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The war at home: budget reflects
Bush admin’s global agenda
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Ashcroft considers bar on asylum
for domestic violence victims
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NATION BRIEFS
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ACLU denounces program to assign
‘threat level’ to all US airline passengers

Washington, DC, Feb. 27— A secretive new system for conducting background checks on all airline passengers threatens to create a bureaucratic machine for destroying Americans’ privacy and a government blacklist that will harm innocent Americans, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said today.

The ACLU’s warning came in response to statements by officials of the Transportation Security Agency that the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II (CAPPS II) will be tested at several airports around the US starting sometime in March.

“CAPPS II is based on the same concept as the Pentagon’s ‘Total Information Awareness’ program, which proposed massive fishing expeditions through some of our most personally sensitive data,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program. “We are all concerned about airline security, but we must not let the unique needs in our airports give the government an opening to create the kind of Big Brother program that Americans rejected so resoundingly in the Pentagon.”

At a news conference yesterday, the government said that under the program Americans will be labeled as a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” security risk. The red code would be reserved for those on terrorist watch lists. Far less clear is who would get a yellow code in their file; those passengers would be subject to extra-intensive security screening.

“This system threatens to create a permanent blacklisted underclass of Americans who cannot travel freely,” said Katie Corrigan, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. “Unfortunately, history suggests that the government will be capricious, unfair, and politically biased in deciding who to stamp as suspect. Anyone could get caught up in this system, with no way to get out.”

According to a January Federal Register notice containing some details of the program, a yellow code in a person’s file could be shared with other government agencies at the federal, state, and local level, with intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and with foreign governments and international agencies — all of which could use those designations for many purposes, including employment decisions and the granting of government benefits.

“Despite the potentially serious consequences of being accused by your own government of being a security risk, CAPPS II would not allow innocent Americans to see the information that such a designation was based on, would not permit them a meaningful way to appeal, and would not reveal the criteria on which such judgments were based so they could avoid suspicion in the future,” Corrigan said. “In fact, individuals would not even have the right to confirm how they have been labeled.”

The CAPPS program would collect information about individuals including “financial and transactional data,” which could include credit card and other consumer-purchase data, housing information, communications records, health records, and many other sources of information about us. It would also make use of public source information such as law enforcement and legal records.

“Once the infrastructure for a system of government files and security ratings on American citizens is built, it won’t be limited to air transportation for very long,” said Steinhardt. “Nothing like it has ever been done in this country.”

Steinhardt cited as an example of the kind of thing that can happen the FBI’s “Project Lookout,” in which the agency gave corporations a list of hundreds of names of people it sought in connection with Sept. 11. The list, which was riddled with inaccuracies and contained the names of many people the Bureau simply wanted to talk to, was widely circulated and took on a life of its own. No one knows how many innocent people have been denied jobs or suffered other harm because of the list.

“CAPPS II threatens our liberty, but its security benefits are far from clear,” said Steinhardt. “It will leave security screeners at sea in an ocean of private data; some of that data will be fraudulent, and much of it just plain wrong. Like TIA, CAPPS II is apparently based on the belief that you can find a needle in a haystack by adding more hay to the stack.”

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Ashcroft considers bar on asylum
for domestic violence victims

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Feb. 24— Human rights and feminist groups are sounding the alarm over reports that the administration of United States President George W. Bush is planning to issue new regulations this week that would bar asylum claims by women who flee to the US to escape serious domestic violence.

If issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft before Saturday, the new regulations would effectively reverse a decision issued by his predecessor, Janet Reno, in 2001 that ordered immigration judges to hear such claims.

Reno intended to draw up new regulations that would guide immigration judges on how to assess asylum claims based on spousal abuse, but the Bush administration took power before they could be formalized. Ashcroft now has until Mar. 1 — the date when the Justice Department loses jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the new Department of Homeland Security — to issue new regulations covering such cases.

“It appears that the Ashcroft Justice Department is scrambling to rush through regulations that will harm refugee women in the few remaining days that they still have the power to do so,” said Elisa Massimino, the director of the Washington, DC office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR).

The Justice Department had no immediate comment on what it intended to do, but a number of groups — including LCHR, Amnesty International, and the San Francisco-based Center for Gender & Refugee Studies — have called for their supporters to contact Department officials and members of Congress to express their concerns.

The prospect of new regulations revolves around the case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who fled to the US after suffering a decade of what Amnesty called “horrific domestic abuse” by her husband, a retired soldier, who is alleged to have raped her repeatedly and committed other acts of violence against her, including an attempt to abort their second child by kicking her in the spine.

Throughout the decade, Alvarado sought help from the police and the courts, but they refused to provide her with official protection. She also attempted to escape her home to other parts of Guatemala, but each time her husband tracked her down, according to case records.

A US immigration judge granted her asylum in 1996, finding that the abuse she suffered, combined with the government’s unwillingness or inability to protect her, constituted persecution under US refugee law. The INS, however, appealed that decision, and, in 1999 a deeply split Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) overturned the judge’s decision on the grounds that the abuse was not perpetrated by a government and that Alvarado was not a member of a “social group.”

Reno then overruled this decision, reinstated approval of her application, and issued proposed regulations that made it clear that gender-related persecution, including spousal abuse, could form the basis of an asylum claim. Those regulations, however, were never finalized.

Reno’s decision and her proposed regulations were consistent with an emerging trend in international law. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the governments of Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand have all explicitly recognized that government-tolerated domestic violence is a legitimate basis for asylum. The European Union is also considering a similar proposal.

Bush’s Justice Department, however, has now reportedly prepared new regulations that, if formally issued this week, would reinstate the BIA’s majority decision. Such a move could return Alvarado to Guatemala and her husband’s violence, according to the rights groups who warn that it could also have much wider implications for all women and girls seeking asylum based on gender-related claims.

Since a BIA decision in 1996, for example, asylum has been granted to women and girls who have fled to the US to escape being forced to submit to female genital mutilation, despite the fact that the practice, carried out in parts of Africa and the Arab world, was not enforced by the government.

The activist groups are especially concerned that the new regulations may be drafted in such a way as to preclude gender-based claims in which private parties like spouses, cultural organizations, or even rebel groups — rather than the government — are the agents of persecution.

“The implications of this change could be enormous,” according to Massimino. “We’re talking about potentially denying protection to whole categories of extremely vulnerable people, including, for example, victims of horrific mutilation and abuse by the RUF [Revolutionary United Front], a rebel group in Sierra Leone notorious for its campaign of mutilation and organized sexual violence against girls and women.”

Editors note: On March 3, The Washington Post reported that Ashcroft has decided to reconsider Alvarado’s amnesty and is considering new gender-persecution regulations for asylum-seekers.

Source: OneWorld.net

The war at home: budget reflects
Bush admin’s global agenda

Analysis by David Moberg

Feb. 24— Under any circumstances, the new Bush budget would seem ideologically driven, lopsidedly tilted to the rich, and deeply flawed as a purported stimulus to growth. But the administration’s economic proposals are particularly peculiar and ominous in light of the administration’s drive toward war in Iraq.

In times of war, governments typically call for national unity, shared sacrifice, and gestures of egalitarianism (despite tendencies to repress dissent). The federal government imposed estate taxes to pay for the Civil War and Spanish-American War. During both World Wars, union membership grew substantially with government encouragement. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson pushed through massive new social programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

But Bush’s economically ineffective program is virtually a declaration of domestic class war. “The only effect [of Bush’s proposals] is to make the very rich richer,” argues Nobel Prize-winning economist Franco Modigliani of MIT, “and the richer you are, the more you benefit.” It’s a “weapon of mass destruction aimed at middle-income households,” says fellow Nobelist Daniel McFadden of the University of California-Berkeley. It will “exacerbate the problem of inequality,” says Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, another Nobelist. “Rather than being a net stimulus, it may harm the economy in the short run and certainly will harm it in the long term.”

Yet in a disturbing way, Bush’s war at home complements, rather than contradicts, a war abroad. Both are part of an escalating ideological crusade to remake the world as a US-dominated haven for corporations and the very rich, while undermining the role of government in providing anything but protection for those corporate interests. That effort includes bending the policies of other governments against the will of their citizens and transforming international institutions, from the UN Security Council and NATO to the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, into instruments of US policy — or else threatening to dismantle them. Saddam Hussein is a conveniently demonic target, even if the administration has failed to make the case that he is an imminent threat to anyone other than his own citizens. But the ultimate point of war against Iraq — far more than the oil interests of the region or national security — is to assert American power.

This new American empire is not a classic imperial quest for control of other territory, even though it is driven by the self-interest of an American corporate and financial elite. Rather, it reflects the use of political and military power on behalf of ideology — a radical pro-corporate, anti-government, free-market fundamentalism. In many ways, this ideology mirrors the archaic and dangerous fundamentalism of the erstwhile Taliban and al-Qaida, a zealous quest for ideological empire that justifies violent means and tolerates no disagreement.

The empire builders of the Bush regime would like the world to think the choice is between their empire and the “axis of evil,” when the real choices before the world are — or should be — more numerous. Bush strategists also see war abroad as a way of providing political cover for the president in conducting the war at home, the domestic front of a long-standing global effort to enforce a free market fundamentalism that includes government austerity, privatization and deregulation.

The heart of Bush’s domestic programs are tax cuts highly skewed to the rich. Besides proposing to eliminate taxation of dividends, Bush outlined three new tax-sheltered savings vehicles that will mainly benefit the very affluent. He would make permanent the 2001 tax cuts (including income tax rate cuts and elimination of the estate tax). In addition, the administration promises to deliver a costly adjustment to the “alternative minimum tax.” A host of other tax cuts include an expensive refundable tax credit for buying private health insurance, which is part of Bush’s multifaceted effort to further privatize health care. The same federal money would be far more productively spent on expanding and improving Medicare to cover everyone.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that Bush’s new tax cuts will cost more than $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years — and the cost to the federal budget of some proposals would continue to escalate even beyond that time. Taken together, the tax cuts enacted or proposed since Bush took office would cost $4.4 trillion, a proportionately far bigger revenue loss than Reagan’s policies of the early ’80s. But even this understates the costs, because many state taxes, tied to federal policies, also have been placed on the chopping block.

Having come into office with a large budget surplus, the administration projects a record deficit of $300 billion this year — not counting the cost of a war. More serious, however, is that even Bush’s own budget proposals forecast a deficit of $200 billion a year after the economy recovers. That gaping hole doesn’t include many tax cuts, and it completely excludes the cost of a war in Iraq and subsequent occupation. Running a short-term deficit to stimulate the economy can make sense — especially if policy-makers direct government spending (or tax cuts) to low-income households or to accelerating needed public and private investment. But the long-term structural deficits put in place by Bush’s programs would be a drag on the economy, most notably through increasing interest rates.

Despite the administration’s rhetoric, the point of the tax cuts is not really to stimulate the economy. Rather, the aim is to shift the burden of taxes away from investment income and toward either taxation of consumption — which the president’s Council of Economic Advisers advocates as a replacement for the income tax — or toward a less progressive income tax. In either case, the rich benefit enormously and almost exclusively, since much of the investment income that goes to middle-income households, such as in pension plans, is already tax-sheltered (and the poor have no investment income).

But beyond being regressive and unfair, this shift of the tax burden will make it harder to win future support for government programs. Less money will be available to government, and that money will be drawn more heavily from those who have the least. This is the heart of the administration’s strategy, as increasing numbers of conservative commentators, including Nobel Prize-winners Milton Friedman and Gary Becker have made clear.

Whatever damage is done to the economy and the social fabric is all worthwhile, they argue, because huge structural deficits will force the government to cut spending and shrink. For example, Becker wrote in his Business Week column, “Deficits created by lower tax rates may be the only effective way to curb the perpetual desire of politicians and interest groups to increase outlays on their favorite projects.”

Add in the rise in military spending, the uncalculated costs of war in Iraq, and burgeoning “homeland security” spending (especially if there is backlash from US attacks on Iraq), and both the deficits and crunch on government social spending deepen. That will make it hard to protect what exists, let alone enact new and needed initiatives. The lessons from decades of tax and budget politics seem clear. Running campaigns against tax increases is more potent than championing balanced budgets, the old Republican mainstream conservative position now adopted by most Democrats — who should instead be championing progressive taxation and more spending on crucial social needs.

Bush’s budget for the current fiscal year proposed slashing many already underfunded programs. He wanted to effectively cut job training, Head Start, public housing vouchers, low-income heating assistance, aid to dislocated workers, youth training, and childcare funding, to name just a few. Overall, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates, Bush is proposing to cut more than 4 percent from programs targeted to low-income households.

Next year’s budget would continue to pare back the same social programs. Under the guise of increasing state flexibility, it would cut funding for Medicaid, says Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There will be new, stricter standards of eligibility for many programs that help low-income families. The limits set under federal voucher programs to help low-income renters would be turned into price floors, squeezing those who are most vulnerable and increasing homelessness.

Funding for education would increase but still be $6 billion less than Bush promised in his “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Bush’s proposal to add new prescription drug benefits to Medicare, but limit them to people who choose private health care plans, would undermine the current system of guaranteeing the same coverage for all Medicare beneficiaries. Worse, the plan would restrict the options available to people on Medicare who need benefits the most.

The failure of the Bush administration to offer any aid to financially troubled states and localities, while worsening their fiscal crisis through new tax cuts, also will result in the deep erosion of important public services. Combined with layoffs of state and local government workers, such retrenchment not only hurts needy families, but further depresses a shaky economy. State governments face deficits estimated as high as $85 billion for the upcoming state fiscal year, equivalent to nearly one-fifth of state revenues, but nearly all of them are forced to balance their budgets. One result of the conservative abandonment of government responsibilities to the states — almost certainly intentional — will be deeper cutbacks in any government role except that of the police and military.

The combined federal and state deficits will grow under the Bush plan, thus setting up a potentially lethal collision with the needs of Social Security and Medicare in years to come. While the threat of Social Security shortfalls has been widely overstated, Bush’s tax cuts and deficit strategy add to the difficulties in assuring that Social Security will be adequately funded. But conservatives hope to exploit a crisis in order to privatize Social Security, destroying the bedrock of America’s modest experiments in social democracy.

Bush has already made it clear that the war at home — often linked with the “war against terrorism” — is directed toward unions: He intervened in the West Coast longshore workers’ contract dispute last fall, moved to deny union rights to many federal workers, and plans to privatize the jobs of 1 million federal workers.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay underscored that offensive with his January letter — which he subsequently denied authorizing — on behalf of the anti-union National Right to Work Foundation. In a striking inversion of reality, DeLay claimed that “union bosses strive to use the war on terror as a cover for a new drive for power.” The letter with his signature said that the “power grab” by Big Labor “presents a clear-and-present danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our Armed Forces overseas.”

Some Bush administration strategists justify a pre-emptive strike against Iraq as a “liberation” effort through which the United States would impose a new democratic regime that would spread throughout the Middle East. But the attacks on democracy at home make such claims to spread democracy overseas ring hollow. Likewise, the failure of the United States to provide substantial aid to Afghanistan once again illustrates how this administration is interested only in wielding military power. Rosy projections about Iraq’s future seem dubious at best.

The record, going back long before Bush, is clear: Washington is quite willing to tolerate friendly tyrants, even if it slightly prefers docile, nominally democratic regimes that bow to US influence and the dictates of global financial markets.

The real agenda, however, is not democracy. The Bush administration’s agenda is to assert the political and military supremacy of the United States to advance the cause of free market, corporate fundamentalism. The war in Iraq fits neatly into that strategy. So does the war at home.

Source: In These Times