ANOTHER MEMO, ANOTHER ROUND OF CHIRPING CRICKETS...

Here's another story the "media" won't dig into because the principals in the event are not believed to have soiled any blue dresses -- but this one's a bit peculiar. From the Guardian, "Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo":

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.
A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 -- nearly two months before the invasion -- reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme... (#)

Nothing new there. What's peculiar is what this memo alleges. Among other items, it says

-- Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors." Mr Bush added, "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]..."

Okay, hold it...

Now Bush has already said that if he knew in early 2003 what he knows now, he would still have invaded Iraq. I believe him. He's the sort of guy who'll wiretap your phone to get information he can use to obtain court permission for wiretapping your phone. I wouldn't put impersonating the United Nations in order to win their support past him, either. Stupid is, after all, as stupid does.

But did he really say that to Tony Blair? In my head, I can hear him saying those words. Did he say them?

There's more than plenty of other evidence that the Bush administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq, and no amount of White House spin or "media" silence on the matter will ever restore Bush's buckshot-riddled credibility. I bring this up for one reason: What if the memo is wrong?

Think about this. Bush authorizes American U2s with UN colors to fly over Iraqi air space. Saddam Hussein finds out about it and orders the planes shot down (assuming he has the missiles Bush & Co. say he has). Whatever happens next, the incident makes the news -- "Saddam Fires at UN Reconnaissance Planes." The first entity to start asking questions will most likely be the UN. And when its people find out that none of their planes were over Iraq when the missiles were launched, given the Bush administration's months-long and quite public obsession with overthrowing Saddam, I think the UN would request to have a long, interesting chat with the American government. If Bush said what the memo claims, then even though I'm wrong, Bush is a hell of a lot more stupid that I thought.

But if the memo's wrong, then remember: You read it at the Medley first...

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE WITNESS BOX...

The trial of Enron founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeff Skilling is slated to begin today, assuming the judge can find twelve impartial jurors to hear the sworn testimony -- no mean feat, since the trial will be in Houston, where Enron had its headquarters. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs when Enron imploded, Wall Street lost tens of billions of dollars, and Lay and Skilling received some $250 million between them in insider stock sales before the implosion -- I don't envy you, Your Honor.

In the meantime, AOL News has a couple of polls for your freeping pleasure. Question One: Do you think Ken Lay is guilty or innocent of the charges against him? Question Two: Do you think Jeff Skilling is guilty or innocent of the charges against him?

So far, Skilling fares slightly worse than Lay, and if this poll is representative of their chances in court, they're both going to hell in a fanny pack...

REMINISCING WITH MYSELF (part two)...

Thinking about Wilson some more...

Wilson told me he loved to fish. Fly fishing was his passion. I've never heard anyone use the word "creel" as much as him. One day, he said he had a vacation coming up. I told him I liked to go to Vermont for a few days whenever I was on vacation. He said he'd never been to Vermont.

I couldn't believe him.

Wilson, you see, lived his whole life in Ashby, Massachusetts, which borders New Hampshire. Vermont is on NH's western border. I'm from Pepperell, Mass., also on the NH border and two towns east of Ashby, and I've been to Vermont many times. "You've never been to Vermont at all?" I asked. "It's an hour away!" He'd never been to any other state except New Hampshire, he told me.

"Wilson, you have got to go to Vermont," I insisted. "You'll love it there."

"You think so?"

"I know so. It's my favorite state." (Nine years later, it still is.)

So he went to Vermont. A week later he came back. "Vermont was awesome!" he said. He had pictures of himself fly-fishing in the Green Mountains and everything.

"What'd I tell ya?" I said.

I don't know where he is now, but I'm sure he spends a little time in the Green Mountains when he can...

OBLIGATORY BOOK REVIEW WARNING(S)...

I will do two multi-post book reviews in February, one starting on Monday the 5th* 6th, the other on Monday the 19th* 20th. The first deals with a certain top ten Texas-based corporation that went ker-boom in 2001, the second with a certain executive branch's unruly behavior during wartime -- whose monarch wanna-be poster boy for arrested development has a cattle-free and brush-laden ranch in Texas. And those are the only hints I'm giving you.

A clarification: I intended to do three book reviews during November and December, but I only did two -- Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil and Lawrence Velvel's Misfits in America. The third book I wanted to review deals extensively with the author of another book, but I didn't know this before I started reading. It soon became clear that, in order to do a just review, I'd have to tackle the referenced book as well. So I've put that particular review on hold. Major setback, hairy project. I don't know when or if I'll get to it, but I do know that in this case a lack of a review is better than a half-assed one.

That's for anyone who actually remembers me saying I wanted to do three reviews.

But there will be two reviews in February, barring a computer breakdown or a medical emergency rendering me Internetless. You have been duly warned, senoras and horsemen.

Til further on...

(*: Post updated shortly after looking at the calendar. I'm just slowly growing old, people, and my sense of time is the third thing I have lost. The second thing I lost was my ability to remember things like this. The first thing I lost was... gee, I forget...)

TEXAS TO THE REST OF AMERICA: "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW SORRY WE ARE"...

Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer writes, "Impeach or Indict Bush and Cheney":

The year 2006 will be historic for the nation, and probably for humanity. Texans Bush and Rove and their conspirators in the second Bush presidency have disgraced American democracy at home and in the workd with debasements of our nation and our values that have now entered their climactic phase. What part will the rest of us Texans play in this decisive year?
...Our elections are bought, and our government is run by and for the major transnational corporations. Bush announced in 2002 his illegal presidential policy that the United States can and will attack other nations first, waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now waging, as if he were doing it in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, which on the face of it is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The President, the Vice-President, and their factors sold this war to Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and terrorize us about Iraq's alleged connections to Al Qaeda and mass-murder endangerments to us from Iraq itself, all of which literally di not exist. In polls now six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest. Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and seems to be maneuvering to use that control to wage another aggressive war on Iran, with literally incalculable consequences.
We Texans are a major source of this deterioration into crisis. The leading Democrats of the state so dishonored the liberal traditions of their party that in the resulting political vacuum, Bush was elected Governor here, and from Austin he mounted the campaign that a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court illegally decreed made him President. After that, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from Sugar Land, crafted his scheme to use corporate money to widen the Republicans' majority in the Texas delegation to Washngton, D.C., battening down right-wing GOP control of the House and the Congress. The third President from Texas and his Republican Congress then waged aggressive war on Iraq, drove the nation into insolvency to further enrich the already rich, and just for good measure tore up the Constitution.
As we in Texas bear guilt for this we have also begun to join the resistance and revolt against it, starting with Cindy Sheehan's brigades in Crawford. By happy accident the Texas trip-root that now threatens to help bring the Bush presidency crashing down, crushing itself under its own arrogance, hubris, and criminality, is a law against corporate money in Texas elections that was passed a century ago in the state's populist afterglow. To uphold that law, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has braved ruthless contumely, as he had done often before in order to prosecute public officials he believed had violated laws. While it is merely seemly to await the outcome of the trial of DeLay and his co-defendants on the charges that they laundered corporate money through Washington to elect Republicans to the House from Texas, in a speech in September Earle declared what he believes his prosecution is all about. "Corporate money in politics" has become "the fight of our generation of Americans... It is our job -- our fight -- to rescue democracy from the money that has captured it," he said. "The issue that we're faced with is the role of large concentrations of money in democracy, whether it's individuals or corporations, is the same"... (#)

Please read the rest...

(Credit: The sewa tenda -- which is where I got that ribbon in the upper-right corner from...)

"ON THE BIBLE YOU SWORE, FOUGHT YOUR BATTLE WITH LIES"...*

The following excerpt comes from Julia Whitty's "Accounting Coup," an essay which appeared in the September/October 2005 issue of Mother Jones. It tells the story of Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Indians of northern Montana, and her tireless efforts to force the U.S. government to pay some 500,000 native Indians all over America the money the Bureau of Indian Affairs has withheld, lost, stolen, and misspent over the course of more than a century -- a tab that, by her estimate, comes to $176 billion:

...Her fight takes the form of Cobell v. Norton, a federal lawsuit on behalf of a half-million Indians across America whose individual property is held in trust by the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BIA. Interior leases these private Indian lands to oil, timber, and agricultural corporations and other commercial entities, then pays the Indians the revenues those leases yield. But Cobell claims the government has been grossly negligent in its 118 years of managing the Individual Indian Trust, treating the Indians not as clients and beneficiaries but as easy marks.

While generations of non-Indians have become rich harvesting the abundant resources of private Indian lands -- which once included virtually all the oil fields of Oklahoma -- Indian landowners have been paid only erratically, and far less than their due. Consequently, even landowning Indians remain among the nation's poorest citizens, joining the 23 percent of Indians in America living in poverty, and the nearly 40 percent who are unemployed. Some tribes fare even worse, and the Blackfeet suffer a 34 percent poverty rate and a 7 percent unemployment rate. Overall, Indians are more than twice as poor as the average American.

Cobell filed her lawsuit in 1996 after years of kinder antreaties failed, demanding payment of all unpaid revenues from Indian leases for the past century, a tally of past revenues, and a new accounting system to deal with future revenues. According to Cobell's forensic accountants, the government owes $176 billion to individual Indian owners, averaging $352,000 per plaintiff, making this momentarily the largest class-action lawsuit ever launched.

If successful, Cobell's lawsuit may force a historical shift of America's capital away from the cowboys -- the oil, gas, timber, mining, grazing, and agricultural industries, along with their political cohorts -- toward the Indians... Not surprisingly, the Clinton and Bush administrations have flexed unprecedented bureaucratic muscle to delay the resolution of Cobell v. Norton, spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending Interior.

...

To those concerned that the United States can't afford a Cobell v. Norton settlement, she says, "It's not your money and never was"...

The "Norton" in the case name is Gale Norton, the current Secretary of the Interior, the department in charge of the BIA. (Note: This case was originally known as Cobell v. Babbitt, the latter being Norton's predecessor, Bruce Babbitt. Norton was appointed by President Bush in 2001, five years after the lawsuit was filed.) Believe it or not, the government is slowly losing this case. The presiding judge, Royce Lamberth, is thoroughly unamused with Interior:

...

The department of the Interior has responded to its ongoing losses in court with tactics the plaintiffs construe as retaliatory and intimidating. In 2004, after Judge Lamberth found the BIA was seizing land owned by Indian trustees without properly informing them of its value or location and selling it to oil companies, he ordered the agency to stop communicating with plaintiffs regarding the sale, conversion, and transfer of land. Interior reacted by shutting down BIA offices and phone lines, telling Indians they would not receive their royalty checks because of the lawsuit. Cobell's name was published on the BIA website -- tacit encouragemnt, she says, for Indians to call and blame her. "It was the dumbest thing they could have done," she says. "I returned every one of those calls and explained what was really going on."

...

Lamberth called these tactics "a testament to the startling inhumanity of government bureaucracy... [and] a deliberate, infantile, and frankly ridiculous misinterpretation of this Court's straightforward order." He added: "The idea that Interior would either instruct or allow BIA to withhold payments and then to stonewall the Indians who dared to ask why is an obscenity that harkens back to the darkest days of United States-Indian relations... The perniciousness and irresponsibility demonstrated by blaming the Court pales in comparison to the utter depravity and moral turpitude displayed by [Interior's] willingness to withhold needed finances from people struggling to survive and support families on subsistence incomes."

...

In 2003, Congress inserted itself into the machinations by attaching midnight riders to omnibus budget and Iraq appropriation bills to delay the court-ordered historical accounting. It also attempted to cut the salary of court-appointed investigators, while permitting Secretary Gale Norton to use discretionary funds to pay for the scores of private attorneys hired by all past and present Interior employees appearing in the case...

Now you may be wondering, what was all that about? Well, I told you all of that in order to prep you for this. I'd go on, but I'm coming down with a migraine, and I need some time to digest what I've already read...

(Credit: Carnacki, who links to more of the same...)

(*: Queen, "White Man")

REMINISCING WITH MYSELF

Lately, I can't seem to help thinking about my last couple of years living in Massachusetts. Particularly the spring of '97. I had been working at a factory that made paper bags for two years. This company made several types of bags: potato bags with the plastic mesh in the front, "sew" bags with the string you pull to open the top, the kind of bag with the waxy seal (known as "hot melt" in the industry) that held the tops closed, and something called "pasted valve" bags. I was primarily involved in making the pasted valve variety. These bags are flat on the top and bottom, and are opened by ripping open whichever corner has the valve -- a strip of paper inserted into the bags just before their tops and bottoms are glued closed that both allows the customer ordering the bags to fill them with their product and prevents the contents from spilling out until the bags are ripped open by hand. You've seen these bags before: they contain cement, or fertilizer, or quick-dry, or some sort of polymer, and so on. They can be a bitch to make, believe me.

In fact, during the early part of '97, I was getting so fed up with making them, I signed up to be an apprentice operator in the press department of the same plant. Under union rules (some day I need to explain the concept of a union to the cell-phone-camera-and-body-piercing kids who are young enough to be my own), when the company posted a job opening, regardless of what it was with very few exceptions, the senior-most employee who signed up for that position got it for thirty days. If it was clear that he/she couldn't handle it after thirty days, he/she was moved back to his/her prior position in the factory. If things were working out, then it was up to the employee to decide whether to stick with it or go back to his/her earlier job. As it happened, I got the apprentice position. It meant taking a cut in pay, too. But with a few days left during my trial, I was asked by the vice president if I wanted to go back to my old job. I said no. He wasn't happy to lose an operator, but hey, union rules are union rules.

All of the guys in the press department had more seniority than I did, and they were very much into the male bonding scene. The ringleader of this circus was Jerry. Everyone loved Jerry -- even me. Or, I should say, especially me. Every morning -- and I mean every morning -- when he got his press up and running, he'd take an air hose, aim it at a small recess in the press' frame, and squeeze the handle. This made a loud piercing noise similar to that of a steam train's whistle. "All aboard!" It was his way of letting the entire plant know that the train had left the station. You have no idea how much this annoyed people in some of the other departments.

Then there was Juan, a guy from Spain. Juan had a hard-headed demeanor which always kept me on edge. He could make me wonder whether he was about to slit my throat for the hell of it, although he would never do such a thing to anyone. That was just the way he was wired up. I noticed one thing about him early on: He could see everything. I'd go to inspect the print as it was running, and I'd focus on the larger stuff -- print registration, image crispness, and the like. Juan would see a yellow speck on white paper that I would never have caught, stop the press, clean the plate, and start back up. I witnessed shit like that dozerns of times. I'm a press operator nine years later and six hundred miles away, and I still marvel at his powers of observation.

On the other end of that spectrum was John, an Irishman. John was a wonderful guy to be around. I liked him more than anyone else in the department. But he was no pressman. A two-color job he could handle. Three or more, and he was lost, for some reason I never understood. Jerry once told me, "Most guys, Pauly, they don't know shit when they come to the press, but over time, they learn and they get better as they go. Not John." I think John's staying power was due to the fact that everyone liked him -- he was just that kind of guy. I still miss him. And I have no idea what's become of him.

Wayne, on the other hand, was a stinking asshole. He was intelligent, he was articulate, he knew how to do his job, and he did have a heart. And he had a vicious sense of humor -- which I've learned to appreciate over the years. But he was chiefly an asshole, and he didn't care who knew it. So many times, I wanted to belt him. However, he knew one thing I didn't: karate. So I let it all go.

And Wilson. He was in charge of the ink room. If there is one m'fug I would never dare tangle with, it's Wilson. He wasn't mean, his eyes weren't black as coal, he didn't have a bloody mouth, nothing like that. He just seemed indifferent to what is known as the "finer things," but in a threatening way; it's hard to describe. There was nothing fancy or hip about Wilson. He was who he was, and that was good enough for him. Your first impression of Wilson upon seeing him is, this dude's a motherfuckin' moron. And your first impression is totally wrong. Wilson was smart the way local yokels all over the country are smart. Maybe that's the threatening part about him. You meet him, and you instinctively start trying to fleece him; next thing you know, your head is mounted on a wooden plaque hanging on his wall. You don't screw with a guy like that.

And I'll never forget Chris. They called him Eddie Munster, which was funny, because Chris wasn't much more than five feet tall. Funnier still, all the other guys in the press department were average to extra-large in size, including me. And that holds true today. Confession: I'm about 6' 2", about 220 pounds. I'm bigger than most guys. But at the print shop I currently work in, I'm probably slightly over average. I was around average at the bag plant nine years ago. Printing and bigger-than-average people seem to go together -- hell if I know why. But regarding Chris... At some point, a roster of the members of the press department utilizing images of the Jolly Green Giant was put on display. Every member of the pressroom was represented by the Giant except Chris, who was represented by a silly cartoonish eagle. Chris had no problem with it. For all I know, it was yet another male bonding thing.

Anyway...

It was the last day of June. I was working second shift that day. Entering the plant, I noticed people were surlier and more withdrawn than normal.

"Oh, hey, Mimus," John said.

"Hi, John," I replied. He looked upset.

"Haven't you heard the news?"

"What news?" I wondered.

"They're shuttin' the plant down."

* * *

There was no set date. But it didn't matter. The place visibly went to hell in the two and a half months I remained there. My last day was in September. On the eleventh, believe it or not -- nowadays the date September 11 always brings two things to my mind.

Jerry quit before I did, in spite of more than twenty years of service and a considerable severance package waiting for him if he chose to stay. He lasted two weeks at his next job. I don't know where he went from there.

Juan was still working at the bag plant after I'd left. But I knew he was looking for a new job -- I'd ridden with him to one interview. Lord knows what he's up to now.

John remained at the plant for a while, too. I don't know where he is now.

Wayne told me he intended to stay to the end. Afterward, he planned to go back to college. And that's all I know.

Wilson left to work at some place in Gardner, Massachusetts. And that's the last I heard of him.

Chris stayed at the plant. I have no idea what he's up to, but I have this feeling that he's doing okay. Men who have what's known as "Little Man Syndrome" tend to excel at getting by, if not getting ahead.

And that's all the reminiscing I can do for now.