Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Remember Lee Iacocca, the man who rescued Chrysler Corporation from its death throes? He has written a new book, and here are some excerpts.

Lee Iacocca Says:
'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder.

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car.

But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course'

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America , not the damned 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the bums out!'

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore.

The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq , the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving 'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the ' America 'my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.
I've had enough.

How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes.

A Hell of a Mess

So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia , while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy.

Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm.

Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it?

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress.

We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough?

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope, I believe in America .

In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America 's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: the 'Great Depression', 'World War II', the 'Korean War', the 'Kennedy Assassination', the 'Vietnam War', the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11.

If I've learned one thing, it's this: 'You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action.

Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to 'Action' for people who, like me, believe in America . It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the crap and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had 'enough.'

Excerpted from 'Where Have All the Leaders Gone?'
Copyright (c) 2007 by Lee Iacocca. All rights reserved.

ITALIA FEDERICI SENTENCED FOR OBSTRUCTING SENATE INVESTIGATION INTO ABRAMOFF CORRUPTION SCANDAL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AT
DECEMBER 14, 2007 (202) 514-2007
http://www.usdoj.gov/

WASHINGTON - Italia Federici, the former president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), has been sentenced to four years of probation and ordered to pay more than $74,000 in restitution, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard T. Morrison of the Tax Division announced today.

Federici, 38, of Washington, D.C., was sentenced today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. In imposing Federici's sentence, Judge Huvelle granted the government's motion for a downward departure based on the substantial assistance Federici provided in the investigation of the corruption scandal surrounding former lobbyist Jack A. Abramoff. Court documents reflect that Federici's cooperation concerned, among other things, the corrupt relationship and dealings that occurred between Abramoff and J. Steven Griles while Griles served as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), the second-highest ranking official at DOI.

Federici pleaded guilty on June 8, 2007, to one count of income tax evasion and one count of obstructing the U.S. Senate's investigation into the lobbying activities of Abramoff. Griles, Abramoff, and several others have pleaded guilty in connection with the government's public corruption investigation.

According to court documents, Federici admitted to obstructing the investigation of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs into Abramoff, which began in the fall of 2004. Federici also admitted to willfully evading her individual income taxes for the calendar years 2001 through 2003 by, among other things, failing to segregate her personal finances from CREA's, using cash to handle CREA's and her own personal finances, failing to maintain proper books and records or properly report CREA's payroll, failing to submit her U.S. individual income tax returns on the relevant due dates, and then failing to pay the income taxes owed. Federici admitted that in lieu of taking a regular salary, she and CREA's other officer, Jared Carpenter, obtained funds from CREA by direct cash withdrawals from CREA's bank account. Carpenter, who pleaded guilty on July 6, 2007, to income tax evasion, is also being sentenced today by Judge Huvelle.

Court documents reflect that Federici was the founder and president of CREA, a non-profit organization set up in Colorado in 1997 and incorporated in Washington, D.C., in 2000 as an Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(4) corporation. On March 1, 2001, she introduced Abramoff to Griles just before Griles was nominated to be DOI's Deputy Secretary. At the time, Federici and Griles were friends, and Griles had helped raise funds for CREA, which had operated primarily through donations.

Griles was confirmed as DOI's Deputy Secretary on July 12, 2001, and served in that position until he resigned effective Jan. 31, 2005. In her guilty plea, Federici admitted that during much of Griles' DOI tenure, she served as a conduit for information between Abramoff and Griles. In this role, she would communicate in-depth with Abramoff about his clients and the issues and concerns applicable to them, and then communicate in-depth with Griles about these issues and/or forward to Griles information and documents Abramoff supplied. Federici also admitted that she met with Abramoff and Griles in order to speak substantively and directly about these issues while Griles was DOI Deputy Secretary. Among other things, Federici's involvement as a conduit between Abramoff and Griles hindered DOI's official record-keeping about Griles' contacts with lobbyists such as Abramoff, and DOI's ability to measure the level of Abramoff's access to Griles.

Griles pleaded guilty to obstructing the Senate committee's Abramoff investigation and was sentenced on June 26, 2007, to ten months in prison and fined $30,000.

Court documents reveal that beginning soon after Federici introduced Abramoff to Griles and began serving as a conduit for information, Abramoff and certain of his Native American tribal clients became significant donors to CREA. Ultimately, Abramoff personally and through his Native American tribal clients donated a total of $500,000 to CREA between March 2001 and May 2003.

In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, Federici was interviewed by Senate investigators, and then testified before members of the Senate committee during a Nov. 17, 2005, public hearing. The Senate committee was investigating the level of access Abramoff had to Griles and the extent of the communications involving Federici, Abramoff and Griles. Federici admitted that during both her interview and her hearing testimony, she lied to and withheld material information from senators and Senate investigators in responding to questions about the extent of the communications involving her, Abramoff, and Griles during Griles' DOI tenure.

FORMER CONGRESSIONAL CHIEF OF STAFF PLEADS GUILTY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AT
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2007 (202) 514-2007
WWW.USDOJ.GOV TDD (202) 514-1888

WASHINGTON – Russell James Caso, Jr., 34, of Rockville, Md., a former Chief of Staff to a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (Representative A), pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, the Justice Department announced today.

Caso’s guilty plea was taken before U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. Caso faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. A sentencing date has not been set.

According to the evidence presented by the government at today’s plea hearing, Caso served as a Chief of Staff from 2005 until 2007. His guilty plea stems from his relationship with a firm (Firm A) that had a stated mission of helping American businesses to operate in Russia and facilitating the flow of trade between the United States and Russia .

Firm A sought to submit its proposals to various Executive Branch agencies seeking federal funding for these efforts. Firm A's General Secretary met frequently with and sought official action from Caso, Representative A, and Representative A's staff, including their assistance in obtaining funding for the proposals.

In or about April and May 2005, Firm A's General Secretary paid Caso’s wife $1500 to edit written drafts of its proposals.

After being paid for editing the proposals, Caso’s wife received and deposited three more checks from Firm A totaling $17,500: a check dated May 27, 2005, in the amount of $2,500; a check dated July 21, 2005, in the amount of $10,000; and a check dated Aug. 25, 2005, in the amount of $5,000. Caso knew that his wife did very little additional work in return for this money, and that the market value of the additional work that his wife ultimately performed for Firm A was far below $17,500.

In the middle of 2005, roughly contemporaneous with the payments that his wife was receiving from Firm A, Caso organized meetings in which Representative A and Caso made presentations to various Executive Branch agencies, including to high-level officials in the Departments of State and Energy and the National Security Council. Representative A and Caso argued that Firm A’s proposals should be federally funded.

As Representative A's Chief of Staff, Caso was required to submit annual financial disclosure statements, listing, among other things, the source of any income earned by his wife. On the disclosure statement for 2005, Caso intentionally failed to disclose that his wife received any payments from Firm A, even though he knew that he was required to do so. One reason for this non-disclosure was that Caso knew that his wife's financial relationship with Firm A created a personal conflict of interest because Firm A was seeking his help to obtain federal funding.

Caso is cooperating with the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation.

In announcing today’s guilty plea, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor, the Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Internal Revenue Service thanked FBI Special Agents Robert Schwinger, Julie Shields, and Michelle Rankin, and IRS Special Agent Randolph Gregory for the outstanding work that they performed on the case.

They also praised the efforts of the prosecutors assigned to the case: Assistant U.S. Attorney Howard Sklamberg and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeannie Rhee, DOJ Trial Attorneys Jennifer Shasky Calvery and Gregory C.J. Lisa of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime & Racketeering Section, Trial Attorney Armando O. Bonilla and former Trial Attorney Natashia Tidwell of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.

FORMER ALASKA STATE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE PETER KOTT SENTENCED

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2007

WASHINGTON – Peter Kott, a former elected member of the Alaska House of Representatives and former Alaska Speaker of the House, has been sentenced to 72 months in prison in Anchorage, Alaska, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division announced today.

Chief U.S. District Judge John W. Sedwick for the District of Alaska also ordered Kott to pay a $10,000 fine and serve three years of supervised release.

In calculating Kott’s sentence, Judge Sedwick found that portions of Kott’s testimony at trial constituted perjury and enhanced Kott’s sentence accordingly. Judge Sedwick also found that the advisory Sentencing Guidelines were insufficient to provide a fair and just sentence given Kott’s conduct, and departed upward to a sentence of 72 months.

On Sept. 25, 2007, a federal jury in Anchorage convicted Kott of bribery, extortion, and conspiracy for corruptly soliciting and receiving financial benefits from VECO Corporation in exchange for performing official acts in the Alaska State Legislature on the company’s behalf.

Evidence at trial showed that Kott, while serving as a member in the state legislature, solicited bribes from and took action to benefit the financial interests of VECO Corporation, a major Alaska oil services company.

Trial evidence, including more than 60 recordings of conversations involving Kott and former VECO executives, showed that Kott repeatedly promised to cast votes in VECO's favor on a key petroleum production tax proposal pending before the Alaska legislature.

In exchange, Kott received cash, checks and the promise of a future job with VECO. The VECO executives who testified at trial, former Chief Executive Officer Bill J. Allen and former Vice President of Community Affairs and Government Relations Richard L. Smith, pleaded guilty in May 2007 to providing more than $400,000 in corrupt payments to public officials from the state of Alaska.

This case was prosecuted by trial attorneys Nicholas A. Marsh and Edward P. Sullivan of the Criminal Division's Public Integrity Section, headed by Chief William M. Welch, II, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph W. Bottini and James A. Goeke from the District of Alaska. The case is being investigated by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigative Division.
http://anchorage.fbi.gov/doj/pressrel/2007/corruption120707.htm

Why there was no exit plan for Iraq - Editorial

San Francisco Chronicle
Lewis Seiler, Dan Hamburg
Monday, April 30, 2007

There are people in Washington ... who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they're looking for 10, 20, 50 years in the future ... the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.

-- former President Jimmy Carter, Feb. 3, 2006

For all the talk about timetables and benchmarks, one might think that the United States will end the military occupation of Iraq within the lifetimes of the readers of this opinion editorial. Think again.

There is to be no withdrawal from Iraq, just as there has been no withdrawal from hundreds of places around the world that are outposts of the American empire. As UC San Diego professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson put it, "One of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn't intend to leave."

The United States maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries across the globe. They exist for the purpose of defending the economic interests of the United States, what is euphemistically called "national security." In order to secure favorable access to Iraq's vast reserves of light crude, the United States is spending billions on the construction of at least five large permanent military bases throughout that country.

A new Iraq oil law, largely written by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is planned for ratification by June. This law cedes control of Iraq's oil to western powers for 30 years . There is major opposition to the proposed law within Iraq, especially among the country's five trade union federations that represent hundreds of thousands of oil workers. The United States is working hard to surmount this opposition by appealing directly to the al-Maliki government in Iraq.

The attack upon, and subsequent occupation of, Iraq can be seen as a direct result of the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as vice president Cheney's energy task force) that was comprised largely of oil and energy company executives. This task force -- the proceedings of which have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of "executive privilege" -- recommended that the U.S. government support initiatives in Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sector to foreign investment." As Antonio Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International wrote last month in the New York Times, "One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve."

The people of the United States have indicated, in the national election last November and in countless polls, that they no longer support the Bush administration's war. The Scooter Libby trial revealed that top administration officials, including the vice president, "cherry-picked" and distorted intelligence in order to sell a "pre-emptive" war to a spooked public. The squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars, some billions of which, according to Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker, is being siphoned into "black-ops" programs being run out of Cheney's office (a stunning redux of Iran-Contra carried out by many of the same actors), has also strained the patience and credulity of the American people.

Another betrayal is the "contracting out" of "war-related activities" to corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Chemonics and Blackwater. Halliburton, Vice President Cheney's previous employer, calls itself an "energy services company" but has tentacles reaching into nearly every aspect of the war (originally dubbed Operation Iraqi Liberation until some bright bulb among the Bushies realized that "OIL" might not be the best handle for this venture). Halliburton has also profited handsomely from no-bid government contracts awarded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the construction at the national embarrassment known as "Gitmo," and most recently, from the fiasco at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, all this corruption, mayhem and death are good for some (or it wouldn't go on).

The U.S. military budget, larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world's nations combined, continues skyward, even without all the "supplementals" passed regularly by Congress to fight the "war on terror."

The question we must ask as citizens is this: Is the United States a democratic republic or an empire? History demonstrates that it's not possible to be both.

Lewis Seiler is president of Voice of the Environment. Dan Hamburg, a former U.S. representative, is executive director.

This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Pentagon May Be Shorting Troop Benefits

By Hope Yen

The Associated Press
Monday 23 April 2007

Washington - An injured soldier's disability should be determined by Veterans Affairs officials - and not the Pentagon - because the Army might be shortchanging troops, a presidential commission was told on Monday.

At a public meeting, the nine-member commission on veterans care chaired by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala delved into ways to cut down on paperwork and problems in the disability ratings system.

Under the current system, each of the armed services assign ratings to service members when they become injured. The ratings determine whether the service member is discharged from active service and if so, the amount of disability benefits to which he or she is entitled. The VA operates a separate system to determine benefits for retired veterans.

Critics say the Army rates its injured soldiers at a lower level of disability compared with the other armed services and the VA so it can save on the costs of disability payments.
Veterans groups urged the commission to make a change so injured soldiers aren't underpaid disability benefits.

Such a proposal would be a major shift in how disability benefits are administered, with both critics and supporters acknowledging it would likely add significantly to costs since the VA takes into account all the disabilities a soldier has - not just one.

"We want to add our voice to others deeply disturbed by concerns of lowballing in Army disability ratings," said Robert Norton, deputy director for the Military Officers Association of America. "The ratings gaps are unacceptable."

In recent weeks, a separate review group found consistently lower disability ratings by the Army and suggested it might be because officials didn't want to pay benefits. The Army says it is perplexed by the finding but would investigate.

Bradley Mayes, director of compensation and pension service at the VA, told the commission that shifting the ratings work to the VA could be done. But he cautioned that the Pentagon would still need to be involved in making judgments on whether an active service member was fit for duty, as well as his level of military and severance pay for service. As a result, changing the current system could add to the level of bureaucracy.