Duty to Warn

Many writers mourning the death of our 40th president fail to mention that Ronald Reagan's administration brought on a poverty and despair that inflicted an entire generation of minorities and changed the sound and reality of ghetto life from a pursuit of the dream deferred into a descent into the American nightmare. The children of that era are many of the progenitors and purveyors of modern hip-hop, and Reagan's presidency single-handedly changed that music. Ronald Reagan is hip-hop's first president, and while America mourns, rappers are still rapping about the rusted legacy he left behind.

Federal energy regulators have just released more than 400 pages of documents that suggest former Enron chairman Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling were aware that Enron's west coast traders may have broken the law by using manipulative trading tactics in California to boost Enron’s profits during the height of that state's power crisis.

Moreover, one of Enron's most powerful Washington, D.C. lobbyists, who met with several members of the Bush administration in the spring of 2001 about Enron's opposition to price controls on electricity sales in California, was told by Tim Belden, the mastermind behind Enron's notorious trading scams, less than a year earlier that Belden and other traders working at the company's West Coast trading desk in Portland, Ore., spent the better part of 2000 and 2001 breaking the rules governing California's power market "when opportunities presented themselves to make money.”

If journalism is history's first draft, the death of Ronald Reagan has caused a step-up in the mass production of falsified history.

It's mourning in America.

The main technique is omission. People who suffered from the Reagan presidency have no media standing today. It's not cool to mention victims of his policies in, for example, Central America.

President Reagan lauded and subsidized the contra guerrillas -- extolling them as "freedom fighters" while they terrorized the population in Nicaragua, killing thousands of civilians. And he proudly funneled large-scale support to governments aligned with death squads murdering thousands more in Guatemala and El Salvador.

 AUSTIN, Texas -- When, in future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States -- a.k.a. "the nation's top law enforcement officer" -- refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department's memos concerning torture.

        In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown -- forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing.

AUSTIN, Texas -- As Lily Tomlin observed, "No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up." But as Con Ed used to say, dig we must. Courtesy of David Sirota at the americanprogress.org website, we find the following matches between word and deed:

        Just before Memorial Day, Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi said, "Our active military respond better to Republicans" because of "the tremendous support that President Bush has provided for our military and our veterans." The same day, the White House announced plans for massive cuts in veterans' health care for 2006.

        Last January, Bush praised veterans during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The same day, 164,000 veterans were told the White House was "immediately cutting off their access to the VA health care system."

        My favorite in this category was the short-lived plan to charge soldiers wounded in Iraq for their meals when they got to American military hospitals. The plan mercifully died a-borning after it hit the newspapers.

Ashraf Al-Jailani is a Yemeni-born permanent legal resident of the United States. Al-Jailani married Michele Swensen, an American, in February 1996. They have three children, now ages 3 (Sami, who will be 4 on June 17), 5 (Layla,), and 7 (Amina). On October 23, 2002, Al-Jailani was arrested at his job, the Akron-based GOJO Industries' Cuyahoga Falls "soap-manufacturing plant where he'd worked as a quality-control chemist for more than two years" (Tiffani Helberg/Ohio News Network, "Wife Still Fights for Muslim Man's Justice," Columbus Dispatch, February 25, 2004, p. C5), on the pretext that "the appeal of a deportation order stemming from a domestic violence incident almost three years earlier had been denied," using the 1996 Immigration Act, even though "al-Jailani had been pardoned by Ohio Gov. Robert Taft in 2001 (Lauri Lebo, "Yemeni Man Still in York Jail; For Second Time, Judge Orders Man Out on Bail; Appeal Pending," York Dispatch, December 10, 2003). Five minutes later, six FBI agents showed up at Al-Jailani and Swensen's house to search it, saying that they found Al-Jailani's business card in the wallet of a suspected Al-Qaeda money launderer.

AUSTIN, Texas -- CBS News has acquired tapes of Enron employees boasting about how they were "f-----g over" California during the late, great "energy crisis" there.

        My favorite segment in these charming conversations is the dismay at Enron when local utilities try to get the money back. "They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" inquires an Enronite. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

        "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man."

        "Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a-- for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

        Grandma Millie. The nerve of her. Imagine thinking it's wrong to rig a market and overcharge by billions of dollars. But hey, no worries at Enron, because George W. Bush is about to be elected president. "It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay secretary of energy."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Here's a special story about a big payday. Richard Strong, formerly of Strong Capital Management Co., will receive 85 percent of a sum estimated to be between $400 million and $700 million dollars. That's a lot of lettuce.         

For those of you who don't follow the business pages, last week Strong sold his company to Wells Fargo at this fire-sale bargain rate, leaving poor Richard with only several hundred million. Alas, the company was down in value from an estimated $1.5 billion just a few months ago on account of the recent unpleasantness over Strong's habit of making "market timing" trades, the root of the current scandal over mutual funds.         

If Mark Twain were living now instead of a century ago -- when he declared himself "an anti-imperialist" and proclaimed that "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land" -- the famous writer's views would exist well outside the frame of today's mainstream news media.

      In the current era, it's rare for much ink or air time to challenge the right of the U.S. government to directly intervene in other countries. Instead, the featured arguments are about whether -- or how -- it is wise to do so in a particular instance.

      It's not just a matter of American boots on the ground and bombs from the sky. Much more common than the range of overt violence from U.S. military actions is the process of deepening poverty from economic intervention. Outside the media glare, Washington's routine policies involve pulling financial levers to penalize nations that have leaders who displease the world's only superpower.

      In Haiti, abominable poverty worsened during the first years of the 21st century while Uncle Sam blocked desperately needed assistance.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Too bad for anyone who tuned in to President Bush's speech Monday night hoping to hear something that would cheer us up -- like a plan. That was as depressing as divorce. There he was, still peddling the phony idea that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11 -- I guess that one will never get too old or too disproved.

            In case you think no one in public life is capable of intelligent thought about Iraq, I recommend a speech made by Gen. Anthony Zinni (well, OK, so he's slightly retired) May 12 to the Center for Defense Information. In it, Zinni lists the 10 mistakes he believes were responsible for getting us into this fine mess.

            My own modest contribution to this task began the day we announced we would be using Saddam's main palace as our headquarters in Iraq. "No, no, no," I moaned. "We're Americans. We don't do palaces." We should have announced that all Saddam's palaces would be converted into universities.