 Here are five amazing
articles, all from great writers and/or great investigative reporters:
George
Soros on The Bubble
of American Supremacy -- Soros argues that "the supremacist
ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the
principles of an open society" and is hence doomed to spectacular and
devastating failure. Thanks to Gary
Lawrence Murphy for the link. Teaser:
The Bush doctrine, first enunciated in a
presidential speech at West Point in June of 2002, and incorporated
into the National Security Strategy three months later, is built on two
pillars: the United States will do everything in its power to maintain
its unquestioned military supremacy; and the United States arrogates
the right to pre-emptive action. In effect, the doctrine establishes
two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which
takes precedence over international treaties and obligations; and the
sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the will of the
United States. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: all
animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated so starkly; it is shrouded
in doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because of the contradiction
between the Bush Administration's concept of freedom and democracy and
the actual principles and requirements of freedom and democracy. Talk
of spreading democracy looms large in the National Security Strategy.
But when President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will
prevail, he means that America will prevail. In a free and open
society, people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by
freedom and democracy, and not simply follow America's lead...It is
ironic that the government of the most successful open society in the
world should have fallen into the hands of people who ignore the first
principles of open society.
Kurt
Vonnegut on Cold Turkey -- The guy who declared
Bush II certifiably psychopathic a year ago (and no one refuted his
argument) is frothing over America's addiction to oil, and to power.
Thanks to Gary for this link too. Teaser:
Power corrupts us, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk
on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I
in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in
the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to
pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid
got for Christmas.
[Bush] and his cohorts have as
little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with
Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they
choose to do next. In case you haven't noticed, they've already cleaned
out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national
security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a
perfectly enormous debt that you'll be asked to repay. Nobody let out a peep when they did that
to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the
Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the
free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First
Amendment) and We the People.
Seymour
Hersh on The Gray Zone -- The much-cited
article that clearly links Rumsfeld, and hence Bush, to direction and
foreknowledge of the torture and atrocities at Abu Ghraib. This guy has
done as much to show the dangers, lies and fraud of the Bush Regime as
Daniel Ellsberg revealed in the Pentagon Papers, which led to the end
of Richard Nixon, the last
American Tyrant President. My bet is that Hersh will be either arrested
or assassinated before November.
James
Grant on Low Rates, High Expectations -- An
explanation of why low interest rates suck for all but the very rich,
and how they seduce us even more into the dangerous spiral of greater
and greater consumption, greater and greater debt. Teaser:
The Fed will raise its rate,
though grudgingly and gradually. It will act in this fashion not only
out of conviction but also, perhaps, out of a guilty conscience. It
knows that its 1 percent rate drove many risk-averse people into stocks
and bonds because they could no longer afford to live on the meager
returns of their savings. That is at one pole of the spectrum of
financial sophistication. At the other, hedge funds borrowed at
ultra-low rates to speculate in everything from gold to lead. Just the
prospect of a slightly higher borrowing rate has brought about
disturbances in the temples of high finance.
The Fed has another reason to be conscience-stricken. It knows, or
should know, that by trying to make the dollar cheaper, it has
precipitated even more borrowing in an economy heavily encumbered. The
greater the debt, the more deflation-prone the economy. And the more
deflation-prone the economy, the more the Fed is apt to try to cheapen
the dollar. The truth is that the central bank of the United States is
chasing its tail.
Brian Bergstein and Randy Herschaft on Seisint's 'Matrix' Terrorism Quotient Database
-- This duo did some digging into the abominable and unethical tactics
that Seisint, a company founded by a reputed millionaire drug smuggler,
used to arbitrarily and libellously finger 120,000 people as 'possible
terrorists', some of whom were arrested as a result, and which gave the
corporation an exclusive bid on a $12 million defense department
contract -- even though the database methodology was shown to be bogus
and the database was ordered scrapped (the ACLU says there is no
evidence it has in fact been scrapped). Teaser:
A
records request by the AP in Florida turned up "briefing points," dated
January 2003, for a presentation on Matrix to Vice President Dick
Cheney and other top federal officials delivered jointly by Seisint,
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida's top police official. One of the
items on Seisint's agenda: "Demonstrate HTF with mapping." Matrix
meeting minutes from February 2003 say Cheney was briefed along with
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In May 2003, the Justice Department approved Seisint as sole data
contractor on the project, citing the company's "technical
qualifications," including software "applying the 'terrorism quotient'
in all cases."
"The quotient identifies a set of criteria which accurately singled out
characteristics related to the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and
other terrorist events," said a memo from an Office of Justice Programs
policy adviser, Bruce Edwards. "This process produced a scoring
mechanism (that), when applied to the general criminal population,
yields other people that may have similar motives."
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