PRETENSIONS TO EMPIRE

Reviewed 12/21/2007

Pretensions to Empire, by Lewis Lapham

PRETENSIONS TO EMPIRE: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration Lewis Lapham New York: The New Press, 2006				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-1-59558-112-9
ISBN-10 1-59558-112-X	288pp.	HC	$24.95

Impeach Bush and Cheney?

President Bush's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low (28% in April 2008); no other administration has had a worse rating. Of course, presidents can be unpopular without committing "high crimes and misdemeanors." But there is a good case for bringing Bush up on charges. A grass-roots movement for impeachment has arisen as a result. One site registers over a million votes in favor.

More importantly, there's been much discussion of this matter in the House, which must assemble Articles of Impeachment and present them to the Senate. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced a resolution to impeach Cheney and is said to be working on a new version, of 300 pages. However, House Speaker Pelosi has taken impeachment "off the table."

There has also been action on the state and local levels. A handful of states, including New Hampshire, Vermont, New Mexico, Missouri, Washington, California, Illinois and Minnesota, have introduced impeachment resolutions. Residents of Brattleboro and Marlboro, both in Vermont, voted to have Bush and Cheney arrested and indicted if they set foot in either town. A long-shot U.S. Senate candidate, Laurie Dobson, is pushing a similar initiative in her hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine.

The administration's actions motivating those calling for impeachment of President Bush (and, moreso, of Vice President Cheney) can be divided into ten categories:

Unwisely abrogating international agreements
Politicizing the Justice Department
Imposing unwarranted secrecy about administration business
Pursuing an unnecessary war in Iraq
Making a fraudulent case for that war
Mismanaging the war's aftermath
Spending irresponsibly (in large part for the war)
Subverting government science
Trashing environmental regulations
Ignoring the Constitution at whim

These actions have had additional detrimental effects: diminishing America's reputation abroad; complicating relations with allies; increasing the numbers of radical Islamists. These detriments are harder to quantify, and are in some cases arguable. And although it's impossible to prove, there is good reason to believe that the administration cheated in some elections, or at least condoned such cheating.

A host of specifications underlies these charges. I can only list a few of them here. A prime example is disclosing the covert status of a CIA operative. Related to that is the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, an abuse that can be laid on Dick Cheney's doorstep. The subversion of science was widespread and persistent; it can be seen in the way ideologues and industry lobbyists were brought in to stack advisory panels, or to water down scientific reports. Fiscal irresponsibility includes lowballing the cost of the war in advance, and firing those who made more realistic estimates; but it also includes misrepresenting the budgetary impact of the prescription drug benefit. Noteworthy aspects of mismanaging the occupation are the provision of too few troops, which led to the looting and burning of many ministry buildings in Baghdad as well as theft of everything from cultural treasures to firearms and munitions to radioactive waste drums. The occupation authority also blundered by shutting down the Iraqi army, throwing thousands of young men out of work. With too much time on their hands, and too many weapons in them, those young men turned to factional strife.

Rolling back environmental protections was also widespread, but nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in the administration's stonewalling, not only of measures to forestall global warming, but even in denial of the very existence of the phenomenon that scientists worldwide had been documenting for decades. This denial was aided and abetted by conservative "think tanks", financed by major energy corporations.

As for international agreements, Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty under review. As well, he had the Justice Department go to great lengths in concocting a dubious rationale for ducking the Geneva Conventions. His motivation was the quest to obtain information from terrorists. This same motivation led him to ignore the laws of this country, conducting warrantless wiretaps despite the grace period allowed by the FISA Court.

As I noted, Lapham devotes his last chapter to making the case for impeaching President Bush. Below I present some findings from Lapham's book on voting irregularities, the Medicare Drug Benefit, and resources available to conservative think tanks and foundations. I also present his observations on and the Bush administration version of science and the quality of its moral values.

Voting Irregularities

Pages 161-162

A Precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, possessed of only 638 voters awarded 4,258 votes to Bush.
In forty-seven of the sixty-seven counties in Florida, Bush received more votes than there were registered Republicans.
Of the 120,200,000 votes cast on Election Day roughly a third were processed by electronic voting machines supplied not by government but by private corporations, at least one of them (Diebold) controlled by a zealous partisan of the Republican Party who made no secret of his wish to bring victory home for the holidays. The software programs enjoyed the protection given to commercial trade secrets.
In three states that relied extensively on paper ballots (Illinois, Maine, Wisconsin) the exit polls corresponded to the final tally. In six states that relied extensively on electronic touchscreens (North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio) the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final tally invariably favored Bush.
In ten of the eleven swing states the final result differed from the predicted result, and in each instance the shift added votes for Bush.
Voters in six states, most particularly those in three Florida counties (Broward, Dade and Palm Beach) reported touching the screen for Kerry and seeing their ballots marked for Bush.
The electronic machines in Broward County began counting absentee ballots backward once they had recorded 32,0001 votes; as more people voted, the official vote count went down.
Exit polls in states equipped with verifiable paper receipts corresponded to the final tally; in states employing electronic touch screens the margin of difference between exit polls and the final tallies was as high as 5, 7, and 9 percent.2

The Medicare Drug Benefit

The principal author of the legislation, Thomas A. Scully, set about the task of writing it in June of last year [2003], while he was employed as the federal administrator of Medicare. At the same time he expressed the wish to enter the private sector, putting his services up for auction to five high-priced Washington influence brokers representing the insurance companies, the drug manufacturers, and the health-maintenance organizations. Eight days after the happiness in Constitution Hall, Scully resigned his government post to await bids for his tour guide's knowledge of the small print that allots as little money as possible to individual citizens and as much money as possible to the vested commercial interests.

Although the government must provide drugs to 40 million people, it may not negotiate a bulk discount; it must pay whatever price the manufacturer sets or asks—prices that in the recent past have been rising at a rate of 12 percent a year. The legislation forbids the importing of less expensive drugs from Canada, prohibits beneficiaries from buying supplemental insurance for drugs unacknowledged by Medicare, reduces or eliminates payments to as many as 6 million people for whom Medicaid now defrays at least some of their prescription costs, declares a suspension of payment at precisely the point when most people might need the most help. An annual premium of $420 covers 75 percent of drug expenditures up to $2,250; from that point upward the beneficiary must pay, with his or her own money, 100 percent of the next $3,600 in costs; once the expenditures reach a total of $5,850, the government pays 95 percent of the subsequent bill. The actuarial tables assume that relatively few people can afford (or will live long enough) to pay the toll on the bridge across the river of public money flowing out of Washington into the privately owned catch basins of the medical-industrial complex. As a further means of implementing the shift of the nation's health-care burden from the public to the private sector, the legislation offers various inducements to the life-enhancing profit motive:

A $12 billion slush fund from which, over the next ten years, the secretary of health and human services may pay out bribes to HMOs otherwise reluctant to accept patients whose illnesses cannot be prepped for a quick and certain gain.
A windfall of $70 billion, also to be provided over the next ten years, to those corporations willing to continue prescription-drug coverage for their retired employees, the money to be paid in the form of both tax deductions and tax-free subsidies.
The guarantee of "maximum flexibility" to the private entities seeking to recruit customers from the general population now served by Medicare. The private entity may exercise the right to "cherry pick"—i.e., to offer its services only to those individuals not likely to require expensive treatment. The government must provide for everybody else, for the hopelessly enfeebled and the terminally indigent.
The legislation's reliance on the drug companies and the private insurers to curtail spending and control costs. The provision serves a dual purpose. It assures the eventual destruction of the entire Medicare apparatus, and it relieves the government of any responsibility for what will be reported as an act of God. Even the dimmest of Republican congressmen knows that the government doesn't have the $400 billion that the drug-prescription benefit presumably will cost over the next ten years—doesn't have the cash on hand or anywhere in anybody's budget projection. The money must be borrowed, at rates of interest yet to be determined. In the meantime, while waiting on possibly unhappy financial events (wars, revenue shortfalls, stock-market downturns, sustained recession, etc.) the government retains no control of the fees charged by the health plans or the prices that the pharmaceutical companies demand for drugs. Let Mother Nature take her course, and the expenditure estimated at $400 billion could easily become an invoice presented for $1 trillion.3

– Pages 79-80

Conservative Resources

Conservative Foundations (2001 assets)
Table from page 4, based on research by Rob Stein. Values in millions, rounded to nearest whole number.
The Bradley Foundation	584
Smith Richardson Foundation	494
Scaife Family (four foundations)	478
Earhart Foundation	84
John M. Olin Foundation	71
Koch Family (Three Foundations)	68
Castle Rock (Coors) Foundation	50
JM Foundation	25
Philip M. McKenna Foundation	17

National "Think Tanks" (2001 budgets)
Table from page 11, based on research by Rob Stein. Values in millions.
The Heritage Foundation	33.0
American Enterprise Institute	25.0
Hoover Institution	25.0
Cato Institute	17.6
Hudson Institute	7.8
Manhattan Institute	7.2
Citizens for a Sound Economy	5.4
Reason Foundation	4.9
National Center for Policy Analysis	4.7
Competitive Enterprise Institute	3.2
Free Congress Foundation	2.7
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis	2.5

Bush-league Science

The American democracy depends for its existence on the force of reason and the uses of experiment, and if I read correctly the report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the signatories find fault with the Republican college of augurs in Washington not for a single error (or even a multiple choice of errors) but for its rejection of the scientific method in favor of the conviction that if the science doesn't prove what it's been told to prove, then the science has been tampered with by Satan or the Democratic Party.

– Page 105

Moral Values

I don't doubt that the country is as rich in moral values as it is in apple trees, but I'm never sure that I know what the phrase means, or how it has come to be associated with the Republican Party, the Santa Fe Trail, or the war in Iraq. How is it moral for the President of the United States to ask a young American soldier to do him the service of dying in Fallujah in order that he might secure for himself a second term in the White House? Why is it moral to deny medical care to 40 million people who can't pay the loan-shark prices demanded by the insurance companies but to allow 12 million American families to go hungry in the winter? What is moral about an administration that never goes before a microphone to which it doesn't tell a lie?

– Page 159

Most commentators agree there is a strong legal case for impeachment. This view is bolstered by the amount of serious discussion it has received in the House. Three years of polling and the growth of grassroots organizations calling for impeachment show there is strong support for it. However, as ACLU President Nadine Strossman and liberal columnist Michael Tomasky have said, impeachment is a bad idea. Tomasky stresses the difficulty of getting a two-thirds majority in the Senate and the likely political repercussions against the Democrats, while Strossman points out that Congress is complicit in many matters, such as the vote to approve Bush's use of force in Iraq. Also, the Bush administration controls most of the evidence, and has apparently destroyed some already: e-mail records relating to the firings of U.S. attorneys and videotapes of terrorist interrogations. For this reason, and because it would be incredibly divisive during wartime, the Democratic Congress has chosen not to push for a trial. As much as I relish the thought of seeing the administration brought up short, I have to agree.

Reference

Anyone wanting the full story on efforts to impeach Bush and Cheney can, with diligence, find it through this excellent (if long) Wikipedia article and the links it provides: Movement to impeach George W. Bush

1 Knowing binary circuits, I think Lapham means 32,767 votes. And this could be buffer overflow due to an innocent programming error; but if so, it's an error unforgivable in a high-school student project, much less a corporation producing mission-critical equipment.

2 This sounds like a restating of item four. It's vague: what does "corresponded to" mean in this context? And it's confusing; why not give just the highest variance, instead of all three?

3 In early February 2005, as the Washington Post reported, the White House revealed that the Medicare drug benefit will cost $1.2 trillion in the coming decade. See Estimate Dwarfs Bush's Original Price Tag