EvansMediaUSA

Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.

The dryland regions of the world, which account for 41 per cent of the earth's land surface, have been particularly badly damaged and yet this is where the human population has grown most rapidly during the 1990s.

Slow degradation is one thing but sudden and irreversible decline is another. The report identifies half a dozen potential "tipping points" that could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of recovery on a human timescale.

Even if slow and inexorable degradation does not lead to total environmental collapse, the poorest people of the world are still going to suffer the most, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which drew on 22 national science academies from around the world.

Walt Reid, the leader of the report's core authors, warned that unless the international community took decisive action the future looked bleak for the next generation. "The bottom line of this assessment is that we are spending earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the natural functions of earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," Dr Reid said.

"At the same time, the assessment shows that the future really is in our hands. We can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently under way," he said.

The assessment was carried out over the past three years and has been likened to the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - set up to investigate global warming - for its expertise in the many specialisms that make up the broad church of environmental science.

In summary, the scientists concluded that the planet had been substantially "re-engineered" in the latter half of the 20th century because of the pressure placed on the earth's natural resources by the growing demands of a larger human population.

"Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber and fibre," the reports says.

The full costs of this are only now becoming apparent. Some 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on earth have been seriously degraded or used unsustainably - an ecosystem being defined as a dynamic complex of plants, animals and micro-organisms that form a functional unit with the non-living environment in which the coexist.

The scale of the changes seen in the past few decades has been unprecedented. Nearly one-third of the land surface is now cultivated, with more land being converted into cropland since 1945 than in the whole of the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

The amount of water withdrawn from rivers and lakes for industry and agriculture has doubled since 1960 and there is now between three and six times as much water held in man-made reservoirs as there is flowing naturally in rivers.

Meanwhile, the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that has been released into the environment as a result of using farm fertilizers has doubled in the same period . More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used on the planet has been used since 1985.

This sudden and unprecedented release of free nitrogen and phosphorus - important mineral nutrients for plant growth - has triggered massive blooms of algae in the freshwater and marine environments. This is identified as a potential "tipping point" that can suddenly destroy entire ecosystems. "The Millennium Assessment finds that excessive nutrient loading is one of the major problems today and will grow significantly worse in the coming decades unless action is taken," Dr Reid said.

"Surprisingly, though, despite a major body of monitoring information and scientific research supporting this finding, the issue of nutrient loading barely appears in policy discussions at global levels and only a few countries place major emphasis on the problem.

"This issue is perhaps the area where we find the biggest 'disconnect' between a major problem related to ecosystem services and the lack of policy action in response," he said.

Abrupt changes are one of the most difficult things to predict yet their impact can be devastating. But is environmental collapse inevitable?

"Clearly, the dual trends of continuing degradation of most ecosystem services and continuing growth in demand for these same services cannot continue," Dr Reid said.

"But the assessment shows that over the next 50 years, the risk is not of some global environmental collapse, but rather a risk of many local and regional collapses in particular ecosystem services. We already see those collapses occurring - fisheries stocks collapsing, dead zones in the sea, land degradation undermining crop production, species extinctions," he said.

Between 1960 and 2000, the world population doubled from three billion to six billion. At the same time, the global economy increased more than six-fold and the production of food and the supply of drinking water more than doubled, with the consumption of timber products increasing by more than half.

Meanwhile, human activity has directly affected the diversity of wild animals and plants. There have been about 100 documented extinctions over the past century but scientists believe that the rate at which animals and plants are dying off is about 1,000 times higher than natural, background levels.

"Humans are fundamentally and to a significant extent irreversibly changing the diversity of life on earth and most of these changes represent a loss of biodiversity," the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says.

The distribution of species across the world is becoming more homogenous as some unique animals and plants die out and other, alien species are introduced into areas in which they would not normally live, often with devastating impact.

For example, the Baltic Sea contains 100 non-native species, of which about one-third come from the Great Lakes of North America. Meanwhile, a similar proportion of the 170 non-native species found in the Great Lakes come from the Baltic.

"In other words, the species in any one region of the world are becoming more similar to other regions.... Some 10 to 30 per cent of mammals, birds and amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. Genetic diversity has declined globally, particularly among cultivated species," the report says.

Agricultural intensification, which brought about the green revolution that helped to feed the world in the latter part of the 20th century, has increased the tendency towards the loss of genetic diversity. "Currently 80 per cent of wheat area in developing countries and three-quarters of all rice planted in Asia is now planted to modern varieties," the report says. Dr Reid said that the authors of the assessment were most worried about the state of the earth's drylands - an area covering 41 per cent of the land surface and home to a total of two billion people, many of them the poorest in the world.

Drylands are areas where crop production or pasture for livestock is severely limited by rainfall. Some 90 per cent of the world's dryland regions occur in developing countries where the availability of fresh water is a growing problem.

One-third of the world's people live in dryland regions that have access to only 8 per cent of the world's renewable supply of water, the scientists found. "We were particularly alarmed by the evidence of strong linkages between the degradation of ecosystem services in drylands and poverty in those regions," Dr Reid said.

"Moreover, while historically, population growth has been highest in either urban areas or the most productive ecosystems such as cultivated lands, this pattern changed in the 1990s and the highest percentage rate of growth is now in drylands - ecosystems with the lowest potential to support that growth.

"These problems of ecosystem degradation and the harm it causes for human well-being clearly help set the stage for the conflict that we see in many dryland regions including parts of Africa and central Asia," he said.

Poor people living in dryland regions are at the greatest risk of environmental collapse. Many of them already live unsustainably - between 10 and 20 per cent of the soil in the drylands are eroded or degraded.

"Development prospects in dryland regions of developing countries are especially dependent on actions to slow and reverse the degradation of ecosystems," the Millennium Assessment says.

So what can be done in a century when the human population is expected to increase by a further 50 per cent?

The board of directors of the Millennium Assessment said in a statement: "The overriding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all.

"Achieving this, however, will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making and new ways of co-operation between government, business and civil society. The warning signs are there for all of us to see. The future now lies in our hands," it said.

Asked what we should do now and what we should plan to do over the next 50 years, Dr Reid replied that there must be a fundamental reappraisal of how we view the world's natural resources. "The heart of the problem is this: protection of nature's services is unlikely to be a priority so long as they are perceived to be free and limitless by those using them," Dr Reid said.

"We simply must establish policies that require natural costs to be taken into account for all economic decisions," he added.

"There is a tremendous amount that can be done in the short term to reduce degradation - for example, the causes of some of the most significant problems such as fisheries collapse, climate change, and excessive nutrient loading are clear - many countries have policies in place that encourage excessive harvest, use of fossil fuels, or excessive fertilization of crops.

"But as important as these short-term fixes are, over the long term humans must both enhance the production of many services and decrease our consumption of others. That will require significant investments in new technologies and significant changes in behavior," he explained.

Many environmentalists would agree, and they would like politicians to go much further.

"The Millennium Assessment cuts to the heart of one of the greatest challenges facing humanity," Roger Higman, of Friends of the Earth, said.

"That is, we cannot maintain high standards of living, let alone relieve poverty, if we don't look after the earth's life-support systems," Mr Higman said.

"Yet the assessment hasn't gone far enough in specifying the radical solutions needed. At the end of the day, if we are to respect the limits imposed by nature, and ensure the well-being of all humanity, we must manage the global economy to produce a fairer distribution of the earth's resources," he added.

THE TIPPING POINTS TO CATASTROPHE

NEW DISEASES

As population densities increase and living space extends into once pristine forests, the chances of an epidemic of a new infectious agent grows. Global travel accentuates the threat, and the emergence of SARS and bird flu are prime examples of diseases moving from animals to humans.

ALIEN SPECIES

The introduction of an invasive species - whether animal, plant or microbe - can lead to a rapid change in ecosystems. Zebra mussels introduced into North America led to the extinction of native clams and the comb jellyfish caused havoc to 26 major fisheries species in the Black Sea.

ALGAL BLOOMS

A build up of man-made nutrients in the environment has already led to the threshold being reached when algae blooms. This can deprive fish and other wildlife of oxygen as well as producing toxic substances that are a danger to drinking water.

CORAL REEF COLLAPSE

Reefs that were dominated by corals have suddenly changed to being dominated by algae, which have taken advantage of the increases in nutrient levels running off from terrestrial sources. Many of Jamaica's coral reefs have now become algal dominated.

FISHING STOCKS

Overfishing can, and has, led to a collapse in stocks. A threshold is reached when there are too few adults to maintain a viable population. This occurred off the east coast of Newfoundland in 1992 when its stock of Atlantic cod vanished.

CLIMATE CHANGE

In a warmer world, local vegetation or land cover can change, causing warming to become worse. The Sahel region of North Africa depends on rainfall for its vegetation. Small changes in rain can result in loss of vegetation, soil erosion and further decreases in rainfall.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd

WASHINGTON -- A group of former national security officials on Monday took up the cause of weaning U.S. drivers from their oil addiction -- normally the realm of environmental groups -- and asked the Bush administration to spend $1 billion on lighter, more fuel-efficient automobiles.

Retail U.S. gasoline prices now averaging above $2 a gallon make U.S. reliance on foreign suppliers like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia a looming national security crisis, a group of 31 national security officials said in a letter to President Bush.

"This really constitutes a national security crisis in the making," said letter signer Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, a thinktank, and a former Defense Department official under former President Ronald Reagan.

Other signers included Robert McFarlane, Reagan's national security advisor, and James Woolsey, Central Intelligence Agency director under President Bill Clinton.

In an uncharacteristic move, the security experts sought input from groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which have long lobbied for more fuel-efficient cars.

"It's strange bedfellows but this is actually the real American majority," said Nicole St. Clair, a spokeswoman for the NRDC. "It's common sense."

Policymakers should address rampant oil demand from gas-guzzling vehicles, and stop trying to solve the problem by opening land like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, she said.

The letter urged the government to encourage car makers to design vehicles from lighter materials to improve mileage. It also endorsed the use of "plug power" -- hybrid vehicles that can run off internal batteries for short trips before switching to their internal-combustion engines.

The program would cost $1 billion over five years.

Regulations known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards require automakers to achieve an average fuel economy of 27.5 miles per gallon for all passenger cars sold, and 20.7 mpg for vans, sport utility vehicles and pick-up trucks. The standards have not been tightened for more than a dozen years due to opposition from Detroit.

The average fuel economy has steadily dropped since 1988. It was 20.8 mpg for all 2003 model vehicles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's annual mileage report.

McFarlane told the White House that stricter mileage standards could help cut U.S. crude oil imports in half.

The group's recommendations gave short shrift to hydrogen-powered vehicles, a Bush administration priority, because they will take decades to field.

U.S. drivers should not depend on foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia for security reasons, they said. Although Saudi officials say the kingdom's oilfields are protected from terror attacks, McFarlane said the oil installations are "extremely vulnerable from a military point of view."

If Saudi oil facilities are damaged, "You're not talking about $100 (per barrel) oil. You're talking about well beyond that," McFarlane said. U.S. crude oil prices peaked on March 17 at $57.60 a barrel.

Copyright © 2005 Reuters

Maybe because it was the Easter weekend, maybe it was because I was replaying Bruce's 911 hymn "the rising," or maybe, because I was meditating on the difficulty we journalists have in reporting or establishing "truth", that I thought of a famous saying I first heard come out of the always eloquent lips of Martin Luther King Jr in a union hall in lower Manhattan early in the l960's.

He closed a sermon of a speech that I will never forgot with a famous quotation: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

Lets hope so.

Today, we live in two worlds of news and information. One is "fact based," the other 'faith-based." In the former, we cling to a world of objective reporting and verifiable evidence even as we know how facts are skewed by media outlets with undisclosed agendas; in the latter, we only acknowledge facts that support our opinions and often don't let facts get in the way of a good argument.' '

Look at the debate over Terry Schiavo. Two worldviews are in conflict. Its not really the right to die versus the right to live because it is the self-proclaimed right to lifers who rally at the side of a terminally brain dead woman to make their larger point. Many support capital punishment, The contradictions on display are too blatant and thick to even fully dissect.

"Their" media supports them uncritically. Judges and journalists who have studied the details of the affidavits and medical records, and beg to differ, are baited and discredited by the ether of emotive passion,

Truth crushed to earth?

What is the truth of the Iraq war? A prominent media critic who I just shared a panel with me revealed that she recently interviewed many leading TV news anchors that could not agree on the causes. "I was shocked, by their lack of a consensus," she said, "

So now we learn that they all reported the war the same way but did not really believe what they were saying.

Think of the last election. At one point President Bush acknowledged that there was no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and that no WMD's were found in Iraq.

He said it, wink, wink, but a majority of supporter wouldn't change their long reinforced views. They told pollsters they believed the weapons were still there and that Iraq is part of the war on Al Qaeda to avenge 911.

It seems to take a long time for truth to trickle out, or up, under mounds of misinformation. In a new book called American Monsters I write about president William McKinley who launched the Spanish American War with the slogan "Remember the Maine."

Thanks to the yellow journalists of that era, Americans were convinced that the war was justified because Spanish terrorists blew up our battleship in Havana Harbor. Fifty years later, we learned that the ship went down because of an accident in the machine room.

Truth tends to rise when it no longer matters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Italian Journalist Giuliana Serena's account of being fired on by US soldiers in Iraq. The intelligence agent who rescued her from kidnappers was killed in the incident.

My reporting on what she said happened--based on accounts in her newspaper--quickly came under less lethal fire, but fire all the same. Some of those 'all the way with the USA' bloggers went to work to demolish her claims and discredit her as a communist who was probably supporting terrorists. This character assassination sought to silence her.

I was also put down viciously as well for calling for am independent probe I was told that photos of the car posted on the internet "proved" that her story was a big lie.

After nationwide protests in Italy, the US government reluctantly agreed to a joint investigation with Italian investigators.

Last week, the Pentagon told the Italians they wouldn't show them the car that allegedly "proved" their claims that her driver was racing past a check point and refused to stop. (Last week the Pentagon also told Reuters that they would not reopen their investigation into the killing of two of their staffers in the infamous April 8 2003 Palestine Hotel incident.)

On Good Friday Amy Goodman interviewed writer Naomi Klein who just visited with Giuliana in a Rome Hospital.

Here's part of what she said---more evidence of how long it takes for truth to trickle out much less rise.

Naomi Klein: Her injuries were (at the time) described as fairly minor; she was shot in the shoulder. …She was fired on by a gun at the top of a tank, which means that the artillery was very, very large. It was a four-inch bullet that entered her body and broke apart. And it didn’t just injure her shoulder, it punctured her lung. And her lung continues to fill with fluid, and there continues to be complications stemming from that fairly serious injury. So that was one of the details.

"She told me a lot about the incident that I had not fully understood from the reports in the press. One of the most - and at first, the other thing I want to be really clear about is that Giuliana is not saying that she’s certain in any way that the attack on the car was intentional. She is simply saying that she has many, many unanswered questions, and there are many parts of her direct experience that simply don’t coincide with the official U.S. version of the story.

"One of the things that we keep hearing is that she was fired on on the road to the airport, which is a notoriously dangerous road. In fact, it’s often described as the most dangerous road in the world. So this is treated as a fairly common and understandable incident that there would be a shooting like this on that road. And I was on that road myself, and it is a really treacherous place with explosions going off all the time and a lot of checkpoints. What Giuliana told me that I had not realized before is that she wasn’t on that road at all. She was on a completely different road that I actually didn’t know existed. It’s a secured road that you can only enter through the Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for ambassadors and top military officials.

"And the other thing that Giuliana told me that she’s quite frustrated about is the description of the vehicle that fired on her as being part of a checkpoint. She says it wasn’t a checkpoint at all. It was simply a tank that was parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, they were just -- it was just opening fire by a tank. The other thing she told me that was surprising to me was that they were fired on from behind. Because I think part of what we’re hearing is that the U.S. soldiers opened fire on their car, because they didn’t know who they were, and they were afraid. It was self-defense, they were afraid. The fear, of course, is that their car might blow up or that they might come under attack themselves.

"And what Giuliana Sgrena really stressed with me was that she -- the bullet that injured her so badly and that killed (Agent Nicola) Calipari came from behind, entered the back seat of the car. And the only person who was not severely injured in the car was the driver, and she said that this is because the shots weren’t coming from the front or even from the side. They were coming from behind, i.e. they were driving away."

File this away: one more example of how you can't trust what you first hear or how it is spun.

In the absence of an independent investigation, we may never know the full truth of what happened. You will notice that the great investigators of so-called "liberal" (sic) media, ABC, NBC and CBS have been silent on this issue even though one of their own, a journalist was a victim. Why bother to follow up in the time of Terri?

This story once again underscores why we need independent journalism and reporters committed to finding the truth, as hard as that sometimes is.

Last week, the Washington Post reported: "Heavy Insurgent Toll in Iraq; Tuesday Raid on Camp Said to Kill 85, Highest Since Fallujah." On Saturday, the Post admitted its report was in error and that the number of the dead was inflated. Dane Baker in the Bewilderhead blog notes that even this admission of a mistake was misleading:

"The admission of "doubts" is made within a narrow framework, quickly established: Only "Iraqi government claims that 85 rebels were killed" is in question and presumably nothing else."

This is going on every day. Incomplete stores, tilted accounts, distorted news. It's not just that some journalists today are on the government payroll. The rot in our corporate media goes deeper. Much deeper.

What can we believe? Who can we trust? What is true? When will truth rise again?

News Dissector Danny Schechter is blogger-in-chief of Mediachannel.org and the director of WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) a film on the media coverage of the Iraq war now out on DVD. (www.wmdthefilm.com)

© 2005 MediaChannel.org

WASHINGTON -- As President Bush and his allies travel the country to promote his Social Security plan, they say individual investment accounts are a no-brainer, bound to result in more money at retirement than workers could expect from Social Security.

But someone at the Social Security Administration did not get the word.

In a Q. and A. on the agency's Web site meant to explain the retirement program, there is this exchange, which has apparently been there for years:

"Question: I think I could do better if you let me invest the Social Security I pay into an individual retirement plan (I.R.A.) or some other investment plan. What do you think?"

"Answer: Maybe you could, but then again, maybe your investments wouldn't work out. Remember these facts:

• Your Social Security taxes pay for potential disability and survivors benefits as well as for retirement benefits.
  
• Social Security incorporates social goals - such as giving more protection to families and to low-income workers - that are not part of private pension plans; and
  
• Social Security benefits are adjusted yearly for increases in the cost of living - a feature not present in many private plans."
  

In the middle of the page at www.ssa.gov., toward the top, are "Questions about." From the drop-down menu, viewers can choose "Taxes and Social Security" and go to Question 18.

After he was shown the passage on Thursday, a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said: "The president is not talking about this approach. The president's approach is a voluntary account financed by a portion of a person's payroll taxes, and that account would have appropriate safeguards to guard against risks in the market."

Does he expect the Web site to be changed? "That's up to the Social Security Administration," Mr. Duffy said.

In the agency's press office, Mark Hinkle, said, "By and large, we have an informational Web site, not a political Web site."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

JUST when Americans are being told it's safe to hand over their savings to Wall Street again, he's baaaack! Looking not unlike Chucky, the demented doll of perennial B-horror-movie renown, Ken Lay has crawled out of Houston's shadows for a media curtain call.

His trial is still months away, but there he was last Sunday on "60 Minutes," saying he knew nothin' 'bout nothin' that went down at Enron. This week he is heading toward the best-seller list, as an involuntary star of "Conspiracy of Fools," the New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's epic account of the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme anointed America's "most innovative company" (six years in a row by Fortune magazine). Coming soon, the feature film: Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a documentary seen at Sundance, goes into national release next month. As long as you're not among those whose 401(k)'s and pensions were wiped out, it's morbidly entertaining. In one surreal high point, Mr. Lay likens investigations of Enron to terrorist attacks on America. For farce, there's the sight of a beaming Alan Greenspan as he accepts the "Enron Award for Distinguished Public Service" only days after Enron has confessed to filing five years of bogus financial reports. Then again, given the implicit quid pro quo in this smarmy tableau, maybe that's the Enron drama's answer to a sex scene.

The Bush administration, eager to sell the country on "personal" Social Security accounts, cannot be all that pleased to see Kenny Boy again. He's the poster boy for how big guys can rip off suckers in the stock market. He also dredges up some inconvenient pre-9/11 memories of Bush family business. Enron was the biggest Bush-Cheney campaign contributor in the 2000 election. Kenny Boy and his lovely wife Linda flew the first President Bush and Barbara Bush to the ensuing Inauguration on the Enron jet. Even as Enron was presiding over rolling blackouts in California, Dick Cheney or his aides had at least six meetings with the company's executives to carve up government energy policy in 2001. Even now what exactly transpired at those meetings remains a secret.

But never mind. The president himself gave his word when the Enron scandal broke that Kenny Boy was really more of a supporter of Ann Richards anyway. Feeling our pain, Mr. Bush told us of his own personal tragedy: his mother-in-law lost $8,000 she had invested in Enron. Soon stuff was happening in Iraq, and the case was closed, or at least forgotten.

Yet the larger shadows linger. Revisiting the Enron story as it re-emerges in 2005 is to be reminded of just how much the Enron culture has continued to shape the Bush administration long after the company itself imploded and the Lays were eighty-sixed from the White House Christmas card list.

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How? As the narrator says in "The Smartest Guys in the Room," Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company's Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn't even work."

If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.

Like Enron's stockholders, American taxpayers pay for the production of such propaganda, even if its message, like that of the Enron show put on for visiting analysts, misrepresents and distorts the bottom line of the scheme that is being sold. We paid for last year's phony television news reports in which the faux reporter Karen Ryan "interviewed" administration officials who gave partially deceptive information hyping the Medicare prescription-drug program. We paid Armstrong Williams his $240,000 for delivering faux-journalistic analysis of the No Child Left Behind act.

The administration cycled the Ryan and Williams paychecks through the PR giant Ketchum Communications. Ketchum was also one of the companies hired to flack for Andersen, the now-defunct Enron accounting firm that shredded a ton of documents. We don't know what, if any, role Ketchum is playing in the White House's Social Security propaganda push, though we do know the company has received at least $97 million from the government, according to a Congressional report.

That $97 million may yet prove a mere down payment. The Times reported last weekend that the administration told executive-branch agencies simply to ignore a stern directive by the Congressional Government Accountability Office discouraging the use of "covert propaganda" like the Karen Ryan "news reports." In other words, the brakes are off, and before long, the government could have a larger budget for fake news than actual television news divisions have for real news. At last weekend's Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how "most" of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us.

USA Today reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security, having failed miserably to secure American ports and air transportation from potential Al Qaeda attacks, has nonetheless shelled out $100,000-plus to hire "a Hollywood liaison": Bobbie Faye Ferguson, an actress whose credits include the movie "The Bermuda Triangle" and guest shots on television schlock like "Designing Women" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." She will "work with moviemakers and scriptwriters" to give us homeland security infotainment - which is to actual homeland security what the movie "Independence Day" is to an actual terrorist attack.

Another propagandist with a rising profile is Susan Molinari, the onetime CBS News personality who appears regularly on news shows like "Hardball" and "Capitol Report." As she bloviates from the right about Social Security or the fake newsman Jeff Gannon, she is invariably described as "a former Republican Congresswoman" or a "CNBC political analyst." But her actual current jobs remain mysteriously unmentioned: C.E.O. of the Washington Group, Ketchum's lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public Affairs. Were the Ketchum link disclosed, perhaps some real NBC reporter might find the nerve to ask her what other Karen Ryans and Armstrong Williamses might be on the Ketchum payroll. Or not.

The Bush propagandists have been successful at many tasks, from fomenting the canard that Iraqis attacked on 9/11 to deflecting moral outrage from Abu Ghraib and toward indecency as defined by its Federal Communications Commission. But Social Security may be a bridge too far even for propaganda machinery of this heft. Polls find that an ever-increasing majority of the country rejects the idea of letting Wall Street get its hands on its retirement savings.

Americans do have short memories, but it's the administration's bad luck that not just Kenny Boy but a whole brigade of bubble plutocrats have lately been yanked back into the spotlight by their legal travails: WorldCom's Bernard J. Ebbers, Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, HealthSouth's Richard M. Scrushy, Global Crossing's Gary Winnick. No one is glad to see them. The public knows that the economy has not fully mended, and that there remain different economic rules for insiders than for the panelists drafted for the presidential Social Security roadshow. The new bankruptcy bill embraced this month by Republicans and Democrats alike throws Americans paying usurious credit-card interest to the wolves even as wealthy debtors remain protected.

You can catch the public mood in the reaction to Martha Stewart's homecoming. Despite the news media's heavy-breathing efforts to hype her emergence from jail as the heartwarming comeback of a born-again humanitarian, the bottom line shows that few in the audience are buying it. The Martha Stewart Omnimedia stock price started tumbling the moment she was back on camera, in line with the cratered circulation and ad sales of her magazine. Handing out hot cocoa to reporters at her Bedford, N.Y., estate did not turn the tide, and her spinoff of "The Apprentice" may be arriving just as the country is getting sick of C.E.O.'s again. Coincidentally or not, ratings for the existing "Apprentice" are off in tandem with the filing for bankruptcy protection by Donald Trump's casino empire, the saturation coverage of his lavish nuptials and the introduction of a Trump fragrance.

It's against this backdrop that the returning Mr. Lay - completely unrepentant, still purporting on "60 Minutes" that he's an innocent victim of others - could be the Democrats' new best friend. A Texas tycoon who helped create the political career of George W. Bush only to be discarded when scandal struck has re-emerged at just the precise moment when he might do his old buddy the most harm.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company