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	US Democrats step up criticism of White House response to Hurricane Katrina by Adam Nagourney & Carl Hulse LA Times / The New York Times   Published: September 19, 2005   "Kerry, Edwards blast Bush over Relief Effort", by Ronald Brownstein. (LA Times - Edited Extract)   Both members of the 2004 Democratic presidential ticket sharply criticized President Bush today. Speaking to a large crowd at Brown University in Rhode Island, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, delivered his most sweeping indictment of Bush''s priorities and performance since last year''s election.   The crisis surrounding the hurricane, Kerry charged, exposed a "pattern of incompetence and negligence" in the Bush administration and "beyond that, a truly systemic effort to distort and disable the people''s government, and devote it to the interests of the privileged and the powerful."   Meanwhile, at a Washington think tank, former Sen. John Edwards, Kerry''s vice presidential running mate, offered more new policy proposals in an address focused on combating poverty. Echoing Bill Clinton''s famous campaign formulation about welfare, Edwards urged "a serious long-term effort to end poverty as we know it.."   Kerry and Edwards each began his speech with a similar argument, contending that the devastation in New Orleans exposed problems that the Bush administration had not sufficiently addressed. But from there, Kerry and Edwards moved in very different directions.   Edwards focused his speech at the Center for American Progress solely on poverty, portraying the suffering among those left behind in New Orleans as a metaphor for the struggles of poor families across America.   He spoke often about disparities between the "Two Americas" of affluence and need. But others were new elements of what he called a "Working Society." For New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast, Edwards proposed a modern version of the Works Progress Administration that Franklin D. Roosevelt devised to create jobs during the Great Depression.   "We ought to have a new WPA where we make sure that the people who lost their homes, and lost their jobs, and are now displaced are able to ... rebuild their own communities," he said.   Edwards'' agenda also included an increase in the minimum wage to $7.50 per hour (from its current $5.15), providing housing vouchers to help more poor families move into middle-class neighborhoods, and new government subsidies to help working-poor families purchase a first home or build savings accounts. Edwards said he would pay for his ideas partly by allowing Bush tax cuts for the top brackets to expire, and increasing the tax rate that high earners pay on capital gains and dividends.   John Kerry focused his speech on broader themes, critiquing Bush on two large fronts. First, Kerry charged, the administration''s response to the hurricane showed a lack of competence also evident in areas such as planning for the reconstruction of Iraq.   Accusing Bush of ignoring warnings about the threat of flooding in New Orleans, Kerry declared: "This horrifying disaster has shown Americans at their best — and their government at its worst."   Kerry said the recovery agenda for the region Bush announced last week "turns the region into a vast laboratory for right wing ideological experiments," such as waiving requirements that federal contractors pay prevailing wages during the clean-up.   On the second track, Kerry said the hurricane should show Americans the need to take collective action through government against entrenched problems, such as persistent poverty and lack of access to healthcare.   Kerry charged that Bush, by emphasizing tax cuts and limited government, had encouraged an ethos of "you''re on your own" and "every man for himself."   "It''s time we framed every question, every issue, not in terms of what''s in it for ''me,'' but what''s in it for all of us," Kerry said.   Washington. 08 September 2005   US Democratic leaders unleashed a series of attacks on the White House on Wednesday, saying the wreckage in New Orleans raised doubts about the country''s readiness to endure a terrorist attack and exposed ominous economic rifts that they said had worsened under five years of Republican rule.   From Democratic leaders on the floor of Congress, to a speech by the Democratic National Committee chairman at a meeting of the National Baptist Convention in Miami, to four morning television interviews by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrats offered what was shaping up as the most concerted attack that they had mounted on the White House in the five years of the Bush presidency.   "Oblivious. In denial. Dangerous," Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the House minority leader, said of President Bush as she stood in front of a battery of uniformed police officers and firefighters in a Capitol Hill ceremony that had originally been scheduled to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.   "Americans should now harbor no illusions about the government''s ability to respond effectively to disasters," she said. "Our vulnerabilities were laid bare."   Former Senator John Edwards, a likely candidate for president in 2008 and the Democratic Party''s vice-presidential nominee in 2004, argued that the breakdown in New Orleans illustrated the central theme of his national campaigns: the nation has been severed into two Americas. "The truth is the people who suffer the most from Katrina are the very people who suffer the most every day," Mr. Edwards said in a speech in North Carolina on Wednesday, according to a transcript provided by his office.   And Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, said in an interview: "It''s a summary of all that this administration is not in touch with and has faked and ducked and bobbed over the past four years. What you see here is a harvest of four years of complete avoidance of real problem solving and real governance in favor of spin and ideology."   The aggressiveness was evidence of what Republicans and Democrats said was the critical difference between the hurricane and the Sept. 11 attacks: Democrats appear able to question the administration''s competence without opening themselves to attacks on their patriotism.   Not insignificantly, they have been emboldened by the fact that Republicans have also been critical of the White House over the past week, and by the perception that this normally politically astute and lethal administration has been weakened and seems at a loss as it struggles to manage two crises: the aftermath of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast and the political difficulties that it has created for Mr. Bush in Washington.   Their response may have allowed the Democrats to seize the issue that Republicans had hammered them with in the past two elections: national security. "Our government failed at one of the most basic functions it has - providing for the physical safety of our citizens," Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who is considering a run for president in 2008, declared in a speech on the Senate floor.   The Democrats'' aggressiveness is not without its risks. The White House has been seeking to minimize the criticisms of Mr. Bush by portraying them as partisan, and some prominent Democrats had earlier avoided going after Mr. Bush on this issue, aware of what the Republicans were trying to accomplish.   Mrs. Clinton, in back-to-back television interviews Wednesday morning, angrily dismissed those kinds of attacks as a diversion from legitimate attempts by critics to point up shortcomings. "That''s what they always do; I''ve been living with that kind of rhetoric for the last four and a half years," Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, said on the "Today" show. "It''s time to end it. It''s time to actually show this government can be competent."   The Democratic reaction took many forms, from urging campaign contributors to give money to hurricane victims, to proposing legislation to provide aid to stricken areas, as Mr. Kerry did, to criticizing the Bush administration for cuts it had made to the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as Mrs. Clinton did. In one less-noted gesture, Al Gore, the former vice president, chartered a private jet and flew doctors to storm-stricken areas.   The Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, said this could be a transitional moment for his party. "The Democratic Party needs a new direction," he said. "And I think it''s become clear what the direction is: restore a moral purpose to America. Rebuild America''s psyche."   "This is deeply disturbing to a lot of Americans, because it''s more than thousands of people who get killed; it''s about the destruction of the American community," Mr. Dean said. "The idea that somehow government didn''t care until it had to for political reasons. It''s appalling."   Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: "The powerful winds of this storm have torn away that mask that has hidden from our debates the many Americans who are left out and left behind."
	Bill Clinton wants to end poverty, bring about global peace and save the planet. by Euripedes Alcantara The Independent   Published: 12 September 2005   Former US President Bill Clinton wants to end poverty, bring about global peace and save the planet. He tells Euripedes Alcântara how he plans to do it..   Bill Clinton is fully engaged in the contest to be the best ex-president of the United States. This week, in New York, he will host the first global meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a super-NGO with grand goals such as the promotion of economic growth without environmental impact and the conciliation of religious differences as a way to end terrorism. At 59 and fully recovered from coronary revascularisation surgery, Clinton expects to gather together almost 1,000 entrepreneurial, labour and political leaders from all over the world. Every year for the next decade, the meeting in New York will coincide with the opening ceremony of the United Nations General Assembly. "It is a meeting unlike a Davos or a UN meeting, but an activism forum from which each participant will come out with a list of tasks to be accomplished," says the former president. "Those who do not fulfil the tasks will not come back the following year."   If the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa were raised, it could be argued that this would hasten the depletion of natural resources. If all the inhabitants of the planet reached the same consumption standards of the inhabitants of California, there would be an environmental collapse, wouldn't there?   "The shortest answer is yes. But the longest is that it is possible to create wealth without destroying the environment. This is the great challenge. All over the world, water reserves are diminishing, fertile soils are being eroded and seed production is showing a downward trend. South America is one of the few regions in the world that was able to increase the production of soy and other seeds thanks to technology and the abundance of fertile lands. But this is an exception in the world. The rule is the shortage of water and of arable lands.   "Therefore, one of the dearest purposes of my initiative is to find ways to turn environmental preservation into a path to attain economic prosperity. Otherwise, the reaction of people, let us say, in China and India, may be very negative. They might think that environmental preservation is an ambush by Americans and Europeans to prevent their countries' economic growth. For this reason, we have to stimulate the use of solar energy, of aeolian energy, and help to popularise highly productive cultivation techniques that will help us preserve water and the soil. Thus, people will understand that preservation makes them richer, not poorer.   "Another beneficial effect of raising the standard of living and consumption of the population is shown by statistics: as countries grow rich, population growth diminishes. When we know that the greatest population impact in the planet is in the countries with the big forest reserves, the importance of helping them grow rich becomes clear."   Recently, you said that the world needs to enter the post-globalisation phase. What does this mean?   "The globalisation of the economy had very positive effects, but a lot of people did not benefit from it. The only way to broaden these beneficial effects is to bring the civil society to the scene. I think time has come for non-governmental organisations, companies, workers' associations and international organisations to try to develop a social and environmental policy that is in keeping with the challenges and opportunities created by globalisation. The global economic system alone cannot solve all the problems, either locally or globally. Issues such as the environment and the increase of poverty and inequality cannot be confronted only by the market forces. Therefore, I think it is not very realistic to imagine that we can have a globalised economy without the counterpart of global social action. My idea is, basically, to contribute to the creation of a global civil society with partnerships that transcend national and regional borders."   It seems very praiseworthy, but aren't you being too optimistic over the practical results it may bring?   "I think that, together, we can produce actual results in a shorter term than what is imagined. Global civil society is rapidly expanding since the end of real communism. If you look at what's happened in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, you will see that three major and little-celebrated phenomena are giving shape to the contemporary world. The first one is the fact that, for the first time in history, more people are living under democratic governments than under dictatorships. The second one is the geometrical expansion of the internet. The third one is the consolidation of NGOs as action-organisations with global amplitude.   Democratic nations rarely wage wars among themselves, but what other opportunities were created by the phenomena you describe?   "The boom of use of the internet as a citizenship tool has been vital. The Chinese, for instance, used the internet to oblige their government to acknowledge the seriousness of the disease known as Sars, the Asian flu, and to take the necessary measures to prevent the progress of the epidemic. After the terrible tsunami that razed South-eastern Asia at the end of last year, 30 per cent of Americans made donations to the victims. Half the donations were made via the internet."   You're talking about millions of people...   "It is unbelievable. Add to this the capillarity of the NGOs in developing countries and in wealthy countries and we have a very optimistic scenario. The boom of the NGOs goes from the Bill Gates Foundation, which spends billions of dollars in health treatments in India and Africa, to the smaller organisations that grant micro-credit in Latin America, in Africa and in southern Asia. What I think I can do to help is to provide all these people with the opportunity to focus their actions so as to make them more effective. I hope to create an environment in which entrepreneurial, labour and political leaders and NGOs can sit together and say: 'Well, these are the things we must begin and end within a year, these are the areas we think are vital for our common future.'"   Great projects have a tendency to attract corrupt people. Do you fear this may jeopardise everything?   "Projects do not need to be great. They have to be functional. For example, Brazil has at least two successful cases that may serve as an example to the world. One of them is the programme of distribution of anti-viral medicine for Aids patients. The medicine reaches even the more distant populations, including indigenous patients who do not even speak Portuguese. This is something extraordinary. No other country in the world has a project comparable to Brazil's. Another programme of which Brazilians must be proud is the one in which mothers of poor families periodically receive an amount of money as an incentive to keep their children at school. I believe that there are many ways to finance projects without running the risk of fostering corruption. For this, the quality of people is fundamental. In many countries of the extinct communist bloc, there are many people who are really skilled in government, in the middle of a rotten bureaucracy that no longer works. What can we do? Identify the good people and help them. I agree that, when a government is dishonest, help is equivalent to throwing money down the drain.   The idea that some good people in the right place may make the difference is comforting, isn't it?   "Yes. Even in countries without a very effective governing system, there are helpless but clever people who are managing to survive even when everything conspires against them. When a good network of NGOs arrives in a place like this, their work can save many lives, establish companies and promote economic growth." Visit the related web page
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