NEWS 131 / NOT JOKES BUT ANSWERS

[Guest guest]

Hello everyone

The title says it all! I have so much more material coming for you - it is

amazing to see my Inbox growing and growing...

Jean Hudon

Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator

http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000

 

The biggest difference between the Russians and Americans was that Russians

recognized that "the Party Line" was propaganda from the ruling elite, and

Americans who receive "the Mainstream Press" fail to recognize it as

"propaganda from the ruling elite" and mistake it for "reality."

- Bill Moyer quoted this from a great peace activist when talking to Carol

Brouillet <cbrouillet (AT) igc (DOT) org>

 

CONTENTS

1. Response and kudos

2. Enron: Tip of the Iceberg: Multi-Trillion Dollar Financial Scandal

3. An Orgy of Defense Spending: Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Rhetoric Fabricates a Need

4. Happy Days, Here Again

5. FRANKENFOODS: The truth at last!

6. SAT - Q&A

 

SEE ALSO:

Sept. 11 Activist Kit - What YOU can do.

Thanks to William Douglas for Emails on this page. Journalists and

academics worldwide have put massive effort into this Activist Kit freely

given worldwide. Please honour this work by USING THIS WELL, and

encouraging all you know to use it well.

Huge data document at: http://www.11september.20m.com/activist_kit.htm

Sent by "Doreen Agostino" <dagostino (AT) rogers (DOT) com>

All the Columnists of the Working for Change website (GIVE IT A THOROUGH LOOK!)

http://www.workingforchange.com/columnists.cfm

OLYMPICS: GOLD, SILVER, BRONZE -- BUT NOT GREEN

The Winter Games are wreaking ecological havoc in Utah, as pristine

wilderness is overwhelmed by development, traffic, waste and energy

consumption.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12344

Make sure to go see those A.M.A.Z.I.N.G visual oddities!!!

http://www.ryanaaron.com/taz/visual.htm

Recommended by "Leonard Spade" <Lspade (AT) msn (DOT) com>

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1.

"Donald Stacey" <dstacey (AT) mediaone (DOT) net>

Ariel Ky <drumbeatdeva (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>

Response and kudos

Fri, 8 Feb 2002

Thank you for your comments in Jean's latest compilation. You write of the

corruption of our country. You and I come at the issue from opposite

starting points, I suspect, but I totally concur with your basic message

that corruption has saturated our country during our lifetimes. I urge you

to look into the role of the Federal Reserve and those who foisted it upon

us(and their successors). Being older than you, I suspect, I have seen the

results of systematic looting of Americans by the Fed and other parts of

our government over the past 40 years.

How does this occur? Think of the ancient practice of "coin shaving" where

monarchs would collect gold coins in payment of taxes and shave a tiny bit

from each coin, thereby depreciating the money. Well that is what the Fed

does, except it doesn't physically shave coins, it merely creates more

paper money out of thin air. Each time it does so, the money in our pockets

is worth less. So when you see soaring prices on homes, it is not that the

homes are worth more. It is that the money to buy the homes is worth less,

so more is required to purchase one.

And on a broad scale, our federal government has become unaccountable. Many

100's of billions, perhaps trillions if we knew all, has "gone missing"

within our government in recent years and no one even loses their job. So

when we agonize over the growing gap between the rich and the poor, it is

easy to see that those who benefit from such extraordinary corruption are

getting richer and those of us who dutifully send in our taxes are getting

poorer.

Please continue to speak out on this subject. We "good people" far

outnumber the bad guys but we are mostly asleep. If we can wake up and take

action, we can right the situation. So keep telling folks about this

extraordinary problem.

Don Stacey

Sent by "Mark Graffis" <mgraffis (AT) islands (DOT) vi>

http://commondreams.org/views02/0205-02.htm

February 5, 2002

Los Angeles Times

An Orgy of Defense Spending

Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Rhetoric Fabricates a Need

by Robert Scheer

Now we get to see just how cowardly the Democrats in Congress can be.

President Bush has proposed the most preposterous military buildup in human

history--annual spending of $451 billion by 2007--and nary a word of

criticism has been heard from the other side of the aisle. The president is

drunk with the popularity that his war on terrorism has brought, and those

sober Democrats and Republicans, who know better, are afraid to wrestle him

for the keys to the budget before he drives off a cliff. The red ink that

Bush wants us to bleed to line the pockets of the defense industry, along

with the tax cuts for the rich, will do more damage to our country than any

terrorist.

The result will be an economically hobbled United States, unable to solve

its major domestic problems or support meaningful foreign aid, its enormous

wealth sacrificed at the altar of military hardware that is largely without

purpose. Why the panic to throw billions more at the military when even the

Pentagon brass have told us it is not needed? Our military forces, much

maligned as inadequate by Bush during the election campaign, proved to be

lacking in nothing once the administration decided to stop playing footsie

with the Taliban and eliminate those monsters of our own creation.

It was obviously not a lack of hardware that made us vulnerable to the

cruelty of Sept. 11 but rather a failure of will by President Clinton, and

then Bush, to brand the Taliban as terrorists and then to take out the

well-marked camps of Al Qaeda with the counterinsurgency machine we have

been perfecting since the Kennedy administration. Clinton authorized the

elimination of Osama bin Laden in 1998, but the spy agencies simply failed

to execute the order. Neither, apparently, were they competent enough to

track Al Qaeda agents from training camps in Afghanistan to flight schools

in Florida.

All this even though these agencies possess secret budgets of at least $70

billion a year, combined. Despite the ability to read license plates from

outer space and scan the world's e-mail, our intelligence agencies lost the

trail of terrorists who easily found cover with lap dancers in strip

joints. The bottom line is that we need sharper agents, not more expensive

equipment. There is not an item in the Bush budget that will make us more

secure from the next terrorist attack.

That being obvious, Bush is now resorting to the tried and true "evil

empire" rhetorical strategy, grouping the disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran

and North Korea as an "axis of evil." This alleged axis then becomes the

rationale for a grossly expanded military budget, the idea being that the

United States must be prepared to fight a conventional war on three fronts.

However, no such axis exists. North Korea is a tottering relic of a state

whose nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled

leadership of the South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal.

Iraq and Iran have been implacable foes for 25 years, and both were

despised by the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, a key Muslim ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, produced

15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers--and Bin Laden. Saudi Arabia is also where

Al Qaeda does its biggest fund-raising and yet, inexplicably, it is

excluded from the new enemies list. Even if the accepted goal were the

overthrow of the three brutal regimes targeted by President Bush, that

would hardly require an expansion of a war machine built to humble the

Soviet Union in its prime.

Is Bush the younger now telling us that his father failed to topple Saddam

Hussein because he lacked sufficient firepower? The road to Baghdad was

wide open after we obliterated the vaunted Iraqi tank army in a matter of

weeks. Or does Bush the younger have even more grandiose plans in mind? His

astonishing budget makes sense only if we are planning to use our mighty

military in a pseudo-religious quest to create a super-dominant Pax

Americana. Bizarre as that sounds, it may be the real framework for Bush's

proposed spending orgy.

In any case, almost every non-American speaker at the World Economic Forum

in New York expressed fear at this specter. Even our own Bill Gates was

alarmed at the United States' apparent hubris: "People who feel the world

is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous

for all of us." Is it too much to ask that these billions, our billions, be

spent to enhance our security rather than further erode it?

Robert Scheer writes a syndicated column.

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4.

Sent by Ken <NCEpanacea (AT) aol (DOT) com>

http://www.nypress.com/15/6/taki/bunker.cfm

Top Drawer-The Bunker

by George Szamuely

Happy Days, Here Again

Forget the war on terrorism. The United States is once again supporting the

drug dealers, gangsters and warlord fundamentalists. The other day a State

Dept. official met Chechnya's self-declared foreign minister, Ilyas

Akhmadov. The Russians were dismayed. Having thrown their lot in with the

supposed common struggle against terrorism, they find the Americans giving

support to terrorists. Last month, after a post-Sept. 11 lull, the U.S.

stepped up its criticism of human rights abuses in Chechnya. The Russians

professed to be "amazed" that the United States, as Agence France Presse

reported, would meet with Chechens, "whose direct links with Osama bin

Laden and al-Qaeda are being proven with constantly emerging, irrefutable

evidence."

Chechnya has always been seen here as a rerun of Kosovo, which itself was a

rerun of Afghanistan. All the ingredients are there: a spurious "national

liberation" struggle financed by organized crime, drug trafficking and the

global Islamic network; support from Western governments and human rights

groups; Islamic fundamentalism as a substitute for genuine nationhood;

violently enforced clan loyalty; political legitimacy based on appeals to

Islam; and terrorists in power. Consider Kosovo: The U.S. is currently

brokering a deal on the distribution of power. Leaders of the three leading

Kosovo Albanian parties recently met the head of the U.S. office in

Pristina, John Menzies, and it was proposed that the job of prime minister

should go to Hashim Thaci's Democratic Party of Kosovo (DPK). Thaci is the

leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Its links to Islamic terrorism

and bin Laden have been amply documented. The KLA allegedly disbanded after

the NATO takeover and reconstituted itself as a "civil defense force," the

Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC). Its wages were paid by the UN.

Last summer, the Bush administration discovered that the KPC was a

terrorist organization after all and that it was fueling a terrorist

insurgency in neighboring Macedonia. The President signed two decrees

depriving "Albanian extremists who were threatening the stability of

Macedonia" of all financial or material support. The decrees also barred

them from entering the United States. This followed the embarrassing

revelation that the U.S. military had facilitated the escape of NLA

terrorists holed up in Arcinovo from the Macedonian army. According to

Hamburger Abendblatt, "Among the rebels that were withdrawing were 17

"instructors" - former US officers that provided military training for the

rebels. Not only that: the Macedonian security forces claim that 70 percent

of the equipment that the guerrilla fighters took with them are of US

production." The "instructors" were almost certainly members of an outfit

called Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI). It is filled

with former senior U.S. Army personnel and works on contract for the U.S.

government. It had trained and directed the Croatian army during Operation

Storm, in which something like 300,000 Serbs were driven out of their homes

in Krajina. One of the commanders of Operation Storm was an Albanian, Agim

Ceku, who also happens to be the chief of the Kosovo Protection Corps.

The people Bush banned from entering the United States included Gezim

Ostremi, the KPC's chief-of-staff; his replacement, Daut Haradinaj; the

commander and deputy commander of the KPC'ôs elite force, the Rapid

Reaction Corps, plus the leaders of two of its six regional divisions, Sami

Lushtaku and Mustafa Rrustem. The UN expressed shock and surprise and

demanded proof that people on its payroll were terrorists. This was an odd

request. The UN had itself reported a year earlier that the KPC was a bunch

of gangsters.

The U.S. decrees were more rhetoric than reality. As an Irish Times report

put it sarcastically: "Commander Rrustem earned fame during the Kosovo war

as one of the most successful guerrilla commanders. He has since become a

favourite with NATO commanders, whose glowing commendations line the walls

of his office. Certainly if the Americans have reservations about him they

have yet to show it: on Tuesday two separate US army teams came to his base

to train his men."

There we have it: The KLA-NLA terrorists are funded by U.S. military aid,

the UN peacekeeping budget, Al Qaeda and by drug trafficking and

prostitution. If everything goes according to plan, their leader is about

to be appointed prime minister thanks to U.S. efforts. O what a lovely war!

Now on to Central Asia.

Washington now has 13 bases in nine countries ringing Afghanistan and in

the Gulf. Agreements are in place to use airfields in Tajikistan. An air

base is being built in Kyrgyzstan to hold 3000 troops. Gen. Tommy Franks

vows to crush the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Assistant Secretary of

State Elizabeth Jones promises $160 million in aid. Some 1500 U.S.

servicemen are already stationed there; 3000 American troops are in

Kyrgyzstan. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the bases will

serve to facilitate cooperation and training with the local military. In

other words, the U.S. will, as in the Balkans, play the Islamists and

anti-Islamists off against each other and reduce the countries to abject

dependence. If the fates of Kosovo and Macedonia are anything to go by, the

Soviet Union era will soon seem like a glorious one.

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"Sibylle Hartmann" <greensib (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>

SAT - Q&A

Mon, 04 Feb 2002

The following questions and answers were collated from SAT tests given in

Springdale, Arkansas in 2000 to 17 year old students! (Don't laugh too hard

- one of these may be the president someday.)

Q: Name the four seasons.

A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to

drink.

A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large

pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?

A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q: What is a planet?

A: A body of earth surrounded by sky.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?

A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and the Moon. All water

tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon,

and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

Q: In a democratic society, how important are elections?

A: Very important. Sex can only happen when a male gets an election.

Q: What are steroids?

A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Q: What happens to your body as you age?

A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?

A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.

Q; Name a major disease associated with cigarettes.

A: Premature death.

Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?

A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: How are the main parts of the body categorized? (E.g., abdomen.)

A: The body is consisted into three parts - the brainium, the borax

And the abdominal cavity. The branium contains the brain, the borax

contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the

five bowels, A,E,I,O and U.

Q: What is the Fibula?

A: A small lie.

Q: What does "varicose" mean?

A: Nearby.

Q: What is the most common form of birth control?

A: Most people prevent contraception by wearing a condominium.

Q: Give the meaning of the term "Caesarean Section."

A: The caesarean section is a district in Rome.

Q: What is a seizure?

A: A Roman emperor.

Q: What is a terminal illness?

A: When you are sick at the airport

Q: Give an example of a fungus. What is a characteristic feature?

A: Mushrooms. They always grow in damp places and so they look like

umbrellas.

Q: What does the word "benign" mean?

A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.

Q: What is a turbine?

A: Something an Arab wears on his head.

Q: What is a Hindu?

A: It lays eggs.