Lest you think that events in the occupied territories are taking place against a backdrop of good-faith efforts by the United States to bring a just peace, here’s a link to House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey’s position on the subject. He openly favors removal of the Palestinians from their land, an activity that is called “ethnic cleansing” when Serbs do it.
The latest atrocity of the Israeli government is a missile attack in which one Hamas activist was assassinated, 15 civilians were killed including eight children as young as two months, and 154 civilians were wounded.
Ordinarily sensible people use the word terrorist to describe someone who would even threaten to fire a missile at an apartment building in a densely populated residential neighborhood, let alone someone evil enough to actually commit the act. If the target were American, the retaliatory strike would already be underway. But the target is not American, and the killers are U.S. allies, flying a U.S.-supplied warplane, so the word terrorist is to be reserved for those on the ground.
The Israeli Defense Ministry actually claims to be surprised by the civilian casualties. “According to the information we had, no civilians were expected to be in his vicinity,” the ministry said. This lie is shocking even by the low standards of Israeli government credibility.
Even the U.S. can’t stomach it, which is a bit of a shame since we paid for it, and in every way encouraged Israel to wage war against the Palestinians.
The Bush administration is planning on recruiting millions of informants to spy on their neighbors, as many as one in 24 Americans by some accounts. This provides an opportunity, as noted by the Washington Post in this editorial, for the government to use utility workers, postal carriers, etc. to conduct warrantless surveillance the government could not lawfully do for itself. Update: The Boston Globe lambasts Operation TIPS in an editorial. “Operation TIPS,” they say, “is a scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.”
George W. Bush has learned that there is corporate corruption in America, and he is shocked, shocked. And he intends to do something to change the appearance that nothing is being done about it: by creating the appearance that something is being done about it. Predictably, this new commitment to improve capitalism’s image will make no enemies on Wall Street.
In today’s speech, Bush did not discuss his own dishonest business dealings. All the Republican spokesmen and pundits are riding the media circuit today, repeating the White House party line: the SEC cleared George W of any wrongdoing years ago. That would be the same SEC whose chairman owed his job to young George’s daddy, then-President George H. W. Bush. Enron, the single biggest financial contributor to the younger Bush’s political campaigns, is barely being mentioned in the corporate media, never mind the President’s speech.
Bush insists that corporate managers who defraud stockholders will be held to account in this new climate of Honest Bidness. There will even be a new Task Force assigned to prosecute accounting fraud. But is it really surprising that government intends to protect stockholders? They are, after all, the people who own the country. What Bush does not intend to do is prosecute corporate misdeeds against the public at large. As long as Microsoft, big tobacco companies, and big pharmaceutical companies continue to turn a profit for stockholders, at the expense of the public, they will have no worries about the Bush administration. Violations of anti-trust law, marketing cigarette smoking to minors, price gouging the sick—all these are good for some corporate bottom line, and therefore aren’t considered criminal, or even wrong, by the corporate shills who run our government.
So how bad will it be for cheating CEOs if George has his way? The maximum penalty for mail and wire fraud will be doubled to 10 years under the Bush proposal. By way of comparison, the average penalty for first-time offenders sentenced for trafficking of crack cocaine is already 10 and a half years.
