"The untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system is liable to break down."

- George Soros, in Atlantic Monthly

By: Harvey Wasserman  

No sane nation hands to a wartime enemy atomic weapons set to go off within its own homeland, and then lights the fuse.

Yet as the bombs and missiles drop on Afghanistan, the certainty of terror retaliation inside America has turned our 103 nuclear power plants into weapons of apocalyptic destruction, just waiting to be used against us.

One or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, could have easily obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson.

The catastrophic devastation would have been unfathomable. But those and a hundred other American reactors are still running. Security has been heightened. But all are vulnerable to another sophisticated terror attack aimed at perpetrating the unthinkable.

Army's Resort at Disney to Undergo $50 Million Expansion

From:  

Shades of Green, the Walt Disney World resort reserved exclusively for active-duty military personnel, is planning a $50 million expansion.

...others are in Germany, South Korea and Hawaii. The resorts are exclusively for active and retired military personnel, civilian federal workers and their families.

Guests are charged according to their rank. Privates [E-2] pay as little as $62 a night, while captains [O-3], for example, pay $87.

Requires (free D/L)

By: Douglas Mattern  

The Appeal of the 100 Nobel Laureates begins by stating, "The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the worldıs dispossessed". And later, "It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek to shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world".

As vital to our future the Nobel Laureates include the 1972 ABM Treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (SALT), and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In the appeal they "urge all governments to commit to these goals that constitute steps on the way to replacement of war by law".

In the opposing mentality we have President Bush and his team rejecting the 1997 Kyoto Protocol designed to reduce climate warming. Bush has no intention of pursuing congressional approval of the CTBT, or the SALT treaties, or just about anything else that actually benefits humanity rather than corporations and the rich that put him into office.

Computer simulation aims to raise questions about huge stockpiles of nuclear warheads.

By: David Pugliese  

A new computer program developed for nuclear weapons researchers in the U.S. probably won't give Canadians much of a sense of security in these days of global tension and uncertainty. The software simulated the destruction of Canada with as few as 11 nuclear warheads.

"If you take out Canada's major centres, what is there left in terms of medical and rescue services, government, industry and other functions?" asks Matthew McKinzie, a physicist who worked on the computer program for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "There is not enough to continue functioning as a country. For Canada, 11 weapons will do that."

For such a scenario, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary as well as military installations were each hit by a 475-kiloton warhead.

By: Molly Ivans  

Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are still out there somewhere, with Judge Crater and Chandra Levy. Now that we've won the war, all the king's horses and all the king's men have to put Afghanistan back together again - warlords and all. OPEC just cut production by 6.5%.

Looking on the bright side, as we are wont to do at this stand, privatization of Social Security is a dead letter, and at least Congress didn't pass the economic stimulus package.

Crooks who defraud investors deserve the same punishment as the rest of the bad guys - and the means exist to mete it out.

By: Howard Gleckman  

The collapse of Enron is the nation's biggest financial scandal since the savings-and-loan failures of the late 1980's. What should be done about it? For one thing, we need to rethink the role of auditors. And some lawmakers and investor groups are calling for a new round of securities regulation. But they're missing the point. More rules aren't the answer.

What we really need is better enforcement of the regulations already on the books. If Enron's board, its top management, or its auditors did break any laws - and it's important to remember that there's no hard evidence so far that they did - the best response is a simple one: Put them in prison. It will, to borrow a phrase, discourage the others.

By: Eric Goldscheider  

Arlo Guthrie, the hippie icon, says his search for spiritual enlightenment has taken him down many roads, leading almost inevitably to a church here that he made famous in the song and movie "Alice's Restaurant".

Along the way he has explored his Jewish roots (on his mother's side), spent time with Franciscan monks, studied Buddhism and found a personal guru who awakened him to what he says is the Hindu practice of embracing all religions.

"I have three or four major traditions that I am carrying around inside me", Mr. Guthrie said, "and they are all just different views of the same reality".

He has long felt that zealotry and fundamentalism are among the biggest dangers facing the world, he said, "and nothing could have proven me more right than 9/11".

By: Randal C. Archibold  

Buddy, former President Bill Clinton's chocolate Labrador, who pulled at the leash, fought with the first cat and stuck by the side of a Commander-in-Chief weathering scandal, was struck and killed by a car here on Wednesday.

Buddy, 4 1/2 years old, met his end in the spirit with which he lived. He playfully took after a contractor leaving the Clinton home about noon and was struck by a sport utility vehicle on Route 117 at the bottom of Old House Lane, the cul-de-sac where the Clintons live.

One Hundred Years Ago...

• The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47.
• Only 14% of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
• Only 8% of the homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.
• There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S. and only 144 miles of paved roads. The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
• Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union.
• The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
• The average wage in the U.S. was 22¢ an hour.
• The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
• A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
• More than 95% of all births in the U.S. took place at home.
• 90% of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended 'medical schools', many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard".
• Sugar cost 4¢ a pound. Eggs were 14¢ a dozen. Coffee cost 15¢ a pound.
• Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
• Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason.
• The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
  
  1. Pneumonia and influenza
  2. Tuberculosis
  3. Diarrhea
  4. Heart disease
  5. Stroke
• The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
• The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was 30.
• Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented yet.
• There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
• One in ten U.S. adults couldn't read or write. Only 6% of all Americans had graduated from high school.
• Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist: "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
• 18% of households in the U.S. had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
• There were only 230 reported murders in the entire US.

By: J. Carlos Jiacinto  

To this day I am shocked by President Bush's attitude. Since he emerged on the national scene the one constant emotion that seems to come from him and his adminstration is arrogance. From his gestures and statement the fact remains obvious: that Bush suffers from a feeling of "self-entitlement", that he is "entitled" to be President, and that no one should question him.

No matter how wrongheaded his policies may be, or how flawed their intended results are, no one should question him because we are in "wartime". To do so, according to their logic, makes one "unpatriotic".

This arrogance disgusts me completely because it shows an unwillingness to consider other viewpoints and admit modesty in any way whatsoever.

By: Richard Roeper  

...Brock called the Harry Potter books "masterpiece[s] of satanic deception", he has never actually read a word of Rowling's, nor has he seen the movie. Why muck up an ignorant point of view by soaking it in experience and knowledge?

Nor can Brock cite even one example of a child turning to witchcraft because of the Potter books (although if some Harry-crazed kid could figure out how to fly on a magic broom, that'd be pretty cool).

But I can understand why the leader of the Christ Community Church would be so afraid of stories about magic. The next thing you know, his followers will be believing crazy stories about a 600-year-old dude who stocks his 450-foot ark with every animal known to man, or a man who performs parlor tricks like turning water into wine and feeding a multitude with a single basket of bread and fish before he's crucified, only to rise from the dead.

"...Republicans chose exactly the wrong solution. They made a huge tax cut their number one priority - ahead of everything else - and discarded the framework of fiscal responsibility," Daschle told his Washington audience. "Sept. 11 and the war aren't the only reasons the surplus is nearly gone. They're not even the biggest reasons. The biggest reason is the tax cut. At a time when we need to fight both a war and a recession, when our nation has urgent needs on all fronts, the tax cut has taken away our flexibility and left us with only two choices, both of them bad."

- Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, shoot'n from the hip

Lack of reporting civilian casualties from the war in Afghanistan is keeping Americans in the dark - and endangering their future.

By: Roberto J. Gonzalez  

For the past three months, Pentagon officials have veiled an essential aspect of the 'war on terrorism': civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Blocking access to information about the human costs of U.S. bombing - and its consequences - might create a dangerous future for Americans.

Such restrictions keep us from understanding how the rest of the world views the war, and why it might provoke future attacks on the United States. They may also breed complacency, ignorance and national insecurity.

I studied in Yemen with John Walker.

By: Joshua Mortensen  

The John Walker I met suffered a problem common to converts of all religions: He was well versed in the letter of Islam, but not so clear on the spirit. To Walker, being a Muslim seemed to be largely a matter of following a certain set of rules. Islam was a tangible puzzle, and with the right knowledge it could be solved. This makes him no different from thousands of other Americans - except for the fact that he chose Islam, not Christianity, to be the focus of his narrow, legalistic interpretation.

Apparently, nothing Walker saw in Yemen fit his Islamic ideal of strict dedication to select edicts of the Quran. He came all the way from California to Sana'a only to find a spiritual void, and he disappeared from the language school just a few weeks after he arrived. The rumor was he had traveled to the north, off-limits to foreigners at the time, to study with a fundamentalist sheik. No one knew for sure.

By: BajanMan  

At the head of the list of extremist right precepts were massive tax cuts. This is not rocket science. All the extremist right exponents understood, as early as 1963, that the way to most efficiently dismember the public sector is to starve it of funding.

If tax cuts are debilitating enough, if public support programs are thereby forced into under funding - or not funded at all, then they must die. The fringe right of the early 1960's understood in the long run that this was the end-run way to kill Social Security and Medicare. Sell the benefits of the tax cut with one hand, then use the other - armed with a scimitar, to slay all long term benefits and support. Starting with social insurance that protected the most vulnerable.

By: Paul Krugman  

I know from experience that even mentioning income distribution leads to angry accusations of "class warfare", but anyway here's what the (truly) nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently found: Adjusting for inflation, the income of families in the middle of the U.S. income distribution rose from $41,400 in 1979 to $45,100 in 1997, a 9% increase. Meanwhile the income of families in the top 1% rose from $420,200 to $1.016 million, a 140% increase. Or to put it another way, the income of families in the top 1% was 10 times that of typical families in 1979, and 23 times and rising in 1997.

It would be surprising indeed if this tectonic shift in the economic landscape weren't reflected in politics.

By: Leigh Strope  

President Bush has been focusing more attention on labor issues of late, much to the chagrin of major union officials.

Bush has repealed a Clinton-era rule favored by unions that prevents the government from awarding contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax, or other federal laws.

Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center.

By: Laurie Kerr  

Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us - after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

By: An Ordinary Patriot  

For weeks following September 11^th, we were treated to frequent explanations from many apologists describing how impossible it was for our $30 billion per year CIA and $300 billion per year military to infiltrate terrorist organizations, particularly the al-Qaeda.

Yet many Americans are now ready to lynch a white, middle class, young man from Marin County as a traitor for doing exactly that.

Editorial from:  

The first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center came just two months into President Clinton's first term, and in retrospect was the beginning of Mr. bin Laden's attempt to destroy what he regarded as a symbol of American economic might. At the time, however, the attack was regarded by press, public and politicians not as the beginning of a campaign against America but the end of one, as the assault that left six people dead failed to do major harm to the towers and the perpetrators were arrested, tried and jailed.

In 1998, truck bombs detonated at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 244 people, but the Clinton administration's response was muted. However, would Americans, the Vietnam quagmire still fresh in their minds, have tolerated an aggressive response that involved putting U.S. troops in danger? Unlikely. Would Americans have supported the federalizing of airport security and the adoption of other tough domestic measures to anticipate terrorism? Unlikely as well.

The embassy attacks eventually caused Mr. Clinton to order the launching of a volley of cruise missiles at a suspected al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan. This came during the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, prompting congressional Republicans and Clinton-hating pundits to hoot that he was "wagging the dog" - shorthand for beginning a foreign military operation to distract Americans from a domestic political scandal. Those same politicians and pundits today, however, blithely assert that Mr. Clinton should have followed up his attack on the suspected camp more aggressively, forgetting or conveniently ignoring their response at the time.

By: Edward B. Winslow  

Almost 30 years have elapsed since the "third rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972 that opened the dam of the Watergate scandal. The press and members of Congress largely ignored the crime, as then President Richard M. Nixon kept the nation's focus on the war in Vietnam.

Similarly, with the press and Congress distracted by President George W. Bush's war in Afghanistan, they are ignoring another scandal. No third rate burglary, the Enron Corp. scandal involves millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Bush, U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm and other members of Congress...

New Deficits to Force Boost of Debt Ceiling

By: Warren Vieth  

Only four years after celebrating the end of chronic deficit spending, Congress soon will be forced once again to raise the federal debt ceiling so that the government can keep operating.

Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill has notified Congress that the current $5.95-trillion debt ceiling could be breached as early as February. He asked lawmakers to move quickly to raise the limit to $6.7 trillion.

"...the Republicans insists upon claiming credit for 'winning the Cold War', while the Democrats, poor saps, say 'no you didn't - we did'. It's like asking, 'who won the Los Angeles earthquake?'."

- Ernest Partridge, from "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Armageddon", an article published in Viewpoints, 1994

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