Bush's Class Warfare

...Bush says he "loathes" North Korean dictator Kim Jong II, but he may have to be satisfied with half a loath...

...So was a plan for prescription drug benefits...

...Or take welfare...

...Last summer, Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to institute a scheme called tips—the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—inviting Americans to spy on one another, but Congress refused to endorse the program...

...Standing in line are Russia, other foreign interests, the American oil industry and, not to be forgotten, a new Iraqi government waiting to be born...

...actually did...

...Or take affirmative action...

...Since September 11, our law enforcement agencies and the Immigration Service have been preoccupied with another kind of identity problem: document mills, expert at forging passports with cleverly stolen photos...

...How's that for class warfare...

...It urged "a level playing field for all international players" in the future repair, development and exploration efforts...

...This at a time of 6 per cent unemployment that makes jobs harder to get, without any increase in the child care support that is essential for working mothers...

...A Shortage of Compassion The Wall Street Journal called it "compassion fatigue" when private philanthropy slumped severely from its postSeptember 11 high because of a shaky economy...

...The President has signed a long-delayed bill extending benefits for 750,000 workers whose 13 weeks of benefits expired during Christmas week...

...America may have five global military commands and deploy aircraft carrier battle groups in every ocean, but it feels obliged to lower its voice a little when it addresses a foundering small Communist principality on the edge of Asia left over from the Cold War...

...A heavy American hand," the panel's report said, "will only convince them and the rest of the world that the operation against Iraq was undertaken for imperialist rather than disarmament reasons...

...How's that for class warfare...

...That is only one of the reasons to hope a program designed to establish a Big Brother of the computer age will not survive a Senate-House conference...

...The most far-reaching plan yet for domestic snooping, being researched in the Pentagon, is also under attack by the Senate...

...After three days of talks that New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson held with North Korean diplomats in Santa Fe, it appeared that Pyongyang is playing its nuclear card mainly to force direct talks, economic aid and a nonaggression pledge from the United States...

...Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), it would employ cutting-edge technologies to establish a centralized grand database on Americans...

...You don't bomb and kill your family...

...Name and face recognition have become the name of the game...

...But the President has delivered little of his compassionate conservatism...

...Credit information about 30,000 people was stolen, then used to drain the victims' bank accounts and to ruin their credit...

...President Bush, expected to raise up to $200 million, has no such worries...

...Into that database would flow every kind of electronic transaction from telephone bills paid to medical prescriptions filled, from credit card purchases to travel plans, all neatly processed into individual dossiers...

...For as the Campaign Finance Institute points out, since 1980 the nomination has invariably been won by the candidate who raised the most money by the start of the election year...

...After September 11, the President became an enthusiastic supporter of voluntary service...

...Now, to its frustration, the Bush Administration finds the South Korea it protects more anti-Washington than anti-Pyongyang...

...And there is now a new category of Americans called "the working homeless...

...This suggests why Bush's "axis of evil" approach, with Iraq as the first target for military action, has not worked out very well...

...A plan for health care credits was stalled...

...That goes further than anything I heard during my six years in Germany, where American troops are stationed to this day too...

...Within a year we may know, for all practical purposes, the name of the Democratic nominee...

...Or take unemployment benefits...

...How's that for class warfare...

...In the case of South Korea, the US...

...Russia, perhaps Iraq's best friend in the international community, was stunned when Baghdad served notice that it was canceling a longstanding, several-billion-dollar contract with Russian oil companies to develop Iraqi oil fields after sanctions are lifted...

...When Bush speaks of class warfare, it is in defense of the economic royalists...

...The House Republicans reduced that $90 billion to $6 billion, and a Democratic-led Senate did nothing...

...He is remembered for a perjury conviction, later overturned, in the Iran-contra conspiracy...

...But the policy of cold-shouldering the regime in Pyongyang has not gotten much support from China or even South Korea...

...The father of the TIA program is retired Rear Admiral John Poindexter, who was President Reagan's national security adviser...

...Now, with the primaries front-loaded and bunched up, the race is substantially over before New Hampshire...

...Some Koreans said that if North Korea wants to have nuclear weapons, it should have them...

...Iran has been determined, by American intelligence, to have a nuclear program that is disguised as a water irrigation project...

...The report also said $30 billion to $40 billion in new foreign investment will be needed to rehabilitate existing wells and to develop new fields...

...But North Korea seems to be giving higher priority to direct engagement and peaceful relations than to energy assistance alone...

...Not how much money he has, which is plenty, but how much he can raise, because that is the first test of his viability as a Presidential candidate...

...It enabled North Korea to seize the moment to do the unthinkable—to speak in menacing terms to the superpower...

...Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said the reason for the cancellation was that Lukoil, the biggest of the Russian companies involved, discussed the future of a major Iraqi oil field with opponents of Saddam Hussein and with an American official in Washington...

...Of the three "axis of evil" countries, the probability is that North Korea is the most advanced in its nuclear program, Iran is second and Iraq, if it has a nuclear program, would be third...

...The reason is clear: Every country with a nuclear weapon is a superpower no longer to be pre-empted...

...In Lahore, Pakistan, a man recognized one of them as a picture of himself...

...While Bush did not, as a result, tell Putin the Russian contracts would be honored, he did say the U.S...

...West Germany's "sunshine" policy was called Ostpolitik, Eastern policy...

...A panel of experts assembled for a videoconference by the James A. Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York has recommended that the Iraqis form their own postSaddam government and control their own oil industry...

...So watch for the next edition of the empire's strategy statement, providing for pre-emptive action against a rogue state unless it is already too late for pre-emption...

...Identities have also become a government preoccupation since 9/11...

...Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly held out the prospect of energy assistance for the North "once we get beyond nuclear weapons...

...A 29-year-old South Korean, to whom the Communist invasion in 1950 may be only a historic footnote, said, "There's no way North Korea will attack us with its nuclear weapons...

...But such attitudes help to explain why the Bush Administration is having so much trouble forging a common front against the nuclear threat from North Korea...

...North Korea has alternately confirmed and denied that it has had a secret uranium enrichment plant, and it is now reactivating a facility that could provide plutonium fuel...

...He says his tax package would shrink the liability of the average taxpayer by $1,083...

...One White House initiative last year was a 10-year, $90 billion plan to encourage charitable giving by offering tax deductions to those who do not itemize their income tax returns...

...Every American's worst financial nightmare,' says Federal prosecutor James Comey in New York, but there is no assurance that it will not happen again...

...The President has said affirmative action programs like Michigan's are "divisive, unfair and impossible to square with our Constitution...

...This is not like the old days when an upset victory in an early primary might generate a lot of cash...

...Still to be determined is whether and for how long an American-led coalition would control the world's second-biggest reserves of petroleum...

...Bush wants the Republican-controlled Congress to approve stricter work requirements for welfare mothers—40 hours a week...

...The Washington Post, in a comprehensive report from Seoul, found sympathy for North Korea and anger toward the United States...

...Jockeying for Iraq's Oil In expectation of war with Iraq, a preliminary war is being fought over who will control the oil fields there once the military conflict is over...

...According to the New York Times, the meeting with an Energy Department undersecretary, unnamed, took place before President Bush met with President Vladimir V. Putin in St...

...We're the same country...

...And yet, to the frustration of the American authorities, West Germany poured millions into keeping the GDR afloat for the sake of family and cultural connections...

...The Kim II Sung (Kim Jong II's father) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany called itself, was the spade-bearded Stalinist dictator Walter Ulbricht, who used his Stasi secret police to terrorize people and built a wall across Berlin to stop their flight to a hospitable West...

...Other hopefuls have money that was transferred from their Congressional reelection campaigns—Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts with $2.5 million and former House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri with something near that...

...Both proteges of the West owe their continued existence to America's willingness to go to war for them...

...That is why Senator Edwards emphasized that he intends to finance his campaign "from funds that we will raise...

...The Washington Post notes, for example, that Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut has strength among Jewish donors, but weakness among trial lawyers, who are ranged against the insurance industry centered in his state...

...That "average" conceals the fact that 59 per cent of the reductions would go to the top 10 per cent of incomes, according to the Brookings Institution, and almost half the taxpayers would see their tax bite reduced by less than $100...

...There is growing fear that, with nuclear know-how on the market, there may be still other candidates for membership in the nuclear club, whose last two publicly known entrants were India in 1974 and Pakistan in 1998...

...Funding for the preschool Head Start program is virtually frozen...

...Money is needed to buy television time, and television time is needed to bring in money...

...The Pyongyang government proclaimed its own deterrent policy, threatening "uncontrollable catastrophe in case of hostilities...

...But the evolution of the nomination process has put a premium on new contributions as an indication of support...

...Education reform, a major Bush priority, ran into a budget fight that left it underfunded...

...Cities have recorded a 19 per cent increase in requests for food and shelter...

...Fund-raising tends to be the centerpiece of a campaign which can cost $ 15 million or more...

...Identity Problems Three men were arrested in New York late last year in one of the biggest cases of identity theft in history...

...Petersburg last November...

...How's that for class warfare...

...States are running out of money for health care for the disadvantaged...

...An Unwelcome Distraction When President Bush defined Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil, potential threats to the United States with weapons of mass destruction," he could hardly have conceived that he might end up confronting all three of them simultaneously...

...The hastily passed USA Patriot Act reduced some of the barriers to the invasion of privacy...

...The New 'Primaries' When North Carolina's Democratic Senator John Edwards forms an exploratory committee, what is it exactly that he is exploring...

...But today, thanks to computer wizardry and modern forgery skills, your good name may well bring enrichment to him that filches it, leaving you poor both in name and in fact...

...Like South Korea today, West Germany had a ministry devoted to advancing the cause of unification...

...North Korea has been getting help from Pakistan, and Iran from Russia and Ukraine...

...Products of World War II Korea today reminds me of Germany a half-century ago, in the way that communal bonds tend to override ideological conflict...

...Trial lawyer John Edwards can presumably count on his fellow litigators for support...

...Indeed, if the United States is the awesome empire that Michael Ignatieff described in a recent New York Times Magazine article, it is certainly a strange empire...

...How level the playing field will be if American-led forces are occupying Iraq remains to be seen...

...Some programs were enacted last year without enough money to make them work...

...Not long ago, the FBI distributed pictures of five men believed to have entered the United States with fake IDs...

...understood Russia's interests, and "these interests will be taken into account...

...Further complicating the situation is that some of America's friends are involved in the nuclear arms race...

...Nobody is going to attack North Korea, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell says with refreshing candor, because a strike against its Yongbyon reactor, now that it is operational, could cause radioactive fallout over a wide area...

...That issue was discussed at a recent meeting of Iraqi opposition groups in London...

...That means pandering to a lot of special interests...

...It was stolen, he said, by someone who once forged a passport for him and then used his picture to make other forgeries...

...But a more ambitious program to expand volunteerism ran into Republican opposition in the House and was left dangling...

...Washington has not had much luck getting these countries to desist from selling or trading nuclear technology...

...But at this writing he has not done the same for nearly a million workers who exhausted their benefits earlier...

...The most immediate nuclear headache for the Bush Administration is North Korea, which may already have two or three atomic devices...

...For the Bush Administration, preoccupied with Iraq, North Korea has represented an unwelcome distraction...

...North and South Korea, like East and West Germany, were products of deals with the Soviet Union made during World War II...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Bush's Class Warfare President George W. Bush, defending his tax cut proposal against what he calls "class warfare," takes me back to the 1930s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke up for a poverty-stricken "one-third of a nation" and inveighed against the wealthy as "economic royalists...

...Despite the fallout from Republican Senator Trent Lott's expressed nostalgia for segregation, the Administration has filed a brief in the University of Michigan case before the Supreme Court opposing race as a factor in admissions...

...The Post quoted another young man as saying, "If the United States left, I wouldn't mind...

...In Shakespeare's Othello Iago says, "He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed...

...By Executive order, he established a USA Freedom Corps to coordinate the domestic AmeriCorps and the international Peace Corps...

...In Seoul, U.S...

...In the first place, money...