Another socialist blog

George Bush wants you to think of him as a visionary space explorer. But his Mars proposal is much more down-to-earth. It’s all about taking his policy of militarizing space to the next level. The prime beneficiaries will be military contractors, not scientists. If you doubt it, consider the fact that NASA will be abandoning the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most productive scientific instruments of all time. As long as NASA is controlled by the U.S. military, its mission will be military, which means it will be all about keeping a river of tax dollars flowing to war profiteers.

There is celebration in Redmond as the anti-trust settlement written by Microsoft has now been approved by a judge. There’s to be no breakup of the company, no forced disclosure of source code, certainly no multi-billion-dollar fine levied at the company, which is still guilty of violating antitrust law.

Looks like Microsoft’s $1 million bribe to the Republican Party has paid off big. The Ashcroft Justice Department has been their shameless ally in getting this sweetheart deal.

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.

Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm that helped Enron shred the evidence, has been fired by no less a client than Waste Management, Inc.. How sleazy have you become, as a corporation, when a company with multiple felony convictions thinks you’re too disreputable to work for them?

Californians are trying to get out from under the long-term energy contracts they signed, at premium prices, during the energy crisis. They say the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) stood by while they were getting screwed in the deregulated energy economy. Only the most cynical observers think that the Bush Administration looked the other way in return for millions of dollars in campaign contributions from Enron and other corporate sharks.

Well here’s a big surprise: Microsoft has been bribing politicians. Well, of course neither Microsoft nor their political lapdogs will actually call it bribery, they’d prefer to think of it as campaign contributions. For the 2000 election cycle, Microsoft gave $6.1 million to political parties, candidates and PACs. Strangely enough, the beneficiaries of this corporate largesse are now in a position to cut Microsoft a sweet settlement deal in its antitrust case (you will recall that Microsoft has already been found guilty of violating antitrust law). Microsoft can also expect red-carpet treatment when it seeks to have its copyright claims enforced by the government, at the expense of ordinary citizens.