ADMISSION: On Friday, George Bush told ABC News he personally approved of the approval of torture - including waterboarding - by Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet.

“Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

OFF TO WASHINGTON, AND THEN BOSTON
SPRING IS HERE
DID GORE LOSE?

I am in Washington today for the 3:30 screening of In Debt We Trust at the Rayburn Office Building on the House Side of the Congress.

LOCATION: 2237 Rayburn House Office Building

On Thursday, I am very honored to have been asked to give the prestigious Ford Hall Forum address in Boston at 6. For more on that event and a recent interview in the Boston Phoenix by Dan Kennedy, see their website. Thanks Dan, now a journalism professor and great media critic for caring.

Funny comment from Ray Yerkes from Newburyport Ma:

“First the Congress of the United States, then The Ford Hall Forum address. Next it will be Carnegie Hall. We are proud of you.”

Thanks, Ray, but to get there, I will have to practice. Practice. Practice.

I know, bad joke!

THE SEASONS CHANGE

I saw Spring erupt in England with greening everywhere, trees and plants blooming and some days of crisp but clear weather. The financial news there was not so great with 20,000 layoffs in The City, food prices up, mortgages up, despite interest rate cuts and a sense of impending gloom. The Prime Minister’s approval ratings is way down as well. I stayed near Paddington Station where the body for a late BBC presenter was found yesterday. He was dispairing over the death of a close friend.

I came back on Delta only to learn when I landed that the directors of Delta and Northwest approved a deal for the companies to merge and create the world’s largest airline….Watch for jobs cuts to be announced and more consolidation in an industry where service is going downhill along with safety standards.

If you saw my article on Mediachannel about the international response to the credit crisis—which is expected to worsen with Citi Bank’s announcement this week of more billions in new write down, you may have not seen this from the Wall Street Journal.

Dearth of Direction At a Time of Crisis

The weekend Group of Seven gathering in Washington demonstrated how little stewardship the world’s richest countries are exerting at this time of global economic tumult.
There was much for finance ministers and counterparts at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to discuss, but the most dominant theme seemed to be inflated food prices world-wide — one of the most tangible concerns for voters in Europe and the U.S….

Speaking of the food crisis:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) Aid organizations said Sunday they feared
the nutritional crisis could deepen in impoverished Haiti, where skyrocketing food prices have already led to deadly protests and the ouster of the nation’s No. 2 politician.

THE Wall Street Journal reported that Food Prices will stay high.

ECONOMIC IMPACT ON WAR LIKELY

Mike Whitney: Financial Collapse Will End The Occupation And it won’t be “A time of our choosing”

The Iraq War signals the end of US interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone will have to be held accountable.

MORE BANK LOSSES:

Wachovia WB, the fourth-largest US bank by assets, warned on Monday that the nation’s economy was deteriorating more rapidly than expected as it revealed plans to raise $7bn in capital after a surprising first-quarter loss.

CITBANK TO ADMIT BILLIONS MORE IN SUBPRIME WRITEDOWNS; MERILL LYNCH DOWN $15 BILLION

The Daily Telegraph says there are fresh calls on the banks to slash their dividends. Also how about CEO compensation and bonuses. What a disgrace! I am still waiting for a criminal investigation.

TORTURE, ISRAELI STYLE

Shin Bet admits to using terror suspects’ relatives to extract confessions

NYT: Zimbabwe Court Refuses to Release Vote Results

The ruling was a rebuff to the opposition party, which had demanded that results of the presidential election be released immediately.

AP: Berlusconi Back in Power in Italy

The conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi clinched decisive victories in both houses of parliament and his main rival conceded.

FT: PEAKING OIL: Russian oil production has peaked and may never return to current levels, one of the country’s top energy executives has warned, fueling concerns that the world’s biggest oil producers cannot keep up with rampant Asian demand.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER ON NOTION THAT “GORE WON

At that preposterous (and unconstitutional) “Compassion Forum” last night, Hillary Clinton took a FOX-style swipe at both Al Gore and John Kerry–asserting that they lost because they were “elitist” candidates (just like you-know-who).

Now, one might actually agree that Gore and Kerry are elitists, just like most other leading Democrats, including, of course, Hillary herself (and, one fears, Obama, too). There is, however, no excuse for Clinton’s claim that those two candidates lost their elections: no excuse, even though the myth that Gore and Kerry “lost” has been repeated all but universally for years, by nearly everybody in the media, the Democratic Party and Bush/Cheney’s GOP.

It was therefore a cause for raucous cheering when Obama said, “I have to say, I think Al Gore won.” It was a statement to be wildly cheered, because no other candidate has dared to make that necessary claim (in public).

Not that there weren’t problems with Obama’s statement. One was that equivocal “I think,” suggesting that Gore’s victory is a matter of opinion–when it’s a fact that Gore prevailed in Florida. The media consortium that finally went through all the ballots there determined that, if all the votes in that state had been counted, Gore would have been declared the winner, and, therefore, the President of the United States. (For the exact numbers, see
the attached Table 1 from the media consortium’s report, which is available on-line at
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf.)

This may come as news to you, since Gore’s win was thickly obfuscated in the press reports, which cast it as a victory for Bush. That’s the Big Lie that we got from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News et al., which is especially weird, since those very institutions were all part of the consortium that carried out that vote-count. They lied about Gore’s win because, by the time the vote-count was complete, it was two months since 9/11, and the nation was “at war,” so that it would have been just too damn troublesome to tell the truth.

I interviewed one of the NY Times journalist from the media consortium who confirmed that Gore did receive the most ballots.

See my report in the film COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY. More info on Globalvision.org

Sorry, have to cut this short tonight. Need to recover from jet lag.

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