THE REPUBLICAN PANDORA'S BOX

Below is an excerpt from a forum, I would
like to share.... UNBELIEVABLE WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO US, WE THE
PEOPLE... HOPEFULLY THOUGH, PANDORA'S BOX HAS BEEN OPENED. ThinkingBlue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Source to Stephanopoulos: President Bush Directly Involved In Leak Scandal
Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George
Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb: Definitely a political problem but I
wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White
House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a
report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to
this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were
actually involved in some of these discussions. This would explain why
Bush spent more than an hour answering questions from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It would also fundamentally change the dynamics of the scandal. President Bush could no longer claim he was merely a bystander who wants to “get to the bottom of it.” As
Stephanopoulos notes, if Bush played a direct role it could make this scandal completely unmanageable.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has the video.

Filed under: Ethics

Posted by Judd October 2, 2005 10:31 am

Permalink

Comment (400)

Click to see 400 Comments
» Below is just one... ThinkingBlue

I hate to rain on the parade, but how can we impeach when there was no
sex involved? Comment by James

gang sodomy rape of all Americans by bushco
& friends isn’t sex? Comment by Terrible — October 2, 2005 @
12:39 pm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HOLY COW, THAT SAYS IT ALL...! I was just thinking about this the other night... after I saw Delay on TV groveling and lying... lying, smugly about how he NEVER DID ANYTHING WRONG... NEVER DID ANYTHING UNETHICAL... NEVER BROKE THE LAW... on and on and on...

IT'S ALL ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH THESE DAYS... never, are simple little words like Probity or Integrity ever even uttered...

Enron, Worldcom, etc... The whole lot... since deregulation... the mentality
seems to be focused only on profit, greed and getting away with crap...
and it's emetic!!! (we need to expand our vocabularies ten-fold in order
to describe what these people of power are doing to us... the average
vocabulary doesn't have enough words in it) ...(ThinkingBlue)

probity n. Complete and confirmed integrity; uprightness: "He was a gentlemanly Georgian, a person of early American probity" (Mary McGrory). See Synonyms at honesty. Moral excellence: • uprightness • goodness • decency • morality • rectitude • righteousness • rightness • virtue • virtuousness
Of which this George W. Bush and his band of Neoconservatives have little or NONE OF!

Also, THE COMMON GOOD... has long been dead... killed by the likes of the
Republican Corporations... Below are a couple of paragraphs from different
internet sites on the subjects of COMMON-GOOD and corporate fraud:
ThinkingBlue

Why Common Good matters

When a group of people behave without " caring for people ", and when
someone who does care for people steps in, this poor newcomer may well
find himself in a dilemma : he will have either to forego his values in
order to be admitted and survive, or to be excluded, perhaps violently.
The newcomer suffers a grave injustice. Selfishness on the part of some
compels others to heroism. Such vicious processes are present everywhere :
corruption in some business sectors, gangs of youth in some suburbs, etc
Lack of concern for people (and therefore for the Common Good) literaly
wounds other people, and society, which in turn becomes dangerous for
people.

Abstract: In roughly two years
since the corporate meltdown began, federal and state regulators have
initiated criminal fraud investigations involving dozens of corporations,
including Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, HealthSouth, McKesson, and Qwest. To date, some ninety corporate owners, executives, and employees have been criminally charged, and the investigations are ongoing. It was against
this backdrop that zeal for corporate governance reform gained unexpected
momentum in Congress and resulted in the surprisingly quick enactment of
the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Although its principal purpose is to address
systemic weaknesses in corporate governance structures, Sarbanes-Oxley
also augments prosecutorial tools available in major fraud cases.

Also for more information Click here
... In the wake of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and other high profile
securities frauds, critics suggest that the law made it too easy to escape
liability for ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

excerpted from the book

The Common Good

by Noam Chomsky

Odonian Press, 1998

p17...the democratic functioning of the states in which they're
based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful
enough to protect and support them.

p19... it's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge
corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're
totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them
to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

p29...The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your
television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it's not your problem. If
the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now
starving, that's not your problem either.

p29...Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and
investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful
states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to
cooperate.

p34...Business wants the popular aspects of government, the ones that actually
serve the population, beaten down, but it also wants a very powerful
state, one that works for it and is removed from public control.

p35...There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something
resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth
and a lot of others have no security ...

p35...Now that ... workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of
all, you have to make sure they don't notice that society is unfair and
try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to
hate and fear one another.

p37...Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous
population that there's no point educating because there's nothing for
them to do. Because we're a civilized people, we put them in prison,
rather than sending death squads out to murder them.

p41...You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying
attention to what's really happening to them.

p43...The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That
gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the
time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits
put on the range of the debate.

p48...Vietnam wasn't a "disastrous mistake" - it was murderous aggression.

p53...... the best defense against democracy is to distract people.

p57...A corporate executive's responsibility is to his stockholders - to
maximize profit, market share and power. If he can do that by paying
starvation wages to women who'll die in a couple of years because their
working conditions are so horrible, he's just doing his job. It's the job
that should be questioned.

p64...... corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, ... they don't have to
exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions -
slavery, say, or royalty - have been changed or eliminated, so corporate
power can be changed of eliminated. What are the limits? There aren't any.
Everything is ultimately under public control.

p74...Many countries are so weak that they can't really solve their internal
problems in the face of US power; they can't even control their own
wealthy. Their rich have virtually no social obligations-they don't pay
taxes and don't keep their money in the country.

Unless these problems are dealt with, poor people
will sometimes choose to vote for oppressors, rather than suffer the
violence of the rich (which can take the form of terror and torture, or
can simply be a matter of sending the country's capital somewhere else).

p75...As happened almost everywhere in the Third World, Brazil's generals, their
cronies and the super-rich borrowed huge amounts of money and sent much of
it abroad. The need to pay off that debt is a stranglehold that prevents
Brazil from doing anything to solve its problems; it's what limits social
spending and equitable, sustainable development.

But if I borrow money and send it to a Swiss bank,
and then can't pay my creditors, is that your problem or mine? The people
in the slums didn't borrow the money, nor did the landless workers. In my
view, it's no more the debt of 90% of the people of Brazil than it is the
man in the moon's.

Discussions about a debt moratorium are not really
the main point. If the wealthy of Brazil hadn't been out of control,
Brazil wouldn't have the debt in the first place. Let the people who
borrowed the money pay it back. It's nobody else's problem.

p75...When you have as much wealth and power as we do, you can be blind and
self-righteous; you don't have to think about anything.

p76....Latin America has the worst income inequality in the world, and East Asia
has perhaps the least. Latin America's typical imports are luxury goods
for the wealthy; East Asia's have been mostly related to capital
investment and technology transfer. Countries like Brazil and Argentina
are potentially rich and powerful, but unless they can somehow gain
control over their wealthy, they're always going to be in trouble.

p76...Of course, you can't really talk about these countries as a whole. There
are different groups within them, and for some of these groups, the
current situation is great, just as there were people in India who thought
the British Empire was fine. They were linked to it, enriched themselves
through it, and loved it.

It's possible to live in the poorest countries and
be in very privileged surroundings all the time. Go to, say, Egypt, take a
limousine from the fancy airport to your five-star hotel by the Nile, go
to the right restaurants, and you'll barely be awar that there are poor
people in Cairo.

You might see some out the car windows when you're
driving along, but you don't notice them particularly. It's the same in
New York-you can somehow ignore the fact that there are homeless people
sleeping in the streets and hungry children a couple of blocks away.

p77... Throughout the 1980s, wages fell (it depends on how you measure them,
but they were roughly cut in half, and they weren't high before that).
Starvation increased, but so did the number of billionaires (mostly
friends of the political leaders who picked up public assets for a few
pennies on the dollar). Things finally collapsed in December 1994, and
Mexico went into the worst recession of its history. Wages, already poor,
declined radically.

P78...Mexico was the star pupil. It did everything right, and religiously
followed the World Bank and IMF's prescriptions. It was called another
great economic miracle, and it probably was ... for the rich. But for most
of the Mexican people, it's been a complete disaster.

P140... the power of business propaganda in the U.S. ... has succeeded, to an
unusual extent, in breaking down the relations among people and their
sense of support for one another.

P140...... advertising ... is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of
being manipulated and controlled.

P144...The West doesn't have to pretend anymore that it's interested in helping
anybody.

P153.... rights are the result of popular engagement and struggle.

P154...You liberate yourself through participation with others ... Popular
organizations and umbrella groups help create a basis for this.

P154... when you come back from the Third World to the West - the U.S. in
particular - you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding,
the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from
each other. It's startling how stultifying it feels, since our
opportunities are so vastly greater here.

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use
it!Thinking Blue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~