The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing propaganda sheet, that has been dumbed-down under the ownership of Aussie Rupert Murdoch. However the WSJ and Barron’s do still have some talented reporters and now and then they do produce news stories that are worth reading.
In the event you want to read a particular article in the Wall Street Journal, or their upscale sidekick, Barron’s, there is a handy back door you can to use to read the entire article without subscribing.
When you visit the WSJ or Barron’s home page and you see a story you’d like to read, simply copy the headline and paste into Google News. You’ll see a link to the article come up. Use that link, and you’ll be able to read the story free of charge.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving media-pirate.
As for an objective, intelligent weekly update on business, I gladly pay for: That would be Bloomberg Business Week.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
"We the People" an obsolete concept?
As we gather with friends and family this Independence Day, and enjoy the holiday at mid-week, let us pause and reflect on the opening of our great and inspiring document, the Constitution: “ We the multi-national corporations and special interests who know better than the people…”
Seems wrong , you say? Doesn’t the preamble begin with “We the People, In Order to Form a More Perfect
Well it used to say that yes, but our constitution and government have been hijacked by a series of court decisions, presidential orders and moves by Congress, so that the first version “ We the multi-national corporations and special interests who know better than the people..” is the more accurate version.
Our elected public officials no longer serve the public. They serve the gigantic companies and other large wealthy organizations who finance their political campaigns. Why should they serve the public? In essence, election campaigns have become auctions. You can see it in the quarter fund raising reports of the Presidential candidates (Obama raises 31 million, a record, Giuliani raises 17 million..etc).
And the results of this can be seen everywhere. Millions upon millions of American jobs outsourced overseas, by CEOs being paid millions upon millions in salary and bonuses for doing this. Huge and wealthy medical insurance companies growing by leaps and bounds, raking in as much as 30% in every dollar spent on healthcare. (See SiCKO, the movie for results of this). Big pharmaceutical companies allowed to hawk their drugs in every hour of every television program in
There’s more much more. It can best be described as the feeling by American citizens that voting just doesn’t seem worthwhile any more. There’s a reason for that.
Why should anyone but registered voters be allowed to contribute money for political campaigns? Why should multinational corporations, labor unions, trade groups, the AMA, be allowed to provide campaign money and slush funds for politicians? They are not human beings. They can’t vote. So why is this allowed?
Maybe some day “We the People” will take our democracy back.
Think about it. Your country’s future is at stake.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Billions.. and Billions and.......
Joseph Galloway: Billions and billions of dollars just disappear in Iraq
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Show me the money, or at least some receipts scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags.
This week, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, squirming in the hot seat as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 tons of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad.
That's $12 billion in cold, hard American cash, and no one, especially Bremer, seems to know where it went.
It may be an urban legend, but the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, is widely quoted as saying: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." If he didn't say it, he should have.
Bremer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq Occupation, said that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent.
The Department of Defense's special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent "ghost employees" -- people who didn't really work there or perhaps didn't really exist.
Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined.
After all, the former czar told the representatives, it wasn't really our money anyway. It was Iraqi money -- oil earnings and bank accounts seized from Saddam Hussein's government -- that we were holding in trust.
I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads rolling; without someone going to prison.
And all this was happening at a time in the war when American soldiers and Marines were going without properly armored vehicles, without lifesaving body armor and even without some of the weapons they needed.
What does it take for the American people's gag reflex to kick in? When do we begin to realize that this is only the tip of an iceberg of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption perpetrated on a monumental scale by the Bush administration, its buddies among the military contractors and their handmaidens on Capitol Hill? The cost of this war is swiftly building toward a trillion dollars.
How much of that was siphoned off by crooked and incompetent contractors, greedy defense corporations and Iraqi crooks in a government that we created and installed? No one in the congressional hearing has yet asked Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was handed out to American contractors in Baghdad, although that question begs to be asked and answered.
During the dark days of World War II, Congress established a Committee on War Profiteering and put a little-known senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, in charge. Truman, a veteran of combat service in World War I, was a bulldog.
His committee went after not only those who stole money but also those who provided shoddy or worthless equipment and supplies for our troops. He had the power to shut down an offending company or contractor, and he used it.
Where's our Truman Committee today? Where are the righteous representatives of the people charged with standing guard over our troops and our money? We've wasted $600 billion on a war that we're losing, day by bloody day, at a time when our president presents a federal budget that cuts Medicare to find billions for more that war. The Decider boasts that if we do things his way, America's wealthiest individuals won't have to pay even one dollar more in taxes.
Meanwhile, the people's representatives, on both sides of the aisle, round up the contributions they need for re-election by putting themselves in the pockets of the very robber barons they're supposed to be investigating, interrogating and policing.
Perhaps we should let a no-bid cost-plus contract to Halliburton to construct large additions to the country club federal prisons to accommodate a population explosion in the years ahead. Or, for convenience sake, maybe we could just add a prison wing to the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.
http://www.modbee.com/opinion/national/story/13277359p-13909379c.html
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Show me the money, or at least some receipts scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags.
This week, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, squirming in the hot seat as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 tons of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad.
That's $12 billion in cold, hard American cash, and no one, especially Bremer, seems to know where it went.
It may be an urban legend, but the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, is widely quoted as saying: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." If he didn't say it, he should have.
Bremer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq Occupation, said that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent.
The Department of Defense's special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent "ghost employees" -- people who didn't really work there or perhaps didn't really exist.
Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined.
After all, the former czar told the representatives, it wasn't really our money anyway. It was Iraqi money -- oil earnings and bank accounts seized from Saddam Hussein's government -- that we were holding in trust.
I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads rolling; without someone going to prison.
And all this was happening at a time in the war when American soldiers and Marines were going without properly armored vehicles, without lifesaving body armor and even without some of the weapons they needed.
What does it take for the American people's gag reflex to kick in? When do we begin to realize that this is only the tip of an iceberg of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption perpetrated on a monumental scale by the Bush administration, its buddies among the military contractors and their handmaidens on Capitol Hill? The cost of this war is swiftly building toward a trillion dollars.
How much of that was siphoned off by crooked and incompetent contractors, greedy defense corporations and Iraqi crooks in a government that we created and installed? No one in the congressional hearing has yet asked Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was handed out to American contractors in Baghdad, although that question begs to be asked and answered.
During the dark days of World War II, Congress established a Committee on War Profiteering and put a little-known senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, in charge. Truman, a veteran of combat service in World War I, was a bulldog.
His committee went after not only those who stole money but also those who provided shoddy or worthless equipment and supplies for our troops. He had the power to shut down an offending company or contractor, and he used it.
Where's our Truman Committee today? Where are the righteous representatives of the people charged with standing guard over our troops and our money? We've wasted $600 billion on a war that we're losing, day by bloody day, at a time when our president presents a federal budget that cuts Medicare to find billions for more that war. The Decider boasts that if we do things his way, America's wealthiest individuals won't have to pay even one dollar more in taxes.
Meanwhile, the people's representatives, on both sides of the aisle, round up the contributions they need for re-election by putting themselves in the pockets of the very robber barons they're supposed to be investigating, interrogating and policing.
Perhaps we should let a no-bid cost-plus contract to Halliburton to construct large additions to the country club federal prisons to accommodate a population explosion in the years ahead. Or, for convenience sake, maybe we could just add a prison wing to the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.
http://www.modbee.com/opinion/national/story/13277359p-13909379c.html
Letters to Harry
Hi Harry
We'll be sending missals this way now and then with thoughts on the good, the bad and the ugly. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot more ugly these days and bad too. But we'll do our best with all three.
We'll be sending missals this way now and then with thoughts on the good, the bad and the ugly. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot more ugly these days and bad too. But we'll do our best with all three.
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