Justice Dept. to Monitor Judges for Sentences Shorter Than Guidelines Suggest The Justice Department told a federal court administrator today that it would begin compiling data on judges who give lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe, a move that critics see as an effort to limit judicial independence by creating a "blacklist" of judges. The new policy will require prosecutors to notify Justice Department officials in Washington whenever a federal judge issues a sentence that falls below sentencing guidelines. The notification will set in motion a review of whether an appeal of the judge's sentence should be filed. The policy, first reported on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, is part of a bill signed into law by President Bush in April that seeks to make it tougher for federal judges to depart from sentencing guidelines. The Justice Department, in a letter today to the head of the administrative office of the United States Courts, said it developed the policy as part of the new law's requirements rather than accept a more "onerous" option allowed by Congress. That option would have required the Justice Department to go to Congress with a detailed report each time a judge broke from the sentencing guidelines. In 2001, federal judges handed out sentences below guidelines in 35 percent of the 54,851 cases examined, the United States Sentencing Commission found. But more than half the departures resulted from plea agreements, and prosecutors appealed the sentences in only a tiny fraction of cases, officials said. Mary Beth Buchanan, the United States attorney for the Pittsburgh area and the leader of a Justice Department advisory committee that helped develop the policy, said in an interview that there would probably be some increase in appeals by the Justice Department over sentences as a result of the new policy. But she added: "I don't think it will be a dramatic increase. Unless we get a tremendous increase in our resources, we wouldn't have the capability to do a lot more." Some lawmakers, judges and legal observers, however, said they were deeply troubled by the shift. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused Mr. Ashcroft of requiring prosecutors "to participate in the establishment of a blacklist of judges." He called the policy "the latest salvo in the Ashcroft Justice Department's ongoing attack on judicial independence and fairness" in sentencing. John S. Martin, a federal district judge in Manhattan who announced in June that he would retire in part because he saw the judiciary's independence as threatened, said the Justice Department policy was "based on the erroneous premise that a lot of judges around the county are just going off the reservation." He added: "The problem is that a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington looking at the statistics won't know the facts of these cases. They're taking a very mechanistic approach to the whole process." Nicholas M. Gess, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, said the policy fit a pattern in the Ashcroft Justice Department of centralizing decision-making in Washington, a trend also seen in death penalty cases. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/08/politics/08JUDG.html

President puts himself in rare company--Hoover's July 29, 2003 BY JESSE JACKSON In upcoming weeks, President Bush and his Cabinet members will fan out across the country to tout the administration's economic plan. Republican legislators will make the economy the centerpiece of their ''message'' in the August recess. They want credit for the tax rebate checks that people will start receiving in the mail, will point to the uptick in the stock market, and predict that a ''robust recovery'' is just around the corner. And in chorus, they'll praise President Bush's tax cuts for turning the economy around. Great song and dance, but where are the jobs? This administration is the first since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression to lose jobs rather than create them. Since Bush came to office, the economy has shed more than 3 million private-sector jobs. And even with the added employment that came from huge increases in military and homeland security spending, the country has still lost more than 2.5 million jobs since Bush took office.� http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse29.html

After the war, American soldiers referred to Iraqi looters as "Ali Babas." Now, the name is more commonly used by Iraqis to describe the soldiers. Iraqis Struggle to Retrieve Goods From G.I.'s After the war, American soldiers referred to Iraqi looters as "Ali Babas." Now, the name is more commonly used by Iraqis to describe the soldiers. This notion is flickering through the capital, propelled by word of mouth and amplified by anti-Western elements ready to exploit any hint of American misbehavior. Many Iraqis are convinced that the soldiers are here to rob them of money, jewelry and cars. American military officials refused to discuss specific charges of theft by soldiers and disciplinary actions, but said that in most instances property believed stolen was more likely to have been confiscated during raids or at checkpoints. That distinction matters little to Iraqis trying to recover their property. Sgt. Thad Farlow, a civil affairs officer whose unit runs a civilian assistance center, said the complaints he heard stemmed from a mixture of negligence and actual misconduct. "It's kind of hard to win the hearts and minds when soldiers are taking $650 Thuraya phones," he said, referring to a type of satellite telephone. Iraqi community leaders warn that the perception is poisoning Iraqi attitudes, buttressing a sense of powerlessness and creating opposition to the American-led occupation, even among Iraqis who welcomed the ouster of Saddam Hussein. But the American forces have done little to refute the rumors of theft. Nor is there a centralized system to help Iraqis recover their property or to answer Iraqi complaints. On any given day, Iraqis can be found pleading at the gates of military bases or in civil affairs offices: an old woman who laments that her savings were taken from her son on the road to Baghdad; a young man who says he gave a Thuraya phone to a soldier for a call and did not get it back; a cigarette merchant who says he returned to a checkpoint to recover his car the day after it was confiscated, only to find that both car and checkpoint had vanished. "I always used to have the radio by my ear just waiting for when the Americans come here," said Ruslia Rumdhan Niima, who was on her fifth trip to Baghdad from the countryside to search for the 7 million dinars she claims Americans took from her son. "Now that they came, this is what happens." Part of the problem is a cultural misunderstanding. In Iraq's cash-based society, it is not unusual for people to carry stacks of dinars and a gun to protect them. But soldiers who discovered piles of cash (a million dinars equals only $700) and an AK-47 often assumed the owner was up to no good. Even now, some soldiers seem not to realize that many Iraqis are carrying on their business � buying houses, selling cars and livestock � often in cash. "Where would an Iraqi get $3,000?" one sergeant asked when the question of confiscation was raised. "I can't even get $3,000." Assad Ibrahim Mehdi, a vegetable seller, is one of the few complainants who can muster a witness. That person, a military translator, has signed an affidavit attesting that during a raid in April, soldiers took the family's savings � about $2,000 in dinars � and an old tin chocolate box containing the deed to his family's house, their citizenship papers and their ration card. The soldiers left no receipt, and Mr. Mehdi considers his property stolen. "What else would you call it?" he said on a recent day, after waiting three hours in the sun to see a soldier about his complaint. "I don't know what they'll do to the people who've been looted who haven't got witnesses," said Elizabeth Hodgkin, a representative of Amnesty International who is helping Mr. Mehdi. "I've heard many people say, `They took $30,000, but I don't think I'll ever see it again.' " http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/international/worldspecial/03THEF.html

Betting on Terror: What Markets Can Reveal Anyone looking for a good bet last week was offered one by an online futures exchange: Would John M. Poindexter, who heads the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the Pentagon known as Darpa, be able to keep his job after the furor over the aborted plan to start a market that would trade terrorism futures? Within days, the answer appeared to be that he would not, as Defense Department officials said Mr. Poindexter would resign within a few weeks. Assuming he does leave by the end of August, some lucky traders stand to make more than 10 times their investment. If that bet was not to your taste, there were plenty of others available. Would weapons of mass destruction be found in Iraq by the end of September? Would Saddam Hussein be captured? How about Osama bin Laden? Would the terrorism alert level in the United States be raised or lowered? Will Kobe Bryant be convicted? The existence of such contracts raises perhaps the most overlooked question of the debate on the proposed Defense Department project, the Policy Analysis Market, which would have allowed people to speculate on such issues as whether there would be an increase in terrorism or a collapse of the Jordanian economy. Why was the government needed to get this market going? The answer is that Uncle Sam had been picked to play the role of designated loser in the gambling. The existing place to make such bets, www.tradesports.com, is an Irish market that can be traded by anyone with a credit card and an Internet connection. There are no market makers, just traders online around the world. Tradesports dreams up contracts based on what it thinks might be interesting, and puts them up for trading. But it does not guarantee that you can find someone to take the other side of your bet. The Policy Analyst Market was going to do just that. The market maker was to be a computer, financed by the government, that was willing to offer a price for any wager on a subject within its bailiwick. If bettors wanted to wager a lot of money on something, the computer would steadily raise the price. One possible wager that was mentioned by Charles Polk, the president of NetExchange, a San Diego company that proposed the idea to the government, was on whether Hamas would join the Palestinian Authority government, a move that he took for granted would indicate it had renounced terrorism. The market-making computer was supposed to be willing not only to take bets on that, but on such related topics as whether the Jordanian economy would boom if that happened. One risk to the market maker would be insider trading. Somebody within Hamas could make some money by placing bets before the decision was made public. That would be all to the good, as Mr. Polk saw it. "We welcome insider trading," he said last week, since it would move prices and send a signal to the Defense Department, and anyone else watching the market, that conditions were changing. By being willing to lose money on the market maker, the Defense Department would be able to get information. One reason some people thought the whole idea stupid was that betting on an increase in terrorism might be a losing bet even if it turned out to be a winner. "Isn't that going to guarantee a knock on the door by the Feds?" asked James Chanos of Kynikos Associates, a money manager who specializes in selling stocks short � that is, betting that a stock price will decline. He recalled the search for evidence � ultimately unsuccessful � that terrorists might have shorted stocks before the Sept. 11 attacks. The people who designed that market thought of that possibility, and proposed that the names of traders be kept secret from the Defense Department. Want to bet whether that secrecy would have been maintained if there was a new terrorist attack? And anyway, said Robin Hanson, the assistant professor of economics at George Mason University who dreamed up this idea and persuaded NetExchange to propose it to the Defense Department, there were plenty of bets that would not offend the government. "The F.B.I. would not knock on my door," he said, "if I bet that if we invade Iraq there will be more terrorist deaths in the United States." For now, the idea is dead, with the Defense Department having abandoned it quickly once the public ridicule began. But Professor Hanson has not lost hope. "I think sometime in the next 10 years, this technology will be applied somewhere," he said. It would not, he said, have to be a public market. Perhaps, Professor Hanson mused, it could be open only to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, who would place their bets and, in the process, let the government know what consensus there was among intelligence professionals. That, he said, could sometimes be different from what the top of the agency was saying. For example, it would be interesting to see how likely the lower-level intelligence analysts think it is that biological, chemical or nuclear weapons will be found in Iraq anytime soon. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/weekinreview/03NORR.html

Bush's Tax Cuts Have Been the Best Job Program China and India Have Ever Had Job Losses in July Add to Mixed Economic Signs The economy shed 44,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported yesterday, though the overall unemployment rate edged down. The rate fell, to 6.2 percent from 6.4 percent in June, only because the number of people looking for jobs declined faster than the number of people holding them. People have been withdrawing from the labor market in greater numbers because of their poor prospects. The latest data on job losses, which came a day after the Commerce Department's mildly encouraging report on economic growth last quarter, left economists wondering what to believe.� The lack of improvement in the labor market despite some economic progress has added fuel to the battle fires in Washington and has frustrated job seekers across the country. Since the most recent recession ended in November 2001, the nation's payrolls have shrunk by more than a million workers. In a telephone interview yesterday, Elaine L. Chao, the secretary of labor, called the latest figures "confusing" and attributed the dwindling of the labor force to unusual seasonal factors. She said the tax credit checks recently mailed to families with children would help to stimulate demand; she also said she hoped Congress would approve $3,000 grants to help the long-term unemployed with training and relocation. Democrats in Washington charged that the three waves of tax cuts advocated by the White House had done little to ensure that new jobs accompanied the economic recovery. "This is the almost predictable consequence of a policy of tax cuts that have not strengthened the country but weakened it," said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. "We sent checks out, but we neglected millions who have family and are struggling. If we're serious about getting the economy going, we've got to start targeting tax relief to middle- and low-income families who will go out and create demand." The labor force thinned by 556,000 people last month, with the number of employed workers dipping by 260,000. These declines followed gains of comparable size in June. The unemployment rate dropped for almost every demographic group except whites for the second month in a row. Among whites, the rate remained at 5.5 percent, its highest level since April 1994. Payrolls contracted for the sixth straight month. Along with the July decline, the Labor Department revised its June report to reflect a decrease of 72,000 jobs rather than 30,000. Jobs in the manufacturing of long-lasting goods like motorcycles and microwave ovens slipped by 54,000, according to the survey of payrolls, which provides more reliable estimates of employment month to month. Wholesale and retail trade combined lost about 29,000 positions. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/02/business/02ECON.html