SUNDAY MORNING REAL ART READING

Why Bush Likes a Bad Economy

From the Progressive:

Finally, stagnation and the Bush tax policy promote rightwing plans to cut and privatize essential services, including health, education, and pensions. As financial wealth escapes tax, neither states nor cities nor the federal government can provide vital services--except by taxing sales and property at rates that will provoke tax rebellions, especially when middle class incomes are not rising. Every public service will fall between the hammer of tax cuts and the anvil of deficits in state, local, and federal budgets. The streets will be dirtier, as also the air and the water. Emergency rooms will back up even more than they have; more doctors will refuse public patients. More fire houses and swimming pools and libraries will be closed. Public universities will cost more; the public schools will lose the middle class. Eventually, federal budget deficits will collide with Social Security and Medicare, putting privatization back on the agenda.

I am from Texas, where you can see this future happening now.

Say what you will, the leaders of the Bush team are plainly not pandering after votes. They are pursuing a governing agenda that favors the factions they represent: tax cuts for the misanthropic wealthy; tax increases for the middle class; imperial control over oil; deregulation, privatization, and cuts in public services at all levels; defiance of international agreements; a systematic spoilage of the environment; an all-out offensive against labor rights; and the placement of right-wingers in government, most insidiously in the courts.

Click here.

Will the 2004 Election be Stolen
With Electronic Voting Machines?

An interview from BuzzFlash:

BUZZFLASH: You have charged that the owners of some of these companies have close connections with the Republican Party. The head of Diebold, for instance, publicly vowed to do everything possible to see that Bush wins in Ohio in 2004. Are you concerned that the Republican Party affiliation of some of these companies could result in voting results skewed toward the GOP, in short, as a result of manipulating the software?

HARRIS: It’s a conflict of interest, just as having military defense contractors involved in our voting system is a conflict. “Conflict of interest” provides a motive to do something impure. Allowing secret code and combining it with conflict of interest is just playing with electoral fire.

Click here.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the link.

Chasing a Mirage

Even mainstream corporate news sources like Time Magazine are now agreeing that the White House was flat wrong on WMDs in Iraq:

Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems—missiles, air defenses, radar—not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place.

These tales are tempting to dismiss as scripts recited by practiced liars who had been deceiving the world community for years. These sources may still be too frightened of the possibility of Saddam's return to power to tell his secrets. Or it could be that Saddam reconstituted an illicit weapons program with such secrecy that those who knew of past efforts were left out of the loop. But the unanimity of these sources' accounts can't be easily dismissed and at the very least underscores the difficulty the U.S. has in proving its case that Saddam was hoarding unconventional arms.

Click here.

And finally, again from the Progressive, the great leftist historian and writer of A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn on the US presence in Iraq:

An Occupied Country

It is often said that this Administration can get away with war because unlike Vietnam, the casualties are few. True, only a few hundred battle casualties, unlike Vietnam. But battle casualties are not all. When wars end, the casualties keep mounting up--sickness, trauma. After the Vietnam War, veterans reported birth defects in their families due to the Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam. In the first Gulf War there were only a few hundred battle casualties, but the Veterans Administration reported recently that in the ten years following the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died. About 200,000 of the 600,000 veterans of the Gulf War filed complaints about illnesses incurred from the weapons our government used in the war. In the current war, how many young men and women sent by Bush to liberate Iraq will come home with related illnesses?

For more, click here.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$