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Thursday, September 15, 2005 |
George W. Bush, emperor of the world, is asking Condi in a note at the World Summit if it is possible to have a bathroom break. He is almost human.
6:05:45 PM 
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CommonDreams: "One of the truly heart-warming reactions to the suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina is the response from the international community. The Red Cross received thousands of donations from individual foreigners - rich and poor - whose hearts went out to the victims.
Unbeknownst to the US public, however, at the very time impoverished Americans are being showered with support from the world community, the Bush administration's newly appointed UN ambassador, John Bolton, has been waging an all-out attack on the global poor.
The goals, to be achieved by 2015, were to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, improve maternal health and reverse the loss of environmental resources. To achieve these ambitious goals, the rich countries made a commitment to spend 0.7 percent of gross domestic product on development. The upcoming Summit was supposed to review the progress toward achieving these goals.
But even before the first world leader landed in New York, John Bolton threw the process in turmoil. In a letter to the other 190 UN member states, Bolton wrote that the United States 'does not accept global aid targets' - a clear break with the pledge agreed to by the Clinton administration. (While some countries, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have already reached the aid target of 0.7 percent, the United States lags far behind, spending a mere 0.16 percent of its GDP on development.)
Bolton wanted these goals to be eliminated from the document being prepared for the World Summit leaders to sign. In fact, Bolton stunned negotiators when less than one month before the Summit, he introduced over 500 amendments to the 39-page draft document that UN representatives had been painstakingly negotiating for the past year.
The administration publicly complained that the document's section on poverty was too long and instead called for greater focus on free-market reforms. But those free market reforms did not include encouraging corporations to promote the public good. On the contrary. Bolton wanted to eliminate references to 'corporate accountability'. And he went even further, trying to strike the section that called on the pharmaceutical companies to make anti-retroviral drugs affordable and accessible to people in Africa with HIV/AIDS. Bolton's message that corporate profits should take preference over social needs offers no comfort to the 30,000 poor who die daily from needless hunger and curable diseases.
He tried to eliminate the principle that the use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort, slash references to the International Criminal Court and calls for the nuclear powers to make greater progress toward dismantling their nuclear weapons, and cut language that would discourage Security Council members from blocking actions to end genocide.
John Bolton's slash-and-burn style has convinced many global leaders that the US agenda is not to reform the United Nations but to gut it. In fact, Bolton even called for deleting a clause saying the United Nations should be provided with 'the resources needed to fully implement its mandates'."
It is not enough for the Bush regime to have total 'free market' control of America - nothing else than the freedom of neocon corporations to fleece the citizens -, but they also want total control of the whole world.
CommonDreams: "The US is accepting aid from UN agencies, Mexico, Europe, and others, at the very moment it is working overtime to avoid or evade commitments to the poorest of the poor, who are dying by the millions each year due to insufficient assistance from the donor countries."
The Bush regime is a criminal regime that wants the world to be governed by corporate greed.
Deregulation and privatization are the keywords nowadays. Even in Europe the neocon ideology is gaining pace, when it has been proven that it increases poverty and breaks down democracy. It is nothing else than economical terror, a return to a past century of exploitation of workers.
12:38:20 PM
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TheState: "President Bush on Monday urged Congress to examine whether the White House needs stronger powers to deal with catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.
Bush's backing for the congressional inquiry raised the possibility that lawmakers might expand presidential authority to:
- Order mandatory civilian evacuations
- Dispatch U.S.-based armed forces for emergency search-and-rescue operations
-Grant wider leeway for active-duty U.S. military personnel to carry out law enforcement operations."
The moron wants more power. The problem after the hurricane was that power was not exerted to help people, it was only used to constrain them. The Bush administration just doesn't know what to do when catastrophe strikes.
KnightRidder: "The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
Chertoff was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.
Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster - caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials to handle."
When the damage has been done, the only way the neocons use power is to deflect criticism.
AmericaBlog: "Senate Republicans on Wednesday scuttled an attempt by Sen. Hillary Clinton to establish an independent, bipartisan panel patterned after the 9/11 Commission to investigate what went wrong with federal, state and local governments' response to Hurricane Katrina."
So George wants more power, eh? What for? To burn down Washington?
12:01:32 PM
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