…How stunningly in recent weeks the landscape has altered – almost like your basic hurricane sweeping through some unprotected and unprepared city. Now, to their amazement, Bush administration officials find themselves thrust through the equivalent of a Star-Trekkian wormhole into an anti-universe where everything that once worked for them seems to work against them. As always, in the face of domestic challenge, they have responded by attacking – a tactic that was effective for years. The president, vice president, national security adviser and others have ramped up their assaults, functionally accusing Democratic critics of little short of treason – of essentially undermining American forces in the field, if not offering aid and comfort to the enemy. On his recent trip to Asia, the president put it almost as bluntly as his vice president did at home, “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them.” The Democrats were, he said over and over, “irresponsible” in their attacks. Dick Cheney called them spineless “opportunists” peddling dishonestly for political advantage.
atimes.com

Top executives now make more in a day than the average worker makes in a year.

You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
— Louis Brandeis
How wealthy the wealthy are does matter. If we allow great wealth to accumulate in the pockets of a few, then great wealth can set our political agenda and shape our political culture — and the agenda and the culture that emerge will not welcome efforts to make American work for all Americans.
— Sam Pizzigati

Plutocracy: 1. The rule or power of wealth or the wealthy; 2. A government or state in which the wealthy class rules. 3. A class for group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.
— Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary

Of the world’s 100 largest economies, 47 are nations, and 53 are corporations.

Seventy-five percent of major corporations hire a consultant to stop employees from forming a union.

The alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses. It is imperative, if we desire to enjoy the full blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust accumulations and the power for evil of aggravated wealth. — Constitution of the Knights of Labor, 1869.
The Washington monument is 555 feet tall. Say it signifies the 2003 average compensation for CEOs in the Fortune 500. The average worker salary would be only 16 inches tall, representing a ratio of 419 to one. In 1965, the worker’s monument was 13 feet six inches tall, representing a ratio of 41 to 1.

Inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government. — Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Born on home plate — Forty-two percent of those listed inherited sufficient wealth to rank among the Forbes 400.

Examples:

J. Paul Getty Jr. inherited the oil fortune from his father.

David Rockefeller Sr. ($2.5 billion) is the grandson of the Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller.

S.I. and Donald Newhouse ($7 billion each) inherited the nation’s largest private newspaper chain, plus Conde Nast publications, from their father in 1979.

Samuel Curtis Johnson ($1.5 billion) is the great grandson of the flooring salesman who founded the floor wax giant S.C. Johnson and Sons.

The United Nations Development Program reported in 1999 that the world’s 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That’s equal to the combined annual income of the world’s 2.5 billion poorest people.

The richest 10 percent of the world’s population receives 49.6 percent of the total world income.

The bottom 60 percent receives 13.9 percent of the world’s income.

The wealth of the world’s three most well-to-do individuals now exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries.

Half of the world’s population of six billion live on less than $2 a day, while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 a day.
commondreams.org

State Rep. Sue Burmeister, an Augusta Republican and author of the state’s controversial voter ID law, told investigators for the Justice Department that the law isn’t a threat since black voters in her area vote only if they’re paid to vote anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s racism, pure and ugly.

I know that sounds harsh — the racism charge gets tossed around a lot these days — but it’s hard to describe this any other way.

In fact, this has really made me angry. I’m a white guy, and I’ve voted lots of times. Now, after all these years of standing in lines and punching ballots, I discover that I’ve been voting for free while black people have been getting paid to do it?

It’s blatant discrimination against white people, that’s what it is. If black people get paid to vote, I should be paid to vote. Equal pay for equal say!

And here’s something else that gets me mad: None of my black friends bothered to let me in on their scam. I mean, it’s one thing if they want to have their own cool super-secret handshakes and their cool supersecret lingo, but this is too much.
commondreams.org

“Why do I like Che?” Evo Morales, MAS’s leader and presidential candidate, said in response to my question, looking as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Morales is the first full-blooded Aymara, Bolivia’s dominant ethnic group, to make a serious run for the presidency, which is in itself testimony to the extraordinary marginalization that Bolivian citizens of pure Indian descent, who make up more than half of the population, have endured since 1825, when an independent Bolivia was established. “I like Che because he fought for equality, for justice,” Morales told me. “He did not just care for ordinary people; he made their struggle his own.” We were sitting in his office in Cochabamba, a building in a condition somewhere between Spartan and derelict that Morales uses as a headquarters when he is in the city but that normally serves as the headquarters of the cocaleros, the coca-leaf growers from the country’s remote, lush Chapare region. Morales started in politics as the leader of these cocaleros, and he has pledged that if he wins the presidential election scheduled for Dec. 18, one of his first acts will be to eliminate all penalties for the cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine.

Unlike Che, who was a kind of revolutionary soldier of fortune, Morales does not have to adopt the revolutionary cause of Bolivia. He was born into it 46 years ago, in a tin-mining town in the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano.
nytimes.com

FULL TEXT

THE FACE OF WAR

The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The unconfirmed report claimed that the explosions occurred while coalition forces surrounded the house in which al-Zarqawi was hiding. American and Iraqi forces are looking into the report.
jerusalempost.com

I notice he is quite often reported dead on Sundays and miraculously resurrected by Monday morning.

We can now start to get an idea of the very simple but ingenious way in which the Jordan bombs were activated. I think we can take as a given that the target of the bombs was the Palestinians, particularly the chief Palestinian spy, and the Chinese military officials. Besides killing the Palestinians, the bomb was intended to send a message to the Chinese that they shouldn’t be dealing with the Palestinians (I’ll leave it up to you to guess the identity of the only country in the world that might want to send that kind of message). Any other story completely ignores the fact that it is just too much of a coincidence that the Palestinian and Chinese officials died. The technical problem was how to manage the bombing so that the right targets ended up dead.

The civilian deaths were required to lay the basis for the suicide bomb fable. In other words, most people died simply to hide the identity of the real targets, as an attack against only those people would make the identity of the killers too obvious. The bombers needed a sure-fire way to ensure that the targets were together in a room pre-planted with the bombs, and that the bombs in the other hotels were detonated at the same time as the bomb directed at the real targets.

A timer wouldn’t work, as no one could be sure when the targets would be together in the room. Cell phone triggers might not work, and a radio signal might be jammed (especially with all the spies about). So they came up with a clever low-tech solution. The bombs were pre-planted in the ceilings, and hooked up to the hotel electrical systems. As long as the power was on, the detonators were off. As soon as the power was interrupted, the detonators were triggered. Someone at the front desk in charge of booking the rooms booked the Chinese and Palestinians into the same conference room, made sure they were all in, and then used the house phone to call the hotel electrical room. The agent in the electrical room telephoned the other hotels to tell them to set off their almost simultaneous cover explosions which disguised the real target, and flipped the circuit breaker to the room containing the Chinese and Palestinians. Boom! An added bonus is that the darkness hid the real source of the blasts, allowing for the creation of the suicide bomber explanation. The Associated Press reports:

“A security official, meanwhile, said lights in sections of both the Radisson and Hyatt hotels went out just before the near-simultaneous blasts in apparently coordinated fashion. A man who was working as a disc jockey at the Radisson, where a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception was bombed, also recalled how the ballroom where the party was being held mysteriously went dark.

‘The lights at the wedding hall went off seconds, maybe just one second, before the blast, although there was electricity outside the room in the corridor, the nearby lobby area and the reception,’ said Fadi al-Kessi.

‘For some reason, I looked to my right in the darkness and saw what looked liked lightning, then there was a loud boom. It felt like the explosion came from the ceiling, then people started running out.'”
xymphora.blogspot.com

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 – The Justice Department has signaled for the first time in recent weeks that prominent members of Congress could be swept up in the corruption investigation of Jack Abramoff, the former Republican superlobbyist who diverted some of his tens of millions of dollars in fees to provide lavish travel, meals and campaign contributions to the lawmakers whose help he needed most.

The investigation by a federal grand jury, which began more than a year ago, has created alarm on Capitol Hill, especially with the announcement Friday of criminal charges against Michael Scanlon, Mr. Abramoff’s former lobbying partner and a former top House aide to Representative Tom DeLay.

The charges against Mr. Scanlon identified no lawmakers by name, but a summary of the case released by the Justice Department accused him of being part of a broad conspiracy to provide “things of value, including money, meals, trips and entertainment to federal public officials in return for agreements to perform official acts” – an attempt at bribery, in other words, or something close to it.
nytimes.com

US unions, weakened by public apathy and internal splits, are fighting back with an online database that accuses corporate supremos of lining their own pockets while grinding down their employees.

Business leaders are deeply unhappy at the online initiative of the AFL-CIO workers’ federation, accusing union bosses of taking a cheap shot when complex issues are at stake.

But the AFL-CIO affiliate behind the site, Working America, says there is nothing cheap about the pay packages on offer to the favoured few while millions of blue-collar Americans fret about losing their jobs and benefits.

“The public should be able to question the outrageous pay of CEOs at a time when jobs are being outsourced every day and their health and safety is endangered every day,” Working America deputy director Robert Fox told AFP.

The site at workingamerica.org has information on more than 60,000 US companies, detailing their violations of health and safety legislation, their outsourcing of jobs overseas and the pay deals for chief executives.
commondreams.org

It’s Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud. “Fire!” he shouts defiantly. The firing squad didn’t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, “ain’t never died.” On this 90th anniversary of his execution, he lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols. Joe Hill’s story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors. His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the IWW made “an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society,” laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind “a genuine heritage … industrial democracy.” Joe Hill’s story is the story of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets, whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force.
zmag.org