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The desire to acquire or possess more material wealth than what one needs is a good definition of greed. Corruption in business and government is a symptom of excessive greed by many in positions of power. Greed for power is as serious as greed for monetary wealth. When I see how greed has affected the lives of so many people, I have to believe that greed is one of the most serious problems any society faces. Through corporate scandals involving greed, innocent workers have lost their retirement savings and their jobs. I never hear our leaders, who claim great moral values, speaking of how the greed for profits and resources has hurt so many of their fellow citizens. We all want to have financial security. The reasonable desire for financial security shouldn’t be confused with the problem of greed. How many homes and cars are needed by any one individual? I’m not suggesting a vow of poverty! Wealth is not a bad thing. Many wealthy people throughout history have been great philanthropist. Countless wealthy people have contributed to society in valuable ways. How wealth is acquired is what matters. If wealth is acquired through corruption and at the expense of others, society is not well served. A vote in favor of a lobbyist by Congressional leaders in return for campaign contributions is an example of corruption driven by a self-serving interest. We have a current scandal of complicity by our Congressional leaders and lobbyists. Do you think free golfing trips, jobs for family members, and campaign donations qualify as a form of corruption and greed? One Congressman even received a Roles Royce as a gift. Wow! Another Congressman, now under indictment for bribery, had ninety thousand dollars in his freezer. Talk about cold cash! Greed! Our leaders discuss moral values in campaign promises. If our government is concerned about the future of our country, they need to address the greed and corruption in our government and corporate America. A race to the bottom for the lowest available labor costs by corporate America will eventually catch up with us. The out-sourcing of good paying jobs lowers disposable income for working men and working women. The tax base is also affected by lower incomes for American workers. We have a shrinking Middle Class in America. Cheap products are great until you can’t afford to purchase the cheap products. When I hear political leaders talk about working hard on the peoples business, I don’t think they understand what working hard means. To me, working hard is a housekeeper cleaning hotel rooms all day for minimum wage, a coal miner working in the coal mines all day and parents working two jobs to support their family. U.S. Senators and Representatives are well paid. In fact, the last Congressional raise was $33.000.00 a year. Where is the interest in a real living wage for all American workers? The excessive salaries of CEO’s and corporate executives are a prime example of the greed epidemic in America. How do executives justify these excessive salaries? When Enron was failing, CEO, Ken Lay was collecting $6 million a year in salary alone. Damn! Why don’t the people receiving excessive salaries see the word greed anywhere? The answer is a sense of entitlement. Whether a CEO of a large company or an elected official, some people just believe the game is get all you can while you can. I used to think that some people acquired great wealth because no one told them that they can’t take it with them when they die. I think maybe I was wrong. I think some people want all they can get in this life because they know they can’t take it with them, so they want to get as much as they can while they are here. I know that someday all my personal possessions will be landfill. Things are to be enjoyed for what they are: just things. We all want to work for security and a decent life, but people are what should matter most. We need strong leadership willing to address the greed driven stronghold that American corporations have over a complicit government. It is time to treat the symptom of greed for power and wealth with integrity. One possession political leaders can take with them is their good name - a legacy worth more than any material possessions. If you enjoyed this post, please make a donation to help keep this website active: Click Here for the Free Populist party Newsletter Fred Flanagan [send him email] is the author of “My America - Is Democracy Floundering?” His book is a citizen’s view on the current political environment in America. Find it online at http://flanaganunleashed.com/MyAmerica.html. More Articles from Fred Flanagan
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Secret Schemes and Undeclared Agendas
The investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein has taken up the Litvinenko case. The media used the Litvinenko case as sensational propaganda against Russian President Putin and then tossed it aside. For those whose memories of the case have faded, Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB officer living in England who died in 2006, apparently from the radioactive isotope Polonium-210. The British government encouraged the tale that Russian President Putin had sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison Litvinenko’s tea at a meeting on November 1, 2006. The story appealed to people brought up on James Bond thrillers, but the story never made any sense. Polonium-210 is a rare and tightly controlled substance as likely to contaminate the assassin as the victim. There are far easier and more effective ways of killing someone. Moreover, there is no evidence to connect Russia to Litvinenko’s death. But this didn’t stop the British government from grandstanding, sending an extradition request for Lugovoi in July 2007. The British government sent the request despite the facts that there is no extradition treaty between Britain and Russia and the Russian constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian citizens. Epstein suggests that the purpose of the extradition request was to block the Russian government from investigating Litvinenko’s death in London. Litvinenko had a false passport provided by the British government. A real investigation might have opened up the shadowy world of security consultants in which Litvinenko rubbed shoulders with former British police and intelligence officials. The Russians asked to see the evidence. The case file delivered by the British contained nothing of substance. Not even the autopsy report was provided to the Russians. Epstein managed to convince the Russians to let him see the file and to question them about the case. In brief, if the British have a case, they are withholding the evidence. The charge that Putin was behind Litvinenko’s death seems to have originated with Boris Berezovsky, one of the Russian oligarchs who had grabbed the lion’s share of privatized Soviet assets during Yeltsin’s presidency. Epstein reports that Berezovsky’s protector in Russia was Litvinenko, the deputy head of the organized crime unit of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. When Berezovsky fled Russia to escape fraud charges, Litvinenko followed. Epstein reports that Berezovsky has declared an agenda of “overthrowing the regime of his archenemy, Mr. Putin.” According to Epstein, “Alex Goldfarb, the executive director of Mr. Berezovsky’s foundation, prepared for Litvinenko’s end by writing out his ?deathbed’ statement, which, according to Mr. Goldfarb, was drawn from statements Litvinenko had dictated to him.” Epstein writes: “A few hours after Litvinenko died on November 23, 2006, Mr. Goldfarb arranged a press conference and released the sensational deathbed statement accusing Mr. Putin of the poisoning.” Web sites supported by Berezovsky spread the story that Litvinenko was murdered by the FSB. The effort to link Putin and the FSB to Litvinenko’s death might be a tale designed to cover up a more serious crime in the making. Polonium-210 is an indication that someone is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Epstein finds reasons to suspect that Litvinenko had, and perhaps Berezovsky has, connections to a Polonium smuggling scheme, and Litvinenko’s death resulted from accidental or careless exposure to Polonium-210. Who would be trying to build a secret nuclear weapon or perhaps only a “dirty bomb” that would serve to spread some radiation and massive amounts of fear and hysteria? The public has been carefully prepared to suspect Iran. If such a device were exploded somewhere in the United States, Bush, Cheney, and the neocon nazis would have their second new Pearl Harbor to justify their planned attack on Iran. We know that the Bush regime wants to attack Iran. Despite the NIE report that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program several years ago and despite no signs of a weapons program having been uncovered by IAEA inspectors, Bush, Cheney, and the neocon nazis continue to agitate for striking Iran “before it is too late.” Their politicized military commander in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, keeps insisting that Iran is training Iraqi insurgents and supplying weapons that are killing US troops. Bush and Cheney themselves have made trips to Europe and the Middle East trying to marshall support for an attack on Iran. Anyone who is not deaf, blind and stupid knows that the Bush regime is doing everything it can to create circumstances that will permit a US attack on Iran. We know for a fact that the Bush regime created false evidence, lied, and deceived in order to attack Iraq. All the reasons given for the US invasion have proven to be false. The real agenda has never been declared. Yet, five years later the traitors in high office who deceived Americans into a war in behalf of a hidden agenda have not been held accountable. As Agatha Christie said, getting away with one murder makes it easy to commit another. If you enjoyed this post, please make a donation to help keep this website active: Click Here for the Free Populist party Newsletter Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones - La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000). Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate
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Iraq War: Unhappy Anniversary
As President George Bush tirelessly continues inflicting terror on the people of Iraq, a deadly process now completing its fifth year, it may be beneficial to review the stated and actual causes of the war, and see just what it has accomplished for the U.S. In March of 2003 the U.S. ‘preemptively’ invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. This followed proclamations by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powel that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons as well. These, they warned darkly, were there for the sole purpose of destroying the American people and their cherished way of life. To further frighten U.S. citizens, they alluded strongly to a link between Iraq and the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, an event that continued to fester like a sore on the American psyche. The fact that a bipartisan panel studying those events found no credible link to them from Iraq was unimportant to the oil-hungry war mongers. U.S. citizens were dubious, but were willing, apparently, to give Mr. Bush the benefit of the doubt. Not so the members of Congress; they demonstrated no hesitation when they stood up in their hallowed halls, endorsed the president’s words and gave him a free hand in unleashing American-brand terror on an oil-rich nation on the other side of the planet. Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, displayed their patriotic credentials by voting for war. It is worth recalling that U.N. weapons inspectors were, at that time, enjoying free reign to sites in Iraq to which they had previously been forbidden. They scoured the country and found none of the weapons that Messrs Bush, Cheney and Powell swore were there. U.S. allies too, for the most part, paid little heed to the Administration’s fear mongering, and with few exceptions did not encourage America’s planned imperial misadventure. Yet on March 19, 2003, after telling the U.N. to remove its inspectors if they valued their lives, Mr. Bush began his ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, targeting residential areas (in a nation where more than 50% of the population was under the age of 15), expecting a quick victory over an impoverished nation. Indeed, on May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush declared victory. After making a dramatic and unnecessary landing by jet on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, 30 miles off shore, and dressed in a flight suit, Mr. Bush proclaimed this: “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” This, of course, was a lie to match those he and his cohorts told about the reasons for invading Iraq. It took Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman, to finally put the truth on the table. In his 2007 memoir he said this: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Mr. Bush’s war for oil has, thus far, killed at least 1,000,000 Iraqi people and 4,000 U.S. soldiers. While he calls it the front line on the war on terror, it is he who has brought terror to a level previously unknown in world history. Additionally, he has used this war on terror to justify the wiretapping of U.S. citizens; the creation of infamous rendition centers around the world where unspeakable torture of human beings occurs; the deprivation of basic rights from those he deems unworthy of them, and the approval of ‘interrogation methods’ that are banned as torture by the Geneva Conventions and shunned by all civilized nations. He has poured countless billions of dollars into his wars while 47,000,000 Americans have no health insurance, the people of New Orleans are still attempting to put their lives together two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their city, and tens of thousands of U.S. citizens risk losing their homes to foreclosure as the nation slides headlong into recession. Throughout the rest of the world the U.S. is hated and resented; Mr. Bush himself is viewed in polls as one of the world’s foremost terrorists. Each bloody death of an Iraqi citizen motivates others to lash out at the nation that has caused so much suffering for five years, with no end in sight. At least 2,000,000 Iraqi citizens have fled their homeland for the relative safety of refugee camps in neighboring countries. Those remaining in Iraq are deprived of the electricity, water and other vital services they took for granted prior to the U.S. invasion. The suffering of the people under their deposed and now executed leader, Saddam Hussein, was nothing compared to the suffering they now experience under Mr. Bush’s deadly reign. As the U.S. heroes that Mr. Bush so often summons in his speeches return home from battle physical and emotionally injured, they are left to languish in unspeakable conditions in the nation’s veterans’ hospitals. At the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the showcase of such hospitals, behind the few areas typically seen in news reports soldiers remain in rooms where mold covers the walls and mouse droppings are seen everywhere. They are cannon fodder, useful to kill Iraqis, forced into repeated deployments, but cast aside when they can no longer perform such ‘useful’ functions. This is the legacy that Mr. Bush, the self-styled ‘War President,’ proudly leaves. His first seven years in office have been marked by two murderous, immoral wars; the neglect of suffering Americans; the restriction of civil rights at home and the torture of prisoners abroad. His administration has provided tax benefits for the wealthiest U.S. citizens while the poorest are unable to visit a physician because they cannot afford medical care. During his first term he had the most dismal record of job creation since Herbert Hoover. In eight years under President Clinton an estimated 9,000,000 jobs were created. In Mr. Bush’s first four years, an estimated 200,000 jobs were created. Yet only recently, when home foreclosures are at a record high and all economic indicators point to recession, has Mr. Bush acknowledged that the country “.is going through a rough time.” At the same time he pointed to the low unemployment rate as one indicator of an underlying strength of the economy. Yet that figure is badly skewed because after a period of several months a person who is on unemployment is considered to have stopped looking for a job. Apparently the government feels that these people no longer need to eat, have a place to live or provide for their families. Mr. Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, said that allowing for those who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate is actually 6.8%, not the 4.8% Mr. Bush would have the country believe. One might conclude from all this that Mr. Bush cares for little other than enriching those who have put and kept him in power. The ‘hardworking Americans’ he mentioned in a March 14 speech, who are worried about their futures, were not represented in his audience: the Economic Club of New York, comprised mainly of wealthy executives, the very people who benefit most from Mr. Bush’s economic policies. The ‘hardworking Americans’ are their employees, not themselves. An economic turndown hardly causes a ripple in their privileged lifestyles, but it means the difference between home-ownership and foreclosure for many who they employ. Five years into the Iraqi War and occupation, it is not the members of the Economic Club of New York, or their privileged cronies, who suffer; it is not they who leave spouses and children with half their previous means of support to try to carry on while their soldier-spouse fights for Mr. Bush’s stolen oil. It is not they who try to scrape together some kind of life in New Orleans nearly three years after that world was turned upside down. It is not they who tearfully watch their sons and daughters go off to an uncertain future in an imperial war. In a true democracy, there would be methods of redress; the people’s elected representatives would not tolerate such abuses of power and such maltreatment of their own citizens. But when control of the government rests in the hands of the wealthy corporations who buy elections for their chosen few, those purchased commodities will not willingly bite the hand that so generously feeds them and, if displeased, can distribute its largess elsewhere. And so U.S. life and governmental policy continue. Mr. Bush and his successors will tell U.S. citizens that while all may not be well right now, the foundation is strong and they just need to ride this through. Waving a flag around while speaking will certainly silence any meaningful dissent; certainly the opposition party will not open its mealy mouth to protest. And while Mr. Bush fiddles, Nero-style, with the nation’s future, the economy slowly burns out, following America’s reputation into the trash. And those who will be required to clean up the mess will not be any who were responsible for its making. If you enjoyed this post, please make a donation to help keep this website active: Click Here for the Free Populist party Newsletter Robert Fantina [send him email] is a long-time activist for peace and social justice. He has worked with the Coalition for Peace Action in New Jersey. Following the 2004 presidential election, he moved to Canada, where he now resides. Robert is the author of Desertion and the American Solder: 1776-2006. More Articles from Robert Fantina
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