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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.
"I have found the quotes section of TheConversation.org particularly interesting in several respects. The intelligence and clarity of thought reflected are refreshing. It is also reassuring to see that one's own perceptions may not be as hopeless a minority as daily life and the mass media view of the world would indicate. Most important is seeing that a disparate group of people of widely differing backgrounds and circumstances with only obvious intelligence and an open mind in common have arrived at surprisingly similar points of view on so many issues. It would seem to indicate that reason can indeed lead to inescapable conclusions and nonsense is still nonsense even when it attracts majority belief." - Walter Starck, Featured Conversationalist
Citigroup will no longer provide financing to companies that conceal debt from shareholders. In other words: it's no longer going to aid and abet the fraudulent acts of corporate crooks. How noble... I guess we're living at a time when "Big Corporation Announces It Will Do The Right Thing" really is news.
But while the media are focusing on these belated corporate mea culpas, there's a truly important movement among American companies that is hardly getting any attention.
More than a hundred companies in America are seeking to redefine the bottom line – moving away from conventional corporate accounting, where the only consideration is profit, to one that also includes the social and environmental impact the company is having. It's called the Triple Bottom Line.
...most importantly, the public has to keep the heat on. We can't settle for companies like Citigroup promising to no longer help corporate crooks intent on fleecing us.
Demanding that companies stop being bad is not enough. We have to demand that they start being good. That has to be our bottom line on corporate reform.
Redefining The Bottom Line: The Coming Corporate Revolution? Arianna Huffington
www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/081202.html
...newscasts have been in their element over the last year. For twelve months we've been besieged, all of us, by predators: hate-filled terrorists living in caves, evil priests molesting our kids, corporate criminals stealing our savings, and most recently, a particular obsession with child kidnappings...
After a year of extraordinary horrors, opponents of a U.S. invasion of Iraq are now faced with the prospect of trying to get a numbed and skittish public to pressure its government into not launching a unilateral, groundless, one-sided "war" that would almost certainly amount to a massacre...
Saddam Hussein has never, by and large, been a predator that posed a threat to Americans. Lone wolves might eat sheep, but they rarely attack, let alone eat, elephants...we, as the elephant, are proposing the obliteration of not only Saddam but those other 40 million creatures in his country...in the kind of war America (and most other militaries these days) fights, the targets are civilian. A lot of them will die before a hair of Saddam's mustache is even disturbed...
We have now a political leadership that is corrupt beyond all measure, in bed with the predators that have been stealing our savings as well as our democracy – a leadership that has been shredding, in the process, the guarantees of personal liberty that many, many Americans take very seriously (and rightly so). And, not incidentally, it's also a leadership frightfully willing to use its military might to commit mass murder at the drop of a hat, for what can only be viewed as selfish political and economic purposes.
The Land of the Hunted Geov Parrish
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13671
...the corporate crimes we've been so sickened by are only symptoms of a much larger – and more insidious – crisis. In a bloodless coup, our government by, for and of the people has been replaced by the dictatorship of the corporate dollar.
...for all his get-tough promises – "No more easy money for corporate criminals, just hard time" – this [Sarbanes-Oxley] bill would actually do very little to change the level of corporate influence over our government.
...corporate lobbyists actually succeeded in fighting off a whole slew of potential reforms: stock options still don't have to be treated as a business expense, offshore tax havens are still allowed, and there's been no pension fund reform...industry lobbyists were able to water down many of the provisions that actually made it into the bill, including those affecting the ability of accounting firms to offer consulting services to the companies they audit.
...down payment on preferential public policy has extended across party lines, with $636 million going to Republicans and $449 million to Democrats. Yet Al Gore, in his New York Times j'accuse, still had the gall to lay the blame for the current threat to "the future of democratic capitalism" squarely at the feet of Republicans "bankrolled by a new generation of special interests." What utter claptrap.
What makes the ongoing corporate crime wave not just a business scandal but a political one, is precisely the fact that there is simply no consistent institutional opposition to the corporate take-over of our politics – certainly not from the Democratic Party.
A Democracy On Corporate Autopilot Arianna Huffington
www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/080802.html
Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling...
As we aspire to universal brotherhood and sisterhood, we harken to the cry from the heart of the world and respond affirmatively to address through thought, word and deed conditions which give rise to conflict: Economic exploitation, empire building, political oppression, religious intolerance, poverty, disease, famine, homelessness, struggles over control of water, land, minerals, and oil.
Spirit and Stardust – Praxis Peace Institute Conference Dubrovnik, Croatia, 6/9/2002, Dennis Kucinich
www.house.gov/kucinich/press/sp-020609-praxispeaceconf.htm
...here we are, poised on the slippery precipice of a pre-emptive war, without even the benefit of meaningful public debate. The constitutional crisis is so deep that it is not even noticed. The unilateralism of the Bush White House is an affront to the rest of the world, which is unanimously opposed to such an action.
...if America attacks and if Iraq truly possesses weapons of mass destruction, the feared risks are likely to materialize as Iraq and Saddam confront defeat and humiliation, and have little left to lose.
A real public debate is needed not only to revitalize representative democracy but to head off an unnecessary war likely to bring widespread death and destruction as well as heighten regional dangers of economic and political instability, encourage future anti-American terrorism and give rise to a US isolationism that this time is not of its own choosing!
We must ask why the open American system is so closed in this instance. How can we explain this unsavory rush to judgment, when so many lives are at stake? What is now wrong with our system, with the vigilance of our citizenry, that such a course of action can be embarked upon without even evoking criticism in high places, much less mass opposition in the streets?
The Rush to War Richard Falk
www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020819&s=falk
Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years...the greatest threat to world peace is not Saddam Hussein, but George Bush. The nation that in the past has been our firmest friend is becoming instead our foremost enemy...
We can resist the US neither by military nor economic means, but we can resist it diplomatically. The only safe and sensible response to American power is a policy of non-cooperation. Britain and the rest of Europe should impede, at the diplomatic level, all US attempts to act unilaterally. We should launch independent efforts to resolve the Iraq crisis and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. And we should cross our fingers and hope that a combination of economic mismanagement, gangster capitalism and excessive military spending will reduce America's power to the extent that it ceases to use the rest of the world as its doormat.
The Logic of Empire George Monbiot
And today, just as the Bush Administration pledges war against Iraq for no discernable reason – with but a few public official or mainstream commentator voices objecting – the warmongers and so-called chickenhawks surrounding Dubya are also vastly increasing America's nuclear arsenal for no apparent reason.
...even when September 11 showed that the United States mainland faced a far more grave and immediate danger from box cutters than from hypothetical missiles, NMD [National Missile Defense] proceeded apace, safely cocooned in the blank check being given the Pentagon.
...we're not building missile systems – not to mention more fanciful weapons systems now under development, like the Airborne Laser – to defend ourselves from North Korea. We're doing it to pay off Dubya's and Dick Cheney's buddies in the defense industry (notice how Halliburton, despite the cloud of corporate scandal hovering above it, is pulling down all these lucrative NMD contracts of late?)...
If, in Ronald Reagan, we were worried that we had a Commander-in-Chief sufficiently stupid, arrogant, and detached from reality to use these weapons, George W. Bush doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But few people seem aware that he has the power to destroy the world instantly.
Dubya's Finger on the Button: Hiroshima Provides Needed Reminders Geov Parrish
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13649
Harken's offshore entity wasn't designed to evade taxes, explained [White House spokesman Dan] Bartlett, it was meant to enhance "tax competitiveness." And to his credit, Bartlett didn't even break out laughing after this claim...
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer even tried the ol' No Harm, No Foul defense, arguing that the reason Bush's company went Caribbean was a "moot question" because Harken never made any money on the Cayman venture. Memo to Fleischer: Arguing that the crime didn't pay isn't a defense...
Cheney's reluctance to talk to reporters is understandable, given what has been coming to light about his heretofore highly touted tenure at Halliburton, including the questionable accounting, the offshore subsidiaries, and the revelation that the company did business with Iran, Libya, and – despite Cheney's denials – Iraq. Call this his "Axis of Profits."
But, to be fair, under Cheney, Halliburton did end up giving a little something back to America – in the form of $2 million worth of fines for consistently overbilling the Pentagon. In one case they charged $750,000 for work that actually cost them only $125,000. Despite all this, the company has continued to be awarded massive government contracts.
Holding Dick Cheney "Accountable" Arianna Huffington
www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/080502.html
There is, in fact, no compelling reason of any sort to go to war against Iraq. The only recent development cited by the Bush Administration is the claim that Iraq is developing new "weapons of mass destruction." That claim that has consistently been considered patently absurd by the rest of the world, including a succession of United Nations officials charged with looking into such things...the only opposition being offered by our pathetic excuse for an "opposition" party has been logistical – when to invade, whether to rely first on air or ground assaults, who to replace Saddam with after we kill him...
But the breathtaking and seemingly universal American arrogance over this whole sad spectacle – all done while continuing to lecture the world on America's unique virtuousness – provides an endless variety of new answers as to why terrorists might hate us.
...questions won't be asked this week in Senator Biden's Strangelovefest hearings. Nobody's been invited who might ask them. That just leaves us. If our Foreign Relations Committee senators (and representatives, and reporters) are to hear any intelligent criticisms of this madness, they must come from you and me. Now. Today. Pick up the phone, pick up your pen – for goodness sakes, type, even. Deluge our policymakers with concerns, critiques, demands. The first demand is the simplest of all: have a real discussion of the pros and cons of launching a war against Iraq.
So far, media coverage, Senate hearings, and Pentagon and White House pronouncements have all been reinforcing one well-coordinated message: the necessity of an inevitably one-sided massacre. The bipartisan enthusiasm for it all has shut out the most basic question possible: whether we should be engaging in such mass murder.
Invasion on Autopilot: The Bush Wars and Public Dissent – Then and Now Geov Parrish
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13634
Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq... twelve-year Marine Corps veteran... "I'm a card-carrying Republican in the conservative-moderate range who voted for George W. Bush for President. I'm not here with a political agenda. I'm not here to slam Republicans. I am one." Yet this was a lie... Ritter was in the room that night to denounce, with roaring voice and burning eyes, the coming American war in Iraq. According to Ritter, this coming war is about nothing more or less than domestic American politics, based upon speculation and rhetoric entirely divorced from fact. According to Ritter, that war is just over the horizon...
"This is not about the security of the United States," said this card- carrying Republican while pounding the lectern. "This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo- conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation."
...if an unquestionable case could be made that such weapons and terrorist connections existed, he would be all for a war in Iraq. It would be just, smart, and in the interest of national defense. Therein lies the rub: According to Scott Ritter, who spent seven years in Iraq with the UNSCOM weapons inspection teams performing acidly detailed investigations into Iraq's weapons program, no such capability exists. Iraq simply does not have weapons of mass destruction, and does not have threatening ties to international terrorism...
Scott Ritter appeared before NATO...After he was finished, 16 of the 19 NATO nations present wrote letters of complaint to the American government about Rumsfeld's comments, and about our basis for war. American UN representatives boycotted this hearing, and denounced all who gave ear to Ritter...
"The clock is ticking," he said, "and it's ticking towards war. And it's going to be a real war. It's going to be a war that will result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It's a war that is going to devastate Iraq. It's a war that's going to destroy the credibility of the United States of America. I just came back from London, and I can tell you this - Tony Blair may talk a good show about war, but the British people and the bulk of the British government do not support this war. The Europeans do not support this war. NATO does not support this war. No one supports this war."
The Coming October War in Iraq William Rivers Pitt
www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.25A.wrp.iraq.htm
...people who care about these issues – human rights and civil rights – never stopped caring about these issues, but now they are starting to organize again...it needs to accelerate, because it appears that the United States is going to attack Iraq, with Tony Blair's complicity, and all that can stop them is public opinion, mass movements, direct action, and all those old methods of organizing...
There is no doubt that the media in the United States has reinforced the position it has always held as a protector of the establishment. Since people depend on the media as their main source of information, this is a very bad situation. But the people working to control our political minds can only control them for so long. They know that. And, after a while, as happened in the 1960s and in the 1970s, people have too much common sense, and they see through the lies.
A worrying issue, though, is the new mechanisms of control that are being put in place, such as the USA PATRIOT Act. In the United States we have seen the disappearance of a thousand people, many simply because they have Muslim names, disappeared as if they were in a Latin American dictatorship. At the same time, the Bush administration has established this concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba...the treatment of the detainees is in contravention of just about every article of international law about detention of prisoners of war that has ever been written...
It seems to me that one of the byproducts of September 11 is that people have an opportunity to really see clearly the nature of the enemy. That's why that letter signed by [69]...artists, academics, and writers that came from the United States was so eloquent. They identified the enemy as the unelected clique, the plutocracy that is running Washington. And the letter called on all of us to resist. I found that a very moving document.
I think people are now beginning to understand that it is not just a matter of opposing a policy, it is a matter of resisting the enemy of the most fundamental human rights...and the distance that resistance has to travel between understanding this and being effective in making change is not all that far.
Although the United States has a formidable arsenal of weapons and power, so does public opinion, and I think resistance can push it over. We have seen that in countries all over the world where people have overthrown oppressive regimes. With the assault on Iraq looming, I think the task of building this resistance is especially urgent.
Q&A with John Pilger Anthony Arnove and John Pilger
ZNet Commentary [Zmag commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of ZMag/ZNet. You must become a Sustainer to read this article.]
Yucca Mountain itself sits atop an active earthquake fault...And while the adjacent Nevada Test Site is already heavily contaminated from nearly a half-century of above- and below-ground tests of America's nuclear arsenal, there's one major presence downwind that wasn't there when the Test Site was created: a major American city...The majority of the United States' nuclear waste is now slated to sit 65 miles upwind, a decision that seems clinically insane.
...moving any waste from its current home – an assortment of weapons plants, nuclear power facilities, and low-grade industrial settings – is something we're even less good at than storage. The possibility of a nuclear leak, accident, theft, or terrorist attack while transporting hazardous nuclear material is far greater than if it sits where it is, and the map of where such materials would need to travel to get them all to Yucca Mountain looks a lot like the nation's interstate highway map – in other words, it passes through or around almost every major population center we have...
The only way – the only way – to not have more of a problem tomorrow than we have today is to simply stop making more nuclear waste, which means to stop all nuclear production – power plants, weapons production, industrial applications, every bit of it. Shut it all down – or we'll just create more waste we have no way of safely disposing.
Put it in Crawford, Texas: Nuclear waste management and your backyard Geov Parrish
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13607
Enron Lawyer of Last Resort Robert Bennett deftly summed up the real reasons for the current economic crisis: "Most of the problems – not all of them – are things that have been legal and acceptable"...the problem isn't what is illegal but rather what is legal...
It is emblematic of the kind of corporate culture we live in that a practice that the man on the street would consider blatantly illegal is not only legal but touted as a breakthrough and a coup. And it is a breakthrough, of a sort. After all, it's not easy to take something so unequivocally wrong and make it legal.
...as part of [Robert Rubin's] $40 million a year gig at Citigroup, he phoned both Bush's Treasury Department and a top credit-rating agency in an effort to delay the downgrading of Enron's credit rating – and, thus, allow the company to continue defrauding the public. What is stunning is that even after all the suffering caused by Enron's deception, when questioned about the ill-advised phone call to Treasury Rubin still maintains: "I would do it again."
So, I suspect, would many, many others. This defiant arrogance is still the order of the day in Washington...It's hard to imagine, but even with the public screaming for reform, behind the scenes on Capitol Hill, the high-level – and perfectly legal – gaming of the system continues unabated.
How Can This Be Legal? Arianna Huffington
www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/072502.html
Colin Powell, the beleaguered Secretary of State, has delivered an angry riposte to the Pentagon hardliners responsible for his recent string of policy defeats - insisting to allies that he "won't let those bastards drive me out" ...the first clear sign that he acknowledges the damaging criticisms he has taken from a combination of Mr Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, and Dick Cheney, the vice-president.
In public he has appeared unperturbed by his setbacks but privately he has expressed concern at the gyrations he has been forced to perform...
The most dramatic problem was over the Middle East, on which Mr Bush jettisoned Gen Powell's advice and declared in a long-awaited speech last month that there could be no negotiations with the Palestinians until Yasser Arafat was replaced as leader. Just days after Gen Powell argued that America must work with the Palestinians' own chosen leaders, he was forced to do a public reverse...
Gen Powell is regarded overseas as a lonely voice of moderation and pragmatism within an strongly unilateralist administration, and his departure would dismay most foreign capitals...The departure of the former Gulf war chief and America's first black secretary of state would also be a blow to the White House - no least because his ratings are better than those of the president himself...
One former State Department official said: "I can't see why Powell is putting up with it. He is losing every argument that matters. He'd do more good now if he did resign - it might just give the White House the jolt it needs."
Powell: 'bastards won't drive me out' David Wastell 
Over the last 15 years, market-based excesses have run the gamut from crony-driven privatization of public assets and attempts to remold U.S. law into a branch of laissez-faire economics to even bolder efforts to recast U.S. election finance as a marketplace...Market mania has emerged as the both the pivotal crippler of U.S. democracy and the driving force behind the upward redistribution of U.S. wealth. It has made the egalitarian principles and patterns of the 1950s and 1960s vanish in a cloud of dust...
Gambling analogies pervaded the early financial markets (and still plague current ones)...The term "blue chip" used in the stock market came from the highest denomination chip in the Monte Carlo casino. One can only wonder at the gall of the American and British think tanks and pundits who have held out "markets" as an alternative organizational basis for society (to replace the notions of state, polity, and community developed over 2,000 years)...
The sages of The Wall Street Journal editorial page told readers in the mid-1990s that voters wanted to be treated as customers, not constituents...
Extreme politics, in this new form as in others before it, has a distinct regional home. As much as the ideological excesses of the left in the 1960s evoked Berkeley, and the militia groups on the right were a Rocky Mountain phenomenon, the market mania of the last two decades has centered on Texas – economic Lone Ranger country, where market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism have joined to create a uniquely strident culture...
It isn't often that a major issue in U.S. politics – perhaps even a potential watershed issue – comes with such a juicy related scandal. Not long ago, this vulnerability of Texas royalty and Texas philosophy would have been hard to imagine. Now, market extremism is in the dock of public opinion. The question is not whether a coherent and powerful indictment can take form, but whether the Democratic opposition in Washington is capable of shaping and voicing it.
Market Extremists Amok and How Best to Dethrone Them Kevin Phillips
The current crisis in American capitalism isn't just about the specific details – about tricky accounting, stock options, loans to executives, and so on. It's about the way the game has been rigged on behalf of insiders. And the Bush administration is full of such insiders...
The closest thing to a substantive proposal in Mr. Bush's tough-talking, nearly content-free speech on Tuesday was his call for extra punishment for executives convicted of fraud. But that's an empty threat...Accounting issues are technical enough to confuse many juries; expensive lawyers make the most of that confusion; and if all else fails, big-name executives have friends in high places who protect them.
The Insider Game Paul Krugman
Any politician with an instinct for self-preservation (and what other kind is there?) can no longer be seen as standing against corporate reform. So the "genius of capitalism" crowd has adopted a new strategy: publicly embrace reform while working diligently behind the scenes to undermine it... Call it How To Succeed in Killing Reform While Looking Like a Reformer...
Instead of strict new laws, the chief executives came out in favor of – surprise, surprise – industry self-regulation...
The enemies of reform will be spending millions of dollars – and every waking hour – making sure there are enough loopholes in the small print to keep the pigs gorging at the trough. The only thing that will make it possible for the handful of real reformers to keep the corporate swine at bay is public outrage. It's up to us to keep demanding that the stirrings of reform are not stillborn.
Undercover Brothers: The Anti-Reformers Blend In Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/071102.html
It became clear that Bush had little regard for the environment – and even less for enforcing the laws that protect it. So last spring, after 12 years at the agency, I resigned.
...when the EPA last year overturned Clinton-era regulations to reduce arsenic in drinking water, the public reaction was so intensely negative that Whitman eventually backed off. But these public efforts to roll back regulations are only half the story. Behind the scenes, in complicated ways that attract less media attention (and therefore may be politically safer), the administration and its allies in Congress are crippling the EPA's ability to enforce laws and regulations already on the books. As a result, some of the worst pollution continues unchecked.
...diesel engine manufacturers, power plants, refineries, large animal feeding operations, and others were rather systematically ignoring the law. This is not to say that corporations are inherently evil; they simply follow the economic path of least resistance and are likely to cut corners where government oversight is lacking...
Environmental law, just like any other, is a dead letter if not enforced. The Bush administration's first step was weakening the government's ability to uncover violations of important requirements...Cutting the enforcement budget by 13 percent, as President Bush has proposed, would hobble the EPA's ability to uncover and stop such malfeasance...
Congressmen have become de facto lobbyists for home state polluters...
Once, over drinks, a state enforcement manager confessed to me that his governor had instructed him to bash the federal EPA, no matter what it did. This has always been a problem, but Clinton officials were less likely to pretend that states could do everything...
Under Clinton, the EPA reasoned that the best way to get polluters to comply with the law was to sue whole industries, not just individual companies. Under Bush, that reasoning has cleverly been reversed. If entire industries are not complying with environmental laws, goes the Bush philosophy, then there must be something wrong with the laws...
While the president talks ceaselessly about innovation, partnerships, and voluntary programs in public, privately his administration questions the costs and challenges the benefits of any worthwhile environmental rule...
The administration's own tone-deafness to the frequent conflict between the public good and private interests – reminiscent of the early Reagan years – have made this a "teachable moment" for those who believe that big companies need oversight.
...the White House won't support a federal environmental enforcement program unless failing to do so will carry political costs. But as that example showed, pressure from Democrats and voters can force positive changes.
Clearing the Air: Why I quit Bush's EPA Eric Schaeffer
What was unusual about the trial was that the defendants were able to do what had not been possible in the previous trials of draft board raiders (the Baltimore 4, the Catonsville 9, the Milwaukee 14, and many others). In those trials, the judges had insisted that the war could not be an issue, that the jury must consider what was done as ordinary crimes – breaking and entering, arson (where draft records were burned, as in Catonsville), destruction of government property.
In Camden, Judge Fisher did not forbid discussion of the war. The defendants were allowed to fully present the reasons for their action – that is, their passionate opposition to the war in Vietnam...
To my surprise, Judge Fisher allowed me to testify for several hours. I recounted what the Pentagon Papers told us about the history of the Vietnam War, and discussed in detail the theory and history of civil disobedience in the United States. I said that the war was not being fought for freedom and democracy; the internal memoranda of the government spoke instead, again and again, of "tin, rubber, oil."
...when I testified for the Milwaukee 14 the year before, and began to talk about Henry David Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience, the judge stopped me cold, with words I have not been able to forget: "You can't talk about that. That's getting to the heart of the matter."...
[The acquittal of the Camden 28] was the first of these trials in which the jury had been permitted to listen to the heartfelt stories of fellow citizens as they described their growing anguish for the victims, American and Vietnamese, of a brutal war. And the jury was led to understand how the defendants could decide to break the law in order to dramatize their protest. Most importantly, the year of the trial was 1973. By now the majority of the American people had turned against the war...
As today we watch with some alarm a nation mobilized for war, the politicians of both parties in cowardly acquiescence, the media going timorously along, it is good to keep in mind that things do change. People learn, little by little. Lies are exposed. Wars once popular gradually come under suspicion. That happens when enough people speak and act in accord with their conscience, appealing to the American jury with the power of truth.
A Break-in For Peace Howard Zinn
Gaza is completely fenced in. It's like the world's largest prison. To the west is the sea. To the north, south and east are electric fences. Palestinians are not allowed to leave. You know that famous quote that says, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer"? Well, here, they've locked up more than a million innocent people....as many military experts acknowledge, these security measures do very little to prevent bombings. What we do know about these security measures, however, is that they prevent people from creating art, from going to school, from living their lives...
The economy of Gaza is a disaster. Most Israelis commute elsewhere to work. But the Palestinians can't move around. Their unemployment rate is 67%. People have been living off of mutual aid, hospitality, donations and savings, and there is some agriculture, but that can only go on for so long. It's been two years now since Gazans have had to function in this prison...
The question is, how would [a two-state solution] work? What happens to Gaza? Are Gazans going to be able to go back and forth to the West Bank? Would there be some sort of bridge or tunnel? Who will control access? From what I've seen, people not being able to move around is the root of so many problems. Without open passage between the two land areas that would make up Palestine, daily life would still be pretty miserable. You can't construct two of the world's largest prisons and then call it a state, and expect that it has anything to do with peace or justice for Palestinians...
I've heard many young men and even children give voice to the idea that they have nothing left to choose but how they die...What Israelis have to worry about is not what's being done to them, but what they're doing.
A Conversation with Justin Podur in Gaza Justin Podur and Cynthia Peters
EUROPE CHAGRINNED
Now what about our allies in Europe? Their concerns were simply not reported on the TV news programs I scoured last night. The Guardian reports:
"Britain, in a rare breach with Washington, aligned itself yesterday with the rest of Europe in expressing dismay over George Bush's Middle East peace plan. It is the first serious rift on foreign policy between Tony Blair and Mr. Bush since the Palestinian uprising began 21 months ago. Ahead of a difficult meeting with Mr. Bush today at the G8 in Canada, Mr. Blair and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, openly rejected US demands that the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, stand down. Mr. Blair insisted: 'It is up to the Palestinians to choose their own leaders.' The British government put pressure on the US administration at the weekend to shelve its plans to call for Mr. Arafat's removal. The concerns in London and other European capitals over Mr. Bush's speech were reported to be shared by the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres. Shimon Schiffer, a respected Israeli journalist, who was with Mr. Peres when he watched the speech on television, reported the foreign minister as saying, 'He [Bush] is making a fatal mistake by making the establishment of a Palestinian state contingent upon a change in the Palestinian leadership.' The foreign minister added that 'a bloodbath' could be expected."
Here’s a third Guardian view. I cite them this morning only because here we have perspectives from London, allegedly home of close allies. They seem simply flabbergasted. Jonathan Freedland writes, "That was a fantastic speech. Quite literally, fantastic. George Bush's address on the Middle East, delivered outside the White House on Monday evening, consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy. It bore so little relation to reality that diplomats around the world spent yesterday shaking their heads in disbelief, before sinking into gloom and despair. Our own Foreign Office tried gamely to spot the odd nugget of sense in the Bush text – but, they admitted, it was an uphill struggle. Israelis committed to a political resolution of the conflict were heartbroken."
Danny Schechter's daily Weblog for June 26, 2002, re: "That Bush Speech" about removing Arafat
http://www.mediachannel.org/weblog
We are at the peak of the latest corporate abuse-reform cycle in which business abuses have been so severe, and their effects so conspicuous, that their low-key treatment and normalization by the mainstream media has been unsustainable...
This was the same problem that faced the business community during the Great Depression. Business abuses of majestic proportions in the 1920s had helped inflate the stock market with borrowed money and unload on the public vast quantities of sure-fire dogs issued in the United States and abroad. The Great Depression collapsed these junkpiles and uncovered massive fraud in security markets and banking alike...Business had a huge public relations problem on its hands, which also provided an environment in which REAL reform could take place...These real reforms of the 1930s were fought bitterly by the bulk of the business community, although an important segment did support them, considering them needed to make capitalism viable. The reforms were softened and weakened in these struggles, but were unstoppable at that time. It is therefore of great interest that as the business community has gained political and media muscle over the last two decades it has succeeded in steadily eroding those earlier REAL reforms...
If all politically viable politicians are on the corporate take, this helps explain why the Enron phenomenon could happen...The needed reforms enumerated by 'Business Week,' suggested by the New York Stock Exchange, Business Roundtable, and various business reformers, are exceedingly modest, and the reformers are perfectly frank that the important thing is "renewing confidence" rather than doing much of substance.
...managements have shown great ingenuity in finding new modes of self-aggrandizement when old ones suffer from adverse publicity.
...market ideology reigns supreme despite the growing evidence of deregulation's failures; and the corporate community is well on its way to riding out this new crisis with the most nominal reforms, if any at all.
The Corporate Abuse-reform Cycle Edward Herman
JULY/AUGUST, 2002 QUOTES
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