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The Government and Business

AUSTIN -- The State of the Union was fairly surreal Tuesday night. We won the war against Afghanistan, but we're still at war with Al Qaeda, so we have to go attack North Korea.

The big paper-shredders at Enron are finally coming to a halt, so we should go ahead and pass huge corporate tax cuts to help all the other companies that use aggressive accounting practices and need the dough. They especially need the rebates on the taxes they didn't pay. We're a better people than we were on Sept. 10, so let's all donate 4,000 hours to the country, except for those who are too busy stashing their loot in offshore banks so they won't have to pay taxes.

To further this noble scheme, the taxpayers will pony up to fund volunteers with religious groups. Does this mean Mormon missionaries will get paid to knock on our doors and persuade us that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are the light and the way?

I'm clearly confused, but I think some of my colleagues are, too. During the run-up to the State of the Union speech, I heard apparently

Afghanistan Aid

Dear Editor,

It was heartening to read that our government is pledging almost $300 million to aid in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. This is a large number but it hardly compares with the amount of money that we are spending to make war. The war in Afghanistan costs US taxpayers $1 to $2 billion per month, and since Sept. 11 the defense budget has been increased by $50 billion to fund weapons programs (like the F22 fighter and the Crusader artillery system) that the Pentagon doesn't want because they are outmoded. This looks to me like war profiteering pure and simple. I'm opposed to terrorism, but I pay taxes too!

p.s. the spending figures come from an article in The Nation (Jan 28, 2002) "Making Money on Terror" by William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School University.

This is Terrorism? The Prosecution of Petrelis and Pasquarelli

Throwing the book at people is nothing new, but in our post 9/11 world, the screws are tightening. Take San Francisco, whose district attorney, Terence "Kayo" Hallinan, has the reputation of being an unusually progressive fellow.

Yet this is the same District Attorney Hallinan who's hit two gay men who are AIDS activists with an escalating barrage of charges, currently amounting to 36 alleged felonies and misdemeanors, all adding up to what he has stigmatized in the local press as "terrorism."

Held in San Francisco county jail since Nov. 28 of last year are Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli. Neither man has been able to make bail, which Hallinan successfully requested to be set at $500,000 for Petrelis and $600,000 for Pasquarelli.

Why this astonishing bail? What it boils down to is that the two accused are dissidents notorious for raising all kinds of inconvenient, sometimes obscene hell about AIDS issues. They've long been detested by San Francisco's AIDS establishment, which Petrelis, in particular, has savaged

Enron, Enron, Enron

AUSTIN -- The seminal historic event always affects the language. Already we can see that Enron is of this shattering magnitude. A stick-up artist goes into the Jiffy Mart to pull a heist. He whips his heater and says to the clerk, "Put 'em up, this is an aggressive accounting practice."

Or, you take your car to Ralph's Rip-Off Garage to get a 50 buck problem fixed and, sure enough, he bills you $600. You say, "What an aggressive accounting practice!"

Euphemism of the Year, and not even February yet.

The single most distinguishing feature of the Enron collapse is that no one is yet sure the company did anything illegal. (Aside from destroying documents, which arguably falls in the "seriously ill-advised" category.) As we gyre and gimble in the wabe of Enron, we run across such delightful items. Did you know that Enron's board twice voted to suspend its own ethics code in order to create private partnerships? But how thoughtful of them to suspend the ethics code first! Otherwise, they might have violated it.

Slaves to fashion: What fur?

Speaking as an animal that has, throughout time, been eyeballed by humans as mostly a delectable honey-baked ham or candidate for a barbecue – always the main course, never the guest – I’m not writing this for my own or my species sake. Yes, perhaps they used to (do they still?) make footballs out of our skin. But pigs have hair, not fur, which is why my dander-allergic daddy picked me for a pet in the first place. Nobody will be wearing a floor-length Iggy to keep them warm this year. I know fur must be warm, though, as my kittycat friends and nemeses in the backyard can attest. I can hardly fault my human friends for wanting to cozy up in a fur during these cold gray days. I’m a tropical pot-bellied pig by nature and spend my winter days on the back porch by a heater.

But here’s my plea for all Freep readers to call for an end to killing animals for fur. I know none of you wear fur, don’t get me wrong. Here’s some quick facts on the fur industry you can use in your arguments and a few local retailers to boycott:

Ashcroft's Media Scam: A Confederacy of Amnesia

Even by Washington's standards, the ability of John Ashcroft to reinvent himself has been a wonder to behold. Just a year ago, squeaking through Senate confirmation as attorney general, Ashcroft found himself shadowed by his own praise for leaders of the Confederacy. Now he's able to tout himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr.

It's quite a scam, and Ashcroft couldn't have pulled it off without major help from news media. Mainstream journalists have declined to subject the attorney general to the most elementary comparisons between present and past stances on race-related issues.

With scant challenge from journalists, Ashcroft is presenting himself as someone with a fervent commitment to racial equality. His lofty pronouncements -- floating like overinflated beach balls in dire need of sharp pins -- are held aloft by the prevailing media winds.

To be sure, when it comes to the undermining of civil liberties since mid-September, the attorney general has faced appreciable criticism from commentators. When the president takes aim at the Bill of Rights, a

Prisoners and World Trade

AUSTIN -- Why do they hate us? Well, scope out the deal at Guantanamo, and see what you think.

We go along for months having a war -- the war in Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, the war to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, troops on the ground, bombs in the air ... in other words, war. Those of us who suggested that maybe war was not the right rhetoric for this situation were booed down for being insufficiently bloodthirsty, and the caissons went rolling along.

Now we've won the war It's not clear what we've won, but we've definitely won, which is better than losing. So we take the prisoners we've captured off to our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suddenly announce that they are not prisoners of war after all, because this isn't really a war we've been fighting. Therefore the prisoners are "illegal combatants," and we don't have to treat them in accord with the Geneva Convention on POWs.

This is why a lot of people hate us. For the sheer bloody arrogance of having it both ways all the time. For thinking that we are

The Enron Uproar

Everywhere we look, it's Enron, in the biggest tumult over corporate criminality since the looting of the S&Ls in the 1980s. Enron will be on the menu for months, if not years. Congress launches into at least eight separate hearings. Federal and state prosecutors prepare indictments. The press marshals, investigative teams and columnists inscribe earnest reflections about the necessity for capitalism to be honest about its balance sheets. My favorite thus far: an article in Reason magazine (a journal of the libertarian right) shouldering a heavy burden of argument to the effect that the evaporation of the life savings of Enron workers, locked in their doomed 401Ks, should in no way slow the effort to privatize the social security system.

Of course Democrats can be forgiven their malicious glee. After years of battering over Whitewater, Chinese influence peddling, Monica, Travelgate, etc., they now enjoy a scandal of epic proportions in which the prime players are: Texan Republicans who were big-time contributors to George Bush; plus a company whose executives were somehow able to locate

War and Claptrap

The disjuncture these days between reality and what one reads in the press here is pretty much absolute. The other day I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle and found a piece hailing what the writer described as something most unusual for Afghanistan, a "peaceful" transfer of power. Now granted, the mostly civilian casualties are probably in the low thousands, and the most effective agent in that same transference of power was large cash bribes to all the relevant warlords, but even so, the word "peaceful" is scarcely the mot juste.

Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, now touted as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie "Black Hawk Down" hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993, Somalia had spent many years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil companies was sufficiently strong for the post-intervention U.S. embassy to be located in the Conoco compound.

The war against the war in Iraq

Delegates from all parts of the U.S. gathered in Washington DC June 15-18 to attend the Education for Peace in Iraq Center’s (EPIC) Iraq Forum and to lobby members of congress to lift economic sanctions and oppose prominent hardliners in Washington who are pushing the president to launch a full scale invasion of Iraq. Speakers at the Iraq Forum included Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies; Christine Gosden, University of Liverpool; Michael Amity, Washington Kurdish Institute; Scot Ritter, former UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector; Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness, and many others.

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