Bush's Successes
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| Mon, 07-19-2004 - 3:25pm |
Dear Reader,
I'm getting sick and tired of my fellow Americans
saying that the presidency of George W. Bush is a
failure. With the string of successes he's had,
nothing could be further from the truth. Let me list a
few:
1. He has successfully rid America of that troubling
budget surplus and turned it into a $500 billion
deficit.
2. He has successfully helped America's trading
partners have the highest trade surplus with us in
America's history.
3. He has successfully lowered the taxes for the
richest Americans and corporations at the expense of
99% of the American population.
4. He has successfully started another Viet Nam in
Iraq after lying to the whole world.
5. He has successfully pushed the price of gas up to
the highest level ever here in America.
6. He has successfully allowed American corporations
to dramatically increase their pollution.
7. He has successfully thrown about 10% of the
population out of work.
8. He has successfully allowed corporations to export
our best middle-class jobs.
9. He has successfully divided our country as never
before.
10. He has successfully driven our oldest allies away.
11. He has successfully united the terrorists as never
before (he said all along he was a uniter, not a
divider).
12. He has successfully broken his oath to uphold the
constitution of the United States of America.
13. He has successfully united Democrats (yay!) as
they haven't been for years (I told you he was a
uniter).
14. He has successfully driven me out of the
Republican party for the rest of my life.
You know, with a string of successes like that, it's a
wonder America is still standing.

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Believe me, we are dealing with the same here. Environmental-activists who demand different alternatives, but when there was a plan for a "windmill-park" off our shore, they claim/yell:
but read the following article - what Kerry did here was MORE important.
As far as I am concerned, this was a MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT.
It's worth the read because the news media isn't really doing it's job
properly to give us real information like this that lets us know
what someone is really made of.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Follow the Money
How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank
by David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was
a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped
finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to
be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's
check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade.
It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with
respected figures around the world.
All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from
Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug
cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense
opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members
of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of
whom were eager to see him succeed.
By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and
exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web
that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for
international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just
enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among
the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil
influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In
retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the
fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge.
More than a decade later, Kerry is his party's nominee for president, and
terrorist financing is anything but a back-burner issue. The Bush campaign
has settled on a new strategy for attacking Kerry: Portray him as a
do-nothing senator who's weak on fighting terrorism. "After 19 years in
the Senate, he's had thousands of votes, but few signature achievements,"
President Bush charged recently at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh; spin
that's been echoed by Bush's surrogates, conservative pundits, and
mainstream reporters alike, and by a steady barrage of campaign ads
suggesting that the one thing Kerry did do in Congress was prove he knew
nothing about terrorism. Ridiculing the senator for not mentioning al
Qaeda in his 1997 book on terrorism, one ad asks: "How can John Kerry win
a war if he doesn't know the enemy?"
If that line of attack has been effective, it's partly because Kerry does
not have a record like the chamber's dealmakers such as Sens. Joe
Lieberman (D-Conn.) or Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Though Kerry has been a key
backer of bills on housing reform, immigration, and the environment, there
are indeed few pieces of landmark legislation that owe their passage to
Kerry.
But legislation is only one facet of a senator's record. As the BCCI
investigation shows, Kerry developed a very different record of
accomplishment--one often as vital, if not more so, than passage of bills.
Kerry's probe didn't create any popular new governmental programs, reform
the tax code, or eliminate bureaucratic waste and fraud. Instead, he
shrewdly used the Senate's oversight powers to address the threat of
terrorism well before it was in vogue, and dismantled a key terrorist
weapon. In the process, observers saw a senator with tremendous fortitude,
and a willingness to put the public good ahead of his own career. Those
qualities might be hard to communicate to voters via one-line sound bites,
but they would surely aid Kerry as president in his attempts to battle the
threat of terrorism.
From drug lords to lobbyists
Despite having helmed the initial probe which led to the Iran-Contra
investigation, Kerry was left off the elite Iran-Contra committee in 1987.
As a consolation prize, the Democratic leadership in Congress made Kerry
the chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and
International Operations and told him to dig into the Contra-drug
connection. Kerry turned to BCCI early in the second year of the probe
when his investigators learned that Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega
was laundering drug profits through the bank on behalf of the Medellin
cartel.
By March 1988, Kerry's subcommittee had obtained permission from the
Foreign Relations Committee to seek subpoenas for both BCCI and
individuals at the bank involved in handling Noriega's assets, as well as
those handling the accounts of others in Panama and Colombia. Very
quickly, though, Kerry faced a roadblock. Citing concerns that the
senator's requests would interfere with an ongoing sting operation in
Tampa, the Justice Department delayed the subpoenas until the end of
the year,at which point the subcommittee's mandate was running out.
BCCI, meanwhile, had its own connections. Prominent figures with ties to
the bank included former president Jimmy Carter's budget director, Bert
Lance, and a bevy of powerful Washington lobbyists with close ties to
President George H.W. Bush, a web of influence that may have helped the
bank evade previous investigations. In 1985 and 1986, for instance, the
Reagan administration launched no investigation even after the CIA had
sent reports to the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments bluntly
describing the bank's role in drug-money laundering and other illegal
activities.
In the spring of 1989, Kerry hit another obstacle. Foreign Relations
Committee chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), under pressure from both
parties, formally asked Kerry to end his probe. Worried the information he
had collected would languish, Kerry quickly dispatched investigator Jack
Blum to present the information his committee had found about BCCI's
money-laundering operations to the Justice Department. But according to
Blum, the Justice Department failed to follow up.
The young senator from Massachusetts, thus, faced a difficult choice.
Kerry could play ball with the establishment and back away from BCCI, or
he could stay focused on the public interest and gamble his political
reputation by pushing forward.
BCCI and the bluebloods
Kerry opted in 1989 to take the same information that had been coldly
received at the Justice Department and bring it to New York District
Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who agreed to begin a criminal investigation
of BCCI, based on Kerry's leads. Kerry also continued to keep up the
public pressure. In 1990, when the Bush administration gave the bank a
minor slap on the wrist for its money laundering practices, Kerry went on
national television to slam the decision. "We send drug people to jail for
the rest of their life," he said, "and these guys who are bankers in the
corporate world seem to just walk away, and it's business as
usual. When banks engage knowingly in the laundering of money, they
should be shut down. It's that simple, it really is."
He would soon have a chance to turn his declarations into action. In early
1991, the Justice Department concluded its Tampa probe with a plea deal
allowing BCCI officials to stay out of court. At the same time, news
reports indicated that Washington elder statesman Clark Clifford might be
indicted for defrauding bank regulators and helping BCCI maintain a shell
in the United States.
Kerry pounced, demanding (and winning) authorization from the Foreign
Relations Committee to open a broad investigation into the bank in May
1991. Almost immediately, the senator faced a new round of pressure to
relent. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman
personally called Kerry to object, as did his fellow senators. "What are
you doing to my friend Clark Clifford?," staffers recalled them asking,
according to The Washington Post. BCCI itself hired an army of lawyers, PR
specialists, and lobbyists, including former members of Congress, to
thwart the investigation.
But Kerry refused to back off, and his hearings began to expose the ways
in which international terrorism was financed. As Kerry's subcommittee
discovered, BCCI catered to many of the most notorious tyrants and thugs
of the late 20th century, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the
heads of the Medellin cocaine cartel, and Abu Nidal, the notorious
Palestinian terrorist. According to the CIA, it also did business with
those who went on to lead al Qaeda.
And BCCI went beyond merely offering financial assistance to dictators and
terrorists: According to Time, the operation itself was an elaborate
fraud, replete with a "global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like
enforcement squad."
By July 1991, Kerry's work paid off. That month, British and U.S.
regulators finally responded to the evidence provided by Kerry,
Morgenthau, and a concurrent investigation by the Federal Reserve. BCCI
was shut down in seven countries, restricted in dozens more, and served
indictments for grand larceny, bribery, and money laundering. The actions
effectively put it out of business what Morgenthau called, "one of the
biggest criminal enterprises in world history."
Bin Laden's bankers
Kerry's record in the BCCI affair, of course, contrasts sharply with
Bush's. The current president's career as an oilman was always marked by
the kind of insider cronyism that Kerry resisted. Even more startling, as
a director of Texas-based Harken Energy, Bush himself did business with
BCCI-connected institutions almost at the same time Kerry was fighting the
bank. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 1991, there was a "mosaic of
BCCI connections surrounding since George W. Bush came on board."
In 1987, Bush secured a critical $25 million-loan from a bank the Kerry
Commission would later reveal to be a BCCI joint venture. Certainly, Bush
did not suspect BCCI had such questionable connections at the time. But
still, the president's history suggests his attacks on Kerry's
national-security credentials come from a position of little authority.
As the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, Kerry's BCCI
experience is important for two reasons. First, it reveals Kerry's
foresight in fighting terrorism that is critical for any president in this
age of asymmetrical threats. As The Washington Post noted, "years before
money laundering became a centerpiece of antiterrorist efforts...Kerry
crusaded for controls on global money laundering in the name of national
security."
Make no mistake about it, BCCI would have been a player. A decade after
Kerry helped shut the bank down, the CIA discovered Osama bin Laden was
among those with accounts at the bank. A French intelligence report
obtained by The Washington Post in 2002 identified dozens of companies and
individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with
bin Laden after the bank collapsed, and that the financial network
operated by bin Laden today "is similar to the network put in place in the
1980s by BCCI." As one senior U.S. investigator said in 2002, "BCCI was
the mother and father of terrorist financing operations."
Second, the BCCI affair showed Kerry to be a politician driven by a sense
of mission, rather than expediency--even when it meant ruffling feathers.
Perhaps Sen. Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee,
put it best. "John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult
investigation," Brown said. "Because many important members of his own
party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for
other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not.
John Kerry did."
My wife is on the government payroll locally as it were, working at a University here in the area. She has been there for some 23, and has the required 20 years of service to put in for retirement. There is though an AGE restriction, as there is for almost every aspect of American society except the military. How many of those who have served in the military get out after 20 years, start collecting retirement at a 60 percent base rate and turn right around and take a civilian job doing the exact same thing they did while in the service. I do not object to people double dipping or even triple dipping in their golden years, but lets be fair...letting some collect a retirement from the age of 38 until their death at say 78 is stupidity of the worst kind. Now, factor in on top of this the cost of living increase that military veterans get, and by the time those veterans reach the age of 48, they are actually drawing more in retirement than they did while serving our nation. Sure all of us who have paid into Social Security for so many untold years wished we were afforded that exact same benefits schedule.
I am not saying veterans should be denied a good retirement package, but do feel it needs to be held until they reach the accepted national norms for retiring. Even with IRA's that are built with our own contributions, we cannot touch them until the age of 55, and even then with a ten percent early withdraw penalty until we reach the age of 59 1/2. You take say 2 million military retirees and the money paid to them over that 20 year span from 38-59 1/2 and you are talking some very serious savings. I would further apply the same standards to judges, senators and every other elected offical as well.
Are you a Bush supporter? Bush wanted to cut military benefits, and during a time of war! Appalling.
Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
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Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
Is $24,000 a year really adequate pay for laying your life on the line for the good old US of A? This is one of the reasons why the military is suddenly finding itself in a situation of not being able to meet recruitment quotas, and unless that changes, it is only a matter of time till we see the draft re-instituted here in America.
Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
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Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
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