Read this book-Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom-- And What You Can Do About It

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Have you read this yet?



Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom-- And What You Can Do About It
by Jamie Court

see author interview: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/corporate/nw/nw003390.php3

Steven T Jones wrote in a recent SanFrancisco Bay Guardian review of the book:
"Court sees our most cherished democratic values being subsumed by corporate domination, and he’s calling on all of us to fight back.
How? Well, we start with the language we use to define the problem.
Behind the word corporateer are important ideas and distinctions. We can evaluate a given corporation to see whether it is corporateering, and if so, whether the public interest might be better served by regulating or even destroying that corporation.

That’s a revolutionary notion in this era of the hallowed “free market,” but maybe a revolution is what we need right now. Pamphleteers llike Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson awoke their compatriots to the injustices suffered under King
George III, and perhaps it will be author-activists like Court who help us again declare our independence and assert our sovereignty. (Steven T. Jones)

MoveOn.org primary: Most votes to Dean... followed by Kucinich, Kerry

MoveOn.org primary: Most votes to Dean... followed by Kucinich, Kerry


Howard Dean received the most votes...winning the MoveOn.org primary by a wide margin!


Results:
Howard Dean received the highest vote total with 43.87% of the vote (139,360 votes); followed by Dennis Kucinich with 23.93% (76,000 votes); and John Kerry with 15.73% (49,973 votes).
The rest of the field was in single digits: John Edwards, 3.19% (10,146 votes); Richard Gephardt, 2.44% (7,755 votes); Bob Graham, 2.24% (7,113 votes); Carol Moseley Braun, 2.21% (7,021 votes); Joe Lieberman, 1.92% (6,095 votes); and Al Sharpton, 0.53% (1,677 votes).

**My comment: MoveOn.org chose to only endorse a candidate IF that candidate were to have received 50% or more of the vote, which is up to them. However, we may look at reality:
Since when is 43.87 NOT a majority when you have nine candidates and you compare the actual results? I realize MoveOn.org's main goal is to bring a grassroots movement to life, but I think their 50% mark was unrealistic (in a field of nine candidates) and I hope they haven't shot themselves in the foot by setting such a mark. I don't doubt there were forces out there who made sure Dean did not reach the 50%. Their failure to be able to endorse a candidate makes them appear just as wobbly on the Democrats as most of the media-at-large appears nowadays. You cannot expect Big Media to run with the story when the CLEAR winner of the primary doesn't even get an endorsement from the organization that has proven who the clear winner was. **


A note about today's MoveOn.org result from a Howard Dean supporter --seen today on Howard Dean's weblog:

"We have begun a new era. When FDR first used the radio to reach millions of Americans it changed everything. When JFK used television to inspire a generation it changed everything. Dr. Dean has changed everything today. To you other 139,359 people who voted for Dean in the moveon.org primary, congratulations we just made history. There will be many books written about this campaign. Mark this day well, it is the day we changed America. I am so proud to be a part of it. I have waited so long.

peace,
billy
June 27, 2003 01:25 PM

From the Howard Dean weblog: A Letter About a Lost Friend--A Plea for Change

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From the Howard Dean weblog:
A Letter About a Lost Friend--A Plea for Change


Dear Dr. Dean:

I know this isn't exactly on topic, but I need a place to put this.

My friend died today.



My best friend, Lance Corporal Gregory MacDonald of the United States Marine Corp died in Iraq when his vehicle overturned while rushing to aid a group of fellow Marines who were being ambushed.

I met Greg when we were both in graduate school at American University. He was studying Arabic and Near East affairs with a focus on the Palestian-Israeli conflict and Iraq.

During the entire build-up to the war in Iraq, Greg argued forcefully and logically that the case being outlined was false and not consistent with any expert opinion on the subject. He was also a man in the finest tradition the USMC has ever produced, and when called to serve with his Recon unit (one of the most dangerous positions, even for the USMC), he did not hesitate to answer the call of duty.

As a final act defiance before setting out to fight a war he knew was wrong, Greg was interviewed on the radio explaining why the President had not made his case for war. He did the interview on condition of anonymity because he did not want his fellow Marines to think he wasn't 100 percent committed to their mission.

Dr. Dean, we need you more than ever. Something is wrong with this country when our best warrior-philosophers are thrown into the cauldren of Iraq by a President who went AWOL from national guard duty. Something is wrong with this country when an actual expert on the subject of Iraq is sent to war by a cynical, unscupulous Vice President who had "other priorities" when it came his turn to serve.

I'm tired of the chickenhawks who lie while our best men pay the consequences.

Greg told me many times that he would support any candidate who stood up forcefully against this war because it was wrong and was not sold on evidence, but lies and ideology.

Greg would have supported you, Dr. Dean.

And I support you Dr. Dean, because I can think of no other way to better honor the memory of a man ten times greater than our President, even when he plays dress-up in a flight suit - unintentially mocking those who fought and died in uniform.

Thank you

SZ

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Companion story from the Washington Post here

AT THE PICKRICK

Scene One: "The Pickrick"




Enter: Lester Maddox

Maddox: "IS this heaven.... or is this 1950s "just-in-case-some-of-you-Communists, Socialists and Integrationists-have-any-doubt ,-The-Pickrick-will-never-be- Integrated" Georgia?



Enter: A Mysteriously glowing figure. Lester rubs his eyes...is he dreaming?

Mysterious Glowing Figure: "Well, hello, Lester! I just arrived this morning. How about a plate of grits and eggs for a kindred spirit?"

May the angels carry them.

Nuke component unearthed in Baghdad back yard


OR......alternate story title....



"PARTS IS PARTS"



So Mahdi from Bag-dahdi led us to his 12-year old

rose bush.


An anonymous official tells us it's NOT a

smoking gun


But you can bet your fanny the Bush administration will use these parts to validate the entire preemptive strike on Iraq.
As if those 12-year old parts under Madhi's rosebushes were an imminent threat to us!!
Jeez, I'll bet they weren't even a threat to the grubs crawling all around them for these past 12-plus years!

I wonder if spreading this around as if it's an actual validation for the Blair/Bush lies is a trick David Kay has up his sleeve.
It's coming out terribly soon after his arrival on the scene.


Who?? ME??


You've gotta love THIS statement from the article linked below......read it and think about it
while FOX news is blathering ad nauseum about these rusty useless pieces of scrap which Mechanic Mahdi from Bag-dahdi
stuck in a buried barrel under the flowers....

"Gen. Abizaid told the Armed Services Committee that he is confident that evidence
"at some point ... will lead us to ACTUAL weapons of mass destruction."

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030625-102141-6927r.htm


Former UN weapons inspector David Albright has said:
"In a sense, the program was in hibernation.

*(ZZZZZZ)

He {Mahdi} was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program,
and he never got the order.
So in that sense it doesn't show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program.
And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991."

Targeting Lobbyists Pays Off For GOP

Targeting Lobbyists Pays Off For GOP

Another method being utilized to murder American democracy.
Beefing up the GOP through the influence of the Special Interest.

"A Republican National Committee official recently told a group of GOP lobbyists that 33 of 36 top-level Washington positions he is monitoring went to Republicans, according to someone who attended the meeting. The trend could deeply influence Washington politics, policy and fundraising
for years..."





This is not the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

This is corruption...plain and simple.



An additional commentary is provided by NY Times' Paul Krugman in a recent column:
"Why isn't the ongoing transformation of U.S. politics — which may well put an end to serious two-party competition — getting more attention? Most pundits, to the extent they acknowledge that anything is happening, downplay its importance. For example, last year an article in Business Week titled "The GOP's Wacky War on Dem Lobbyists" dismissed the K Street Project as "silly — and downright futile." In fact, the project is well on the way to achieving its goals."

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Administration, Yellowstone Staff at Odds on Park Threats
Link here



"Tinkering with scientific information, either striking it from reports or
altering it, is becoming a pattern of behavior," said Roger G. Kennedy, a
former director of the National Park Service."

Wait----is this an article about the decision to go to war with Iraq--or is this an article about the rape of Yellowstone?
It could be either, on the surface.

This administration perverts all information made available to them in order to fit its ugly, ugly agenda.

A malleable Congress with a partisan majority facilitates the perversion.

I fear for Yellowstone.
I fear for the soldiers risking ALL in Iraq.
I fear for our American democracy.

"Yellowstone is no longer in danger," Paul Hoffman, an Interior Department
official, wrote in an April 7 letter to the World Heritage Committee of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization."

Neither is our American democracy, if you ask anyone from the Bush administration.

Tinkering with the sanctity of nature...the sanctity of the lives of our troops and their families...tinkering with
the true freedoms we've known and enjoyed for so long (thanks to the lifeblood of American democracy)....

Bush is tinkering toward the death of all the above.