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Thursday, June 30, 2005 |
Why doesn't this surprise me at all?
NYTimes: "The cow that was found last week to have mad cow disease spent its whole life in Texas, making it the first domestic case of the disease, the United States Department of Agriculture said yesterday."
1:05:39 PM 
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Practically everything Western governments - from the USA to Holland - devise is meant to further the interests of private companies. From software patents to expropriation, laws are no longer made with the citizen in mind, but the profits of corporations and banks.
"Privatization does the ideological work of global market economics inside nation-states, privileging the private interests of corporations and banks and delegitimizing the common goods of the community. National government now becomes an instructed instrument of the private sector rather than participatory assembly of the public sector. In this guise, government is made over into a useful tool of global firms, banks, and markets in such international organizations as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund - nominally democratic political organizations constituted by sovereign states, but in effect servants of global economic interests that undermine both national sovereignty and democracy. Privatization does not decentralize power; it is not devolution. Rather, it shifts power deployed from the top down that is public, accountable, and transparent to the private sector, where it remains top-down but is now unaccountable and opaque. Privatization effectively gives public power away, yielding it to private elites beyond scrutiny and control. In the name of liberty, it destroys democracy by annihilating the good of the public (the res publica) in whose name democratic republics are constituted in the first place."
From Fear's Emprire - War, Terrorism and Democracy, by Benjamin R. Barber.
The worst thing is that governments promote and wage wars for the benefit of private corporations.
The cost and damage to society are immense.
Veterans for Common Sense: "The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds."
The only war that is worth fighting is the war on want.
In the meantime, the madness and obstruction of democracy continue unhampered.
Hitlists are made to target Democrats for transfer and dismissal.
Guardian: "The Labor Department kept secret for more than a year government studies that supported Democratic opponents of the Bush administration's new Central American trade deal, internal documents show.
The studies, paid for by the department, concluded that several countries the administration wants to be granted free-trade status have poor working conditions and fail to protect workers' rights. The agency dismissed the conclusions as inaccurate and biased, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press."
"Mystery planes continue to circle over Lodi." CIA, FBI planes? Again under the guise of private planes. No control, no information, no accountability. The government works increasingly in secret.
Still, you do find Americans who are willing to stand up against the Bush Mafia.
Reuters: "A California man, angry over a U.S. Supreme Court decision expanding government power to take private property, says he will try to use the ruling to seize the New Hampshire home of Justice David Souter and convert it into a hotel to be named the Lost Liberty Hotel."
12:47:31 PM
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