According to the New York Times, George W. Bush took "full responsibility" for the slow federal response to the Katrina disaster. Apology accepted, Captain Bush.

On a more serious note, Bush's acceptance of responsibility reminds me of Richard Nixon's acceptance of responsibility for the Watergate mess: words meant to sound repentant but spoken with no intention of doing anything different or correcting the behavior that caused the problem.

Acceptance of responsibility means more than merely mouthing words; it means that one willingly bears the just consequences of one's malfeasance or nonfeasance, which in this case ought to be the loss of office and the disgrace that ordinarily accompanies such a breach of trust.

Nixon wouldn't resign until impeachment and loss of office were inevitable. It looks like Bush is following the same philosophy: apologize but stay the course.

The Bush administration is demonizing Iran's Islamic government. There can be no other reason than to prepare the American people for military action against Iran. Like the propaganda campaign against Iraq leading up to the invasion of that unfortunate nation, the current one is a mixture of half-truths and outright lies. Once Washington has decided to attack, Iran's compliance with U.N. resolutions will protect Iran to the same extent that Saddam's compliance with U.N. resolutions protected Iraq. One can only hope the American people and the Congress see through this (neo-) con game in time to avert another disaster.

Today is the day when the nation's mind turns to Katrina, the lives lost, the inconceivable destruction--not only of people's homes but also their hopes and dreams--and profound disappointment and disgust at the response of the Bush administration before and after the catastrophe. In every single aspect, Bush failed. Even the administration's spinmeisters were incompetent. The usual CYA propaganda from Washington was not only ineffective; it was infuriating.

Bush fooled a large part of this nation into believing that we could invade Iraq on the cheap, cut taxes for the wealthy and shrink government without having to endure the cost of a war, a burgeoning deficit, inadequate public services and decaying infrastructure.

Bush lied. Katrina exposed the lie and showed him to be a liar, along with the rest of his administration and the Republican majority in Congress. There is no truth in them.

When Bush became president, FEMA was a cabinet-level department, staffed with experienced and capable managers, and adequately funded to handle serious national disasters. When Katrina struck, some four and a half years after this nation entrusted itself to the care of George W. Bush, FEMA was a cash-starved shell of its previous self, staffed by political hacks, without access to the president, and as a consequence totally incompetent and unwilling to do what needed to be done before and after Katrina. By August 2005, the agency personnel who knew what to do had left in frustration, as life and death matters came to be decided on political grounds, rather than mission requirements.

The pattern has been repeated throughout the federal government. Bush has nothing but contempt for competence; loyalty to the administration is everything. Cabinet-level departments are being run by politically reliable appointees who know nothing about the organizations they are supposed to manage. It takes years and years to develop expertise within a government agency , but less than four years to destroy it. Whoever succeeds Bush, Republican or Democrat, will be faced with the almost impossible task of restoring these agencies to functioning.

To the folks in Mississippi who feel they must be loyal to the Republican Party: It's OK to be loyal to a football team that has losing seasons, because that kind of loyalty is harmless and enjoyable. It's OK to be loyal to your family and friends because we are bound to them by ties that make their welfare a part of our welfare.

A political party, however, is not a family; It's not a football team. Its actions have consequences far beyond family, friends and football team. Our loyalty to a political party ought to depend entirely on how competently and honestly it carries on the work of the people. There is no place for sentimentality or foolish loyalty to a den of thieves, and that is what the Republican Party has shown itself to be, time and time again since 1994 when it took control of both houses of Congress.

In 2000, FEMA was a cabinet-level functioning agency that would have made a huge difference before and after Katrina had struck. The proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof. Bush destroyed FEMA and did not replace it with anything else that could have fulfilled its mission. One year after Katrina, New Orleans is unprepared for another major hurricane and the Mississippi Gulf Coast is still a shambles with little prospect of rapid recovery. The facts speak for themselves; New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast are not priorities for the Bush administration.

The resources that should have been devoted to rebuilding the devastation and preparing for future hurricanes were and are being poured down a rathole on the other side of the world, with nothing to show for it but high gas prices and body-bags being shipped into Dover AFB under cover of darkness. It is time to wake up and smell the latrine. George W. Bush, his administration, and his party are no friends of Mississippi.

Greg Palast reveals more of the corruption and criminal negligence of the Bush administration on Katrina.

The Bush Administration just can't get away from the notion that if it decides you are a terrorist, you have no rights, not even the right to contest your terrorist status. The latest episode in this struggle is the refusal of the administration to even consider allowing defendants on trial for terrorism to see the evidence against them. The Justice Department, in the wake of Hamdi, is drawing up rules and procedures for trials and ignoring the input of military lawyers that permitting secret evidence in trial is a violation of the Geneva Accords and risks being declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The idea that the government can declare you a terrorist and strip you of your rights without recourse strikes at the very heart of the American idea of justice. We rebelled against the British in great part because of the abuses of executive power. Bush wants to find the Guantanimo prisoners guilty before trial, and convert what should be fair and impartial trials into mockeries of justice. For extensive background on the right to confrontation against one's accusers, see Justice Scalia's opinion in Crawford v. Washington, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the absolute right of a defendant to cross-examine his accusers in open court.

Once again, Bush believes that he is above the law. Can the republic survive this administration? Are enough people even concerned?

The Boston Globe: Military Lawyers See Limits on Trial Input (The title is deceiving. The article discusses Bush's intention of dominating the workings of the military courts, including the independence of military lawyers.)

By way of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal via the Carpetbagger Report via the Daily Kos, the Fellowship Baptist Church in Saltillo, Mississippi, voted not to approve blacks as members during a scheduled Sunday night business meeting Aug. 6. A 12-year old boy of mixed race who was converted in the church at a revival sought to become a member, but the church was afraid that he might come with his people, and they couldn't have that. The pastor, Rev. John Stevens resigned that night in protest.

When I was in high school in Jackson, my church, Central Presbyterian on West Capitol Street, was the target of a civil rights effort to integrate white churches in the city. I remember that my father, one of the leaders in the church, argued in favor of seating them when they came, but he was overruled, so when they arrived, accompanied by a crowd of reporters and photographers, there was a solid wall of elders and deacons across the front of the church that refused to let them in. It was not our proudest moment. They were refused by nearly all the churches in Jackson. St. Andrews Episcopal Church seated them, but they left almost immediately.

The Bible makes it extremely clear that the kingdom makes no distinction of persons. At Central we frequently sang from the Presbyterian Hymnal the hymn "In Christ there is no East or West," but I guess people didn't bother to think about what they were singing. That very hymn is undoubtedly contained in the hymnbook that sits in the pews of Fellowship Baptist Church. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian is contained in their Bibles, just as it is in ours. Acts 8: 27-39. Given sufficient emotional (and financial) investment, however, the human mind can easily convince itself that fair is foul and foul is fair.

So the stench of bigotry hovers through the filthy air.

I have always been fascinated by the conflict in U.S. business between long-term organizational cultivation and making a quick buck. Today, the dominant philosophy is the quick buck or the overnight millionaire, and I suspect that the incentives are structural, which is a subject for another time. The result, however, of this mindset is not pretty: infrastructure decay, downsizing, unemployment, underemployment, and the rise in stress-related disorders such as depression and eating disorders, all forms of externalization of costs by corporations pressured to maintain the bottom line and the price of their stock.

It was therefore of particular interest that one European business school teaches its students how to run a business for the long haul, the University of Navarre's business school, Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (ISCE). The school was established by Opus Dei, of Da Vinci Code notoriety.

ISCE is ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit (part of The Economist Group) as the number one business school in the world. It's philosophy is in many respects the opposite of the U.S. model. Loyal employees are the most valuable asset of a firm. Turnover is costly. Employees are people, not merely "resources." Running a business ought to be for the long term and not the quick buck. Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, writes:

Why a caring culture makes sense for IESE is pretty apparent: Emphasizing the long term, the school is interested in the personal transformation of its students and building closer relationships with them, and is willing to make the difficult economic trade-offs to convert noble sentiments into reality.

The school caps enrollment in its senior-level programs at 35 students, a remarkably low figure compared with most American schools. Forty percent of the alumni are alumni association members, even though Europe has less of a tradition of private philanthropy and provides fewer tax advantages for giving.

There are big lessons in this for U.S. companies, which have long resisted allowing more of their workers' lives inside their boundaries. Our CEOs pay lip service to the importance of both customer and employee loyalty, but they frequently overlook the importance of personal relationships and connections, and rarely consider the idea of doing more for people than what is formally expected.

Take, for instance, U.K.-based Innovation Group, a 1,000-employee, publicly held insurance software company. During the 1990s, executive board member Ed Ossie rebuilt MTW - now a subsidiary - increasing sales from $8 million to more than $40 million in about four years.

During this same time, annual employee turnover fell from an industry-typical 30 percent to just 4 percent. Ossie credits much of that to a culture of community he built among employees.

—Management Tips from Opus Dei (CNNMoney.com)

Although companies can succeed in the present monetary, economic and regulatory climate by long-term thinking, the pressure and temptations of our contemporary business culture make it very difficult for a CEO to do so. This situation can only be remedied by structural change that eliminates the incentives to make a quick buck and rewards management that builds an organization for the long-term.

Wikipedia on ISCE

While on vacation, I read the news that a federal judge in Detroit had found that Bush did not have the authority under FISA or the U. S. Constitution to order warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, but it was only today that I downloaded a copy of ACLU v. NSA from the district court site and read through it.

It seems clear to me that the Department of Justice came into this case believing that it could rely on the national security privilege to have the case dismissed. The technique had worked many times in the past, as Judge Taylor pointed out in her 44-page opinion. There was a big difference in this case, however: the administration had already admitted that it had spied on American citizens without authorization from the FISA court, and therefore the necessary elements of the plaintiffs' case were not state secrets. Having admitted that it engaged in the proscribed actions, it was forced to rely upon the president's "inherent" powers. As the court put it, "The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself."

When the issue is put that way, the obvious answer is "no," and, sure enough, the judge made short shrift of that argument:

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

We have seen in Hamdi that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution is fully applicable to the Executive branch’s actions and therefore it can only follow that the First and Fourth Amendments must be applicable as well. In the Youngstown case the same “inherent powers” argument was raised and the Court noted that the President had been created Commander in Chief of only the military, and not of all the people, even in time of war. Indeed, since Ex Parte Milligan, we have been taught that the “Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace. . . .” Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 120 (1866).Again, in Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, we were taught that no emergency can create power.

FISA provides criminal penalties for violations. It now appears that Bush has, by admitting he eavesdropped on American citizens in violation of the act and further by announcing that he planned to continue doing so, confessed his criminality.

The question now is whether anything will be done about it.

After a few days on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, we have returned to the hot, murky atmosphere of the Deep South, taking refuge in air conditioning and hoping for an early fall. Fat chance.

By way of Feral Scholar, Counterpunch ran an article by historian Gabriel Kolko, "Bankers Fear World Economic Meltdown." Kolko seems to know what he is talking about. Financial derivatives and hedge funds have put literally trillions of dollars at risk, all enabled by low interests rates. Scary.

Juan Cole has a very interesting post on his blog on the geopolitics of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The comments are thoughtful and knowledgeable.

Juan Cole: One Ring to Rule Them

In the wake of the arrests of would-be bombers in Britain and Pakistan, I wonder which additional constitutional rights the Bush administration will ask us to give up for the illusion of security? The Fourth Amendment is pretty-well shredded, the Fifth Amendment is under attack, and the Sixth Amendment right to a trial and confrontation of witnesses has already been declared null and void if the administration says you are a terrorist. We just have to wait and see.

Orion Magazine has a fascinating article on how factory workers were able to take over shuttered factories closed by economic policies imposed on the Argentinean government by the IMF and turn them into cooperatives. This is a moving story of steadfastness and ingenuity borne of desperation.

The Silent Revolution

Yours truly is leaving his job with the Federal Government and has been spending all his time writing a huge appellate brief on behalf of a person convicted (wrongly, I believe) of bank robbery. The posts will be sparse to non-existent for a couple more days. There's much to comment about. The disaster that is Israel-Lebanon is beginning to sink in around the world, but especially in Israel. Occupying hostile territory is a loser, no matter what kind of a spin you put on it. Israel has been sowing dragons' teeth a long time and the harvest will not be put off forever.

Tying the minimum wage to a cut in the estate tax takes the prize as the most cynical act this year by the Republican house leadership, and that's saying something.

It's hot in America and temperatures are significantly higher that in the past—statistically significant. Will it take another Katrina or a dust bowl to convince the power elite in this nation that something has to be done, or will it take an environmental disaster of more catastrophic proportions? Wait and see.

It looks as though net neutrality is safe for the time being, but look for the telecoms to be back next year with their legions of lobbyists. Now that the net has become a gigantic river of commerce, the telecoms want to become the robber barons on the banks of that river, extracting tolls upon every packet going past.

Robber baron castle on Rhine (1969)