The following is an update from Suzanne Taylor and
TheConversation.org Making Sense of These Times [http://www.theconversation.org] Website. Thank you for
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May 14,
2002
We've posted our next Monthly Report, where we review what's happened in the past
month as reflected in writings we've
posted. This new Report also calls attention to conversations that
are underway. There is a track that hasn't been mentioned
in the Updates:
"For a search for ways and means to deliver us humans from the
consciousness that got us to this precipice, read what's been going on in our
'Conversation on Becoming a Force' [http://www.theconversation.org/c-force.html]. This site exists to unify us in a new reality, where our oneness
supercedes our separation. On the way from being gadflies to becoming a
force, we're looking for how such a shift
could occur."
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Suzanne's
comments: In case you can't grasp the handles on the
homefront for just how things add up in terms of corporate greed and Wall Street
malfeasance, here's Arianna summing up the disaster that Harvey Pitt, chairman
of the SEC is, "...at the very moment when
the average shareholder desperately needs a champion...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."
Other
quotes drawn from the column:
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.
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."
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Column from Geov
Parrish: Making Money
from Misery -- May
9, 2002
Suzanne's comments: This cuts to the chase about what
happened with Enron and California. "...the staggeringly expensive energy crisis
suffered by California and other western U.S. states in 2000-2001 was to a
substantial extent artificial, manipulated, at least by Enron, to reduce supply,
jack up prices, and keep them inflated. The phrase 'at least' pertains because
internal Enron memos suggested that 'other market participants' -- including
Duke Energy, Dynegy, the Williams Companies, Mirant, and Calpine -- were using
similar methods to take advantage of deregulation's gaping loopholes." Read it
and weep about how these shameful manipulations may prove to have been legal
dealings. "...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."
Other quotes
drawn from the column:
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.
Column from Geov
Parrish: In the Name of
Womanhood -- May 13,
2002
Suzanne's comments: Profound food for thought
in this history lesson about Mothers Day, which "was originally conceived as a
sort of one-day women's general strike to protest the carnage of war. It began
in 1870 as a rallying cry for mothers who lost husbands and sons in the U.S.
Civil War, and as a renunciation of war, militarism, and what we now call
patriarchy." Read the stirring "original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day
Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870" here. In another
piece, "A History of Mother's Day," [http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/special/holidays/97/mom/history.html]
you get an interesting snapshot of our descent into the rampant
materialism that has become the American Way. "Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia is
credited with bringing about the official observance of Mother's Day," and,
being of one mind with Julia Ward Howe about its serious purpose, she died with
"her maternal fortune dissipated by her efforts to stop the commercialization of
the holiday she had founded." (Highly recommended echo of the "renunciation of
war, militarism, and what we now call patriarchy": our Five Star
Piece, "More Shock and Horror" [http://www.theconversation.org/shock.html,] that was posted when we went to war in Afghanistan.)
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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.
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."
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Five Star Piece: Apartheid in the Holy
Land, Desmond Tutu
-- April 29,
2002
F
ull
piece: http://www.theconversation.org/tutu.htmlSuzanne's comment: Would that the world were populated by people like
Desmond Tutu. It is hard for me to conceive of anyone arguing with his
perspective on the Middle East. (See our Conversation on the Middle
East [http://www.theconversation.org/c-mideast.html]
for someone who did.) "I am not pro-this people or that. I
am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression."
Quotes
drawn from the piece:
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...
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.
Five Star Piece: How Wal-Mart is Remaking
our World, Jim Hightower
-- April 26,
2002
F
ull
piece: http://www.theconversation.org/walmart.htmlSuzanne's comment: Jim Hightower is a great read,
and this piece, which is the centerpiece of his current newsletter, the
"Hightower Lowdown," will hold your attention. The price being paid in human
misery for us to get cheap goods at Walmart is a sad commentary on the state of
the world of oneness -- not. "Corporations rule...The media and politicians
won’t discuss this, for obvious reasons, but we must if we’re actually to be a
self-governing people. That’s why the Lowdown is launching this occasional
series of corporate profiles. And why not start with the biggest and one of the
worst actors?"
Quotes drawn
from the piece:
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.
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