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Wednesday, January 01, 2003
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As I explained on Monday, the old way of living is dying. Neutrality, which is based on capitalism and the great market, is failing. We humans must now work together or perish. This morning George Monbiot explains why: Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion. This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic. Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life. The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt. (01/01/01) | |
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New York Post -- Up to 19 men of Islamic background have entered the United States illegally in the last few days on a possible terror mission, law-enforcement sources told The Post yesterday. Pictures of five of the men wanted for questioning are posted on the FBI's Web site. Those five and the remaining 14 are believed to have reached the United States by using phony IDs to travel through Britain and then Canada, the sources said. Exactly what the men may be up to is unknown. Officials also don't know if the men have specific targets in mind. But The Post's sources said the 19 are believed to be scattered through several U.S. cities, including New York. The group planned to be in place in the United States today, said the sources. The men are believed to come from Pakistan and "surrounding countries," the sources said. (01/01/03) | |
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The Miami Herald -- If you had to pick one word to describe our national mood in 2002, that word would be ''wary.'' We went to sleep wary, and we woke up wary. We wallowed in wariness. We were wabbits. This was partly because bad things kept happening. But it was also because government officials kept issuing alarming, yet vague, warnings. ''We have received reliable information,'' an official would say, 'that something bad might happen. We don't know what, or when, or where. But it is very, very bad. Also we are seeing the letter 'E.' So we urge all citizens to continue leading normal lives, while remaining in a state of stark, buttpuckering terror. Tune in tomorrow and we'll see if we can't ratchet this thing up a notch or two.'' We were also wary of the stock market. One day it was up; the next day it was down; the next day it was way down. And as we watched our 401K plans decline from a retirement villa in France to a refrigerator carton in an alley, we heard the unceasing babble of the financial ''experts,'' the ones who have never yet failed to be wrong, speculating endlessly on whether the market had bottomed out. (01/01/03) | |
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CNN Money -- Stocks fall for 3rd straight year, market's longest losing streak in 61 years.The Dow Jones industrial average (up 8.78 to 8341.63) edged higher for the day but sank 16.8 percent for the year, its worst performance since 1977.  The Nasdaq composite (down 4.03 to 1335.51)fell modestly Tuesday, capping a whopping 31.5 percent decline for the year. And the Standard & Poor's 500 index (up 0.43 to 879.82) ended the day little changed but was down 23.4 percent for the year -- a year that many investors were happy to put behind them. Just about anywhere investors looked this year they found things not to their liking: global tensions over Iraq and possible new terrorist attacks, spiraling oil prices, corporate accounting scandals, and an economy struggling to recover from the first recession in a decade in 2001. (12/31/02) | |
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Washington Post -- Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys." A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. (12/31/02) | |
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Williamette Week Online -- Back in March, the police swiped the trash of fellow officer Gina Hoesly. They didn't ask permission. They didn't ask for a search warrant. They just grabbed it. Their sordid haul, which included a bloody tampon, became the basis for drug charges against her. The news left a lot of Portlanders--including us--scratching our heads. Aren't there rules about this sort of thing? Aren't citizens protected from unreasonable search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment? The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office doesn't think so. Prosecutor Mark McDonnell says that once you set your garbage out on the curb, it becomes public property. ... After much debate, we resolved to turn the tables on three of our esteemed public officials. We embarked on an unauthorized sightseeing tour of their garbage, to make a point about how invasive a "garbage pull" really is--and to highlight the government's ongoing erosion of people's privacy. (12/31/02) | |
4:09:35 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
2/2/2003; 7:50:31 AM.
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