These quotes are in reverse order – the first posting is at the bottom, with the most recent quotes at the top:
...each of the major business scandals to emerge so far involved a different scam. So there's no comfort in saying that few other companies could have employed the same tricks used by Enron or WorldCom — surely other companies found other tricks. Second, the scams shouldn't have been all that hard to spot. For example, WorldCom now says that 40 percent of its investment last year was bogus, that it was really operating expenses. How could the people who should have been alert to the possibility of corporate fraud — auditors, banks and government regulators — miss something that big?...
Auditors weren't interested in giving a hard time to companies that gave them lots of consulting income; bank executives weren't interested in giving a hard time to companies that, as we've learned in the Enron case, let them in on some of those lucrative side deals. And elected officials, kept compliant by campaign contributions and other inducements, kept the regulators from doing their job — starving their agencies for funds, creating regulatory "black holes" in which shady practices could flourish...
Six months ago, in a widely denounced column, I suggested that in the end the Enron scandal would mark a bigger turning point for America's perception of itself than Sept. 11 did. Does that sound so implausible today?
Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read. And the situation is likely to become much worse as a result of radical deregulation efforts by the Bush administration and some horrendous court decisions...
The essential problem with television is not just a right-wing bias in news and programming, or the transformation of politics and government into entertainment and sensationalism. Nor is it just the constant bombardment of advertising, much of it directed at children. It's that the most important issues facing the middle-class and working people of our country are rarely discussed...
If television largely ignores the reality of life for the majority of Americans, corporate radio is just plain overt in its right-wing bias. In a nation that cast a few million more votes for Al Gore and Ralph Nader than for George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan, there are dozens of right-wing talk show programs.
Well, knock me over with a junk bond. Yesterday, WorldCom's world of hurt
finally broke out of the business pages and into the headlines...
At what point does an avalanche of similar (or even identical) crimes become
an indictment not of one particular executive or company or accounting firm,
but of an entire economic system?...
Even today, as Bush self-righteously thunders that WorldCom's corporate
behavior is unacceptable blah blah blah, he's busy cramming in as many
fundraising opportunities as possible all summer long before the soft money
tactics he's ridden all the way to the White House become officially illegal
this fall. And every other D.C. politician is doing the same thing, only not
as efficiently.
...until global capitalism makes room for a different kind of accounting
altogether – one that incorporates moral values and social costs and
benefits into business decisions big and small – scandals big and small
will keep right on happening.
I am of a generation, which thought that we could bring peace to the world,
and we didn't think it mattered if we ourselves were angry. What we learned
is that an angry generation cannot bring peace...
We know that health is more than the absence of sickness. Health is a
positive state that we proactively cultivate. You don't just wait until you
get sick, you cultivate health. Sickness is the absence of health; health is
not the absence of sickness.
And so it is with war, and conflict in the world as well. It's not like,
'well if we don't have a war, we're at peace'. In fact, Martin Luther King
Junior used to say that there are two kinds of peace. There's negative
peace, and there is positive peace. Negative peace is where there is no
outright war, but there is underlying tension and anxiety. Positive peace is
the presence of justice and brotherhood. So while many people would say that
as they look at it, there was peace before September 11, many of us would
say, 'that depended on what neighborhood you lived in'...
We cannot take a quantum leap forward in our circumstances unless we take a
quantum leap forward in our thinking, and I am here today for the same
reason that you are, because one of our most powerful tools for change in
consciousness is conversation.
...for those of us who are interested in the non-violent politics
of Dr. King and Gandhi, one of the lines from Martin Luther King, which I
find fascinating is, he said, 'You have no morally persuasive power with
people who can feel your underlying contempt'. You have no morally
persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt. So that
takes us full circle back to the principle that self-purification must
precede direct political action.
A friend of mine over the weekend was recalling her days as an idealistic child of the 60's...
She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.
"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the 60's have crept back into power. And we were the empowerers, because we've turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against."
The times they ain't a-changin'. The passionate activists from the Age of Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.
Cherie Blair, Tony
Blair's wife, [said], "As long as young
people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are
never going to make progress." It's an appalling situation. The suicide
bombings are terrible crimes that leave innocent people dead. But the
fact remains, if you want to stop a crime from happening, you have to
look at the cause...you can't live with any dignity under an
occupation. Some people are convinced that at least they can die with
dignity...
But the "War on Terrorism" does not allow for any investigation of the
roots of the problem. It cuts off dialogue and has created a situation
where asking why is practically censored. It's simply not allowed.
(Cherie Blair was severely criticized for her remarks – the suggestion
being that any examination of the root of the problem is somehow a
justification. She has rushed to apologize for her remarks.)...
Look at Gaza, where there already is a fence. It's like one big
prison. There's one way in and one way out. Unemployment is 67 percent.
Crossing checkpoints takes hours and hours. That's what they would be
recreating on the West Bank...
Despite the terrible conditions, however, this is one of the
most hospitable places I've ever been. You might expect that
Palestinians would harbor resentment towards North Americans and/or
Jews. In fact, the guide book I have warns of exactly that. It says
nothing about checkpoints or the violence of the Israeli occupation. But
it does recommend that you be careful travelling in the West Bank if you
look Jewish. That's so far from the truth. As Jewish volunteers have
repeatedly told me, the one thing you *don't* need to be afraid of is
the thing they warn you about in the traveler's guide. Most Palestinians
have no special hatred of Jews or Americans. But they do hate the
occupation.
There may be just one national politician in the north.
Everyone asks, so I have to tell you: In the U.S. I have seen just one
national politician
running on a "North" platform of the kind that Cultural Creatives and New
Progressives will
like: Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat of Cleveland, Ohio. In the 2000
election, in a district
that had previously voted 61% and 68% Republican, looking safely
Gingrich-ite before
Kucinich, he ran a pure "North" campaign and won with 75% of the vote, far
ahead of the
standard bearer of his party. His platform was entirely that of the North,
and the Cultural
Creatives: Create a cabinet department of Peace for both home and abroad; do
everything we
can to live up to the Kyoto Accords, i.e., make the economy subservient to
the ecology; and run a
citizens campaign without the influence of big money. Notice that it’s "not
news" in the
Modernist media. Kucinich’s recent speech condeming the Bush administration’
s war policy
and destruction of civil liberties, reminding voters that they’re an
unelected bunch at that, is also
a pure North position. His speech fits a movement-based position, and fits
the revival of the
peace movement in 2002. This demonstrates what can win for the North’s New
Progressives,
time and again. And yes, Kucinich was a big city mayor.
This is a serious job opportunity for politicians who can think outside the
box, and who
can authentically appeal to the political North.
The Reverend Jerry Vines, senior pastor of the Jacksonville, FL First Baptist Church, spoke to thousands of the faithful at the Southern Baptist pastors conference in St. Louis this past Monday. In his remarks, Vines stated that, "Islam is not just as good as Christianity." Vines went on to decry Mohammed, the founder of Islam, as, "A demon-possessed pedophile who had twelve wives - and his last one was a nine-year-old girl."...
George W. Bush graced the pastors with his presence via satellite link...Bush's appearance in a place where intolerance and hatred are preached by Christian spiritual leaders underscores the central crisis facing America today...
Americans are no longer sure which way is up. We have lost our sense of moral clarity. Our freedom to ask questions without fear of reprisal has been cast into a well of doubt that is made all the more darker by homespun threats and intimidation...
Americans are now subject to a government that will terrorize them in order to further whatever agenda happens to present itself at the moment. More often than not, that agenda is about protecting the Bush administration from criticism about the catastrophe that was their preparedness for 9/11...There is no moral clarity here, but only a base instinct for self preservation that shames us all.
The Bush Administration has, in effect, announced that they are giving us a
new American constitution to replace the old one — by executive order.
Presumably, as with the ABM Treaty the U.S. officially withdraws from today
(since nuclear weapons are no longer a threat, right?), it's just a relic of
a bygone era. All that freedom-and-stuff is no longer relevant to America's
21st century needs...
John Ashcroft and his minions have covered themselves already, by giving
themselves the legal authority to investigate anyone, at any time, for any
reason, for generations to come.
At some point, the fact that this sort of threat to public safety exists can
no longer be called an emergency; it will have to be viewed as the way the
world is in the 21st century. This country will have to decide that the
proper balance between public safety and such once-popular ideas as
individual freedom and innocence until guilt is proved.
Most of us, these odd 6,600 hours after 9-11, are back to watching sporting
events, shopping at the mall or engaging in other variations on adult
thumb-sucking. Meanwhile, our highest levels of decision-makers — in the
White House especially, but also in Congress and the courts — are stuffed
with people inclined, when not being watched, to use their power mostly to
get more power and to enrich themselves and their friends.
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