__________________________________________________
Column from Arianna Huffington: Poverty, the President and the Pest -- March
25, 2002
Suzanne's comments:
Looks like Arianna
has picked up on a Bush awakening to what has been one of the advocacies of many
of us -- as she pushes and prods for follow through, and then some. "'We
cannot,' said the president, 'leave behind half of humanity as we seek a better
future for ourselves. We cannot accept permanent poverty in a world of progress.
There are no second-class citizens in the human race.' Pie in the sky
speechifying? Maybe. But it nevertheless represents a major shift in the
administration's stated public policy goals...it's a direct result of
9/11."
Other quotes drawn from the
column:
[Bono has] been such a
persistent presidential prodder on the issue, he's earned the ultimate accolade,
a White House nickname: "The Pest."...
"We fight against
poverty because hope is an answer to terrorism," [Bush] said. When it came to
fighting terrorism after 9/11, however, Bush was eager to put his money where
his mouth was. $30 billion was promptly poured into that effort. Now that he's
offered up a noble vision of global economic justice, will he also step up to
the plate and address the domestic injustice caused by his budget cuts in health
care, education, and public housing programs? In fact, the president has yet to
acknowledge the destabilizing impact of poverty here at home, where the gulf
between rich and poor continues to widen...So while the reeducation of George W.
Bush on the immense challenge of poverty is welcome, it has yet to be matched by
a commensurate, meaningful and across-the-board shift in policy abroad or at
home.
__________________________________________________
Other additions to our quotes
section:
Texas populist Jim
Hightower's plan to "put the party back into politics" with a rollicking
national tour of speechifying, entertaining, organizing and coalition-building
along the lines of the 19th-century Chautauqua gatherings...to pack a
fairgrounds east of Austin for a day of Bush-bashing, corporation-crunching,
plutocrat-poking politics with a punch...The masses were ready for this
movement...By the time filmmaker and author Michael Moore arrived at mid-day, to
the foot-stomping, fist-pumping and cheers of close to 7,000 rebels against the
consensus, this corner of Texas was definitely not Bush country...If there was a
theme for the day, it may well have been that dissent is back in
fashion.
"We come to this Chautuaqua because 53 million children trapped
in separate and not equal schools, and 45 million Americans without health
insurance, deserve the same (level of) national response that bin Laden got,"
boomed [US Rep. Jesse] Jackson Jr, as he called for a restructuring of national
priorities that recognizes a need not just for security against attack from
abroad but also for security from hunger, illness and neglect at home.
The Lollapalooza of the
Left
John Nichols
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=38
...Bush’s minions were
maneuvering to limit peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan -- meaning the
administration did not care much if the country disintegrates into
warlord-ravaged territory...The Bush administration promises and pep-talks
regarding humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan will mean little if there is no
civil stability there... It is not classified info that peacekeeping, in
general, is not popular among the Bush crowd. In early March, the word leaked
that the Army is considering shutting down its Peacekeeping Institute, a small
unit at the Army War College, with a staff of 10 people and an annual budget of
$200,000. This is the only office in the military devoted to studying U.S.
peacekeeping missions...
In the 1980s, the Reagan
administration enthusiastically backed the mujahedin battling the Soviet
occupiers of Afghanistan. Once the Soviet Union was chased out by the rebels,
the United States disengaged from Afghanistan -- contributing nothing to
national rebuilding, doing nothing to promote internal stability. From (what
seemed) a comfortable distance, Washington watched as Afghanistan was rocked by
violent factional fighting. Out of that chaos rose the Taliban movement, which
promised to restore order to Afghanistan -- a promise that understandably
appealed to many Afghans. The rest is ... tragedy. It would be too easy to warn
of history repeating itself. But the Bush administration is sending an ugly
signal: the United States cares more for making war than maintaining peace.
The Loyal Opposition:
Bush To
Afghanistan: We Make
War
[Other
quotes, that appear on the site in the Quotes
section, are in
bold in the Five Star Piece below.]
__________________________________________________
Five Star Piece: Enron, the Slow Burn, William
Rivers Pitt -- March 26, 2002
Suzanne's comments: If you
were wondering if Enron was not going to fulfill its promise to become this
administration's Watergate -- or, perhaps more precisely, this democracy's
Watergate -- take heed of William Pitt's sharp reportage (there's another Five
Star piece of his we posted, Hell to
Pay, a chilling perspective on how 9/11 came to pass).
"Watergate burned slow and hot for two years before it lit the sky. The
deliberate process behind Congress's Enron investigation is eerily reminiscent
of this. One thing is certain: the ground in Washington is slowly heating up.
One does not need to see a pillar of smoke to know a fire is
burning."
Any
Western smokejumper will tell you that the most dangerous kind of forest
fires aren't the ones that burn in the treetops, but the ones that burn slow and
hot in the duff just below the surface of the ground. Treetop fires can
be seen for miles, allowing firefighters to track them and contain them. Fires
that smolder just beneath the surface, fed by years worth of fallen leaves that
can lay as thick as a foot below the forest floor, can burn undetected for acres
in every direction. Only when the flames explode upwards, charring everything
around them to dust in the blink of an eye, does the danger become apparent.
This analogy is appropriate when considering the last two
political scandals of significance that scorched the woods of Washington, D.C.
The Whitewater scandal of the Clinton years was a treetop fire: visible
in all directions, it spit sparks into the wind that singed but never fully
burned down the President of the United States. In the end, its own lack of
substance caused it to burn out. The recently released Special Counsel report
codified the years and money spent investigating Whitewater as a colossal waste
of time and energy.
For a long time, the Whitewater fire lit the sky.
Reading accounts by former conservative assassins like David Brock, or simply
parsing the tortured language of Investigator Robert Ray, one is left with the
undeniable sense that those who participated in the aggrandizement of the
Whitewater scandal knew in their hearts that there was nothing to it. It was a
far sharper political tool than a legal one. This explains why the fire burned
so bright. The flames fanned by partisan operatives obscured the true
proportions of the scandal.
The other scandal of note, involving
the disgraced firms Enron and Arthur Andersen, glows hardly at all. One must
peruse the back pages of newspapers and the daytime television of C-SPAN to hear
anything about it. The New York Times, which for a time carried at least two
Enron stories per day on its front page, has moved on to more combustible
pastures. As a scandal, it has become quite dull from the media perspective. In
reality, however, the fire has moved below the surface. It burns slow, hot and
undetected. It has become dangerous.
Consider the implications
of the Federal criminal indictment recently handed down against the accounting
firm Arthur Andersen. Andersen, bookkeepers for Enron, stands accused of
obstruction of justice for their shredding of bales of pertinent Enron
documentation. The executives of Andersen are not accused - it is the
corporation itself that has been criminally charged. If the Justice
Department prevails in its case, Andersen's ability to operate will be suspended
for five years. This is, as Andersen representatives have claimed, a death
sentence for the company.
Justice has a strong case, as
evidenced by the particulars of another instance where the federal government
pursued a corporation in a criminal prosecution. In the ruling for 'United
States v. Hilton Head Corp.,' the judge declared:
"A corporation is
responsible for the acts and statements of its agents, done or made within the
scope of their employment, even though their conduct may be contrary to their
actual instructions or contrary to the corporation's stated policies."
This decision was later affirmed on appeal. (467 F.2d 1000)
The
legal and the political are tightly intertwined here. If George W. Bush's own
Justice Department is pursuing Arthur Andersen with such deadly intent, despite
its connections to Enron and all attendant political implications, something
serious is afoot. Unless the case is compromised from within, U.S. v. Andersen
promises to erase one of the largest accounting firms on Earth. This fact alone
stands the Enron scandal tall in political importance.
Congress
has begun firing out a new round of subpoenas in the Enron matter, focusing new
scrutiny on connections between the energy corporation and the White House. The
scope of these subpoenas covers 1992 through the present, which means Clinton's
dealings with Enron will likewise be examined. This lends a bipartisan veneer to
the proceedings, a wise tactic that should serve to knock down accusations of
unfairness by Republicans who feel the ground getting hot beneath their
feet.
Most important to this ten-year scope is the fact that it
will cover any and all dealings Bush had with Ken Lay back in his Texas
gubernatorial days. It was there that the ties between these two men were
forged, on both personal and policy levels, and it is there that the evident
political connections within Bush's national energy policy were created. Like
the Enron investigation, the focus of the Whitewater investigations was on
Clinton's dealings before he arrived in Washington, D.C. Unlike Whitewater, this
Enron work by Congress moves slowly and quietly, almost completely beneath the
radar of the media.
The gold standard for Washington political scandals
is, of course, Watergate. Before Watergate became a treetop blaze that burned
Nixon's administration to the ground, it was a slow, smoldering fire that did
not earn a great deal of notice. The Watergate break-in that started everything
happened on June 17, 1972, when the burglars were arrested in the act. The
conflagration did not truly begin until October 20, 1973, after the infamous
"Saturday Night Massacre." The principal actors were not indicted until March of
1974. Nixon did not resign until August of that year.
Watergate
burned slow and hot for two years before it lit the sky. The deliberate process
behind Congress's Enron investigation is eerily reminiscent of this. One thing
is certain: the ground in Washington is slowly heating up. One does not need to
see a pillar of smoke to know a fire is burning.
William Rivers Pitt is freelance writer and a regular
contributor to truthout.org. You can visit Will at : www.willpitt.com
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