Quotes from Writings in Response to September 11, 2001

Posted in May, 2002

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These quotes are in reverse order – the first posting is at the bottom, with the most recent quotes at the top:


Kozlowski bought the high-end paintings – which included a $4.7 million Renoir and a $3.95 million Monet – for his $18 million, 13-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, but had them routed through Tyco's offices in New Hampshire so he wouldn't have to spring for New York City's 8.25 percent sales tax. In one case, the cooperative art dealers didn't even bother to ship the paintings for a brief layover in New Hampshire. Turns out it was easier just to ship them directly to Kozlowski's apartment while shipping empty crates to Tyco headquarters.

...he funded some of his art purchases with no-interest loans drawn from a Tyco program designed to help employees buy company stock... it was maneuvers like these that, until his sudden fall from grace, had earned Kozlowski the admiration of Wall Street and a glowing reputation as America's "Most Aggressive CEO" – the title of a 2001 cover story in Business Week. The magazine even went so far as to laud Kozlowski – an accountant by trade – for his "willingness to test the limits of acceptable accounting and tax strategies". Such strategies allowed the company to report billions of dollars in earnings every year, while building up $24 billion in debt. It took the Enron collapse for Wall Street to stop applauding and start asking questions. The disturbing answers caused Tyco's stock to lose three-quarters of its value this year, costing investors $95 billion.

Still Life in Prison Stripes: A CEO’s Not So Artful Dodge
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/061302.html



U.S. General John Ashcroft announced in Moscow Monday that the Bush Administration can now hold U.S. citizens in prison indefinitely, without charges, access to defense lawyers, or trial. I am not making this up. And you'd think it would be a screaming headline. Instead, this little nugget is being buried as, oh, I don't know — one sentence in the sixth paragraph of Tuesday morning's Associated Press story in one of my local papers... The AP story genuinely devoted more lines to [Jose] Padilla's traffic violations in the '90s than to John Ashcroft's assaults on 213 years of American jurisprudence.

Hello? Is Anybody Getting this down? The U.S. Constitution, Now Fully Waivable
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13443



Of course, the real reason is the one we're not hearing: there is no Enron-inspired reform because the big donors are determined there will be no Enron-inspired reform. And they are willing to pay through the nose to guarantee it...

Back in March, it looked like the House Energy and Commerce Committee, fresh off its public flogging of Enron execs, had set its investigative sights on Wall Street, sending letters out to the big securities firms seeking information about their involvement with Enron's shadier practices. Some of them responded by threatening to turn off the campaign contribution spigot unless reformers on the Hill cooled their jets.

Congress And Enron: Why The Bang Turned Into A Whimper
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/061002.html



After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level...In 1992, the [New York] Times got its hands on a version of the material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power...In his first major foreign-policy speech, delivered in November of 1999, Bush declared that "a President must be a clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to connote an absence of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the foreign-policy doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected, partly because it posits the impossibility of any one country's ever dominating world affairs for any length of time.

One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much the terrorist attacks of September 11th have changed official foreign-policy thinking...all indications are that Bush is going to use September 11th as the occasion to launch a new, aggressive American foreign policy that would represent a broad change in direction rather than a specific war on terrorism. All his rhetoric, especially in the two addresses he has given to joint sessions of Congress since September 11th, and all the information about his state of mind which his aides have leaked, indicate that he sees this as the nation's moment of destiny – a perception that the people around him seem to be encouraging, because it enhances Bush's stature and opens the way to more assertive policymaking.

Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been "a transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch with put it, is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas....

Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst who was the National Security Council's staff expert on Iraq during the last years of the Clinton Administration, recently caused a stir in the foreign-policy world by publishing an article in Foreign Affairs calling for war against Saddam..."The only way to do it is a full-scale invasion," he said, using a pen as a pointer. "We're talking about two grand corps, two to three hundred thousand people altogether. The population is here, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra. "Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince Sultan airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base, but it's much easier in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and southern Iraq" – pointing again – "because otherwise they'll fire Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil fields. You probably want to prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil fields, so troops have to occupy them. And you need troops to defend the Kurds in northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." His hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him." Smack.

...the Administration appears to be committed to acting forcefully in advance of the world's approval...the chain of events leading inexorably to a full-scale American invasion, if it hasn't already begun, evidently will begin soon.

The Next World Order
Nicholas Lemann
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.010B.lemann.order.htm



Like a cancer left untreated, the seeds of hatred are sown long before violence occurs, and when ignored, options for survival are drastically reduced. Much has already been said about this administration's failure to address, let alone acknowledge, the role that U.S.-fed disparities in wealth and political power contribute to the seeds of hate around the world. The administration's diagnosis of the problem, summed up as, "We are good. They are bad" has hardly been a panacea. But now, with the just-announced FBI makeover and the Department of Justice's resurrection of domestic spying on political activists as a 'new' tool, it seems as if the prognosis is anything but promising.

...dividing the world into good and bad, returning to domestic spying tactics from the last half-century – is reminiscent of the Cold War. This reflex to look backwards for strategies and responses comes at a real peril. Such easy answers to complex problems verge on denial and tend to minimize the severity of our current plight. They also keep us removed from the world's current ills...until we deal with federal law enforcement's apparent inability to trace terrorists – we will not be safe. The never-ending terror warnings from federal cops will simply become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, we'll be hit again...

Without insight and foresight, I'm afraid our future prognosis is bleak, perhaps, even terminal.

Terror's Prognosis  
Jill Rachel Jacobs



Isn't nuclear war a real possibility? It is, but where shall I go? If I go away and everything and every one, every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love, and who will love me back?

..on TV the old generals and the eager boy anchors talk of first strike and second strike capability, as though they're discussing a family board game...

Tony Blair arrives to preach peace – and on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every visiting journalist always asks me: "Are you writing another book?"

That question mocks me. Another book? Right now when it looks as though all the music, the art, the architecture, the literature, the whole of human civilisation means nothing to the monsters who run the world. What kind of book should I write? For now, just for now, for just a while pointlessness is my biggest enemy. That's what nuclear bombs do, whether they're used or not. They violate everything that is humane, they alter the meaning of life.

Under the Nuclear Shadow  
Arundhati Roy



I am appalled by the approach of the American media to the current violence in Kashmir. It is deeply irresponsible, sensationalistic and condescending for our headlines and reports to emphasize the 'likelihood' or 'extreme possibility' of nuclear war between India and Pakistan...

I have been in close contact with Indian friends over the past days and weeks. According to them, there is no call for the use of nuclear weapons in India or Pakistan...The nuclear weapons that they now have are intended to be used for detente, not for mass destruction. As one of my friends remarked: a nuclear war will virtually wipe out Pakistan and kill as many as 100 million Indians, not to mention the effects it will have on the rest of South Asia and the world. No one would consider that as a feasible choice...

Let us focus our energy where it is most needed: on our own country and our own responsibilities with regards to exactly what damage we are causing in Central Asia and what is the truth in our relationships with Saudi Arabia, the Bin Laden family, and multinationals, among other things. The sensationalistic manipulation of our news media can easily divert us from present necessities.

Calm Down a Little  
Stephen Huyler



[Re his West Point speech, June 1,] Bush has reconfigured the mission of the American military from a defensive posture - at least, that's what we've always been told - to what is obviously an offensive posture. We are now the nation that might launch a Pearl Harbor-style attack...

People like Noam Chomsky have commented that 9/11 didn't really change anything, but instead revealed some of the fundamental weaknesses of our system and our conceits. History books by writers like Howard Zinn will tell you that America's military has been consistently offensive in mission for generations...

If we have often been the aggressor, our cover stories have obscured that fact. Now, no obfuscation is necessary. After Saturday, a great deal of the planet is now fixed between American crosshairs. The pretense of defense has been buried under the purported volume of potential threats to the nation. We will go anywhere, drop bombs on anyone, invade nations and tear down governments, all to thwart the repetition of an attack that could have been prevented with the forwarding of some memos...

September 11th happened, and our government reacted in a way that absolutely guarantees the continuation of war, strife, terror and death. Rather than look to the roots of terrorism, its reasons for existing, rather than consider ways to heal the world of the wretched truths that motivate young men and women to kill themselves in colossal acts of murder, we declared war on the planet. Rather than heal, we will continue to destroy. In all its horror, 9/11 could have been an epochal moment in human history, one of those bold places on our timeline where we finally decided that the old ways had failed and new ways needed to be coursed...There is no epochal moment, no great change out of such a terrible catastrophe. We continue to chart the course that will, without doubt, come to be the death of us all.

The Death of Us All
William Rivers Pitt
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.04D.pitt.us.all.htm



By now, America's "war on terrorism" often seems to be a war of narcissism. The world view is so extremely self-engrossed – and so widely accepted by news media – that the movers and shakers of the Fourth Estate usually don't bat an eye even when rationales get positively loopy.

There was a remarkably myopic – no, let's not beat around the bush – there was a remarkably deranged moment on May 28 when Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke voiced concern about the increasing chances of war between the two nuclear-armed states. Why? Because, in order to confront India with additional ground forces, Pakistan was about to pull troops away from its border with Afghanistan and thus weaken efforts against Al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers.

Noting that Pakistani troops at the Afghan border have been "enormously, enormously helpful" to the U.S. government, Clarke worried aloud. "Attention and troops that cannot be focused there because they're focused elsewhere, that's a concern for us because we need as much assistance as possible in guarding that very porous border," she said. Those comments didn't raise many eyebrows in America's newsrooms.

War On Terrorism: Winking At Nuclear Terror
Norman Solomon
ZNet Commentary [Zmag commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of ZMag/ZNet. You must become a Sustainer to read this article.]



...you can almost see the wheels turning as White House officials weigh the costs versus benefits of a nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent...

There seems little doubt that the Bush Administration has cast its lot with the terrorism-sponsoring military dictatorship of Pakistan rather than democratic India, and that it has done so purely out of self-interest...

Most terrifyingly, by all accounts political and military leaders on both sides are sanguine about the prospect of a nuclear exchange, resting on the two country's enormous populations ability to 'absorb' even large casualty figures...

Most strikingly, both sides seem to have inherited George W. Bush's cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons. The U.S. officially pulls out of the 1973 ABM treaty on June 13; Pentagon and White House officials (as well as any number of prominent Congresspeople) have not only talked openly about development and use of "tactical" nuclear weapons as a desirable battlefield strategy, but have been pushing hard for the development of new generations of weapons that can strike instantly and kill millions.

Lines of Control: The Thinkable Nuclear War
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13413



Director Robert Mueller seemed to consider the FBI's tragedy of errors a question of flawed management flow charts, nothing that a rejiggered PowerPoint presentation couldn't fix. But there was a much more fundamental problem plaguing the bureau before Sept. 11. And it wasn't one of office politics, but of office-wide priorities. Namely, the agency's crippling addiction to America's war on drugs...

Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau's ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren't making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor's resume and make the evening news. Let's face it, canvassing flight schools in search of suspicious students is nowhere near as sexy as one of those big drug busts with the bags of coke or bales of pot piled high for the cameras...

And it wasn't just the FBI. This Drug War Uber-Alles mindset infected the entire law enforcement community, starting at the top. "I want to escalate the war on drugs," said Attorney General John Ashcroft in his first interview after being nominated for the post. "I want to renew it. I want to refresh it."

Did The Drug War Claim Another 3,056 Casualties On 9-11?
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/060302.html



[June 12] is the expiration of the six-month's notice...of the 1973 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Ever since (literally) taking office, Bush has been insisting, much to the slack-jawed disbelief of the rest of the world, that the ABM Treaty should be discarded entirely as an outmoded relic that no longer serves either the security needs or the technological developments of the 21st Century. It would be far more accurate to say that the ABM Treaty does not serve the financial interests of U.S. military contractors or the global conquest fantasies of penthouse warriors like Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. This prospect of having the world's dominant military power walking away from limits on arms control has left nuclear proliferation experts aghast...

Their logic has little to do with American security and everything to do with the free market — namely, the application of capitalist theory to weapons of mass destruction. America wants a monopoly, just as it wanted an A-bomb monopoly after World War II. The assumption is that (particularly with space-based weapons) the United States can keep potentially hostile countries out of space entirely, thereby acquiring complete global military dominance. (And this includes, not incidentally, selling a lot of the component technology and hardware to lesser militaries around the world in the bargain.)

...what, in the wake of the United States' abandonment of the ABM Treaty, the treaty banning weapons in outer space, and various others, will be the simplest and most effective "defense"? Why, embracing whatever sort of weapons of mass destruction that warrior can lay his hands on — nuclear, chemical, biological, or others yet unimagined. It's open season. This creates a feedback loop, justifying an infinite U.S. war on "terrorists" and "terror states" (such states being anyone who might use against us the same sorts of weapons we'd use against them)...

The calculations...seem to add up threefold: first, that the United States will be so dominant militarily that it can keep a lid on everyone, everywhere in the world, at all times, under all circumstances; second, that any human costs incurred in the process (say, a few million dead here and there) are well worth the resulting profits; and third, that this will be seen as so inevitable that most Americans won't object and nobody else's opinions will matter...

With open talk of American development and casual battlefield use of "tactical" nukes, newly aggressive U.S. military deployment around the world, and the lingering image of a comparatively low-tech tragedy that killed a fraction of the number of people such weapons can destroy, you'd think that fewer people would think George W. Bush was stupid and more people would think he was clinically insane.

Bombs away: Leaving Omnicide to the Free Market
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13401



You have imprisoned an entire people for over a year with a degree of cruelty unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation. Your government is trampling three million people, leaving them with no semblance of normal life. No going to the market, no going to work, no going to school, no visiting a sick uncle. Nothing. No going anywhere, and no coming back from anywhere. No day or night. Danger lurks everywhere, and everywhere there is another checkpoint, choking off life...

[Palestine] has had its fill of suffering, from the Nakba in 1948, through the 1967 occupation and the siege of 2002, and it wants exactly the same things that Israelis want for themselves - a little quiet, a little security and a drop of national pride. To a man, this entire people now wakes up each morning to a gaping abyss of despair, unemployment and deprivation - now with tanks parked at the end of the street, too...we have a prime minister who only wants to occupy, to avenge, to kill, to expel, to demolish and to uproot and he has no other plan in mind.

An Open Letter to Shimon Peres for Ha'aretz Daily
Gideon Levy
http://www.palestine-pmc.com/press/press-30-1-2002.html



But by far the most encouraging event of the week was Peace Now's rally last night [May 11] in Tel-Aviv, as some 100,000 Israelis turned out to demand, "Get Out of the Territories Now!" This was the largest rally since the al-Aqsa Intifada began 20 months ago. (In fact, by the end of the rally, Peace Now announced that 150,000 were in attendance.)

The media have already begun to minimize it - saying there were 'only' 60,000 or that many people showed up, but were not enthusiastic. This is not true. Those of us who attended can celebrate what we saw with our own eyes - Rabin Square, that huge plaza in Tel Aviv where Rabin spoke his final public words before being assassinated - was filled to overflowing with people from all corners of Israel who came to shout "Enough!" about where the Sharon-Peres leadership is taking us - deeper into tragedy and further than ever from peace...

And several emotional highlights (at least for me): Yaffa Yarkoni, the singer roundly condemned by the media and others for criticizing the army's behavior and supporting the refuseniks, received an ovation when she appeared and sang...

Last night's demonstration was critical in terms of affecting a broad swath of public opinion. This effort must be reinforced by actions throughout the world, as well as locally, by Israeli and Palestinian allies of peace. The occupation can - and will - be stopped.

At-Home with Gila Svirsky – Jerusalem, 12 May 2002 – Subject: Tipping Point?
http://www.joannestle.com/livingrm/gila/gila020512tippingpoint.html



The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique called "viral marketing"...

Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information.

...a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

An article on its website, entitled Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World, warns that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved...

On November 29 last year, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen. The paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico, Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM crops...

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000 scientists, called AgBioWorld...messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made.

...the pressure on Nature was so severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he published...a retraction in which he wrote that their research should never have been published...

"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

The Fake Persuaders  
George Monbiot



BENNETT: Go through the Chomsky work, line by line, argument by argument, and you will see this is a man who has made a career out of hating America and out of trashing the record of this country. Of course, there is a mixed record in this country. Why do you choose to live in this terrorist nation, Mr. Chomsky?

CHOMSKY: I don't. I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.

Interview with Noam Chomsky and Bill Bennett
American Morning with Paula Zahn on CNN



...my new film, "Bowling for Columbine," was awarded the Special Prize of the 55th Cannes Film Festival. It had already made history by being the first documentary chosen to be part of the official festival competition in almost 50 years. And, last night, it was the only prize awarded that received a unanimous decision from the festival jury...the standing ovation our film received as the credits rolled set a new record in the history of the Cannes Film Festival – 13 minutes long.

..."Bowling for Columbine" winning "Best Film" from a vote of hundreds of French teachers and students from arond the country who each year come to Cannes and award one movie their "Cannes Prix Educational National." It's the only "people's prize" at Cannes where everyday citizens get to screen the films and vote...

"Bowling for Columbine" is a provocative, controversial film that is going to make a lot of people angry. That is not my intention. I do not relish the hassle I am in for. But the work I do must be an honest expression of what I see and believe...

"Bowling for Columbine" is my personal view of America at the turn of this new century. It is not specifically about Columbine and, no, it is not about bowling. My favorite quote I read during the festival was, "This film will single-handedly guarantee that George W. Bush will never see a second term." Well, one can only dream. After all, it is just a movie. If it go as planned, the film will be released in October.

"Bowling for Columbine" Wins Cannes Prize  
Michael Moore



It's a textbook case of special interests triumphing over the public interest...the same folks who helped bring us this mess by relentlessly chipping away at the rules and regulations governing their industries are now ensuring that any efforts to clean things up will be thwarted. And lest we forget, the problem is that much of what is being done isn't illegal but should be. Otherwise, the manic appetite for profits will continue to inspire Wall Street's rats to squeeze through every loophole...

"It is unlikely," Sen. Jon Corzine, a Banking Committee member championing reform, said this week, "that we will get strong reform unless there is a new event that captures the public imagination." You mean the largest corporate bankruptcy in history and the parade of corruption that has followed weren't big enough?... Do we have to wait for another 433 companies to go belly up, and two million more Americans to lose their jobs, before our leaders heed the warning signals and make passing the post-Enron reforms a top priority?

Why Is Washington Ignoring The Warning Signs Of Economic Devastation?
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/053002.html



For anyone interested in learning about the seamy underside of global capitalism, skip the front section of your paper and head to the business pages. There, corporate fraud and crime are actually reported — not, alas, with any kind of an eye toward the impact upon its victims or society, but in terms of how it might affect stock value...

When, last month, federal regulators released correspondence between Enron lawyers and executives that detailed a stunning variety of predatory practices, those documents also included a number of claims that, in effect, "everybody's doing it" — that is, that Enron's major competitors (including Duke Energy, Dynegy, the Williams Companies, Mirant, and Calpine) were engaging in the same sort of price manipulation...

It's no coincidence that so many of these large, Enron-style debacles involving shady accounting practices, market manipulation, and victimization of both investors and consumers, are coming in recently deregulated industries...

Young ghetto kids these days are getting life sentences for stealing ballpoint pens or medicating themselves, but a multi-billion dollar scam — when taxpayers are picking up the bill and the company evades taxes entirely — is considered no big deal outside the stock exchanges.

Feeling unregulated? Public drowning in shower of dropping shoes
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13393



...the last time Colombia elected an extremist like Uribe in 1950, the resulting dictatorship killed 150,000 people in three years before a coup deposed it. On the prior occasion in 1898, the result was the "Thousand Days' War," with 100,000 massacred. The talk in Bogota these days is of a 50-year cycle of tragedy and how the United States is not only walking right into it, but encouraging it...A dramatic escalation in Colombia's war is upon us and, in both Bogota and Washington, the expectation is that the United States will be a full partner...

Colombia already has the hemisphere's worst human rights record...And now Colombia has elected as its president a man who first came to national prominence a decade ago, encouraging the growth of "self-defense groups" — paramilitary vigilantes of the sort associated with 80% of Colombia's human rights abuses.

...the United States has now clearly cast its lot with the continent's most violent regime in a war it cannot win. Moreover, virtually nobody in the United States seems to have noticed, or cared. For years observers have been warning that Colombia could explode, with the United States caught in the explosion. By all accounts, that crisis is finally here.

Colombia on the Verge: The next crisis is here
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13386



What a sad place New York City has become...the narrowness of public discussion, not just on Israeli-Palestinian issues, but also on the threatened American attack on Iraq and the administration's war on terrorism in general.

... universities are the only place for political discussion these days. "I hear there was a fantastic debate at Yale Law School recently," my highly placed Bush appointee reported. "Two Palestinian law students wiped the floor with Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist."

The fascination, and frustration, of America has always been the way one society can produce so much optimistic vigour and risk-taking intellectual energy alongside a ruling culture of such boorish ignorance and cruelty.

New York is starting to feel like Brezhnev's Moscow: Public debate in America has now become a question of loyalty
Jonathan Steele
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4414414,00.html



The American president Bill Clinton, with the most famous scandal regarding women, was in love with the childish Jewess Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state. He would make no decision without getting the approval of this woman, who became notorious for her short garments that often caused embarrassment when she met political dignitaries. She...describ[ed] the Palestinian resistance as terror, and she spared no efforts in her support for Israel!

The American Snake
Kamal Sa'ad, a columnist for the Egyptian opposition weekly Al-Usbu
http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD38502



...the internet seems to have turned those who do not like to hear the truth about the Middle East into a community of haters, sending venomous letters not only to myself but to any reporter who dares to criticise Israel – or American policy in the Middle East...In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death...

How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper...

The events of 11 September turned the hate mail white hot. That day, in an airliner high over the Atlantic that had just turned back from its routing to America, I wrote an article for The Independent, pointing out that there would be an attempt in the coming days to prevent anyone asking why the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington had occurred. Dictating my report from the aircraft's satellite phone, I wrote about the history of deceit in the Middle East, the growing Arab anger at the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children under US-supported sanctions, and the continued occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza by America's Israeli ally. I didn't blame Israel. I suggested that Osama bin Laden was responsible.

Since Ariel Sharon's offensive in the West Bank, provoked by the Palestinians' wicked suicide bombing, a new theme has emerged. Reporters who criticise Israel are to blame for inciting anti-Semites to burn synagogues. Thus it is not Israel's brutality and occupation that provokes the sick and cruel people who attack Jewish institutions, synagogues and cemeteries. We journalists are to blame...

Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?
Robert Fisk
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=294787



The President's lecture tour of Europe and Russia reminds us how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than in the US. As if to underline this point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used the Commander-in-Chief's absence from Washington to reveal their deep concerns about any attack on Iraq...

Eight months on from the 11 September attacks George Bush's reflection on the grave new world appears to be no more than a couple of slogans deep. The war on terrorism took America just so far, but now Europeans want to see some evidence of thought and leadership beneath the rhetoric...

Whatever else emerges from the Congressional inquiry into what went wrong on 11 September, we can certainly conclude that there was a monumental lack of grip at the top. And it is from this man that we are now all expected to take a dressing down about moral fibre, cohesion and foresight...

Besides this, the White House has offered no post-Saddam vision for a country which contains 9 per cent of the world's known oil reserves and, let's not forget, some of the most abused and terrorised people on earth. No one in Bush's administration thinks beyond the slogan ["Axis of Evil"] which means that in the event of Saddam being toppled another despot will probably fill the void and the whole process will begin again...

At the end of this week it is clear that Bush's presidency is showing signs of being disorganised and intellectually under-powered. He returns home to face a group of generals who are in more-or-less open contempt of his plan to launch against Saddam and an intelligence community which is riven with competition and cover-ups about who knew what before the al-Qaeda attacks.

Don't Wag Your Finger at Us, Mr. Bush  
Henry Porter



Almost immediately after September 11, Dubya declared "war," not against an enemy country, but against a tactic — one brandished by adherents of a self-defined club open to anyone, from any country, at any time, that, for whatever reason, wants to kill a lot of Americans. Such a war is necessarily without limits and unwinnable, as is the language gradually adopted later — that we were to fight not just war but evil itself. That's a much bigger involvement than the 50 years Dick Cheney is giving it. (Ask Jesus of Nazareth...

The warnings of "inevitable" terrorist retaliation will continue, as surely as Ariel Sharon's government can confidently predict, after razing some part of the West Bank, that another suicide bombing is "inevitable." In the meantime, Bush's retaliatory strikes will do nothing to ensure your safety or mine. Eventually, even domestic opinion will begin to realize that such U.S. attacks do nothing to prevent future anti-American terrorism, but instead kill a lot of innocent people and inspire a lot of future anti-American terrorists...

The hijackings and mass murders of September 11 were crimes — international in scope and heinous beyond imagination, but crimes nonetheless.

...nobody seemed to be asking why we don't think we can prevent the next one — or what we can do, when it happens, to prevent the one after that. In the end, that sort of prevention can only be successful if America stops making enemies — that is, if America changes the way it conducts itself in the world. And that's a topic nobody in Washington wants to discuss.

Running for Cover: On Bush, the Press and Impending Doom
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13380



To the ever-growing mountain of evidence that corporate kingpins live in an entirely different world from the rest of us we can now add the latest revelations about the gargantuan loans CEOs receive from their companies...Essentially, these are simply large gifts, dressed-up with paperwork and disguised as "loans."...

How can corporate executives legally use the balance sheet of a public company as their own personal piggy bank? Doesn't the balance sheet belong to the shareholders? And don't CEOs have a fiduciary obligation to them? How then can they legally write their own checks for ridiculous amounts – often from companies that are troubled and can't afford it, and at the expense of shareholders who can't prevent it?

How Can I Never Repay You? The CEO Loan Racket
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/052302.html



Of course these agencies lack competence. Moreover, what good does demonstrating the incompetence of U.S. intelligence agencies do peace and justice?...

In contrast to the difficulty of knowing Bush's foreknowledge of terrorist tactics, it's easy to know what Bush knew and when he knew it about bombing Afghanistan, about the Kyoto Accords, about Mideast policy, about implications of embargoes on Iraq and Cuba, about globalization, and so on. And knowing this would reveal important truths profoundly relevant to peace and justice concerns. So why is any leftist caught up in the hypocritical democratic party and media maven hoopla?...

The irony is that the question "what did Bush know before 9/11?" may be the only "what did he know" question that Bush can answer without revealing a grotesque value system.

...democrats and media commentators ask what Bush knew regarding 9/11, rather than asking how markets, private ownership relations, and government bureaucracy compel horrible outcomes regardless of what Bush or anyone else knows.

The left should not climb aboard as a barely audible echo to a crescendo of hypocrisy.

The left should direct public attention back on the plight of Palestinians, on the Iraq embargo and impending invasion of Iraq, on the enlarging war in Colombia, and on the horrors of globalization, racism, sexism, and wage slavery.

What Did Bush Know?  
Michael Albert



In the latest scheme, one that is costing consumers billions of dollars, drug companies are using American courts to stall the sale of generic versions of some of their most popular products. Here's how it works: when a drug's patent is about to expire, its maker tries to ward off competition by filing frivolous lawsuits against anyone looking to make a low cost, and perfectly legal, version of the pill. They don't really expect to win, but the suit can delay the generic version from hitting the market for up to 30 months – allowing the patent holders to rake in billions in additional, competition-free sales. And the public gets to pay twice: we pay for unnecessarily high-priced drugs, and we pay for the court system they're exploiting to keep us paying the high price.

Has The Patent Expired On The Pharmaceutical Industry's Invincibility?
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/052002.html



The only things we know for sure about the next major attack are that thousands more people every day aspire to carrying one out, and that it won't involve either jet planes or boxcutters. That's why these dire warnings can safely (and accurately) be trotted out whenever a day's uncomfortable news stories warrant some White House damage control...

[Asking] how our government brought us and the world to this sorry point, and how we can make it better should be the preoccupation of every waking moment of every political leader in both parties.

Scandalmongering: Hit the Panic Button Enough and No One Will Read the Real News
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13359



While the East Timorese honor us with their gift of exemplary courage and resilience, "the world's most powerful nation" prepares its own trademark birthday gift – resumption of military aid to Indonesia, East Timor's neighboring human rights abuser. Already responsible for more than 200,000 East Timorese deaths during the occupation, the Indonesian military left East Timor in a "smoking ruin" (according to Human Rights Watch) in the weeks immediately following East Timor's independence referendum in August 1999.

Despite the fact that not a single military officer has yet to be held criminally responsible in a court of law, and despite the Indonesian military's ongoing domestic human rights abuses, President Bush and his administration are paving the way toward restoring military aid.

East Timor Independence Day: May 20, 2002
Cynthia Peters
ZNet Commentary [Zmag commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of ZMag/ZNet. You must become a Sustainer to read this article.]



Danny Schechter's Daily Weblog, a must-read for me on the MediaChannel.org Website, has a post about our Site in his May 15 edition. He said this about us:

TAYLOR: TALK ABOUT IT

Other American Jews are turning to websites to discuss their feelings about what is going on. Suzanne Taylor from LA sends in an invitation to join the discussion on her lively site. "With so much posted this past month about Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and my own strong feeling about this – aligned with Robert Scheer, who says, 'Those are not my tanks careening around the West Bank bringing fear and havoc in their wake' – I point you to 'Conversation on the Middle East' where us Jews in conflict can engage each other. It amazes me how strongly I am being met with a defense of what I think is indefensible. I welcome any help to get us to where we are indeed 'making sense of these times,' and not fighting with one another." [http://www.theconversation.org/c-mideast.html].

And look at the good things we got from him in the same day...

You would never see this type of reporting in a US paper, but Mathew Engel of The Guardian seems to have told it like it was, citing a Saudi paper, interviewing their own leader.

In the most regal possible manner, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia skewered President George Bush yesterday as a man so ignorant about the Middle East, and specifically about the suffering of the Palestinians, that he needed several hours of personal tuition to bring him up to speed. When the prince visited the presidential ranch in Texas last month, the two men spent five hours together, far longer than expected. This was an indication - according to the White House spin machine - of how well they got on. Prince Abdullah presents a different interpretation: the time was spent coaching the president in political realities. "He is the type of person who sleeps at 9.30pm after watching the domestic news," the prince told Okaz, a Saudi newspaper. "In the morning, he only reads a few lines about what is written on the Middle East and the world due to his huge responsibilities."

George Bush? He's Nice but Dim, Says Crown Prince
Matthew Engel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4413737,00.html
Todd Gitlin, the student activist turned culture critic and Media Channel advisor, has been a loud voice against the so-called Blame America school which Noam Chomsky has, unfairly in my view, been accused of leading. Todd tends to be even handed at times of polarized debate and the search for political purity. Writing on Mother Jones online, he laments the rise in a sense of victimization among Jews as a result of the crescendo of criticism being heaped on Israel.

The victim mentality, left unleashed, both leads to the crimes of the present and incites the murderers of the future, who might not hesitate to graduate from suicide bombs to suitcase bombs. At this moment, Palestinians who think with their blood are thirsting for the apocalyptic day when they will run the risk of rendering large portions of their wished-for homeland unfit for human habitation. Meanwhile, Jewish fundamentalists, cheered on by the leaders of America's Christian right, gird up to expel the Philistines once more. Self-righteousness has its reasons, but it murders the future in the name of an unsalvageable past.

The Politics of Victimhood
Todd Gitlin
http://www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/commentary/opinion/gitlin_may.html


Several weeks ago, I called for a congressional investigation into what warnings the Bush Administration received before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I was derided by the White House, right wing talk radio, and spokespersons for the military-industrial complex as a conspiracy theorist...Today's revelations that the administration, and President Bush, were given months of notice that a terrorist attack was a distinct possibility points out the critical need for a full and complete congressional investigation...Ever since I came to Congress in 1992, there are those who have been trying to silence my voice. I've been told to "sit down and shut up" over and over again. Well, I won't sit down and I won't shut up until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people.

Terrorist Warnings, a statement by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/05.17AA.Mckinney.Bush.NU.htm



Corporations rule. No other institution comes close to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us...Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the villainous old robber baron William Henry Vanderbilt spat out: "The public be damned! I’m working for my stockholders."

Wal-Mart is now the world’s biggest corporation... "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers...Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons...The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier.

Wal-Mart is an unrepentant and recidivist violator of employee rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges from coast to coast...A top Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawyer told Business Week, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law."...

As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst," adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation "is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions."...

Wal-Mart is on a messianic mission to extend its exploitative ethos to the entire business world. More than 65,000 companies supply the retailer with the stuff on its shelves, and it constantly hammers each supplier about cutting their production costs deeper and deeper in order to get cheaper wholesale prices...

By slashing its retail prices way below cost when it enters a community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has monopoly control over the market.

How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World  
Jim Hightower



Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred...

"I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."...

People are scared in [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe.

Apartheid in the Holy Land  
Desmond Tutu



...the sheer variety and creativity of profit-taking methods outlined in the Enron memos suggest the extent to which energy companies got the laws written for their own benefit – and our loss...

Enron execs – the same guys that later made out sweetly while screwing their own employees – seemed to also take inordinate glee in ensuring that a basic necessity of life would cost California over $30 billion extra, confronting especially small businesses and lower-income people with crippling bills and even the loss of lights and winter heat.

...they are a separate scandal from Enron's pyramid scheme accounting practices, involving instead a clear description of how Enron victimized, not stock analysts or shareholders or employees, but over 50 million residents of the West. They provide conclusive proof of the dangers of handing over control of a necessity of life to capitalists who could not care less about the consequences of their actions to society.

Making Money from Misery
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13288



With big business in such a sorry state, what we need more than ever is a courageous crusader at the helm of the Securities and Exchange Commission, someone who will do everything in his power as America's top securities cop to root out corporate corruption and restore the public's trust.

...naming a man who had made a career out of butting heads with the SEC as its new chairman was a little like naming Osama bin Laden to run the Office of Homeland Security...

The [Wall Street] Journal ended its biting editorial by deriding the White House's ludicrous claim that Pitt is doing "a great job getting tough on corporate misconduct": "We doubt," read the editorial, "anyone at the White House really believes that. At least we hope they don't; because no one anywhere else does."

Scooby Dooby Doo, Harvey Pitt, Where Are You?
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/051302.html



The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this shortsighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hardwired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring – even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal.

The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from this conflict between short-term and long-term values.

The Bottleneck
Edward O. Wilson
http://www.sciam.com/2002/0202issue/0202wilson.html



A confidential Enron document released by federal energy regulators Monday showed how traders for the now-bankrupt energy company drove up power prices during last year's California power crisis. Written by Enron lawyers, the December 2000 memorandum lists practices described by California officials who say the energy trading company created phantom congestion on energy transmission lines and engaged in sham power sales between its affiliates to increase electricity prices. Referring to a strategy called "Death Star" by Enron traders, the lawyers wrote, "The net effect of these transactions is that Enron gets paid for moving energy to relieve congestion without actually moving any energy or relieving any congestion."

Enron – 'The Smoking-Gun Memo'
Mark Sherman
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/05.08A.Enron.Memo.htm



They call us "self-hating" Jews when we raise criticisms of Israeli policies. Yet most of those Jews who risk this calumny as the cost of getting involved actually feel a special resonance with the history and culture of the Jews – because this is a people who have proclaimed a message of love, justice and peace...No wonder, then, that social-justice-oriented American Jews today feel betrayed by Israeli policies that seem transparently immoral and self-destructive.

Social justice Jews are not apologists for Palestinian violence. We are outraged by the immoral acts of Palestinian terrorists who blow up Israelis at Seder tables, or while they shop, or sit in cafes, or ride in buses. We know that these acts of murder cannot be excused. But many of us also understand that Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been immoral and outrageous...

There is ample reason for the non-Jewish world to atone for its past oppression of Jews. But non-Jews are doing no favors to the Jewish people when by their silence they help the most destructive elements of the Jewish world pursue immoral policies that almost certainly will generate more hatred of Jews.

...an impossible choice between pro-Israel groups that support Sharon's current policies in lockstep or pro-Palestinian groups that claim the Palestinians are facing Nazi-like genocide at the hands of the Jewish people (an exaggeration that allows right-wing Jews to yell "anti-Semitism" because there is no attempt to systematically murder Palestinians, thereby letting Israel off the hook).

Jews for Justice
Michael Lerner
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020520&s=lerner



...Eliot Spitzer, the crusading attorney general of New York, whose investigation into conflicts of interest in the investment banking world is ruffling feathers from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. His probe has so far uncovered shocking evidence that analysts at Merrill Lynch gave investors misleading stock recommendations in order to help promote companies their firm's investment bankers were doing business with...

But all the apologies and damage control in the world won't make this problem go away. Too many people were lied to and financially devastated along the way. Since the Merrill Lynch emails were made public, lawyers across the country have been inundated with calls from angry investors looking for restitution.

"Merrill Lynch used to be the gold standard for how an investment banker should do business," Philip Aidikoff, president of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, told me. "Now, at my firm alone, we're getting 40 to 45 calls a day from Merrill customers who feel they've been duped."...

Stay tuned, this one is far from over.

Greed, Fraud, And Apologies: Corporate America's New Bottom Line
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/050602.html



...another round of humiliating impotence for the United Nations. Today, a fact-finding mission, left to cool its heals by Israel while the bodies cooled in the Jenin Refugee Camp, gave up and went home...

The U.N., understandably, wanted to separate fact from rumor; unless the worst of the rumors are true, such an exercise would actually have helped Israel. But in what kind of an investigation – let alone one involving allegations of crimes against humanity – does the defendant get to dictate the terms of who will do the investigating, where they will be allowed, what they can look at, and when they can do it?...

Dubya's particularly obtuse insistence that Iraq accept the U.N. teams gives Saddam Hussein a sympathy card that will play well virtually throughout the world. And now, Iraq can rub it in even further, by pointing to the grotesque double standard of Israel's right to reject a U.N. inspection – one which it had previously approved – when the topic is not potential for mass murder, but determining whether mass murder has already occurred.

The Untied Nations: The Israeli and Iraqi Double Standard for International Oversight
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13246



Ramallah is the most cosmopolitan of the Palestinian cities, and the destruction wrought there stands as evidence that Ariel Sharon did not only seek a war on terrorism, as he claimed, but also a war against the future peacemakers of Palestinian society...

"Some people blow up bombs and Israel makes all of us suffer for it." ...

The very institutions of the intellectual class were utterly ransacked. Christina Storm, director of Lawyers Without Borders, commented that it seemed as if the Israeli government sought to embitter any and all future peacemakers in the legal arena of educated Palestinian society. While Sharon's spokesman Raanan Gissen stated to the AP on April 21 that Israeli troops had "explicit orders to avoid unnecessary damage," the damage to non-governmental and private organizations was extensive...These attacks can only be construed as a policy and not a series of accidents.

...the Israeli raids destroyed "years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country." With specious rationale, Sharon and the IDF continue to explain away this damage (when they even bother to) as justifiable in a search for terrorist infrastructure.

...under the cloak of a 'war against terrorism,' Sharon, ever the pragmatist, took the opportunity to also destroy any vestige of a viable Palestinian society, one that could someday flourish as an independent nation. By rhetorically subsuming all Palestinian citizenry into the archetype of bloodthirsty terrorists, he has gotten away with sabotaging any future alternatives to Yassir Arafat, be they lawyers, doctors or educators, and he has forever embittered the whole of Palestinian society.

Gaza City: Sharon's War On The Future
An Eyewitness Recounts Israel's Military Action  
Benjamin Dov Granby



"9-11," as the volume is titled, analyzes the attacks from the distinctive perspective that Professor Chomsky has honed in more than a dozen books. "While the attacks were "horrifying atrocities," he writes, "we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies." The United States, he asserts, is "a leading terrorist state."

"People said it would have no success whatsoever," said Daniel Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, "because most Americans were lock-step behind the war." As soon as the volume hit bookstores, however, it began selling briskly, and it hasn't stopped...Such a performance, considered extraordinary in the publishing world for a quick political book, has come despite limited promotion and few reviews. "People are coming in every day, asking, `What can I read that can give me some understanding of what's happening?' " said Virginia Harabin, the floor manager at the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington. "This is the one I recommend."

Surprise Best Seller Blames U.S.  
Michael Massing



In his speech to the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, criticizing Bush's conduct of the war on terrorism, Dennis Kucinich set the crowd on its ear – one standing ovation after another. Sure, they were all liberals, but what counted was the response on the Internet. The Cleveland Congressman's e-mail box was stuffed to overflowing with 20,000-plus enthusiastic letters...

"I found out very quickly there were a number of special-interest groups who made city hall their private warren. There are thirty-two councilmen. Thirty-one to one was usually the score. When I got elected mayor just as I came to the Council, I was expected to represent the system. When I started to challenge it, the titans of Cleveland's business community began to get surly and used their clout in the media to disparage the administration. I came to understand that big business has a feudal view of the city, and that city hall was within their fiefdom."...

"There are increasingly two Americas: the America of multinationals dictating decisions in Washington, and the America of neighborhoods and rural areas, who feel left out. I see, in the future, a cataclysm: popular forces converging on an economic elite, which feels no commitments to the needs of the people. That clash is already shaping up. The American Revolution never really ended. It's a continuing process. I think we're approaching the revolution of hope. We have the country that makes it possible for people, if they've lost control of the government, to regain it in a peaceful way. Through the ballot box. Before I got into politics, I didn't know whether what I was doing even mattered. Now I know. One person can make a difference."...

Imagine him in a televised, coast-to-coast debate with Dubya. Blood wouldn't flow, but it would be a knockout in the first round, and we'd have an honest-to-God working-class President for the first time in our history...I haven't touched on ways and means. Obviously, the big dough will not be there. But this could be the catapult for the hundreds of grassroots groups on a thousand and one issues to coalesce behind one banner. Jim Hightower has touched on that often. And Michael Moore's book, Stupid White Men, is a bestseller. And there's a whole new generation of kids, not just the students, but bewildered, lost blue-collar kids. And, strangely enough, it can be done the old-fashioned way, shoe leather and bell-ringing, as well as e-mails. It could be that exciting.

Kucinich Is the One
Studs Terkel
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020506&s=terkel





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