Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that Zaleski [who is out front of a group of doctors who strike against liability for malpractice] may be more a source of the problem than a victim of it. Between 1987 and 2002, according to the West Virginia Board of Medicine, patients filed 14 lawsuits against Zaleski, eight of which resulted in payouts that together came to $1.7 million. … In a 1985 lawsuit (one not among the 14 reported to the Board of Medicine), he admitted in a deposition to being addicted to prescription painkillers for a substantial part of the time that he was operating on people in the early 1980s. Not only was he a drug addict, but to maintain his Percodan habit, Zaleski allegedly wrote prescriptions for other local addicts, who filled them and kicked back some pills to the doctor, according to court documents that include copies of the prescriptions and depositions from some of the addicts. … Given this history, the real scandal may not be how high Zaleski's insurance premiums are, but the fact that he can get insurance at all.

The doctors' protests aren't about good policy. They're about good politics. Although the malpractice strikes look like a natural outgrowth of physician frustration, they are, in fact, the product of a sophisticated lobbying campaign coordinated by Republican operatives and underwritten by business groups with little interest in the practice of medicine. GOP leaders view malpractice lawsuits as a pivotal issue for the 2004 campaign. With health-care costs skyrocketing on its watch, the GOP is eager to shift blame onto the Democrats, who have long enjoyed greater public trust on the issue. And doctors, who enjoy great credibility among voters, are the key. By linking rising health-care costs to frivolous medical lawsuits, Republicans can use doctors as a cudgel against trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's second-largest funding base and one which could be paralyzed by lawsuit caps. Once bills to restrict malpractice lawsuits are on the table--in Congress and in the state legislatures--Republicans can slip in much broader legal relief for corporations under the guise of bringing down health-care costs, especially for senior citizens. Frank Galitski, a former Bush campaign staffer who works with the doctors as head of the Texas Alliance for Patient Access (TAPA), a coalition of insurance companies and health-care corporations, puts it bluntly: "This is a great issue for the president, particularly in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, where they have an aging population." Indeed, if the experience in West Virginia is any indication, the GOP has found itself a winning formula.

… Studies have repeatedly shown that only 5 percent of the nation's doctors are responsible for more than half of all malpractice payouts. Yet those lawsuit-magnet practitioners generally pay the same insurance rates as doctors who've never been sued, the equivalent of giving drunks the same car insurance rates as soccer moms with perfect driving records. This practice exists among malpractice insurers partly because many of them are owned by doctors themselves, but mostly because they make their money on investments, not on claims management. As a result, the insurers have an incentive to sign up as many doctors as possible so they can invest their premiums in the stock market--a strategy which ensured that, when the economy went south they would have to begin hiking premiums sharply. The use of experience rating, like that employed by auto insurers to weed out the dangerous drivers, would reward better doctors and price those who attract the most lawsuits out of business rather than subsidizing them.

Better regulation of health care would likely reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits simply by reducing the number of medical injuries. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported that preventable medical errors kill as many as 100,000 people a year--and cause a tremendous number of lawsuits. The IOM recommended a national mandatory public error-reporting system, along with stronger requirements that doctors regularly upgrade their skills as a condition of maintaining their licenses. Error reporting would allow better data-mining that, in turn, would help the health-care industry combat mistakes more systematically by detecting problem areas and suggesting remedies. Research has already shown that surgeons who do a large volume of high-risk procedures such as bypass or delicate spine surgery make the fewest mistakes, since practice makes perfect. That's why the IOM also has recommended that such procedures be restricted only to experienced doctors at high-volume specialty facilities rather than letting any neurosurgeon in Wheeling, W. Va., try his hand at it now and then.

Yet striking doctors aren't advocating any of these proposals: Their organizational lobbyists have indeed vigorously fought such measures, even simple protocols such as marking surgical sites with a pen to avoid, say, amputating the wrong foot, as did a doctor in Florida in 1995. These days, the only solution that doctors seem to offer for any of the nation's myriad health care problems is limiting the patients' right to sue. And the Bush administration is just fine with that.

In reality, …companies with superior performance on environmental matters (as well as other social concerns) are producing better returns in the stock market for shareholders, partly because those companies face fewer environmental risks to their future profitability. … [Although] Government at present is captured or stymied by dominant economic interests and unable to make fundamental advances, especially in the regulatory system[, business is responsive to SRI investors who learn] the precise points of leverage. The connection between financial investing and environmental progress is one such point.

… SRI's edge in performance remains in contentious dispute among Wall Street bankers and brokers, and most of them, it is safe to say, still don't buy it. Environmentalists, who start from a broader understanding of what constitutes efficiency and value, may find it easier to appreciate the underlying logic. American business, despite its inventiveness and supposed obsession with efficiency, actually operates in a swamp of everyday wastefulness, as environmental thinkers have contended for years. It stands to reason that a company reducing toxic effluence from its plants, or modifying products and production processes to reduce collateral damage in nearby rivers or forests, is also engineering internal efficiencies that will be reflected in the bottom line.

Innovest, an upstart financial advisory firm[,] … has developed investment-risk ratings for 1,500 corporations, a grade that resembles the credit-risk ratings by Moody's or Standard & Poor's. In this case, a corporation's environmental performance and viability are evaluated according to 150 concrete indicators, including its liabilities for past pollution, risks of hazardous waste disposal, the energy efficiency of its production systems, exposure to future regulatory costs, and scores of other markers.

… The simple and obvious truth Innovest captures with its analysis is that companies are vastly different in how they perform and the risks they assume, even when they look alike by Wall Street's usual financial measures. … "What you're really discovering with the Innovest screen is something fundamental about the company," says Wall Street veteran Peter M. Camejo…. "A company that has a very high rating on the environment is doing everything right," he observes. "The management team has got its head on straight. They avoid litigation; they know how to handle themselves; they're thinking ahead. With a company that's very bad, that cuts corners and gets into trouble all the time, you may be discovering that they have internal management problems they don't admit to, maybe don't even recognize."

What's missing from the $400 billion figure is an accurate recognition of the mounting obligations of the Social Security system. Under current practices, Social Security reports its financial performance on a cash-flow basis: it compares annual revenues to annual costs and reports a surplus or a deficit. Last year, Social Security enjoyed a surplus of roughly $160 billion. The government used this money to mask what would otherwise have been a $560 billion federal deficit.

But even if the Social Security surplus were not used to disguise the deficit, the budget would still ignore the substantial growth in commitments to current workers and retirees. Under current law, Social Security participants and beneficiaries earned hundreds of billions of dollars of additional benefits last year. Even though future generations will almost certainly have to pay for these additional obligations, the federal budget pretends that they don't exist.

Were the federal government to account for its Social Security obligations under the rules of accrual accounting, which govern public companies, its financial outlook would be far worse. By the end of last year, the Social Security system owed retirees and current workers benefits valued at $14 trillion. The system's assets, in contrast, were only $3.5 trillion. These assets include not only the trust funds' current reserves ($1.4 trillion), but also the present value of the taxes that current workers will pay over the remainder of their working lives ($2.1 trillion).

… Accrual accounting is the gold standard for the private sector because it forces long-term liabilities to be recognized when they are incurred and can be controlled. The federal government is increasingly in the business of making long-term promises to its citizens. Until the federal government adopts principles of accounting that recognize these promises, the federal budget will remain the most misleading document in Washington. And that's saying a lot.

A number of empirical studies have shown that poorer countries experience higher levels of corruption. Badly paid officials are easily tempted by bribes, the reasoning goes, while the well paid officials in richer nations risk losing their comfortable salaries if they are caught taking backhanders. But if corruption so bedevils developing nations, how do they escape and become rich?

Daniele Paserman, an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues say they have found a simple answer. If a poor country opens up its economy to the outside world too quickly, the flow of money across its borders encourages corruption, which in turn hampers growth. … But those countries with closed economies can grow until they can afford to pay their officials well. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that free markets across borders encourage development and cut corruption. "We are highlighting one of the dangers of being more open," says Paserman. "But there are other benefits."

… In open countries [countries with free markets] there was a strong link between poverty and corruption, with poor countries far more corrupt than rich ones. But in closed countries they found no correlation. … The most plausible explanation for this disparity, says Paserman, is that in a closed country, corrupt officials are obliged to spend their ill-gotten gains at home. Even if this money is spent on the black market, it still helps boost the nation's economic growth. But in open nations, corrupt money leaves the country, doing nothing to relieve poverty, so encouraging more corruption.

”NATO and Nuclear Disarmament”, by the Washington-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, analyses conflicts arising from NATO's treaty obligations and calls for NATO countries to encourage the United States to stop all efforts to promote new nuclear programmes and to ”denuclearise” NATO. … Under article six of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), all NATO members, including the United States, agreed to undertake a process of nuclear disarmament. The NPT was originally designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and know-how from nuclear to non-nuclear powers, and was amended in 1996 to include Article VI. … Recent moves by the U.S. government indicate that the United States may begin designing, testing, and producing new nuclear weapons, in direct defiance of the NPT. The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, issued by the Department of Defence, set a course for U.S. nuclear strategy that includes renewed emphasis on the role of nuclear weapons in military planning. Recent budget requests have also included funding to develop usable nuclear weapons such as ”bunker busters” and ”mini-nukes.” These plans would bring the United States, and thus NATO, into violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). All NATO countries, except the United States, are party to the CTBT, which mandates a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.

Medical injuries during hospitalization resulted in longer hospital stays, higher costs, and a higher number of deaths in 2000, according to a study from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The study, "Excess Length of Stay, Charges, and Mortality Attributable to Medical Injuries During Hospitalization," is published in the October 8 Journal of the American Medical Association. … "The message here is that medical injuries can have a devastating impact on the health care system," said Dr. Zhan. "We need more research to identify why these injuries occur and find ways to prevent them from happening."

Medical injuries in U.S. hospitals that are largely preventable add up to a substantial burden in terms of unnecessary deaths and additional days spent in the hospital, a study out Wednesday says. More than 32,000 Americans each year die as a result of such errors, the study says. [My note: IOM estimated malpractice deaths at up to 98,000 annually] But even people who survive pay a price: They often have to pick up some fraction of the cost of the extra-long hospital stay, says study author Chunliu Zhan of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. … Nationwide, the team estimates such injuries result in about 2.4 million extra days in the hospital and $9.3 billion in extra charges for longer stays and more care.

As 2,000 White House employees scrambled to meet a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday to turn in to the White House counsel's office all phone records, e-mail messages, notes and other materials that might be relevant to the inquiry, Mr. Bush raised for the first time the possibility that the investigation might come up empty in its search for the the source of the first article to name the Central Intelligence Agency officer. … "I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your [journalist] profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers."

The principal point of contention between the United States and Britain, on the one hand, and Mr. Annan, France and other Council members on the other, is the American intention to retain full control over Iraq during what could be a long period of writing a constitution, holding elections and restoring sovereignty. Mr. Annan's comments were especially compelling to Council members because he warned that in light of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in the summer, he could not in good conscience send his personnel into a dangerous environment to play a role subordinate to the American occupation.

President Bush hailed IBM's decision in an address to the White House press corps Monday. "No one said freedom was easy," said Bush, who in recent months has praised wage-slave-emancipation programs initiated by Eastman Kodak, Sun Microsystems, AT&T, General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler, Ford, Boeing, General Mills, and Oracle. "But doing what's best for the corporation as a whole eventually benefits us all. This is what America is all about. I wish all the newly freed wage slaves the best of luck in their bright new futures."

Timothy Mills, a partner at Patton Boggs, one of several K Street firms that have launched a practice dedicated to Iraq … advises clients to look beyond the continuing violence in Iraq and toward the long-term payoff for multinational corporations. "Western companies, if they make the right connections early enough," he says, "have the potential of being swept into the mainstream of Iraqi commerce."

… Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Cohen, a critic of Bush's foreign policy, has also begun marketing himself as an expert on reconstruction; his firm includes his former Pentagon deputy, Paul R.S. Gebhard, who also worked for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In September, Cohen helped Nour USA, which was founded a few months earlier with the express purpose of winning contracts in Iraq, land an $80 million security contract for Iraq's oil fields.

… Cohen has teamed with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, both of whom work at the K Street powerhouse Piper Rudnick, to form an "Iraq Task Force"; according to Piper's website, the task force offers clients access to "relevant decision makers in the United States and the region." Among the group's first clients is General Motors, which has retained Piper lobbyist John Zentay, a former Senate representative from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversees most Iraq reconstruction contracts. "We have to keep close liaison with the U.S. government to have ingress there," explains Chris Preuss, the Washington spokesman for General Motors, which has already begun selling vehicles to aid agencies in Baghdad.

… General Anthony C. Zinni, who headed the Pentagon's Central Command during the Clinton administration, has signed up as an adviser at the firm Akin Gump.

[F]ormer House Speaker Bob Livingston's firm, the Livingston Group, has hired Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief -- the Iraqi lawyer who helped with the rescue of Jessica Lynch -- to advise clients seeking contracts in Iraq.

… At the Department of Agriculture, … a flood of lawyers and former government officials has been working the hallways, seeking markets in Iraq for everything from grain to excess chicken parts.

Agribusiness giant Angliss International has hired Clayton Yeutter, who served as secretary of Agriculture in the first Bush administration and now works for the lobbying firm Hogan & Hartson, to troll for new business in Iraq.

Food distributor Atlas Holdings has hired Hogan lobbyist Robert Kyle, a former national security and trade official in the Clinton White House.

"The filed rate must be collected despite its sometimes harsh consequences because it incorporates the policy which Congress has adopted in regulating interstate commerce," Federal Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez wrote in his decision. In the end, Sierra will have to pay for power that it never really received.

… The dispute has already attracted the attention of members of Congress. On Sept. 9, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, and Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, submitted a statement on the dispute to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. In it, the senators criticized the federal regulator's decision in June not to modify contested contracts with wholesale electricity suppliers that were struck during the electricity crisis — a period F.E.R.C. has found the suppliers were engaged in market manipulation. "Regardless of what standard is used, the only just result, the only result that doesn't reward criminal behavior, the only result that protects rather than punishes the victim is a result that frees Nevada ratepayers from the unjust and unreasonable consequences of its contracts with Enron," the senators wrote in their statement.

[T]he weekly magazine said that factors that make people happy vary. Personal success, self-expression, pride, and a high sense of self-esteem are important in the United States. "In Japan, on the other hand, it comes from fulfilling the expectations of your family, meeting your social responsibilities, self-discipline, cooperation and friendliness," according to the magazine.

… Researchers believe the unchanging trend is linked to consumerism. "Survey after survey has shown that the desire for material goods, which has increased hand in hand with average income, is a happiness suppressant," the magazine added.

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq's oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

Similarly, Bush administration officials announced earlier this year that Iraq's oil revenues would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, which added to the impression that the aftermath of the war would place a minimal burden on the United States. Mr. Bremer now estimates that Iraq's total oil revenues from the last half of 2003 to 2005 will amount to $35 billion, running at a rate of about $14 billion a year.

Shortly after the war began in March, the administration's budget office provided Congress and reporters with a background paper on Iraq. It said that Iraq would "not require sustained aid" because of its abundant resources, including oil and natural gas.

On March 27, Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told the House Appropriations Committee that his "rough recollection" was that "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years."

Testifying in the Senate that same day, Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that "when it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayers we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government." He noted that the war's costs were not knowable, but he also said an important source of money for reconstruction would flow after the United States worked "with the Iraqi interim authority that will be established to tap Iraq's oil revenues."

"One of the reasons I'm optimistic about the future of our economy is because of our entrepreneurial spirit," Bush said. "The tax relief plan puts more capital in the pockets of the small business owners -- which means somebody is more likely to find a job."

"Today's job growth is further evidence that America is on its way towards getting back to work," Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans said. "The president's tax relief has put America on a path toward better jobs and faster growth."

The stock market rallied on the news of the overall growth in payroll jobs. Investors and economists have worried that continued job losses might spook consumers into reducing their spending, which could weaken the recovery from the 2001 recession. [Note: The stock market values people in terms of their purchasing. Whether their standard of living is improving or declining would be a matter of indifference, except that keeping wages low makes workers less demanding and more accepting of lower divisions of the wealth created by their common enterprise.]

Robert Gay, an economist at Commerzbank Securities who used to work for the Federal Reserve Board, said employment usually begins increasing three months after an upturn in other economic indicators, and then accelerates as expansion continues. "We are seeing the first trickles of hiring, right on cue," he said. [Whose cue?]

But other economists said it is too early to tell whether job growth will accelerate. With non-farm payrolls totaling nearly 130 million workers, an addition of 57,000 amounts to what the Labor Department called "little change." "To me it looks like the job market's just going nowhere," said Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution. "It looks pretty much flat in the water."

BNP Paribas, a global economic research firm, said the U.S. economy needs to gain 150,000 jobs a month to maintain a stable unemployment rate, triple the job gain in September. Last month's unchanged rate is more a result of people leaving the workforce than of job gains, the firm told clients.

Economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute noted that White House economists predicted that Bush's tax cut would create 1.4 million jobs on top of the 4.1 million that were projected to be created anyway through 2004. That would work out to a total gain of 306,000 jobs a month, according to the White House's calculation. By that measure, the 57,000 new jobs in September fell 249,000 short.

[Observing that half of the new jobs were temporary, Richard Berner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley] cautioned that rising temporary employment should be a warning sign that the cost of full-time employees -- especially rising health insurance premiums -- is putting permanent payroll increases out of reach for many companies.

Among women only, the need for money was the top answer [in the AARP survey] by far, which becomes more understandable when viewed in the context of another study, by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, noting that the median annual income of women between 50 and 61 is just under $29,000, about two-thirds of what it is for similarly aged men. "These are among the most vulnerable people in our society, women aged 50 and up," says Heidi Hartmann, an economist who is president of the institute. Many women on the high side of the median may be executives or managers who work because they want to, she says, but many on the low side work because their husbands have lost their jobs, or they lost their savings when the stock market declined, or they need even the most basic of benefits they otherwise would not have. "Because they have to," she says.

"You have almost an acceptance that humankind cannot resist the pressure to cheat, whether it's Sammy Sosa in a slump or Kobe Bryant cheating on his wife," said Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that works with schools and businesses to advocate ethical behavior.

… Those who argue that cheating is more pervasive now are familiar with this history [of various cheating throughout American history], but they counter that now there are more practitioners and less guilt. … Not only is cheating significantly up since then, Mr. McCabe [a Rutgers professor who has studied cheating among students] has found, but many students do not consider it a big deal, saying it was just a modern fact of life. His study this year of 16,000 undergraduates at 23 colleges and universities found that 38 percent had taken material from the Internet and passed it off as their own. Forty-four percent of all the students surveyed said it was no big deal. In a 2000 survey only 10 percent of students admitted to Internet cheating.

… To Mr. [David] Callahan, whose book ["The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead" (Harcourt, 2004)] is one of the first scholarly attempts to evaluate the current bout of cheating, new economic pressures for those at the bottom and more goodies for those at the top is partly responsible. He writes, for example, about Sears auto-repair workers who cut corners because their jobs were at stake. He based his argument on interviews, surveys and studies in fields like accounting and law.

Rushworth M. Kidder, president of the Institute For Global Ethics, a nonprofit think tank in Camden, Me., points to Americans' increasing disillusionment with public institutions as one reason for more cheating. "You've got a pervasive decline in trust," he said. Since established institutions can no longer be relied on to behave honestly or set standards, everything — including ethics — becomes "individual and negotiable," he said.

For all of the hints of a turnaround, however, the report also showed how the length and depth of the jobs slump continued to weigh on workers. With the economy having shed 2.8 million jobs since the start of 2001, employees have continued to lose bargaining power and unemployed people are struggling to find new work.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers — who make up about four-fifths of the work force — fell last month for the first time since April, by 33 cents, to $520.67. The number of people who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks and continue to look for a job jumped to 2.1 million, from 1.9 million in August. Almost five million people were working part time because they could not find full-time work, up from 4.4 million.

Demonstrating the job market's continuing troubles, the Ford Motor Company said on Tuesday that it would lay off 1,700 workers and eliminate 1,300 vacant positions. On Wednesday, Verizon Communications offered voluntary buyouts to all 74,000 of its managers in hopes of trimming its payroll, too.

Each year, more than 57,000 people die because they do not receive the care that the medical profession and health care community agrees they need. According to "The State of Health Care Quality 2003," a report released Sept. 18 by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), this is not a measure of medical errors or an analysis of patient access to health care. It is an accounting of the simpler but perhaps more sobering fact that, despite record per-capita spending on health care, the quality of U.S. medical practice badly trails the state of medical knowledge. Effective treatments for many conditions are available, the report asserts, but many patients are not receiving them.

… The death toll, the report states, is only one consequence of a "health care system [that] regularly fails to deliver care we know to be appropriate." There is a huge financial burden as well. The NCQA estimates that more than $1 billion is spent each year on hospital care that would not have been needed if more people received timely preventive treatment and that businesses lose $11.5 billion due to nearly 41 million needlessly missed work days.

Why the world's hearts and minds even matter can be seen concretely in the US effort to persuade other countries to contribute money and troops for postwar Iraq. The more unpopular the US is, experts note, the more difficult it is for leaders to buck their constituents and lend the US a hand. More broadly, they add, a poor US image globally makes achieving international policy goals and pursuing key national interests more difficult.

… The panel, which was created by Congress in June to study the problem of America's sinking image, finds that unpopular US policy goes a long way toward explaining increasingly anti-American foreign publics. Key unpopular policies include what is perceived as a one-sided stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war and occupation in Iraq, and US support for unpopular Arab regimes. … What can help, however, experts say, is a sustained effort to explain the values and motivation behind those policies - and to listen more to foreigners as to why they are unpopular. "Our policy is the issue, but no one wants to acknowledge that," says one official who asked not to be named. "Basically the policymakers don't care much about the impact on foreign opinion of those polices."

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. agreed today to pay $25 million to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that a unit of the firm pressured recipients of shares in initial public offerings to buy more shares after trading began, possibly inflating stock prices. J.P. Morgan also settled a complaint that the firm induced institutional investors to accept shares in "cold," or undesirable, offerings by promising them shares in hotter IPOs in the future, a violation of securities industry rules.

In a recent book, "Income and Influence: Social Policy in Emerging Market Economies" (W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; $14), two economists, Ethan B. Kapstein and Branko Milanovic, remind us how the assumptions behind such "shock therapy" were not borne out. To the contrary, the gross domestic product continued to fall for years in most of the "reformed" nations, and eventually unemployment rose rapidly. The failure to grow immediately after the transition became, in the words of the M.I.T. economist Olivier Blanchard, "the major theoretical challenge facing economists."

And supply side economics, which argues that low taxes are the main ingredient in motivating people to save, invest and innovate, did not even work in the United States. The economist Arthur Laffer, a member of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, claimed that reduced taxes in the 1980's would actually raise tax revenue. President Bush's current chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote in his widely read textbook that "subsequent history failed to confirm Laffer's conjecture."

… Fadhil Mahdi [regional program manager for the United Nations Development Program in Beirut, stated] "After the long years of war since 1980 and the sanctions since the 1990's … Iraq's technological prowess in the civilian sector is worse than Russia's in the 90's. Opening up to imports at a mere 5 percent tariff will most probably ruin many producers and exacerbate unemployment."

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell have trumpeted local councils as one of the most important and underreported democratic fruits of US-led reconstruction in Iraq. But in the southern province of Diq Ar, at least, such councils are broke and powerless, according to their members and coalition officials. "The city councils that sprang up after the war have no easy way to fit into the administrative structure," says Adrian Weale, an official with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the capital of Diq Ar, Nasariyah. "The councils don't have budgets because there has been a realization that they are not the best way to use money to reconstruct the economy." Instead, he says, the CPA is channeling funds through recently reestablished government ministries and their local representatives at regional and town levels, in the same way the former regime did. "The town councils really don't have any formal responsibilities other than as advisory bodies to the CPA," he adds.

That leaves these pioneers of Iraqi democracy dangerously vulnerable, worries Haider Faisal, head of the town council in Fadliya, 10 miles from Nasariyah, that was elected earlier this month under CPA supervision. "If we don't provide services, people will say democracy is nonsense, just empty words," he frets, sitting in the office he has set up in the local police station, equipped with only a desk and a few chairs. "Some people are saying it already: others will soon." … Potentially rich farmland and massive oil reserves have yielded no benefits for local people. "We are like a camel, carrying gold on its back but eating only thorns," complains Mr. Hassan. … Bourne says, "My message to Baghdad is that we don't have much time" before popular resentment boils over into public anger against the coalition, even in a region where goodwill is widespread, built on gratitude to the US-led forces that rid the country of Saddam Hussein.

Critics of the administration's campaign against the ICC have pointed out that most of the countries penalised by the ASPA sanctions are young and emerging democracies that have generally backed U.S. interests and values, making Washington's position counter-productive. … The administration's 'campaign against the ICC has also been cited as an example of the unilateral stance that has contributed to a rise in anti-Americanism in many countries.

… The administration has argued that the tribunal grants too much discretion to prosecutors who could bring cases against U.S. officials and soldiers for political reasons. With some 120,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq, another 9,000 in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more in scores of countries across Eurasia and in and around the Gulf, the administration is worried that they could become a prime target for politicised prosecutions. But groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and U.S. allies -- including Britain, which has some 15,000 troops in Iraq -- say these fears are greatly exaggerated and that Washington should ratify the Statute in the interests of expanding the rule of law and making particularly serious human rights atrocities punishable by an international tribunal.

In addition to the information on regulatory reform, the Report contains a "regulatory accounting" statement covering the last ten years of major regulatory actions, estimating that these major regulations provided quantified benefits of $146 billion to $230 billion annually, and quantified costs of between $36 billion and $42 billion annually.

Board elections [currently] bear no resemblance to democratic elections. Voters get one slate of candidates nominated by the board, and those candidates win even if most investors oppose them. [When this happens in other nations, we say the election was rigged.] Also, efforts by investors to replace directors through a proxy contest can be prohibitively expensive; the new rules are intended to reduce sharply the costs of challenges.

The report added that "spin" and manipulative public relations "are not the answer," but that neither is avoiding the debate. … The panel warned that the war in Iraq and the intensified conflict in the Middle East had increased anger at the United States, and that people throughout the world were ignorant of or misinformed about American policies. … The group's major recommendations, besides creating a new White House director of public diplomacy, were to build libraries and information centers in the Muslim world, translate more Western books into Arabic, increase scholarships and visiting fellowships, upgrade the American Internet presence, and train more Arabists, Arab speakers and public relations specialists.

[As for previous efforts at outreach to Muslims,] The Bush administration, for example, started a program called "shared values" last year, a series of television commercials showing that Muslims in the United States lead lives of dignity and equal rights. The advertisements were suspended after several Arab countries refused to show them. Many in the administration were privately critical of the commercials, agreeing with Arab and Muslim spokesmen who said they were irrelevant to Muslim concerns about American policies toward Iraq and Israel. The advisory panel said that it recognized that American policies might well be the root of the problem, but that Washington could do far more to present its side of the issues and rebut widespread misinformation among Muslims overseas. [Emphasis added.]