Friday, October 22, 2004

Economic WMD's FEATURED ARTICLES - Harvard Business School Open Letter to President Bush on U.S. Economic Policy - The Election Protection Coalition featuring Artists For A New South Africa - FEATURED REPUBLICAN: Why I'll vote for Kerry, by Gov. William Milliken - BOTTOM LINE: Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry QUOTE OF THE DAY "People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice. It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian." - - Charlie Reese (Conservative Florida Columnist) http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese74.html KNOW YOUR HISTORY - October 22nd 1951 -- 5,000 U.S. soldiers deliberately exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in Nevada for study purposes. 1962 -- High Seas: Cuban Missile Crisis: US blockade in response to Soviet missiles in Cuba, from the 22nd through 28th. President Kennedy intent on proving his anti-communist bona fides. Out of the White House 2 terms, Democrats were intent on proving themselves more anti-Red than the right wing Repubs. 1983 -- Capping a week of protests, over two million people in six European cities march against U.S. deployment of cruise &Pershing nuclear missiles. 1.2 million Germans, including 180,000 at Bonn; a 64 mile human chain between Stuttgart & New Ulm (+ Hamburg, W. Berlin); + hundreds of thousands in London + 350,000 Rome + 100,000 Vienna + 25,000 Paris + 20,000 Stockholm + 4000 Dublin + 140 sites in US. RHINO HERE: Don't miss the Bottom Line; Wendell Barry's "Compromise? Hell!" ...and today's distinguished Republican for Kerry; Former Michigan Governor William Milliken. Earlier this week, The Rhino promised leads & links to organizations fighting for fair elections. Today I deliver. But first, FLASH! 169 professors of business & economics from U.S. business schools have signed an Open Letter to resident gee dubya shrub concerning the sorry state of the economy. It began circulating at Harvard Business School, where dubya received his MBA in '75. Fifty-six current or emeritus Harvard Business School faculty members signed it before it was sent to other schools. Within 72 hours, 113 more professors, from Stanford Business School, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), Sloan (MIT), Darden (University of Virginia), Fuqua (Duke University), Kellogg (Northwestern University), McCombs (University of Texas-Austin), & Stern (NYU), had added their signatures including two Nobel laureates in economics -- Professor Robert C. Merton of Harvard University and Professor Emeritus William F. Sharpe of Stanford. All signatories are tenured or emeritus professors who have signed in their individual capacities. The letter represents the signers' views, not those of their institutions. Organizers of the letter allowed only tenured and emeritus professors to sign to avoid any suggestion of pressure on non-tenured faculty. They encourage any other tenured or emeritus professors at a U.S. business schools to add their name to the signatories. LETTER & SIGNATORIES LIST POSTED AT: Harvard Business School Open Letter to President Bush on U.S. Economic Policy http://openlettertothepresident.org The Election Protection Coalition, Artists For A New South Africa Los Angeles based Artists For A New South Africa (ANSA), helmed by Sharon Gelman, was founded in 1989 to support South Africa's quest for freedom and democracy. In an effort to counter election fraud, ANSA has joined 50 other civil & voting rights organizations across the country in The Election Protection Coalition. One of ANSA's contributions is the production & broadcast of a series of PSA's featuring such artists as Angela Bassett, Danny Glover, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Rock, Blair Underwood, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Vanessa Williams, and Alfre Woodard. The PSAs have powerful messages urging people to vote & offering vital information on how to resist the kind of voter intimidation and suppression that has occurred in recent elections. To help support ANSA's work with The Election Protection Coalition, contact them at: http://www.ansafrica.org or Phone (310) 204-1748. The Election Protection Coalition. encourages voter participation, advises voters of their legal rights, provides volunteer poll monitors, and offers free and immediate legal assistance to voters, who encounter problems registering or voting, from now through Election Day via a toll-free number: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. This hotline has trained volunteer legal advisors standing by to help you and all voters with any problems or needs for information, including where to vote, how to deal with new voting machines and other voting methods, and what to do if anybody tries to stop you from voting. To help support Election Protection, go to http://www.electionprotection.org To volunteer with Election Protection, Call 1-866-204-1941 or go to: http://www.electionprotection2004.org/v-resources.htm Other groups keeping a close eye on this year's US presidential election } electionline.org: A nonpartisan, nonadvocacy website with news and analysis on election reform. http://www.electionline.org } Fair Elections 2004: Global Exchange; human rights group in San Francisco, recruiting international monitors to evaluate US voting. http://www.fairelection.us } Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe: Regional security organization of 55 nations, including the US, which is sending monitors for Nov. 2. http://www.osce.org } Verifiedvoting.org: Initiated a project to recruit experts to monitor accuracy of new voting technologies. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/techwatch FEATURED REPUBLICAN Why I'll vote for Kerry BY WILLIAM MILLIKEN , DETROIT FREE PRESS, 10/19/04 ( Republican - Former Governor of Michigan from 1969 to 1983) As a lifelong Republican, I have had mounting concern watching this year's presidential campaign. I have always been proud to be a Republican... ... My Republican Party is the party of Theodore Roosevelt, who fought to preserve our natural resources and environment. This president has pursued policies that will cause irreparable damage to our environmental laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the public lands we share with future generations. My Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, who freed an enslaved people. This president fought in the courts to strike down policies designed to provide opportunity and access to our own University of Michigan for minority students. My Republican Party is the party of Eisenhower, who warned us to beware of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. This president has pursued policies skewed to favor large corporations in the defense and oil industry and has gone so far as to let those industries help write government policies. My Republican Party is a party that respects and works with the men and women of the law enforcement community who put their lives on the line for us every day. This President ignored the pleas of law enforcement agencies across America and failed to lift a finger to renew the assault weapons ban that they strongly supported. My Republican Party is a party that values the pursuit of knowledge. But this president stands in the way of meaningful embryonic stem-cell research that holds so much promise for those who suffer from diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries and other conditions.... IT'S ALL AT: http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/emill19_20041019.htm 7:44:08 AM    comment

Compromise, Hell! Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry, Orion Online, October 20, 2004 ...Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes - the farms and ranches and working forests - and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and the wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy. Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work. ... ... governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so. Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify... READ IT ALL AT: http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_14514.shtml Rhino's Blog is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. Feedback & requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. (rhino@kifaru.com) Search the Rhino's Blog Archives, The Daily Rhino Photo, and lots of links at (http://www.rhinosblog.info) Rhino's Other Web Sites: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (Indigenous Assistance & Intercultural Dialog) http://www.kifaru.com (Native American Relations Video Documentaries) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:40:18 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.