… The commission said that pretax profit for all of 1998 was reported at $278.8 million, 46 percent more than the $190.9 million that would have been reported under the old accounting. The first three quarters of 1999 also had earnings that were about $40 million higher than they would have been, although the percentage increases were smaller.

At the time the accounting was changed, Halliburton was preparing to merge with Dresser Industries and was dealing with a decline in the company's share price partly caused by slumping oil prices. It reported a 34 percent gain in profit for the quarter, far better than other oil services companies were reporting, and Mr. Cheney said then that "Halliburton continues to make good financial progress despite uncertainties over future oil demand." The commission said yesterday that the gain would have been just 6.7 percent without the undisclosed change in accounting policies.

The proportion of Americans under age 65 covered by employer-sponsored health plans fell to 63% in 2003, compared with 67% in 2001, according to a study released Tuesday. In all, about 9 million fewer Americans had employer health coverage in 2003 than in 2001, after accounting for population growth, according to the study. The report, based on information from about 25,000 families, was published by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington. Much of the decline stemmed from reduced employment in the tough economy, though sharply rising health care costs likely played a role as well, according to HSC Health Researcher Bradley C. Strunk, who co-authored the report.

Halliburton Co. is seeking class action certification in an Aug. 16 court hearing for a lawsuit filed against several retired employees who have challenged a company decision to eliminate health insurance coverage for Medicare-eligible retirees. … The amendments eliminate health insurance coverage for retirees over the age of 65 who are eligible for Medicare, effective Jan. 1, 2005, the spokeswoman said. The amendments also revise the prescription drug benefit for these retirees, although they would still have access to a prescription drug program toward which Halliburton would contribute $22 per month, she said.

"Practical politics," said Henry Adams, "consists in ignoring facts." … You won't hear straight talk about this all-important matter from either camp. And you can forget the chatter about an exit strategy for American troops. There isn't one. … These are incredibly difficult issues and an honest search for solutions can only come from a sustained effort by the broadest array of America's brightest and wisest men and women. What the U.S. really needs is leadership that could marshal that effort. Unfortunately, we've become a society addicted to the fantasy of a quick fix. We want our solutions encompassed in a sound bite. We want our leaders to manipulate reality to our liking. … The voters may deserve better, but there's a real question about whether they want better. It may well be that candidates can't tell voters the truth and still win. If that's so, then democracy American-style may be a lot more dysfunctional than even the last four years has indicated.

… It also means serious trade talks will resume early next year, after the US election. And, in the meantime, it means Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry lost a foreign-policy issue with which to criticize President Bush. … One major concession would mostly affect the European Union - home of massive subsidies to farmers: If the current round of talks is completed, the agreement reads, all subsidy payments to farmers for exported products will be eliminated "by a credible end date." Observers say this date could be around the year 2020.

Another potential concession, although vaguely worded, commits the US to aim for "ambitious" and "expeditious" cuts in subsidies to cotton farmers. … But some observers see the whole trade-talks milieu as having gotten so complicated that it obscures - and perhaps sabotages - real progress. Trade expert Michael Finger at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, has studied the topic for decades. He says he recently spent an entire day wading through a section of a recent agreement - and was no clearer on what it meant. That, he says, hints that much of the impetus for the talks, at least for the US, is political, not economic. Mr. Finger figures US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's marching orders were to just keep the talks alive. … But the price for the US of keeping the talks alive wasn't high, he says. The administration "hasn't lost any constituency" - like cotton farmers - "on this because none of it is legally binding." Indeed one of the more telling phrases in the new document is this: "[A]dditional negotiations are required to reach agreement."

If United manages to cut itself loose from the costly burden of its pension plans, it might force others determined to keep their costs similarly under control to emulate its move. "Rivals may feel they are at a competitive disadvantage and follow suit, raising the specter of a domino effect in the industry," said Bradley D. Belt, the executive director of the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions. If every airline with a traditional pension plan were ultimately to default, the government would be on the hook for an estimated $31 billion. Its insurance coverage is limited, so some employees would have their benefits reduced. "The pension insurance program is there to protect workers' benefits," said Mr. Belt, who took over the agency in April. "It shouldn't be used as a piggy bank to help companies restructure."

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is already hobbled by debt, having picked up the pieces of more than 3,200 failed pension plans in its 30-year life. The scale of the failures has risen sharply in the last three years, but the agency has few tools at its disposal to prevent the situation from becoming worse.

… It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1974, Congress responded to an ugly string of pension failures in the auto industry by passing landmark legislation [our beloved ERISA]. From then on, any company that promised pensions to its workers would be required to set aside enough money to pay them. Rules were written to determine how much money was enough. To weave the retirement safety net even more tightly, Congress also created the pension insurance program. [But this failed to achieve its purpose] because pension law allows companies to fund their plans with the assets that any prudent investor would select. Over time, that has meant a shift away from the very conservative bonds that companies used to secure pensions before the 1974 law, in favor of more aggressive investments.

The Commerce Department estimated that the nation's gross domestic product - the broadest measure of economic activity - expanded at an annual rate of 3 percent in the April-to-June quarter, sharply below the 4.5 percent growth achieved in the first quarter of the year and less than the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

… Changes in consumer spending - which counts for roughly two-thirds of economic output - caused virtually all of the deceleration in the second quarter. Personal consumption spending slowed to a 1 percent annual growth rate, the most sluggish pace since the second quarter of 2001, when the economy was in the midst of a recession, down from a rate of 4.1 percent in the first three months of the year. Sales of durable goods - things like cars, furniture and appliances - actually fell slightly. "The consumer is overextended," said Charles Dumas, chief international economist at Lombard Street Research in London.

… Job growth … took a dip in June, expanding by barely 112,000, less than necessary to absorb the natural growth of the labor force. Wages, adjusted for inflation, declined and the average number of hours in the work week fell.

The White House projected on Friday that the budget deficit would reach $445 billion in this fiscal year. That would make it by far the largest shortfall ever in the dollar amount, though it would be well below the record for a deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product and well below the amount forecast six months ago.

Mr. Bolten acknowledged "today's deficits remain unwelcome," but he said the situation was not serious. "The most relevant perspective on the deficit is in relation to the size of the nation's economy," he said, and the figure projected on Friday is 3.8 percent of the gross domestic product, "well within historical range" and much lower than the record 6 percent reached in 1983.

Mr. Bolten attributed the worsened government balance sheet to "an extraordinary confluence of adversity: the stock market downturn that began in 2000, and the subsequent recession that the president inherited as he took office; the terrorist attacks on America, and subsequent spending for homeland security and the war on terror; and the crisis in confidence produced by corporate scandals years in the making." He did not mention the effects of Mr. Bush's tax cuts. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that about half of the budget turnaround was caused by the weaker economy, about a quarter by higher spending and about a quarter by lower revenue because of the tax reductions.

… First, the U.S. is entering this new age of empire with a gross federal debt that is the highest in more than 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product. For fiscal 2005, which begins in October, the U.S. gross federal debt is projected to be $8.1 trillion, or 67.5% of GDP. By the time 100,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1965, it was 46.9% and falling. … [T]he most commonly reported estimate of the annual federal budget deficit is $478 billion for 2004. But this number is misleading, because it doesn't include borrowing from federal trust funds -- mostly Social Security and Medicare. … The annual federal budget deficit is, therefore, $639 billion, according to the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. This is 5.6% of GDP, a near-record level for the post-World War II era.

[Meanwhile, our interest rates will go up, as inflation has jumped from 1.9% in 2003 to 4.9% in the beginning of 2004. Foreign banks will not continue supporting our borrowing by buying US debt, and we will have to start paying the deficits back. The housing market bubble will burst, which is likely to cause a recession similar to the bursting of the stock-market bubble.]

… The combination of unsustainable public debt and foreign debt is a deadly and explosive mix by itself. Rising real interest rates and a looming housing bubble bursting make it all the more dangerous. Financial markets will exert the necessary discipline if politicians refuse to do so, but either way the U.S. can't afford even the $486 billion a year that it's currently spending annually on the military and homeland security.

… In the meantime, the segment of American society that would like to see advances in health care, education, poverty alleviation, or any other positive economic or social goals will get bad news. The foreseeable future is a lot different from most of the post-World War II era, during which the U.S. added such programs as Medicare and Medicaid while spending literally trillions of dollars on cold and hot wars. This time, little or no federal money will be available for any of these things until U.S. foreign policy changes. The most likely scenario is that most areas of nonmilitary discretionary spending will be squeezed relentlessly before anything gives in the realm of superpower ambitions.

The post-9/11 age of American empire will close not with a bang but a whimper, suffocated by the laws of arithmetic, the constraints of public financing, and the limits of foreign borrowing. What remains to be determined is how much the U.S. will pay -- in lost and ruined lives, as well as bills for future generations -- and how many enemies it will make throughout the world, before coming to grips with reality.

The time has come for the general council to call churches and members to repent of complicity, through silence, denial, or direct activity, with these particular features of neoliberal capitalism:

1. where debt enslaves people and nations and denies basic needs

2. where systemic ecological damage destroys the habitat of life

3. where we have succumbed to greed for material wealth and possessions

4. where property is coopted by large capital owners as absolute property for private accumulation at the expense of the common good

5. where the financial system leads to speculation, corruption, tax evasion and extortionate rates of return on capital.

In faithful response to God’s covenant, the time has come for the general council to call churches and members to repent by

1. overcoming greed and consumerism

2. refusing individualistic understandings and expressions of faith

3. overcoming unjust salary scales

4. disinvesting from banks and funds involved in speculation, tax evasion and taking interest rates beyond growth rates

5. paying more attention to the preservation of natural habitats.

The time has come for the general council to call churches and members to take a faith stance against the structural and practical implications of neoliberal capitalism. This ideology systematically excludes the poor, creates suffering, destroys the earth, and claims sovereignty over all of life. It claims to be without alternative and thus challenges the sovereignty of God. Neoliberal ideology challenges and is in opposition to God’s covenant. It is based on

1. the principle of private property without any social or ecological obligation and contract as the only legal basis

2. greed, competition, consumerism and the limitless accumulation of wealth as best for the whole world

3. privatizing the gifts of God, as well as liberalizing, deregulating and protecting the markets in the interests of the capital owners

4. misusing technological power so that it plunders, degrades, and destroys the earth’s resources and manipulates and destroys the biological texture of life at all levels.

In faithful response to God’s covenant the time has come for the general council to call churches and members to reject

1. legal regimes that protect neoliberal powers and principalities and both sacrifice people and life

2. the military regime of the empire that victimizes people and life through wars and weapons and destroys peace on earth

3. the environmental regime that exploits natural resources and living beings and does not care for life on earth

4. the way in which communication and information are used to dominate the consciousness of the people

5. greed that destroys the human person and community.

Never mind that the dynamics of the free market system encouraged the development of these drugs – and their global distribution -- in the first place.

… But what kind of economic system is better at discouraging corruption? One could easily argue that governments with central planning ambitions are much more easily corruptible than systems that spread economic and coercive power over diverse institutions. Any Nigerian who has lived under the combination of government ownership of oil and epidemic levels of corruption could have clued the Alliance in on this point. … Their [the task force's] utopian vision of “communities” solving problems at the local level is just a cover for a return to central planning, economic enslavement and corruption.

Whenever oil is discovered in an African country - which happens more and more these days - a certain pattern unfolds. Vast sums of money start flowing in. Government officials divert much of it into their private bank accounts. And the masses are left nearly as poor as before - and are increasingly angry.

… This month, Chad got its first $38 million in oil revenues. Over the next 20 years, it's expected to get at least $2 billion, boosting national revenues by 50 percent, according to the World Bank. But unlike other African nations, Chad is committed to spend 80 percent of oil revenues on schools, clinics, roads, and other basic needs. Five percent goes to a fund for future generations. Another 5 percent goes to develop the southern oil region, near the Cameroon border. And 10 percent is socked away in case oil prices fall. Most of the cash is held by the World Bank in a London account to avoid "leakage." And a citizens committee, with four members from nonprofit groups and five from government, must approve all oil- revenue expenditures.

The pressure on police departments has grown in some ways even as their budgets have fallen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has greatly decreased its crime-fighting work, like investigating bank robberies and drug deals, to concentrate on counterterrorism operations. And many of the nation's 17,000 police forces have been ordered by the federal government to deploy more officers to combat terrorism, in tasks like guarding airports and water works. … "We are having to discontinue many of the proactive strategies like community policing, which we developed in the 90's, and just go back to basics like sitting in patrol cars waiting for calls for service after a crime has been committed," [one police chief] said.

… The community policing program, which was begun by President Bill Clinton, added 118,000 officers across the country. Mr. Bush has proposed $97 million for the program in the next fiscal year, down 80 percent from $481 million this year. The president has proposed reducing money for the other two programs to $508 million from $884 million this year.

''There is little evidence that patient safety has improved in the last five years," said Dr. Samantha Collier, vice president of medical affairs at HealthGrades, which publishes rankings of hospitals and doctors. ''The equivalent of 390 jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to likely preventable, in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in the US." [The most controversial aspect of this report is that it attempted to quantify deaths resulting from omission of timely care.] … HealthGrades said there were 195,000 deaths annually from 2000 to 2002, and estimated that Americans paid an extra $19 billion in medical care costs for the victims of mistakes.

[Speaking to an Amish group, he said:] "I trust God speaks through me," he said. "Without that, I couldn't do my job."

[Speaking to Bob Woodward for his book, Plan of Attack, he stated that he did not talk to his father for advice.] "He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength. … There's a higher Father that I appeal to."

[The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported last year that the President said to then-Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas:] "God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and then he instructed me to strike Saddam, which I did."

Let's also remember that his administration now has an almost unparalleled track record when it comes to getting (and taking) bad advice. In fact, almost every piece of earthly advice it bothered to garner on the nature of the world it was about to pummel was off-base or downright wrong; and its major acts, ranging from the setting up of an offshore mini-gulag of "information extraction" to invading Iraq, to ravaging the environment for immediate gain, seem intent on sowing chaos. Far be it from me as a nonbeliever to mention this, but given the record, I wonder whether our President should be quite so certain about Who he's been speaking with, about exactly Whose advice he's been following. Could our President actually be getting that advice from the wrong side of the Celestial Aisle?

Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would "undermine public health" and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging "lay judges and juries to second-guess" experts at the F.D.A., the government said in siding with the maker of a heart pump sued by the widow of a Pennsylvania man. Moreover, it said, if such lawsuits succeed, some good products may be removed from the market, depriving patients of beneficial treatments. … The threat of lawsuits, it said, "can harm the public health" by encouraging manufacturers to withdraw products from the market or to issue new warnings that overemphasize the risks and lead to "underutilization of beneficial treatments." … If juries in different states reach different conclusions about the risks and benefits of a medical device, they will cause "chaos for the regulated industry and F.D.A.," the administration said.

Ms. Witczak, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Hinchey said Mr. Troy [FDA's lawyer] had a potential conflict of interest because Pfizer was one of his clients when he was a lawyer in private practice.

These concerns [of the Bush administration] seem overblown and are offset by other considerations. The F.D.A. is not infallible. It seems poor policy to assume that once the agency has judged a product safe enough to use, the manufacturer should be insulated forever from lawsuits that could force improvements. Simple justice suggests that victims harmed by a product should be able to seek compensation. If a manufacturer has acted in good faith and received the agency's approval, the likelihood of huge punitive damages - the real bκtes noires of the tort reformers - seems slight.

We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive. The commissioners recommend that the U.S. should be much more critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to demonstrate our principles. They suggest we set up a fund to build secondary schools across Muslim states, and admit many more students into our own. If you are a philanthropist, here is how you can contribute: We need to set up the sort of intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war, with modern equivalents of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to introduce them to Western intellectuals. … Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological.

Consequently, from three different vantage points - employment breakdowns by industry, by occupation and by degree of attachment - the same basic picture emerges: While there has been an increase in job creation over the past four months - an unusually belated and anemic spurt by historical standards - the bulk of the activity has been at the low end of the quality spectrum. … It was only a matter of time before the globalization of work affected the United States labor market. The character and quality of American job creation is changing before our very eyes. Which poses the most important question of all: what are we going to do about it?

After launching two wars, President Bush said on Tuesday he wanted to be a "peace president" … . … "The enemy declared war on us," he told a re-election rally. "Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president."

Bush has called himself a "war president" in leading the United States in a battle against terrorism brought about by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America. "I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind," he said in February.

War is Peace

… War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. … The primary aim of modern warfare … is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. … The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. … Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.

… A six-month examination by The New York Times, drawing on military and court records and interviews with dozens of industry executives and servicemen and women, has found that several financial services companies or their agents are using questionable tactics on military bases to sell insurance and investments that may not fit the needs of people in uniform. Insurance agents have made misleading pitches to "captive" audiences like the ones at Fort Benning. They have posed as counselors on veterans benefits and independent financial advisers. And they have solicited soldiers in their barracks or while they were on duty, violations of Defense Department regulations.

The Pentagon has been aware of practices like these since the Vietnam War; investigations have even cited specific companies and agents. But because of industry lobbying, Congressional pressure, weak enforcement and the Pentagon's ineffective oversight, almost no action has been taken to sanction those responsible or to better protect those who are vulnerable, The Times has found. … The military market includes hundreds of thousands of men and women, many of them young and financially unsophisticated, all of them trained to trust leadership, obey orders and show loyalty to comrades.

• Personal bankruptcies peaked in 2003 with a record 1.6 million cases filed - a rate of 185 an hour. That annual total is nearly double the 812,898 filings in 1993.

• Household debt stood at $8.9 trillion last year, a record high relative to disposable income, that is, income after taxes.

• Credit-card defaults rose more than 55 percent in the past four years.

• Home mortgage foreclosures are up 45 percent in the same time span.

… Americans also have had to deal with other rising costs over that period, including housing (up 17 percent), child care (18 percent), and health insurance (40 percent). In addition, median family income has fallen 2.8 percent since 2000. US workers can expect modest pay increases of 3.3 percent this year and 3.5 percent next year, barely more than inflation, according to a new survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

In 2003, credit-card companies racked up about $30.2 billion in profits, according to CardTrak, a consumer group tracking bank credit cards. That's up from $20.5 billion in 2000 and $6.4 billion in 1990. … Since 2000, credit-card fees are up more than 100 percent.

… And, my, how the list of goodies can go on. First comes the executives' severance pay, almost always nearly three times salary and bonus. Accelerated vesting of stock options and stock awards quickly follows; sometimes the options are granted with their full terms remaining - up to 10 years - giving them tremendous value. Then there are the three additional years of pension credits that get tacked on to an executive's pay, as well as the 401(k) match, years of health care benefits and the cash value of perquisites at the time of termination - such as use of the corporate jet, country-club memberships, allowances for financial planning advice, office space and secretarial services. All in one delightfully fat lump sum. AND don't forget that executives' pensions are often based on the unusually high severance pay, which ratchets the numbers way up. Of course, one downside to these enormous payments is that they generate stunning tax bills for executives. Good thing their contracts almost always require the companies to pay. And how!

With $14 billion in sales, G.E.'s health care business is among its fastest-growing and most profitable units …. "We run the business to make a buck for investors; we run the business to help our customers," [GE's CEO] said recently at the company's headquarters in Fairfield, Conn. … "It's important to be big in big markets," said Mr. Immelt, who has identified health care as one of the richest opportunities in an aging America. Spending is forecast to increase by about 8 percent a year, he said, "as far as the eye can see."

Policy analysts, however, say that this rate of growth is being driven in large part by the very technology that companies like G.E. are promoting. … "In health care, supply creates its own demand," said Christopher J. Queram, chief executive of the Employer Health Care Alliance Cooperative, a nonprofit purchasing group in Madison, Wis., who is concerned about the proliferation of magnetic resonance imaging machines in doctors' offices. … Technology "has been a major factor that is driving costs upward," said John C. Rother, policy director for AARP, the lobby for older Americans. … G.E.'s sales pitch is aimed squarely at a doctor's desire to make more money from doing more tests. The company even sells research to physicians that provides five-year projections of demand for certain tests in their markets - and helps doctors calculate the potential fees from different types of diagnostic tests. In selling an exam table that doubles as a device to measure bone density, G.E. trumpets the system's potential revenue: $30,000 a year if a doctor sees five patients a week. … Critics say the results can be too much equipment and too many tests. …