At issue is Mr. Bush's willingness to demand financing from Congress on his signature "compassionate conservative" issues, like education reform and AIDS, with the same energy he has spent to fight for tax cuts and the Iraq war. Critics say the pattern has been consistent: The president, in eloquent [sic] speeches that make headlines, calls for millions or even billions of dollars for new initiatives, then fails to follow through and push hard for the programs on Capitol Hill.

On a proposal this summer to extend a $400-a-child tax credit to low-income families, Mr. Bush at first demanded that Congress appropriate the money, then backed off in the face of opposition from his conservative allies in the House, most notably the majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. …

Financing for another item on Mr. Bush's compassion agenda, the national volunteer program called AmeriCorps, faltered this summer under similar opposition from Mr. DeLay. Although Mr. Bush forcefully called for expanding that Clinton-era program in his 2002 State of the Union address, he was largely silent last month amid objections to a $100 million emergency infusion that it needed to maintain its current level of operations. …

… In January 2002, with great fanfare, Mr. Bush signed his No Child Left Behind Act, a landmark bill that mandated annual testing of children in Grades 3 through 8 and greatly enlarged the federal role in public education. Democrats like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California were crucial to its passage, and say they went along with the president on his assurances that the government would give states enough money to comply with it. But the White House has now asked for $12 billion to continue that financing next year, $6 billion less than the legislation authorizes. "We raised this in the Oval Office, we raised this in our meetings with the president," Mr. Miller said. "He assured us that the funds would be there if the reforms were there. This is calculated conservatism, and they calculate just as much as they can get away with. You can dress it all up, but at the end of the day he broke his promise. It's not much more complicated than that."

… Last month …, the president toured Africa and heavily promoted his recently enacted bill to fight global AIDS, a measure that authorizes spending of $3 billion a year for five years. "I'm here to say you will not be alone in your fight," Mr. Bush said on July 12 in Nigeria, to applause. … But that very week in Washington, the White House asked for only $2 billion, $1 billion less than authorized, for the first of the five years.

[I]nternational brow-beating over exchange rates can be risky and dangerous for all countries concerned. Charlene Barshefsky, who was the United States trade representative under President Bill Clinton, said that China's exchange rate was a legitimate issue, but she warned against formal accusations of unfair trade practices. "These trade actions are very costly to bring and success is not assured," she said. "The U.S. is now getting as good as it gets and has become the most prominent country against which antidumping rules are brought, to the detriment of our exporters."

But boards are also spending more time in making decisions and monitoring their companies' dealings because of a realization that they failed to head off accounting blow-ups that shattered reputations and opened up some directors' to litigation by shareholders. The shenanigans seen at such companies as [Enron and Worldcom] left investors with a sullied image of many directors as sleepy, inept or hopelessly conflicted.

[W]hen directors start making over $200,000 a year to sit on company boards they might become more reluctant to ask difficult questions. At much above $200,000, directors would be getting nearly $1,000 an hour, based on Elson's 240 hours estimate. "The fear is that someone begins to depend on this thing as their full-time income and that is when they are no longer monitors, they become management[.]"

As the takeover market has warmed up over the past six months, time and again the shares of buyout targets have jumped on big volume before acquisition news. The unavoidable explanation: Individuals familiar with corporate dealings are trading on their privileged knowledge. The unfortunate result: Honest investors selling to crafty buyers-in-the-know during those rallies are getting cheated out of hefty gains that they could have enjoyed following the buyout news.

… If you’re an investor, the sting of selling shares just ahead of a pop from buyout news is compounded by the thought that the person who bought your shares had inside knowledge of the deal. Given the unusual volume and price action in targets right before takeover news, it’s safe to assume some of those buyers knew something. Does this pattern suggest Wall Street is as corrupt as ever?

… The damage from that fraud goes beyond investors who hand over their shares too cheaply to potential illegal insider traders. A more ominous risk hangs in the air. If too many investors think the markets are still crooked, they’ll simply put less cash in the stock market. That, in turn, harms one of the main engines of our economic system, a well-oiled market machine that efficiently transfers capital from investors to the managers with the best business plans.

While $1 million is a negligible amount for Citigroup, which operates in more than 100 countries and is known for delivering mammoth profits, the NYSE action is nevertheless a black eye. "We are pleased to have the matter resolved,'' said Smith Barney spokeswoman Mary Ellen Hillery.

"Put simply," Rey has said, "We should start with the premise that a policy cannot be good for the environment if it is bad for people."

…Fitzsimmons wrote a memo suggesting that "public recreational benefit is the principal reason for conserving natural features." … In one 1999 paper, published by the Political Economy Research Center, Fitzsimmons declared that "The main problem is that ecosystems are not real... Ecosystems are only mental constructs, not real, discrete, or living things on the landscape. The second problem is that even if they were real, we have no idea of what their 'health' or 'integrity' might mean."

… The author of "A Consumer's Guide to Environmental Myths and Realities," Scarlett cites the following as common myths about the environment: Disposables Are Bad; We Are Running Out of Resources; Americans Are Especially Wasteful; etc. … Scarlett wrote, "Environmentalism is a coherent ideology that rivals Marxism in its challenge to the classic liberal view of government as protector of individual rights."

Of Gale Norton, Sansonetti has said, "She understands the system. She is very good on national park issues and on Endangered Species Act law. There won't be any biologists or botanists...to come in and pull the wool over her eyes."

"The biggest disaster now facing ranchers is not nature," Myers said in a speech before the cattlemen's association, "but a flood of regulations designed to turn the West into little more than a theme park."

In a speech before the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia, Smith said, "The biggest challenge is going to be how to best utilize taxpayer dollars to the benefit of industry."

Tony Blair recommended that a claim Saddam Hussein could produce an "improvised nuclear device" within a few months be reinstated in the Iraq dossier, just days before its publication, evidence revealed this weekend. … The evidence of Mr Blair's intervention is damaging for the government, which has consistently denied claims it "sexed up" the dossier. … The government has consistently maintained that the dossier was an objective intelligence assessment of the risks posed by Mr Hussein, rather than a politically driven manifesto for war. A briefing note to Mr Blair from Alastair Campbell, his head of communications, advised him to tell MPs that Downing Street had had limited involvement. … The documents shed new light on why Mr Blair ignored advice from Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, to make it clear the government had no evidence Iraq posed a threat. Mr Campbell's reply to Mr Powell did not deny his assertion. The head of communications suggested the dossier did not need to spell out the absence of a threat because it was designed to make the argument for war, rather than set out the case for and against.

Estimates of the cost of the war are rough. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has told the Senate the "burn rate" runs about $3.9 billion a month. Afghanistan, together with Noble Eagle, the protective overflights of military jets in the US, costs another $1.1 billion a month. Members of Congress have asked the Bush administration for a detailed breakout of those costs. They also would like to get a guess on the bill for reconstruction of Iraq. But these numbers have not been forthcoming.

… Looking at Iraq alone, one congressional expert puts the cost for this fiscal year (ending next month) at $80 billion, of which $62 million is charged to the Defense Department. That works out to $281 per man, woman, and child in this country. This sum doesn't include the extra gasoline and other fuel costs, nor Afghanistan. … Restoring basic services, such as electricity (a $13 billion cost, by one estimate) and water ($16 billion), is considered essential to dampening Iraqi unrest. Broader reconstruction is an open-ended project. … Conservative estimates of reconstruction costs run about $100 billion. That's on top of the $3.9 billion per month of US defense spending. The cost to maintain a peacekeeper in the Balkans amounts to between $200,000 and $250,000 per year. Peacekeepers (troops) in Iraq won't likely be cheaper. Last year, William Nordhaus, a Yale University economist, calculated that under certain conditions, a "protracted and unfavorable" war and its aftermath could cost as much as $1.9 trillion.

… Moreover, because restoration of Iraqi oil production has been slowed by sabotage and other problems, US consumers and business are paying probably an extra $100 million a day for gasoline and other petroleum products.

I can't help but contrast this sense of urgency and political realism with the happy talk coming from Washington. The federal budget deficit is nearing $500 billion, more than 50 percent bigger than the $304 billion deficit that was forecast early this year. That doesn't include the full costs of the war in Iraq, for which the administration still hasn't provided detailed numbers. Estimates range from Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer's recent prediction of up to $100 billion over the next three years to a Brookings Institution forecast of $300 billion to $450 billion.

Does the Bush administration plan to raise taxes to pay for the war? Does it plan to cut spending? Or does it just plan to wing it and hope for the best? That would ignore the one clear lesson of Vietnam, which is that if you decide to go to war, you have to pay for it -- or risk the damage of severe inflation.

But the Bush administration apparently thinks it is exempt from the laws of economics. It can wage war, cut taxes, spend what it likes -- and worry later about the consequences. That choice is not open to the nation's governors. Their unanimous cry for help should be a wake-up call to the White House.

Mr. Reischauer, an economist who is president of the Urban Institute, said: "If you think the new drug benefit is essential and more important to the future of the nation than the deleterious effects of larger deficits, you support it. The political consequences of increased deficits will pale in comparison with the benefits that politicians get from enacting drug coverage."

… Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said Republicans had aggravated the need for borrowing by cutting taxes. "It is really only a matter of priorities," Mr. Harkin said. "This administration and Congress had no qualms about passing enormous tax cuts for millionaires, but now we have problems coming up with adequate funds for our nation's seniors."

Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group, said, "There's a rational case to be made for adding a drug benefit to Medicare as a matter of health policy." But he added: "The political consensus in favor of fiscal discipline has totally broken down. Creating a major new entitlement at the same time you're cutting taxes would have been inconceivable just a few years ago."

The US-led coalition aims to help Iraq move "from a centrally planned economy, dominated by value-destroying, state-owned enterprises to a free market," says Paul Bremer, the top US civilian administrator. … "We are evaluating all of the state-owned enterprises to see which ones should be closed immediately," said Bremer, adding that a "well-financed, well-functioning safety net" would ensure workers who lose their jobs are not left behind. … Tens of billions of dollars will be required over the next four years to rebuild Iraq's economy and make the transition from a socialist to a market system. To foot the bill, Washington seeks to increase Iraq's crude-oil production to the prewar levels of 2.5 million to 3 million barrels per day by the early part of next year. In the long run, Iraq's estimated 112 billion barrels of oil reserves - the world's second largest - are expected to drive the economic recovery.

That tremendous diversity suggests to me that the 86 percent of pay variation that can't be explained by either company size or company performance might be explained by what Freud called superego controls -- or by what theologians and ethicists call conscience. If a CEO can't control his monetary appetites, then his board offers about as much resistance as a bunch of papier mache cutouts.

Republicans in Congress and the White House badly need businesses to start hiring. Economic growth has to happen before next year's elections and it has to involve investment-driven job creation by risk-takers.

"The expansion of production led to a modest narrowing of the output gap - the difference between actual and potential output. Capacity utilisation edged from 74.2 per cent to 74.5 per cent. This still leaves US companies with substantial spare capacity, which is expected to constrain companies' investment and hiring."

One key fact to have emerged from the regulatory clampdown is that co-operation is critical to the outcome for those being investigated. It is not up to LaBranche to say what e-mails the NYSE should review and its defiance can have one of only three causes. The e-mails might be incriminating, or it is using the probe as an excuse to try to oust Mr Grasso. Finally, LaBranche does not trust NYSE officials not to leak e-mails. If the e-mails are trouble, LaBranche should sacrifice the individuals responsible and try to survive. Otherwise, it has picked the wrong stage for its showdown and is creating the impression it has something to hide. Regulators have to be accorded respect in the new enforcement world, or else chaos ensues - as happened last year when the Securities and Exchange Commission lost its standing while state regulators questioned its ability and leadership.

Reports have suggested too that the days of Robert Luciano, a Merrill board member with ties to those removed, are numbered. But wait: is that not the whole point of beefed-up independent boards? Imperial chief executives are supposed to be scrutinised by boards no longer stocked with cronies. Good governance at Merrill might be strengthened by Mr Luciano, even welcomed by investors.

Richard Bernstein, a strategist at Merrill, says many institutions appraise their staff monthly these days - yearly used to be common at one time - and so there is pressure to look for volatile, day-trading-style, gains in the market. This is followed by after-the-fact analysis of a company's fundamentals. "What drives stock prices up is that they are going up," says Mr Bernstein.

Now, the U.S. government is going after Fippinger with a vengeance, saying she owes at least $10,000 in fines for violating U.S. sanctions that prohibit "virtually all direct or indirect commercial, financial or trade transactions with Iraq." But Fippinger has refused to pay the fines, claiming that the only money she spent while in Iraq was for food and emergency supplies - hardly major international trade. … It seems extremely unlikely that the government is actually applying the Iraq sanctions to Fippinger based on her supposed "trade" with Iraq, as it claims. Her tiny purchases are simply not the kind of trade the sanctions contemplate. Rather, these sanctions were meant to be enforced against those who illegally exported to, imported from, and did business with Saddam Hussein's government, thus propping it up. They were meant, that is, to primarily target corporations, businesses, and business persons. Fippinger is none of these. … To apply trade sanctions to Fippinger, therefore seems at best absurd, and at worst, pretextual. What really bothers the government can't be the few bandages or meals she bought. Instead, it must be what she said, and the fact that the media has listened to her.

Who wins when the financial market-place seduces us to adopt double standards?

Just in whose interest is it, for the UK population to be up to its eyeballs in debt?

How does our childhood shape our views on money and why are these attitudes so difficult to shift?

Just what is social capital and how rich can it make us?

If God made the land for the people, why do we have so little of it?

In ‘Root Of All Evil? How To Make Spiritual Values Count’ award winning columnist and author Antonia Swinson shows us how we can make our spiritual values count, even if we are, as in the UK, crushed between an enduring feudal social order, and a rampant US style market economy. In this personal journey through the world of modern finance and entrenched vested interests, Swinson dares to challenge the financial establishment which has enslaved the post war generations to Mammon and charts an escape route back to financial salvation.

1.Introduction

2.The Childhood of Money

3.Debt: The Spiritual Danger of A Four Letter Word

4.The True Price of a Lousy Work life Balance

5.God Made the Land For The People ... (& why Jesus was nearly thrown off a cliff.)

6.Why Markets Need God, More Than He Needs Them.

7.Ethical Business — Oxymoron or Hope?

8.Heh Big Spender! Ethical Investing, Shopping & Eating.

9.The Spending Power of Social Capital - If You’ve Got It Flaunt It!.

10.Conclusion

The world may need to make even more drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought, one of the UK's leading climate scientists warns on Thursday. New research by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Research has found that the capacity of soil and vegetation to absorb carbon dioxide could become saturated over the next few decades, according to a paper published on Thursday by the Institute for Public Policy Research. The loss of this "buffering effect" from soil and vegetation means that "we will only be allowed to emit half as much as we thought" in order to stabilise carbon dioxide concentrations, according to Geoff Jenkins, the Hadley Centre's head of climate prediction.

… In another paper published by the IPPR, Margaret Beckett, environment secretary, said that the "predicted dire consequences and irreversibility of climate change" means that temperatures should not be allowed to rise by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The government is pressing Russia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which is "something we believe is in their interests as well as the globe's". But she warned that "more radical action will be needed and much deeper cuts in greenhouse gases must be realised if the most severe adverse impacts of climate change are to be avoided".

The contract announced yesterday ends more than six months of tense negotiations between the Navy and the contractors. "It's been a challenging negotiation," said John Young, assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition. The deal provides a welcome financial underpinning for the companies, General Dynamics said in a prepared statement. "The two shipyards now will have [a] stable workload," said Michael W. Toner, executive vice president of General Dynamics Marine Systems group.

His speech, followed by lunch with about 200 Marines and sailors, was the first stop on a two-day swing through Southern California. This evening, he attended a $2,000-per-person fundraiser at the San Diego Convention Center that was anticipated to draw an audience of about 500 and raise about $1 million, a campaign spokeswoman said. It was his second fundraiser this week and it be followed by one Friday in Irvine that the campaign predicted would generate about the same amount of money. Bush raised a total of $5.2 million at two previous California fundraisers -- in San Francisco and Los Angeles -- on a single day in late June. Vice President Cheney already has held a half-dozen fundraisers for the campaign this month.

The Bush administration has been reluctant to give the United Nations more than minimal authority in the reconstruction of Iraq. Many administration members say that France, Germany, Russia and other countries demanding such a role are actually doing so to try to get more contracts and economic benefits for themselves.

American military officials say they fear that involving the United Nations, even indirectly, will hamper the latitude the United States must have in overseeing Iraqi security and pursuing anti-American guerrilla forces or terrorist actions. The Pentagon said today that besides the United States and Britain, the other countries that have already sent troops to Iraq are Albania, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and Ukraine. The troops in Iraq serve under American and British command, and so would the troops of any other countries that took part. In addition, another dozen countries have been asked to help with forces to protect and carry out relief. They include Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Portugal and Thailand.

The centuries-old mercenary trade has morphed into an immensely profitable corporate enterprise, complete with boards of directors, stockholders, and substantial returns on investment. And the post-cold-war period has spawned a slew of former military types with access to global arms bazaars. These latter-day soldiers of fortune are working for firms ready to roll, provided the price is right. … Singer worries that the current rush to privatize runs the risk of cutting crucial corners. For-profit firms, he warns, may be cost-effective, but they are largely unaccountable, with plenty of incentives to pad their payrolls and hide their failures. Government can be notoriously inefficient, to be sure. Even so, its constitutional duty is to provide for the common defense. Those responsible for this fundamental public service, Singer says, should be fully accountable to the public. He's exactly right.

Provide insurers with a defense against damages when their conduct was compliant with a statute, regulation, finding, or order.

…Of these 57 legislators, 23 (40 percent) were affiliated with or conducted business with insurance interests. This included legislators who identified their current or previous part- or full-time occupations as "insurance", insurance agents, claims representatives, agency owners or insurance underwriters. This figure also includes legislators who were attorneys who practiced or whose firms practiced insurance law. …

… "NCOIL proposes to put the state that is most subject to political pressure - the state where an insurance company is based - in charge of market conduct regulation for that company."

NCOIL has also offered model legislation on the use of credit scoring for insurance purposes, which has been adopted by several states. The legislation would allow insurers to continue to use credit scores to grant insurance policies and establish rates, even though serious concerns have been raised about the logic of using credit history to predict consumer accident propensity (why would getting laid off in a recession make a person a worse driver?), the inaccuracy of these scores, and the disproportionate impact that this practice has on low income and minority consumers. NCOIL's model bill would only ban the use of credit scoring if it is the sole factor used in the underwriting or pricing of insurance, which means that the bill offers no protection, as credit scoring is never the sole factor used for these purposes.

… After years of effort, consumer groups persuaded the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) to adopt a credit personal property insurance model bill with a 60% loss ratio standard, which is necessary because credit insurance is added to a sale of some other product with huge, often hidden commissions being paid to the seller. Because the seller selects the insurer, not the customer, credit insurance suffers from "reverse competition" driving prices up. Thus a loss ratio limit is vital to control cost. A short time after NAIC acted to control the loss ratio, the industry went to NCOIL, who had never worked on the issue, and got them to issue a resolution opposing the loss ratio standard. If NCOIL prevails, consumers who purchase this form of credit insurance will pay millions of unnecessary dollars.

… NCOIL's Insurance Compliance Self Evaluation Privilege Model Act would give insurers a privilege of secrecy for anything they claim as "self-audit" effectively allowing the industry to shield itself from responsibility for its market conduct actions.

Advocates of a single-payer national health system dispute that. They say patients would have more choice than they do now of doctors and hospitals, which would continue to be run privately under the system they're proposing. And they contend the services received would be more comprehensive for a fraction of the cost. Currently, about 26 cents on every US health care dollar is spent on paperwork and administration. Replacing private health insurance companies with a single, government insurer like Medicare, which spends about 3 percent on administration, would save the country $200 billion dollars annually.

… Currently, the United States is the only major industrialized country that doesn't provide some kind of universal coverage, even though it spends more than 14 percent of its GNP on healthcare. According to the World Health Organization, that's more than any other in the developed world and yet it remains the only one with tens of millions of uninsured. The quality of care in the United States also fares only modestly when compared with other countries. Out of 181 rated by the WHO in 2000, the US came in 35, just two slots above Cuba.

The United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage. Yet more than 41 million Americans have no health insurance. Many more are underinsured. Confronted by the rising costs and capabilities of modern medicine, other nations have chosen national health insurance (NHI). The United States alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. In this market-driven system, insurers and providers compete not so much by increasing quality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patients and shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. This creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick. It generates huge administrative costs that, along with profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demands of business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, such as consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasing fraction of the health care dollar. We endorse a fundamental change in US health care—the creation of an NHI program. Such a program, which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare, would cover every American for all necessary medical care. An NHI program would save at least $200 billion annually (more than enough to cover all of the uninsured) by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry and reducing spending for marketing and other satellite services. Physicians and hospitals would be freed from the concomitant burdens and expenses of paperwork created by having to deal with multiple insurers with different rules, often designed to avoid payment. National health insurance would make it possible to set and enforce overall spending limits for the health care system, slowing cost growth over the long run. An NHI program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage.