark 10-year U.S. and German debt last week narrowed to the least in almost two years.
``There's more concern about the U.S. economy,'' said Mitul Kotecha, head of global currency research in London at Calyon, the securities unit of Credit Agricole SA, France's second- biggest bank by assets. ``We're going to see renewed signs of softening in the housing market. That's negative for the dollar.''
The dollar declined to $1.3184 per euro at 7:46 a.m. in London, after reaching $1.3199, the weakest since Jan. 3, from $1.3166 late in New York on Feb. 23. It also dropped to 120.87 yen from 121.08. It may fall to $1.36 against the euro by the middle of this year, Kotecha said.
The Fed's target overnight lending rate between banks of 5.25 percent is 1.75 percentage points higher than the European Central Bank's.
The yield premium investors earn on 10-year U.S. Treasuries over similar-maturity German bunds reached 0.613 percentage point on Feb. 20, the smallest since March 2005. It was 0.637 percentage point today.
A survey sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc showed 19 of 47 central banks cut the share of dollars in reserves and 21 have increased holdings of euros. Sixty-nine percent said they were looking for more yield.
Currency Options
The Commerce Department will say tomorrow orders for U.S. durable goods fell 3 percent in January, a Bloomberg News survey showed. Reports the following day will show the economy grew 2.3 percent last quarter, from the 3.5 percent the government reported last month and sales of new homes declined 3.6 percent in January, separate surveys showed.
Losses in the U.S. currency may be limited as some traders buy to protect options that would become worthless should the dollar weaken beyond $1.3200 per euro, said Tsutomu Soma, a bond and currency dealer at Okasan Securities Co. in Tokyo.
``There's talk of buying interest between $1.3190 and $1.3200 to defend options with $1.3200 triggers,'' Soma said. ``These bids may stem the dollar's decline.'' Options give holders the right to buy or sell a currency at a set price at a fixed future date.
Heading South
The euro pared gains against the dollar after a German report showed consumer confidence in Europe's largest economy fell for a fourth month in March.
GfK AG's confidence index dropped to 4.4 from a revised 4.9, the Nuremberg-based market research company said today.
``The euro is heading south after the release of the Gfk report,'' said Noriyuki Kato, head of foreign-exchange at State Street Bank & Trust Co. in Tokyo. ``The move is accelerating, especially after the euro failed to break through $1.32 option barriers.''
Investors trimmed bets on further ECB rate increases this year, to 4 percent from 3.5 percent currently. The yield on the three-month Euribor interest-rate futures contract for December declined to 4.145 percent today from 4.175 percent on Feb. 22.
The contract settles to the three-month interbank offered rate for the euro, which has averaged about 16 basis points above the ECB's benchmark rate since 1999.
Sense of Security
The yen may fall 4 percent to 126 a dollar by the end of June because the Bank of Japan won't raise rates before the fourth quarter, said Deutsche Bank AG, the world's biggest currency trader.
Japan's currency remained higher after minutes of the Bank of Japan's January meeting showed policy makers decided against raising rates, preferring to examine more data.
The central bank voted 8-1 on Feb. 21 to increase its key overnight lending rate to 0.5 percent from 0.25 percent. Governor Toshihiko Fukui last week said the bank will keep borrowing costs ``very low'' for some time.
``There will be no additional rate increases by the BOJ at least in the coming six months,'' Koji Fukaya, senior currency strategist in Tokyo at Deutsche Bank, said in an interview today. ``Interest-rate differentials meantime will provide an environment where investors can sell yen with a sense of security.''
The New Zealand dollar rose the most against the yen today, climbing to 85.70 yen from 85.62. New Zealand business confidence climbed to a three-year high in February and imports unexpectedly gained in January, suggesting the central bank will raise interest rates from 7.25 percent next week.
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Young in Sydney at cyoung12@bloomberg.net ; Ron Harui in Singapore at rharui@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: February 26, 2007 02:48 EST
Body in river confirmed as Israeli official
Body in river confirmed as Israeli official
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21282880-1702,00.html
From correspondents in Paris
February 24, 2007 10:37pm
Article from: Reuters
FRENCH police have confirmed a body found in a river in northern France is that of a missing Israeli defence ministry official.
DNA tests proved the dead man found in the River Seine near Rouen on Wednesday was David Dahan, head of the Israeli Defence Ministry Mission to Europe, a police official said.
Dahan disappeared from his Paris home on Jan. 22.
Police say they are treating the incident as a possible suicide and that Dahan had suffered depression in the past.
Dahan's wife and child live in Israel.
The Israeli Defence Ministry Mission buys military equipment in Europe. The mission used to be based in central Paris but was hit by a car bomb in 1982 and is now situated in a suburb.
Excuse me, but how likely is it that anyone suffering from depression would ever be allowed to hold such a post? This stinks. This is bullshit.
In Paris, France, Defense Ministry emissary to the European Union David Dahan went missing from his home Saturday. He lived at the residence alone while his wife and child remained in Israel.
Dahan’s official job is to purchase military equipment from Europe for the IDF. The mission used to be located in central Paris, but was moved to a suburb after it was targeted with a car bomb in 1982.
French police have been leaking details of the case to the press, including the existence of a possible suicide note at the residence and speculation that he had been depressed.
Dahan’s car was found parked near the Seine River in the town of Rouen Wednesday. Police say no signs of violence could be found in the vehicle.
Divers have been dispatched to search the river.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21282880-1702,00.html
From correspondents in Paris
February 24, 2007 10:37pm
Article from: Reuters
FRENCH police have confirmed a body found in a river in northern France is that of a missing Israeli defence ministry official.
DNA tests proved the dead man found in the River Seine near Rouen on Wednesday was David Dahan, head of the Israeli Defence Ministry Mission to Europe, a police official said.
Dahan disappeared from his Paris home on Jan. 22.
Police say they are treating the incident as a possible suicide and that Dahan had suffered depression in the past.
Dahan's wife and child live in Israel.
The Israeli Defence Ministry Mission buys military equipment in Europe. The mission used to be based in central Paris but was hit by a car bomb in 1982 and is now situated in a suburb.
Excuse me, but how likely is it that anyone suffering from depression would ever be allowed to hold such a post? This stinks. This is bullshit.
In Paris, France, Defense Ministry emissary to the European Union David Dahan went missing from his home Saturday. He lived at the residence alone while his wife and child remained in Israel.
Dahan’s official job is to purchase military equipment from Europe for the IDF. The mission used to be located in central Paris, but was moved to a suburb after it was targeted with a car bomb in 1982.
French police have been leaking details of the case to the press, including the existence of a possible suicide note at the residence and speculation that he had been depressed.
Dahan’s car was found parked near the Seine River in the town of Rouen Wednesday. Police say no signs of violence could be found in the vehicle.
Divers have been dispatched to search the river.
New England Town Prints Up Its Own Currency
New England Town Prints Up Its Own Currency
'Berkshares' Are Intended to Encourage Local Commerce
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Business/story?id=2903049&page=1
By STEPHANIE SY
SOUTHERN BERKSHIRE, Mass., Feb. 25, 2007 — - Susan Witt is an unassuming middle-aged woman who drives a Volvo around her quaint Rockwell-esque town and has somehow managed to foment a small revolution.
After years of planning, Witt started printing her own money and spending it around town.
She is not a counterfeiter. She is the founder of Berkshares, a local currency that was introduced last fall in Southern Berkshire, Mass. (where Normal Rockwell lived out his later years).
"The Berkshares are pretty simple to operate," she said. "You walk into a local bank, put down $90 federal and get 100 Berkshares, and then those Berkshares are spent at full value at regional stores."
$835,000-worth of notes were printed on fine-grain paper and distributed to banks that agreed to participate. The notes are now accepted at 225 businesses in the area, and the program continues to grow.
Berkshares were created to stimulate the local economy by giving people incentive to shop in their own neighborhood, rather than drive the distance to large chain stores.
"We want to encourage everybody to do their business locally rather than going to a mall or shopping online," said Sharon Palma, executive director of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce. "Using Berkshares, you have to do business locally, and the other really nice piece of that is it's face-to-face business."
Several communities across the U.S., Canada and Europe have developed similar programs, but only Berkshares are fully-backed by the U.S. dollar. Several banks in Southern Berkshire have agreed to exchange Berkshares for dollars.
Ursula Cliff was spotted using Berkshares at Guido's grocery store, a 27-year-old family business in the town of Great Barrington.
"I don't think that whether or not a merchant accepts Berkshares really affects my decision if it's something I really want to buy," she said. "On the other hand, almost everywhere I go the stores use Berkshares, and I do certainly have a warmer feeling for them when they do that."
It is that warm, fuzzy feeling that makes a regional currency scheme operable.
Witt, who spent years dreaming up a local currency project, said it "takes a local population that understands and is committed to supporting the buildup of their own regional economies."
That is certainly the case in this picture-perfect town with its Main Street lined with mom-and-pop shops. It's the type of community where people seek out locally-produced food, and where buying into a program such as Berkshares is, in itself, a sort of social currency.
Some business owners have reported an increase in foot traffic and customer loyalty. Because the Berkshares users get a 10 percent discount at the point of exchange, merchants say customers have incentive to use them.
Steve Carlotta, the owner of Snap Shop, a photo store said, "We find that there are some people doing business with us at this point who are very, very loyal customers because we accept Berkshares … without any restrictions."
But the system is far from perfect. The discount may be difficult for businesses that have thin profit margins, such as Guido's, to absorb in the long term.
Witt said the Berkshares board will re-evaluate the program down the line and make necessary adjustments.
The individuals behind Berkshares have even higher hopes for the project. The next step is developing Berkshares into an electronic debit-card system, to replace or supplement the cash notes.
In the long-term, the non-profit Berkshares, Inc., would like the capability to offer loans in Berkshares to start-up businesses, thereby promoting small-scale manufacturing that has been lost to the global economy.
"We think that by strengthening the piece of the fabric of this country, this world, that you're strengthening the whole," said Asa Hardcastle, the young software engineer who heads Berkshares, Inc. "We definitely hope that this grows and this becomes something that flourishes across the country and the world."
Similar programs are in place in a handful of other American towns -- the most successful program being in Ithaca, N.Y., where 900 businesses accept "Ithaca Hours."
The Berkshares program caught the eye of Sam Anderson, a community activist and black history professor in Brooklyn, N.Y. He thinks an alternative currency could be a tool for reviving black and Hispanic businesses, which he said have been "locked out of capitalistic development."
Anderson suggested that a "Blackshares" experiment could start in a community such as Harlem or East Los Angeles, and eventually have a wider inter-state reach.
"In the slavery period, you had this economic relationship developing," Anderson said. "It was more bartering between enslaved Africans, between plantations. … That tradition was carried on in the Reconstruction period, and during that period you had the most powerful economic development in the black community coordinated in the South."
Anderson said the introduction of Jim Crow laws set black businesses back so far, they've never adequately recovered to compete with mainstream white businesses.
"By the time [of the Civil Rights movement], the economic development between white development and black development was so disparate … that by the 1960s, when black business folk were trying to do something, there was already a monopolistic structure in place," he said.
Anderson explained that while a racially-based currency might appear to discriminate or isolate, "if you want to support black economic development, no matter what race you're from, you'd get Blackshares."
Like Berkshares, the idea behind the still-theoretical Blackshares is to challenge the current tide of globalization. It is, at its heart, a way for the disenfranchised communities who have missed out on the fruits of global capitalism to have their piece of the pie.
Regional currencies can also be seen as part of a larger environmental movement. In many cases, local production and consumption makes more sense in terms of energy efficiency and with warnings about global warming and dependence on foreign oil ubiquitous these days, the argument for "local living" is especially relevant.
"By making sure we have a vibrant local economy with local production, then we are creating a more sustainable future for our region," said Witt. "If other regions do the same, then we are creating networks of more sustainable regional economies that certainly want to trade with each other outside, but have within them the resources to support their own economies in the future."
It's a big vision for such a modest person, but Witt is not too far off. The chambers of commerce of three neighboring towns recently contacted Witt to see how they can bring Berkshares to their communities.
Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures
'Berkshares' Are Intended to Encourage Local Commerce
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Business/story?id=2903049&page=1
By STEPHANIE SY
SOUTHERN BERKSHIRE, Mass., Feb. 25, 2007 — - Susan Witt is an unassuming middle-aged woman who drives a Volvo around her quaint Rockwell-esque town and has somehow managed to foment a small revolution.
After years of planning, Witt started printing her own money and spending it around town.
She is not a counterfeiter. She is the founder of Berkshares, a local currency that was introduced last fall in Southern Berkshire, Mass. (where Normal Rockwell lived out his later years).
"The Berkshares are pretty simple to operate," she said. "You walk into a local bank, put down $90 federal and get 100 Berkshares, and then those Berkshares are spent at full value at regional stores."
$835,000-worth of notes were printed on fine-grain paper and distributed to banks that agreed to participate. The notes are now accepted at 225 businesses in the area, and the program continues to grow.
Berkshares were created to stimulate the local economy by giving people incentive to shop in their own neighborhood, rather than drive the distance to large chain stores.
"We want to encourage everybody to do their business locally rather than going to a mall or shopping online," said Sharon Palma, executive director of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce. "Using Berkshares, you have to do business locally, and the other really nice piece of that is it's face-to-face business."
Several communities across the U.S., Canada and Europe have developed similar programs, but only Berkshares are fully-backed by the U.S. dollar. Several banks in Southern Berkshire have agreed to exchange Berkshares for dollars.
Ursula Cliff was spotted using Berkshares at Guido's grocery store, a 27-year-old family business in the town of Great Barrington.
"I don't think that whether or not a merchant accepts Berkshares really affects my decision if it's something I really want to buy," she said. "On the other hand, almost everywhere I go the stores use Berkshares, and I do certainly have a warmer feeling for them when they do that."
It is that warm, fuzzy feeling that makes a regional currency scheme operable.
Witt, who spent years dreaming up a local currency project, said it "takes a local population that understands and is committed to supporting the buildup of their own regional economies."
That is certainly the case in this picture-perfect town with its Main Street lined with mom-and-pop shops. It's the type of community where people seek out locally-produced food, and where buying into a program such as Berkshares is, in itself, a sort of social currency.
Some business owners have reported an increase in foot traffic and customer loyalty. Because the Berkshares users get a 10 percent discount at the point of exchange, merchants say customers have incentive to use them.
Steve Carlotta, the owner of Snap Shop, a photo store said, "We find that there are some people doing business with us at this point who are very, very loyal customers because we accept Berkshares … without any restrictions."
But the system is far from perfect. The discount may be difficult for businesses that have thin profit margins, such as Guido's, to absorb in the long term.
Witt said the Berkshares board will re-evaluate the program down the line and make necessary adjustments.
The individuals behind Berkshares have even higher hopes for the project. The next step is developing Berkshares into an electronic debit-card system, to replace or supplement the cash notes.
In the long-term, the non-profit Berkshares, Inc., would like the capability to offer loans in Berkshares to start-up businesses, thereby promoting small-scale manufacturing that has been lost to the global economy.
"We think that by strengthening the piece of the fabric of this country, this world, that you're strengthening the whole," said Asa Hardcastle, the young software engineer who heads Berkshares, Inc. "We definitely hope that this grows and this becomes something that flourishes across the country and the world."
Similar programs are in place in a handful of other American towns -- the most successful program being in Ithaca, N.Y., where 900 businesses accept "Ithaca Hours."
The Berkshares program caught the eye of Sam Anderson, a community activist and black history professor in Brooklyn, N.Y. He thinks an alternative currency could be a tool for reviving black and Hispanic businesses, which he said have been "locked out of capitalistic development."
Anderson suggested that a "Blackshares" experiment could start in a community such as Harlem or East Los Angeles, and eventually have a wider inter-state reach.
"In the slavery period, you had this economic relationship developing," Anderson said. "It was more bartering between enslaved Africans, between plantations. … That tradition was carried on in the Reconstruction period, and during that period you had the most powerful economic development in the black community coordinated in the South."
Anderson said the introduction of Jim Crow laws set black businesses back so far, they've never adequately recovered to compete with mainstream white businesses.
"By the time [of the Civil Rights movement], the economic development between white development and black development was so disparate … that by the 1960s, when black business folk were trying to do something, there was already a monopolistic structure in place," he said.
Anderson explained that while a racially-based currency might appear to discriminate or isolate, "if you want to support black economic development, no matter what race you're from, you'd get Blackshares."
Like Berkshares, the idea behind the still-theoretical Blackshares is to challenge the current tide of globalization. It is, at its heart, a way for the disenfranchised communities who have missed out on the fruits of global capitalism to have their piece of the pie.
Regional currencies can also be seen as part of a larger environmental movement. In many cases, local production and consumption makes more sense in terms of energy efficiency and with warnings about global warming and dependence on foreign oil ubiquitous these days, the argument for "local living" is especially relevant.
"By making sure we have a vibrant local economy with local production, then we are creating a more sustainable future for our region," said Witt. "If other regions do the same, then we are creating networks of more sustainable regional economies that certainly want to trade with each other outside, but have within them the resources to support their own economies in the future."
It's a big vision for such a modest person, but Witt is not too far off. The chambers of commerce of three neighboring towns recently contacted Witt to see how they can bring Berkshares to their communities.
Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Bush Administration Moves to Sell National Forest Land
Sequoia National Park, Sierra Nevadas, California
Isolated groves of giant sequoias grow on the foggy moist western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These trees are the world's largest and nearly oldest living things. The General Sherman tree is 272 feet high and measures 27 feet in diameter at the base. It is estimated to be 3,500 years old.
Bush Administration Moves to Sell National Forest Land
by Seth Borenstein
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration will unveil a proposal Friday to sell up to 200,000 acres of national forest land in "isolated parcels" ranging from a quarter of an acre to 200 acres, much of it in California.
The sale is part of a National Forest Service plan to raise $800 million over the next five years to pay for rural schools in 41 states, offsetting shrinking revenues from sale of timber from national forests. The Bureau of Land Management also plans to sell federal lands to raise an estimated $182 million over five years.
Environmentalists charge that the short-term gain would be more than offset by the loss of public land. Congress would have to approve the land sales, but it has rejected similar recent proposals.
"I am outraged, and I don't think the public is going to stand for it for one minute," said Wilderness Society policy analyst Mike Anderson. "It's a scheme to raise money at the expense of the national forests, the wildlife, recreation and all the other values that Americans hold dear. It's the ultimate threat to the national forest."
Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the proposed land sales make sense.
"Private property will end up in the possession of those who value it the most," Taylor said. "That is an iron law of economics."
Details about what plots of land would be put up for sale are expected to be revealed at a noon press conference by Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist. The Forest Service owns 193 million acres of land and plans to sell about 175,000 to 200,000 acres, according to Forest Service spokeswoman Heidi Valetkevitch.
"They could be theoretically from every national forest," Valetkevitch said. "California has a lot on the list, I understand."
The lands in question aren't environmentally sensitive wilderness or protected scenic areas, Valetkevitch said. "It could be something that's in a neighborhood that people don't even know is forest land," she said.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., attacked the plan as "crazy," saying: "Here the administration wants to pass more tax cuts for the rich, and to pay the bill, they want to sell off public land - our nation's natural heritage."
The Forest Service owns 20 percent of California, including much of the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, Big Sur and dense forests along the Oregon border. The Bureau of Land Management owns 15 percent of the Golden State.
Rural schools get 25 percent of federal forest timber sale proceeds, but those revenues have fallen, so the idea is to sell forest land to make up for that, Valetkevitch said.
Anderson of the Wilderness Society argued that money for rural schools could come from many sources and that the land sales are being proposed "so the budget deficit doesn't get worse." He noted that if forests are sold, future federal timber sales likely would yield even less money for rural schools.
The president's new fiscal 2007 federal budget calls for the bureau to raise $1 million in 2007 land sales, $28 million in 2008, $40 million in 2009, $42 million in 2010 and $71 million in 2011.
Dave Alberswerth, a Wilderness Society senior policy adviser, said that would be "way more than they have been selling in recent years." From 2000 to 2004, the bureau sold 13,160 acres for an average price of $320 an acre, he said. At that rate, the government would have to sell more than half a million acres to garner $182 million.
© 2006 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources
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