Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

John Kenneth Galbraith interview from Common Dreams Newscenter:

“We can’t say how serious this is yet, and anyone who makes such a prediction is suspect,” he says, eschewing the giant soundbite dangling in front of him. “I can only say I hadn’t expected to see this problem on anything like the magnitude of the last few months – the separation of ownership from management, the monopolization of control by irresponsible personal money-makers.” Time and again as we talk, the author of American Capitalism and of The New Industrial State, the chronicler of The Affluent Society, returns to the same two points. His first is that the large modern corporation, as manipulated by what he calls the “financial craftsmen” at Enron and elsewhere, has grown so complex that it is now almost beyond monitoring.

Second, and consequently, these new entities “have grown out of effective control by the owners, the stockholders, into nearly absolute control by the management and the individuals recruited by management”. And in the process, he insists, this latter group has “set its own compensation, either in the form of salaries which can get to fantastic levels, or of stock options”.

“That was the achievement of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Public attitudes were never quite the same again.” But then Galbraith leapfrogs 70 years and a dozen presidencies to the massive Bush tax cuts of 2001 to reinforce his point that nothing very much has changed. “It is still politically safe to be very rich,” he says, citing what he calls the “imaginative developments” of the Bush administration as a prime example.

“Assuming they will not be in power indefinitely, they are taking the interesting step of enacting tax legislation not for the immediate future but for all of a decade hence. We not only legislate for the affluent, we do it for their permanent advantage.” And suddenly, once more, the impish delight of the phrasemaker bursts through. “How’s that?” he asks with the sly chuckle of an iconoclast 93 years young.

From CNN.com:

The White House announced in a one-sentence statement Monday that President Bush had signed into law a nearly half-trillion-dollar increase in the government’s ability to borrow money.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer put the news out on paper: “On Friday, June 28, 2002, the president signed into law S. 2578, increases the public debt limit from $5.95 trillion to $6.4 trillion.”

As Al Martin reports, wealthy Republicans have been relocating overseas to avoid a potentially explosive economic situation in the United States.

Alleged 9-11 conspirator, Moussaoui, has been punching holes into the government’s case while defending himself almost totally pro se as his own counsel. Too bad no one will listen and that the government has already decided he will die.

In the motion describing the government’s case as speculation, Moussaoui said prosecutors must prove that bin Laden ordered and organized the 19 hijackers and that he participated in the conspiracy.

“So I am a Mujahadeen, if Allah accept me, I am a terrorist in your eyes (as terrorism is like beauty, it is in the eyes of the beholder.)” Moussaoui wrote. “But it does not mean that I took part in September 11. And the FBI knows it as they were monitoring all my movement and communications for quite a long time in the US and abroad.”

Wonderful interview with the acid-tongued Gore Vidal. He makes me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the subject matter is rather depressing:

The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy, is
allowing this to go past them without any question, puts me in mind of
my favorite Emperor – and I always talk about Emperors when I do
Pacifica, at least on the West Coast – Tiberius, who was a very
brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the
Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent
them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word
and he said, “You’re crazy. Suppose, suppose the Emperor is mad,
suppose he’s ill, suppose there’s a palace coup and somebody else is
sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you’re
passing is really his, or should be passed?” They sent it back:
“Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us.” And Tiberius
said, “How eager they are to be slaves.”

And this is more and more my view of the American people in general.
They’ve allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no
fuss. We have perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have the
Enemy-of-the-Month Club: one month it’s Noriega, one month it’s Saddam
Hussein, one month it’s Khadafy, currently it’s Osama bin Laden, we
are…

“It’s going to be a loooooong war!” said George W. Bush, with such glee,
’cause it means he has Imperial powers. And it also means that we are
not going to get the Constitution back. Once civil rights are gone,
they are gone. People get out of the habit of them.

Then there was this little nugget that I hadn’t heard before:

I don’t think it’s Osama, I think he’s part of it in some way, but…
The best, the only news you really get, unless you know people who are
actually involved, is from the European press, they do follow this, and
they are not as strictly censored as the American press, where we don’t
get any facts of any kind. But the former foreign minister Mohammed
Hakum, I used to know, of Egypt, he said, look, we’ve been tracking
Osama for years. We know all about him, talking about the Egyptian
Secret Service, as also Mossad had, the CIA has, we know everything
about him. He’s no more capable of pulling off as intricate a stunt as
9-11, organizing it, putting it in place, he said, that’s a major
country’s has done that, with a secret service and modern forces. It
isn’t coming from a bunch of religious fanatics no matter how
dedicated. They can’t do it, any more than Timothy McVeigh all alone
could have made that bomb and detonated it without blowing himself up.
There was a larger group involved. And the FBI had a pretty good idea
who they are.

Who governs? Obviously the oil companies are involved in our
Middle-Eastern capers. And for those reasons we have motive, and we’ve
provoked a response from Moslems. What Mohammed Hakul is suggesting,
was that a country was involved, and he didn’t say which one, but he was
sort of pointing his finger at Pakistan. They had the secret service,
they had the intelligence. And we do know that the head of their secret
service, which is called ISI, a man called Mahmoud Ahmed, happened to be
in Washington by the way at the time of 9-11, he had sent about two
weeks before 9-11, a hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta, the
first suicide bomber who was in the United States. This was
embarrassing when it came out, and he took early resignation, early
retirement.

I’ve really appreciated Pat Buchanan being outspoken on the crimes being done to this country in the name of fighting terror. He is perfectly incisive and cuts through all the bull. For example from an editorial in USA Today:

“We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name,” Bush thundered. But which is the evil side in Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Kashmir? In the Afghan war, we were aided by Iran, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan and Northern Alliance generals accused of massacres. In the Gulf War, we were aided by Syria’s Hafez Assad, in World War II by Stalin, in the Cold War by the Shah and Augusto Pinochet.

“Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place,” Bush said. But ask Germans if what we did to Dresden was moral. Ask the Japanese about what we did to Nagasaki.

By dividing the world into good and evil and threatening pre-emptive wars on all “evil ones,” we may persuade our targets to acquire the only kind of weapons able to deter a crusading US president.

I found this article on Bush’s Troops to Teachers program troubling. Why do people assume that career military personnel who be good teachers? Education should not foster authoritarian tendencies and ‘group think’.

“It’s a natural to go into education as a second career,” said Lt. Col. Rick Mills, director of Chicago’s Junior ROTC program. “Military personnel are well-equipped both in leadership and management.”

Leadership and management. How inspiring. “We will turn your little mush minds into well-oiled American learning machines!” I found this next part to be casually patronizing:

The 49-year-old teacher sees a lack of role models for young black men in the public schools, and he became a teacher in part to fill that void. Other military retirees should consider doing the same, he said.

“A lot of young urban kids, they find themselves trapped in the cycle of poverty and gangs,” Buckner said. “Knowing what being part of a team really meant, I felt I could help those kids who were perhaps going down the wrong path.”

Phil Donahue has a show again. This time on MSNBC. It will nice to see someone who isn’t a lockstep right-wing nutjob on television for once. I remember during the 2000 presidential election Donahue valiantly championed the campaign of Green Party Candidate, Ralph Nader. It was funny watching the talentless pundits trying to make heads or tales of that. They were so fixed on their support of Bush or, on rare occassions, of Gore.

From Reuters: Boy, those morons in the federal government are really grasping at straws. In another case of thought crime an Islamic Florida man was arrested for alleged ties to the so-called ‘dirty bomber’. His apparent crime is that he has what the FBI considers ‘extremist views’. That and he attended the same mosque as the dirty bomber.

Although the details of Hassoun’s affiliation with Muhajir were unclear, both men attended the same mosque in Fort Lauderdale while Muhajir lived in south Florida from 1991 to 1998.

“We have suspicions; that’s it,” a federal source told the Herald. “We are working hard right now to run this all out. We have reason to believe this man has extremist views. They were friends and they attended the same Fort Lauderdale mosque.”

From Spike Magazine:

For the past three years students in the Investigative Reporting class of the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have attempted to enlighten the public as well by seeking to identify the Post’s secret source of information — a man known only as “Deep Throat.”

Via MSNBC:

A federal jury awarded $4.4 million Tuesday to two members of the environmental activist group Earth First! who claimed that Oakland police and FBI agents framed them for bombing their own car 12 years ago.

Dirty rats. They’ve been dirty their whole history. Why believe they’re doing anything differently? Who knows how much criminality they get away with on a regular basis?