The following is an update from
Suzanne Taylor and TheConversation.org Making Sense of These Times
[http://www.theconversation.org] Website. Thank you for your
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June 13,
2002
I introduced you to Walter
Starck, editor of the impressive Golden Dolphin Video CD Magazine, in
our June 1 Update. His contribution is so substantive that we've made it a Featured Conversation.
It began when he responded to a piece he read about the upcoming film, CROP
CIRCLES: Quest for Truth, for which I am Executive Producer. I was so
impressed with how he saw the crop circles and the world that I wrote to him,
and each time he responds I am moved to tears by his insight and intelligence. I
commend you to read these quintessential writings of his that are "making sense
of these times." If you want to be communicating about the state we are in and
what we can do about it, this is a great dialogue to take part in. These quotes
of Walter's will give you the idea:
"The war on drugs isn't about preventing the
detrimental health and social effects. Alcohol, tobacco, automobiles and even
obesity each do far more damage than all of the illegal drugs put together. The
real problem is that people use drugs to alter the way they see the world and
they are willing to defy authority to do so. To the political mind this
justifies any degree of force necessary to repress it and intimidate anyone who
might be tempted to try. Even without drugs, thinking different and defying
authority was what Waco was all about. Simply out waiting them was the obvious,
easy and safe tactic but making an example of them was deemed more
important...
"Have been thinking about the circles and what
they may mean. Neither human nor natural causation is a sustainable hypothesis.
There is simply no known means for either to be possible. On the other hand,
everything points to their being the product of conscious design and being
intended to communicate something to us. Although they may seem enigmatic and
even controversial I think we can assume their originators know what they are
doing and are doing it for a purpose. That their meaning is not immediately
clear and explicit is probably because they are intended to wake us up and make
us think for ourselves, not simply to instruct
us.
"...we are an integral part of this world, not
just in it but rather deeply and inextricably of it. This recognition results in
a very different perspective on life. What we do to the world we do to
ourselves...
"Belief in a limited, discrete, isolated self is
self-fulfilling. It leads to a fearful, selfish, lonely existence. Too much
power in such hands can only result in destruction. Before any civilization may
advance to a high level this problem must be resolved. Such resolution can only
be prompted and encouraged. It cannot be taught as a recipe, or bestowed, or
enforced. It has to come from self-directed inner transformation on an
individual level. Prompting and encouraging such realization is what I think the
circles are all about and are in fact doing."
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COLUMN FROM ARIANNA
HUFFINGTON: Congress and Enron:
Why the Big Bang Turned into a Whimper -- June 10, 2002
Suzanne's comments:
As happened with the non-election of
Bush, if Arianna is right -- and I always find she is -- we're watching, in
plain sight, another victimization of the populace. Here, big money is buying
its way out of consequences from Enron and from Wall Street's double dealing.
How can we let this happen to us? Why doesn't everyone who isn't bought, like
Arianna, scream, "No?" How to collect ourselves -- to get a meaningful voice,
that affects policy, for all those people who keep Michael Moore on the best
seller list -- is, to me, the central question. How can we stand what's being
done to us? What to do, what to do...????? Arianna, I know you're reading this.
Do you have any ideas about how can we link up to be more than gadflies, and
become a force? "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."
Another quote drawn from the
column:
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.
COLUMN FROM ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Still Live in Prison
Stripes: A CEO's Not So Artful Dodge -- June 13,
2002
Suzanne's comments: The
ever entertaining Arianna gets her teeth into a member of the
lowest-of-low-lifes billionaires club, Dennis Kozlowski, who "viewed all of
Tyco's assets as his own because, well, without him Tyco was nothing." Even as
we weep for how deeply corrupt things are, it at least can afford a modicum of
satisfaction when one thief is caught in the act, as Kozlowski has been in
facing jail for evading a million dollars of sales tax "on $13.2 million worth
of paintings, wryly described by the New York Times as 'second-tier work by
big-name artists.'"
Other quotes drawn from the
column:
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.
COLUMN FROM GEOV PARRISH: Hello? Is Anybody Getting
this down? The U.S. Constitution, Now Fully Waivable -- June 11,
2002
Suzanne's comments:
Geov's indignation at Ashcroft's
announcement that U.S. citizens will now be held indefinitely without charges or
trial is for all of us. How come we are being assaulted this way by this
administration, and can't we do anything about it? "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."
Another quote
drawn from the column:
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.
COLUMN FROM GEOV PARRISH: British Invasion: American
Journalist Says Deep Political Reporting Only Possible from Abroad -- June
10, 2002
Suzanne's
comments: This column is on Greg Palast, the BBC/"Guardian"
investigative reporter whose reports on American political and corporate
evildoings have won widespread acclaim in Britain, but can't get air time in the
United States. Here's insight into how our media is failing us. "'You don't
learn how to investigate in [an American] newsroom. I get all this praise; the
trick is that I have editors and producers [here] that will give me the money,
the time, the backing, and the space. I can get on the air and tell the story of
how the election was stolen in Florida; I would have to take hostages to get on
the air in America.' That's true even though Palast's BBC program has a
reciprocal, free story-trading agreement with ABC; only Ted Koppel has nibbled
so far, but even 'Nightline,' eventually, backed away from the Florida
story."
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IN DEPTH REPORT: The Next World
Order, Nicholas Lemann -- March 25,
2002
Suzanne's comments: This is a master-piece,
mapping the evolution of Republican foreign policy, from when Dick Cheney was
Secretary of Defense under the senior
Bush, to what was going on a couple of months ago. It gives a dimensional
picture of what has become a build-up to a forthcoming invasion of Iraq. This is
a teaching, and I especially
recommend reading the whole thing. "..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...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...the chain of events
leading inexorably to a full-scale American invasion, if it hasn't already
begun, evidently will begin soon."
Other
quotes drawn from the report:
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 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.
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.
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COMMENT FROM ONE OF OUR
LISTMEMBERS:
This is
a Catholic sponsored website. This is the Catholic version of the Crusades. It
is not an untrue version but it is certainly incomplete. It is so easy to use
one part of history to revise all of history. A full view requires extensive
reading on many levels and from varying sources. Let me recommend a GREAT, FUN
and informative read on early European history, The Knight The Lady and the
Priest by Georges Duby, Random House, 1985. He is a French anthropologist
and this is a translation from the French. I am recommending it because it goes
into great detail, novelette style, to show how the Church and State battled
each other for supremacy -- and the consequent separation of Church and State.
It's a juicy story. E.g. did you know that at that time the Church owned over
half of Europe and, therefore, royal families had to completely change their
rules on inheritance of property and marriage in order to keep the property
intact? First born sons were the only ones who could inherit -- or even marry!!
The consequence was that there were a LOT of single men and women running around
-- entering convents and entering service as knights to the kingdom that would
take them. A consequence, again, is that these knights needed to win the favour
of their lords, hence their praise, in what we now refer to as the era of
Courtly Love, of the ladies of the court -- simply to win favour at court. (The
ladies, of course, express themselves sincerely in their poems and songs of
love, which you can read in tidy little books like Meg Bogin's The Women of
the Troubadours, WW Norton & Co., 1980.)
The point is that
Europe was in complete upheaval and in need of a unifying cause when the
Crusades became a political necessity!!
Keep up the terrific
work!
Suzanne
responds:
This response is much appreciated -- bless the Net for
how it keeps allowing complete pictures to emerge. Glad to have your knowledge
contributing to us. Your Catholic background gives you special credence in
calling for greater understanding, since it's the Catholic version you call
incomplete. For the sake of becoming a sensing body here, do say more about what
people would learn, by reading your recommendations, about what's omitted in the
story we posted.
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