The NYTimes issued a correction on its editorial page today.
An editorial last Friday supporting a Supreme Court decision that bans execution of the retarded stated incorrectly that apart from the United States, only Kyrgyzstan and Japan permit the death penalty for retarded convicts. The law in Kyrgyzstan prohibits the execution of the retarded.
That makes me feel so much better; I was so embarassed for Kyrgyzstan.
For those who may have already missed this item contained within the text of an earlier link, here it is again, from a different source. Note that the proposed Federal Agency will effectively control us all, even as we are told we can’t control it. Interestingly enough this link is from that bastian of often mindless conservatism, The Washington Times!
A provision in the bill seeking to create a Homeland Security Department will exempt its employees from whistleblower protection, the very law that helped expose intelligence-gathering missteps before September 11.
The legislation now before Congress contains a provision allowing the director of the proposed agency to waive all employee protections in Title V, including the Whistleblower Protection Act. The act protects government employees from retaliation or losing employment for speaking out on waste, fraud and abuse.
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[In addition] The department would not be required to release information under the Freedom of Information Act. This would eliminate the agency’s responsibility to answer questions from the public. Advisory committees that normally include public input would be immune, and the Cabinet secretary would have veto power over inspector general audits and investigations.
I thought this piece might be too simplistic to pass muster with someone more familiar with economics than m’self, but B says he thinks it’s probably too abstruse for the casual browser, too much attempted too minimally. Must be just right then. I dunno. It does it for me, but you judge for yourself.
The argument is that it was basically a crisis of overproduction which drove the U.S. stock market boom, but it was a singleminded concentration on the needs of investors which created the disaster we visited on the third world but which has now landed in our own lap.
Industry after industry had made more productsautos to computer chipsthan could be sold for a profit on the market. Market saturation of a particular product didnt happen by itself. The why of the story is that the working majority hasnt been able to buy what it has made.
Accordingly, overproduction reduced profitability for those who buy labor-power. No profits, no investment in more productive capacity. The result was lots of money with no place to go.
What to do? The response from the titans of the global market economy was twofold. One was that investment migrated from industrial production to financial speculation.
The other was the destruction of productive capacity. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank in part enforced policies that purposely plunged Third World and newly industrialized nations into depressions that devastated peoples living standards.
In the meantime, investment seeking profits flowed into the U.S. stock market.
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[While] the flow of foreign funds into the U.S. [helped] consumers and corporations live beyond their means….[the] unsustainable trend of U.S. spending based on lending was given a boost by the nation’s high-flying stock market.
In any case, the boom is now bust, and investors around the world know it. Is there a lesson going forward? Of course there is. The question is only whether we can get rid of enough of the fools and villains at the top to do something about it.
… describing the end of what some have called the speculative boom of all time by sidestepping what led to its creation covers up what needs to be covered. Namely, that a market economy system based on production to meet the needs of investors instead of human needs is the problem for the vast majority of humanity.
WorldCom Finds $3.8 Billion Error, Fires CFO [Reuters lead headline]
Yes, but I want to know what the severence package looks like.
WorldCom, which is already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it would restate its financial results for 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 to show net losses.
It also plans to cut 17,000 jobs, or more than 20 percent of its work force, starting on Friday, in a bid to save $900 million a year. It also will pare its capital spending budget to $2.1 billion.
Seventeen thousand workers are now going to be put out onto the street because the stockholders had to be fed, at all costs to the people.
Ok, time for a humor break. Let us return to a simpler time, when things did not look as bad as they do today, now that we’ve shown the world the stuff we’re made of.
The Onion 26 September 2001
HOLY FUCKING SHIT
Attack On America
The George W. Bushies do have the “vision thing” the father’s administration admitted it lacked. Unfortunately “…they are rather less interested in the reality thing.”
Real problems, even really big problems, are seen by this tinkertoy administration only as opportunities for its greedy and autocratic agenda.
A slump in the economy was an opportunity to push a tax cut that provided very little stimulus in the short run, but will place huge demands on the budget in 2010. An electricity shortage in California was an opportunity to push for drilling in Alaska, which would have produced no electricity and hardly any oil until 2013 or so. An attack by lightly armed terrorist infiltrators was an opportunity to push for lots of heavy weapons and a missile defense system, just in case Al Qaeda makes a frontal assault with tank divisions or fires an ICBM next time.
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For the distinctive feature of all the programs the administration has pushed in response to real problems is that they do little or nothing to address those problems. Problems are there to be used to pursue the vision. And a problem that won’t serve that purpose, whether it’s the collapse of confidence in corporate governance or the chaos in the Middle East, is treated as an annoyance to be ignored if possible, or at best addressed with purely cosmetic measures. Clearly, George W. Bush’s people believe that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won’t make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.
Oh, don’t we wish someone would just wake us when it’s over, but this is all too real, it involves us, not some people on the other side of the planet, it involves the future of this planet, and there is nowhere and no way we’ll be able to sleep through it.
We were somewhere near day 600 of the Bush administration on the edge of sanity when reality began to take hold… And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the future was full of bombs and Enrons and Cheneys, all swooping and screeching and diving around the SUV, which was going about a hundred miles an hour straight into a brick wall. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! How did we get here?”
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If this were simply madness it would be scary enough – but the coldly calculated method behind the madness confirms this administration is on a suicide run, taking us pedal to the metal down their dangerous dead end street.
You tell ’em, Bushie!
Insufferable arogance, especially since, regardless of what one thinks of either individual, the facts are that our executive was selected, and Arafat was elected!
And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state …. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.
“We” have just stood in the Rose Garden to tell a people denied a place in the world for 54 years that they have to throw out their elected president and create the oh-so-perfect political and economic system that we have before we can consider letting them exist as a nation. Can one suggest that at the very least the Administration apply that criterion to our friends in the “War on Terrorism,” including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, and virtually all of the nations north of Afghanistan, just for starters?
In any event, the Administration’s plan for the Middle East is actually only a “vision,” and that is the word it seems to prefer, with good reason. It will please the Israelis and anger the Palestinians
Normally, when you grant people statehood, you deal with the leaders those people have chosen. Not in this case.
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[Bushie] asked the U.S.-friendly dictators of various Arab countries, whose statehood he doesn’t dispute, to “work with Palestinian leaders to create a new constitutional framework and a working democracy for the Palestinian people.”
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Why is Bush’s plan so vague? Because it was conceived as a pretty picture, not as a solution.
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That’s what the offer of a “state” with no defined borders, powers, or timetable (and no right to be represented by its present leadership) is. It isn’t even a bone thrown to the Palestinians. It’s a picture of a bone.
Advisory to the world [probably unnecessary]: Do not believe a word “we” say!
Only a few days left, but definitely worth a detour. A great and gutsy production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” can be found through sunday at The Culture Project. It’s Shakespeare were he alive today, and were he appreciated as much as this sturdy little company does Stoppard’s first big success, written when he was 26.
“It costs little to watch, and little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that’s your taste and times being what they are.” (The Player)
Yes.
On a surface level, the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an absurdist look at two secondary characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Amidst their clever rhetoric, the two characters find themselves (or rather DON’T find themselves) trapped in a fatalistic path leading to their inevitable destruction. Given the universal nature of the play, a director has the ability to extract worldly significance from otherwise ambiguous, yet extremely thought provoking, text.
Daniel Carlton, as the player king, is brilliant, and Jenny Gravenstein and Frederique Nahmani, as Guilderstern and Rosencrantz respectively, are more than worthy of everything their characters are—and are not.
Does the world simply envy us, or is there something else going on as well?
Americans are the world’s luckiest teenagers, with the best car, the fattest allowance and the biggest line of brag, yet like all teenagers we’re secretly afraid that someone is laughing at us. Here’s a news flash. They are. Our cowboy Puritanism dumbfounds the rest of the world. We execute teenagers, we impeach a president over a sex act, we want to ban pop from schools to protect children at the same time we practically sell guns in vending machines.
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Instead, the United States practices Pops Americana, a soft-sell virtual empire of culture, burgers, movies, jeans and slang. Ronald Reagan genuinely believed that if the rest of the world was safe for big-screen TVs and gold MasterCards, everyone would be just like us, and thrilled to be so.
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Pops Americana is one reason “they” hate us, in all those sinister and unpronounceable places on the world’s map, and one reason why we now find ourselves on the crash-course terrorism tour of the world, learning about places like Kabul and Kandahar, and, like our other tours of places with names like Normandy and Saigon, we risk once again making the mistake of coming home from “over there” convinced that the great world is full not of intriguingly different places, but only perilous ones.