Fwd: Konformist: Digest Number 753

There are 9 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

  1.  Chinese president's visit underscores Washington-Beijing tensions
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  2.  The Touchable and the Untouchable
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  3.  The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  4.  KN4M 05-02-06
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  5.  Worst President Ever!
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  6.  Worst President Ever! PT 2
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  7.  Oil News 05-02-06
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  8.  America meets the new superpower
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
  9.  Save the Net
        From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com

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Message 1
   From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
   Date: Tue May 2, 2006 11:31am(PDT)
Subject: Chinese president's visit underscores Washington-Beijing tensions

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

World Socialist Web Site
wSWS.org

Chinese president's visit underscores Washington-Beijing tensions
By Patrick Martin
24 April 2006

The four-day visit to the United States by Chinese President Hu
Jintao, culminating in Thursday's White House meeting with George W.
Bush, produced little progress on any of the key issues in dispute
between the two world powers. Instead, there was evidence of growing
tension as the Bush White House inflicted a series of diplomatic
snubs, ranging from the trivial to the flagrant, recorded in detail
by the US media, and undoubtedly noted by the visitors from Beijing.

Despite Chinese requests, Hu's session at the White House was not
accorded the status of a full state visit, with an evening state
dinner and associated ceremony, a distinct step down from the
treatment accorded Hu's predecessors Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping
during previous visits to Washington by a Chinese head of state.

When the Chinese national anthem was played to welcome Hu, the White
House announcer described the country as "the Republic of China,"
the official name for Taiwan, rather than the "Peoples Republic of
China," the title of the Beijing regime. Given that the status of
Taiwan is the number-one foreign policy issue for China, this can
hardly have been an oversight.

More significant was the decision of White House officials to permit
a prominent activist of the banned Falun Gong organization to
participate in the joint press conference of Bush and Hu, which she
then interrupted by shouting denunciations of the repression of the
quasi-religious group. Wengyi Wang, a Chinese-born doctor who lives
in New York City, was admitted to the press conference on a one-day
pass issued to the Falun Gong's newspaper, Epoch Times, which
recently carried a series of articles, written by Wang, alleging
that Chinese authorities were harvesting the organs of imprisoned
Falun Gong disciples.

For several minutes, Wang stood on a camera platform shouting, in
English and Chinese, "President Hu! Your days are
numbered," "President Bush! Stop him from killing!" and other anti-
Beijing slogans. She tried to unfurl a banner. Secret Service agents
finally removed her, and she was later arraigned before a magistrate
on charges of attempting to intimidate or threaten a foreign
official, which carry a sentence of up to six months in jail.

Given the current security mania in Washington, it is inconceivable
that the decision to give press credentials to a Falun Gong activist—
one with a record of heckling the previous Chinese president, Jiang
Zemin, at an appearance in Malta in 2001—was made unwittingly. The
White House routinely denies access to such events, not merely to
those suspected of an intention of disruption, but to journalists
from socialist and antiwar publications, who might ask embarrassing
questions.

Only three months ago, Capitol Hill police arrested Iraq war
activist Cindy Sheehan for wearing an antiwar t-shirt at Bush's
State of the Union Speech, which she attended as the guest of a
Democratic congresswoman. While Secret Service agents took three
minutes to get to the Falun Gong representative (a Washington Post
columnist commented that their strategy seemed to have been to let
her shout herself hoarse), they would have been far quicker to grab
and silence a heckler denouncing Bush for having blood on his hands
in Iraq.

Even after the fact, Bush administration officials defended the
decision to give Wang a press pass, presenting it as an example of
their commitment to democracy and a free press. One told the Los
Angeles Times, "We can't go around denying access to reporters when
we're going around the world trumpeting that to do so is incorrect."
This from an administration that is currently engaged in
investigating leaks on secret CIA torture prisons and illegal
domestic spying by the National Security Agency, in which both the
journalists and their whistle-blower sources could face imprisonment.

The most ominous indication of US-China conflict, far more serious
than the diplomatic slights, came in a statement little noted by the
media, issued by the Pentagon on the day Hu visited the White House,
confirming that the US military regards China as a dangerous
potential adversary and is repositioning its forces to deal with a
future military confrontation with Beijing. Bryan Whitman, a
spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters that
the Pentagon remained concerned about "a lack of transparency and
some uncertainty surrounding China's future path. Therefore, we and
others have to naturally hedge against the unknown."

Whitman was responding to questions generated by reports this week
in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, both
publications closely linked to the right-wing forces directing the
Bush administration, that the Pentagon has increasingly focused its
long-range military planning and preparations on the likelihood of
conflict with China. This includes shifting forces from Europe to
the Asia-Pacific region and increasing both aircraft carrier and
submarine fleets in the Pacific.

According to these reports, one key change involves new maintenance
procedures for Navy warships to keep four aircraft carrier battle
groups on station in the Pacific at the same time. Another involves
the shifting of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, the US island
territory in the western Pacific that is being built up as a center
for long-range bombers, spy aircraft and logistical support
operations.

These measures were hardly mentioned in the press coverage of the US-
China summit, and there was no hint of the possibility of mutual
annihilation in the carefully orchestrated public statements by Bush
and Hu. The 10,000 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal could destroy
not only China, but all life on earth. For its part, China has
hundreds of nuclear weapons, together with missiles that can reach
most major US cities.

The danger of a military conflict between the United States and
China, with all its potentially cataclysmic consequences, does not
arise out of the personalities of Bush or Hu, but out of deep-going
objective contradictions. The same economic forces that have
produced an ever-greater integration of the US and Chinese economies—
perhaps the highest expression of the overall globalization of the
world economy—lead inevitably to conflicts between these two powers
over access to natural resources, control of key strategic positions
and, ultimately, world power.

From the early 1980s, the major imperialist powers—the US, Japan,
the European powers—have poured capital into China, building China
up as an offshore manufacturing platform that plays a decisive role
in their class strategy, allowing them to put unrelenting pressure
on labor costs and generating super-profits. The growth of world
capitalism over the past quarter century is largely bound up with
the opening up of China.

But this same process has generated a challenge to US domination of
the Asia-Pacific region. The growing industrial and financial might
of China increases its strategic weight in world affairs and makes
possible a more ambitious program of armament, diplomacy and
cultivation of economic ties. US imperialism reacts to China's rise
as a threat to its hegemony all along the eastern shore of Asia, as
well as in the Indian Ocean and even in Africa and South America.

For all the ritualistic invocations of democracy by American
politicians, the US-China conflict has nothing to do with any
repressive actions on the part of the Stalinist dictatorship in
Beijing. On the contrary, maintenance of China as an almost
inexhaustible supplier of cheap labor for international capital
requires an internal political regime that denies workers any
democratic rights and suppresses all opposition to the most brutal
sweatshop methods.

Corporate America relies on the Beijing dictatorship to police and
suppress the Chinese workers as well as to provide an increasingly
important market for the sale of US goods. Hu Jintao's trip was
clearly intended by the Chinese leadership to showcase this
relationship. The Chinese president spent two days in Seattle,
meeting with corporate executives, touring the Boeing aircraft
factory and dining with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. In
Washington, after his chilly reception at the White House, Hu was
the guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the US-China Business
Council, where he was introduced by former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, an architect of the turn by US imperialism to cultivate
Beijing in the early 1970s. More than 900 corporate executives
attended the dinner, while several dozen more were guests at the
White House luncheon.

China has, if anything, proceeded extremely cautiously in response
to the US drive to seize control of the oil resources of the Persian
Gulf and Caspian basin, even though these are vital to the future
development of the Chinese economy. Clearly, Beijing would rather
use diplomatic and economic methods than risk a confrontation with
Washington.

The Bush administration's policy, however, has been considerably
more provocative, with top officials like Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
and Secretary of State Rice suggesting that China must have some
dark and ulterior motive for building up its military forces—which
remain far inferior technologically to the United States. There is a
considerable degree of recklessness in this posturing, not only
because of the danger of sparking military conflict, but because of
China's growing role in the world financial system.

China has accumulated the world's largest foreign currency reserves,
surpassing Japan this year. The Chinese central bank holds more than
$1 trillion, currently mostly in dollars, although it has begun, at
least on a small scale, to shift some of these reserves into euros
and the Japanese yen. As the New York Times observed in a commentary
on Hu's trip, "If China were to begin a fire sale of these and other
American securities—perhaps as part of a policy to loosen the yuan's
peg to the dollar—American interest rates could increase
significantly, delivering a powerful blow to the housing market and
consumer spending." This in turn would undermine the ability of
consumers and US corporations to pay their debts, with incalculable
consequences for financial markets worldwide.









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Message 2
   From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
   Date: Tue May 2, 2006 11:31am(PDT)
Subject: The Touchable and the Untouchable

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

April 17 , 2006

The Touchable and the Untouchable
A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police
By JEFFREY BLANKFORT
Counterpunch.org

It's another tale of two members of Congress, of racism and
hypocrisy, and it serves as a reminder, as if one was needed, that
Washington, D.C., is in the heart of the old Confederacy.

Rep. Tom Lantos and Rep. Cynthia McKinney are members of the
Democratic Party, but there the similarities end.

Lantos represents South San Francisco and San Mateo County. He is
white, Jewish, Hungarian born and portrays himself as "the only
Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress." He is an unabashed
supporter of Israel. That makes him, of course, an "untouchable."

He is also the ranking Democrat on the powerful House International
Relations Committee, which provides him with unusual opportunities
to help Israel. He sponsors repressive legislation targeting the
Palestinians and Israel's Middle East adversaries and, when called
upon by Israel, he represents it in countries where Israel has no
diplomatic relations, a questionable activity by a member of the
U.S. Congress.

"He's true blue and white" - the colors of the Israeli flag - a
former leader of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or
AIPAC, Israel's official lobby, told the Jerusalem Post, referring
to Lantos' devotion to Israel. Lantos made his first trip to the
Jewish state in 1956 and has been there nearly 60 times since.

And all along you thought his first concern was the voters in his
district.

In 1991, in an effort to convince Congress and the world that Iraq
needed to be forcibly removed from Kuwait, Lantos helped stage a
hearing before his private Congressional Human Rights Caucus at
which the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, pretending she was a
nurse who had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital at the time of
Iraq's invasion, testified that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers
throwing babies out of scores of incubators on to the hospital floor
in order to take the incubators back to Iraq.

The story was a total fabrication, but the outrage it engendered was
enough to get reluctant members of Congress to change their minds
and vote for the war. Despite articles about the fraud in the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Harper's, Lantos was never
criticized on the House floor, let alone censured.

But this story is not about Israel or Iraq. It's about the different
treatment afforded Lantos as compared to that meted out by the
Capitol Police to our second member of Congress, Cynthia McKinney,
who represents the De Kalb district in Atlanta, Georgia.

McKinney, of course, is African-American, and one of the few members
of the Congressional Black Caucus who has not been cowed into
submission by the Democratic Party and the only one who has refused
to genuflect to the Israel lobby. But, again, this story isn't about
Israel, although its specter and that of its lobby seem ever
present.

To make matters worse - for McKinney, not for the pursuit of truth
and justice - she has refused to accept the official Bush
administration explanation of the events of 9-11, and she has
participated in events alongside of other critics of that narrative
who have been marginalized not only by both political parties and
the mainstream media but by the "gatekeepers" of the left.

She has also been outspoken - while the Democratic Party has been
largely silent - about the disenfranchisement of Black voters in
Florida in the last two presidential elections, which is the subject
of a new film about her on that subject, "American Blackout," that
opened in February at the Sundance Film Festival. In other words,
she is considered a "trouble-maker" in a colony of "go-along-to-get-
alongs."

The Democrat Party leadership was overjoyed when McKinney was
defeated for re-election in 2002. After she had served five terms,
AIPAC decided to make an example of her for having criticized
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. That led to a stream of
money flowing to her opponent, Denise Majette, from wealthy out of
town Jewish donors.

That, a steady drumbeat of attacks by the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, plus an estimated 40,000 votes from Republicans who
crossed over to vote in the Democratic primary were enough to turn
the tide against her. The Democrats were, in turn, mortified two
years later when, without their help, the plucky McKinney ran and
was re-elected to her seat.

To show the party's displeasure, McKinney was denied the return of
her seniority by a tight-lipped Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco
congresswoman who serves as the Democrats' minority House whip.

And McKinney, it turns out, is "touchable" - as those who have been
following her ordeal with the Capitol Police are well aware.
Touchable by a white Southern cop in a Capitol Police uniform in a
white dominated predominantly Black city in which the Black majority
are second class citizens and reminded of it every day.

So when McKinney entered the halls of Congress over a week ago, one
of a handful of Black congresswomen - who should have been
recognized - and walked around the security barrier on her way to
vote as members of Congress are allowed to do, a Capitol cop on duty
reached out to stop her.

McKinney allegedly turned around and struck him in the chest with
the cell phone she was carrying in her hand, and now, incredibly,
the Capitol Police have taken this minor incident to a federal grand
jury.

Now what about the "untouchable" Tom Lantos; how did he get into
this story?

Six years ago this May, Lantos was driving his car in Washington,
D.C., and ran over the left foot of 13-year-old Owen Sanderson.
Sanderson and his eighth grade classmates from a school in Bolton,
Mass., were crossing the plaza in front of the Capitol when the
congressman drove over the boy's foot, sending him to the pavement
screaming in pain, the boy and his teachers told the press. Lantos
then left the scene without getting out of his car to see whether
the boy had been hurt.

As the Boston Globe described it, "While several horrified teachers
and the principal shouted at Lantos to stop, the California Democrat
sat rigidly, staring straight ahead and refusing to get out of his
white Ford Taurus, which carried U.S. Congress plates."

"The first thing I heard was Owen screaming," said Ken Tucker,
principal of the Worcester-area school. "Owen's foot was pinned
under the car."

Lantos, 72 at the time, finally reversed slightly, freeing Owen's
foot and ankle, and drove off without checking on his condition,
said Tucker and several teachers. Lantos said he had no idea the boy
had been hurt. "I was driving to my office," he said. "There was a
typical spring mob of tourists and kids and so on. … One of the
kids, horsing around, not looking or something, jumped in front of
the car, stumbled, then got up and walked away."

Owen's teachers and principal were dismayed at what they saw as
insensitivity and arrogance by a government official, the Boston
Globe reported. "If he had stopped and spoken to us, we would have
had a much different response to this," said Malin, the art
teacher. "It's called human decency."

Youngsters "learn too often in life that if you have money and
power, you're above the law," said Perkins, the school
nurse. "That's not the way it's supposed to be."

The teachers, Tucker and the tour guide disputed Lantos' assertion
that he did not know Owen was hurt. Lantos "was asked several times
to get out of the car by myself and the teachers," Tucker said. "He
was told, 'You hit a kid and you need to stop.'"

"He was trying to drive through a crowd of kids, was what he was
doing. Why or how, I don't know," Tucker said. "He didn't roll down
his window. He made no offer to get out of the car."
Laura Friend, an English teacher who was among those chaperoning the
68 students, said she raced toward the Taurus and screamed at Lantos
through a half-open window.

"I was saying, `Stop, stop, stop! Back up, back up, back up!' He
didn't look at me. He didn't even take his hands off the wheel or
anything," Friend said.

When it appeared Lantos might not stop, Tucker said, he stepped in
front of the car. A Capitol Police officer twice told the principal
to move out of the way or he would be arrested, Tucker and several
teachers recounted. "The officer said, 'Look at his license plates.
He's a congressman. If we need to get in touch with him, we can find
him if need be,'" Friend recalled.

The boy he hit said he did not harbor bad feelings toward Lantos or
his wife, Annette, who was a passenger in the car.

But "it's disappointing that they didn't get out and say, 'Are you
OK?' I just feel bad he didn't call to apologize."

Lantos paid a $25 fine after being issued a ticket for "failure to
pay full time and attention," said Lt. Dan Nichols, spokesman for
the Capitol Police, adding that the investigation was closed.

Which brings us back to the Capitol Police and Cynthia McKinney and
her accusations of racism on its part. One wonders what would have
been the fate of McKinney or any member of the Congressional Black
Caucus had they run over the foot of a white child, congressional
plates and all.

As it was, when McKinney leveled the charge of racism against the
cop over her encounter in the Capitol, not one Democrat, not one
member of the Congressional Black Caucus, chose to stand with her
and with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, who had flown out to be
at her side, at a Monday morning press conference.

Her fellow Georgia congressman, John Lewis, one time civil rights
hero but in the decades since a Democratic Party loyalist, had the
audacity to tell her, "You need to come to a non-violence workshop."
Compare that with the comment from Ohio Congresswoman Marci Kaptur
who, in the same NY Times article, described her as "a modern day
version of Sojourner Truth. The edge of her knowledge singes some
people. Sometimes turmoil surrounds the truth."

On Wednesday, April 5, with the grand jury case hanging over her
head, McKinney met with members of the CBC and, following that
meeting, in an effort to defuse the situation, she offered a public
apology to the officer and to the Capitol Police, saying, "I am
sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all. I regret its
escalation. And I apologize."
But was McKinney on target in charging racism against the white
Capitol Police?

According to the evidence, most definitely so. When the Black
officers in the U.S. Capitol Police filed a racial discrimination
lawsuit against the government in 2001, they expected to get
justice, reported the Final Call newspaper in August 2003. What they
say they've gotten is retaliation. At the time the article was
published, they were threatening a second class action suit, the
paper reported.

The officers took their case to Capitol Hill July 30, 2003, for a
press conference alleging the Capitol Police Department's pattern
of "filing excessive and unfounded disciplinary charges against
prominent members of the class action, as well as a pattern of
harassment, including exclusion of class members from the U.S.
Capitol Complex and a series of auto tampering, break-ins and
vandalism of class members' automobiles."

"We suspect that such conduct by the department smacks of
retaliation against the class members and is designed to undermine
the momentum of current settlement negotiations," class attorney
Nathaniel D. Johnson told the Final Call. Officer Larry A. Ikard, a
member of the class action, spoke on behalf of the 358 Black members
of the Capitol force.

"When will someone become accountable for the blatant acts of
discrimination the African American officers have had to endure
throughout our tenure? How can we be responsible for egregious acts
committed against us?" he asked. He told the audience about training
opportunities he was denied and being subjected to a racially
hostile work environment.

The Congressional Black Caucus responded to the officers' complaints
with a letter June 26 to Chief Terrance W. Gainer and members of the
U.S. Capitol Police Board.

"We are incensed and embarrassed at having to deal with these same
systemic issues of discrimination against African American officers
in our own U.S. Capitol Police force, now in the 21st century," the
letter stated.

"In these uncertain times of terrorism, concern over homeland
security and crises abroad, these police officers are entrusted with
the responsibility of guarding and protecting us as members of
Congress, our staff and the Capitol buildings and grounds, as well
as our constituents who visit the Capitol."

The letter, signed by the 39 members of the CBC, concluded by
saying, "We strongly urge the Capitol Police Board to implement far-
reaching non-monetary remedies and oversight measures to ensure that
discrimination against the African American officers ceases, and we
fully support the complete monetary settlement proposed in the
letter to the U.S. Attorney's Office."

It was the same Chief Gainer who filed the complaint last week
against McKinney. But it seemed to be a different CBC, one that not
only failed McKinney, but apparently failed to defend itself against
a racist remark directed at all its members by Texas' poster boy for
sleaze, Rep. Tom De Lay, who recently announced he was not running
for re-election.

"Cynthia McKinney is a racist," DeLay said on Fox News
Channel's "Fox and Friends," a day after abandoning his re-election
campaign under a cloud of ethics violations and charges, the
Associated Press reported. "She has a long history of racism.
Everything is racism with her. This is incredible arrogance that
sometimes hits these members of Congress, but especially Cynthia
McKinney."

While McKinney was being slandered right and further right by other
Fox commentaries and the same racist talk show hosts who raged at
her re-election, she was sandbagged from the left by columnist Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, who somehow thinks the Congressional Black Caucus
is something other than what it currently is, a rather meek
handmaiden to an even meeker Democratic Party.

"A big tip that the race squawk won't cut it in this case is the
mute reaction of the Congressional Black Caucus and other
Democrats," wrote Ofari in an article entitled "The Sad Saga of
Cynthia McKinney," as if either group - and particularly the
Democrats - was deserving of any credibility in this day and age.

"Not one Caucus member publicly charged to her defense," he went
on, "and not one Democratic House member stood at her side at her
initial press conference when she cried racism. In all likelihood,
she apologized at the quiet urging of Caucus members. No, McKinney
was wrong."

No, Ofari was wrong, and the refusal of the CBC to stand behind her
at this time, along with their refusal to demand a return of her
seniority when she was re-elected, will go down as shameful chapters
in the caucus's history, while the betrayal of McKinney by the rest
of her fellow Democrats and the party itself is consistent with
their betrayal of the rest of America.

Jeffrey Blankfort is a radio program producer with KPOO in San
Francisco and KZYX in Mendocino and KPFT/Pacifica in Houston. He is
a journalist and Jewish-American and has been a pro-Palestinian
human rights activist since 1970. He was formerly the editor of the
Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of
the Middle East. He may be reached at jblankfort@earthlink.net.









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Message 3
   From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
   Date: Tue May 2, 2006 11:31am(PDT)
Subject: The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

2005 was a good year for bad corporations.

There were no U.S. elections to worry about, with their troubling
possibility of politicians running on the popular platform of
curbing corporate power.

There were corporate scandals and corporate crime and violence
galore, but none that rated the ongoing banner headlines of Enron
and WorldCom.

Indeed, the ongoing prosecutions of individuals associated with
corporate financial scandals enabled Big Business and its apologists
to claim there had actually been a crackdown on corporate crime.

All leaving corporations free to buy legislation, profiteer,
pollute, poison, and mistreat workers without restraint.

Benefiting from the spike in oil prices associated with the tragedy
of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ExxonMobil recorded the most
profitable year any company has ever achieved.

Thirty years ago, when the oil giants profiteered in the wake of the
first oil embargo, almost half the U.S. Senate voted to break up the
integrated oil companies. In 2005, just 40 of 435 members of the
House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor the leading
legislation calling for a much more modest approach, imposing a
windfall profits tax on the oil companies. Eight members of the
Senate co-sponsored the leading windfall profits bill there.

In the U.S. Congress, corporations were able to ram through
limitations on victims' rights to sue corporate perpetrators
(mislabeled class action "reform"), the NAFTA-expanding Central
American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and an energy bill that
deregulates electric utilities and actually gives tax breaks to the
oil industry, among many other government gifts.

Perhaps nothing revealed Big Business's cockiness more than the
Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations' efforts to
undermine the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Sarbanes-Oxley imposes
very modest anti-fraud requirements on corporations. It was the only
reform legislation passed after the Enron and related financial
scandals.

These corporations will never stop on their own.

Asked to comment on a recent Harris poll that found 90 percent of
people in the United States believe corporations have too much power
in Washington, D.C., Hank Cox, a spokesperson for the National
Association of Manufacturers, replies, "That's a perception fostered
by the news media and the entertainment industry, and if they really
had any idea of how little power corporations have they would be
astounded."

The corporations will never give up power, unless forced to do so by
the people.

Where to start?

No better place than the 10 worst corporations of 2005, presented
herewith in alphabetical order:

BP

In November 2005, BP said that it expects to spend as much as $8
billion in alternative-energy projects, including solar, wind,
hydrogen, and carbon-abatement technology, over 10 years.

It is running two-page ads in major U.S. newspapers touting itself
as a leader in alternative energy.

This is part of a high-energy campaign to cover up BP's dirty tricks
that flow from its oil business.

To do so, it has to cover up its shoddy operations on the North
Slope of Alaska, where it is seeking to bust open the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, and its reckless operations
at its refineries around the globe.

In March, 15 workers were incinerated, and more than 170 injured,
following an explosion at BP's sprawling refinery in Texas City,
Texas.

It was the third fatal accident at the Texas City BP facility in the
last four years.

In September 2004, two workers were burned to death and another was
seriously injured.

In 2001, a maintenance worker at the facility died after falling
into a tank that had been shut down. Nationwide, BP's facilities
have had more than 3,565 accidents since 1990, ranking first in the
nation, according to a 2004 report by the Texas Public Interest
Research Group (TexPIRG).

BP has admitted it was at fault in the Texas City explosion. "We
regret that our mistakes have caused so much suffering," said Ross
Pillari, president of BP Products North America, after the company
had completed an interim investigation in May.

"We apologize to those who were harmed and to the Texas City
community," said Pillari. " We cannot change the past or repair all
the damage this incident has done. We can assure that those who were
injured and the families of those who died receive financial support
and compensation. Our goal is to provide fair compensation without
the need for lawsuits or lengthy court proceedings."

There is a case to be made that BP engaged in criminal reckless
homicide, or involuntary manslaughter. To prove this, the District
Attorney in Galveston County, where the deaths occurred, would have
to find that BP and its executives consciously disregarded "a
substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death will occur."

We believe that the families of the dead deserve a full-blown
reckless homicide investigation by the District Attorney in
Galveston County.

When asked about this, Mohamed Ibrahim, the first assistant district
attorney in Galveston County, told us that his office had opened no
such criminal investigation into the BP matter. "We have no reason
to believe at this point that it was anything but an unfortunate
industrial accident," Ibrahim said.

"If OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] came to
us and said it was a result of criminal recklessness, we would look
at an investigation," he added.

In September, OSHA fined the company $21 million for violating
federal OSHA law. There was no criminal referral. Lesser workplace
crimes this year have resulted in criminal convictions against
smaller companies. BP gets off because it is a large multinational?

On the North Slope of Alaska, BP continues to muscle the political
machinery to get its way.

Its reckless operations there — including unreported oil spills —
will someday end up in an environmental disaster, long predicted by
oil industry critic Charles Hamel.

BP is eager to portray itself as the good guy oil company, but it is
not eager to answer tough questions.

In October, U.S. News and World Report held a press conference to
announce "America's Best Leaders 2005."

The press event was paid for by BP.

BP's guy at the door wouldn't let us in.

No questions about corporate crime allowed.

Delphi

"I want you to view what is happening at Delphi as a flash point, a
test case, for all the economic and social trends that are on a
collision course in our country and around the globe," Delphi CEO
Steve Miller told BusinessWeek in October.

Miller's view of how those trends should be resolved: with a
leveling down of worker wages to the lowest common denominator, and
provision of huge windfalls for executives.

In October, Miller took his company into bankruptcy, with the
explicit purpose of trashing the social contract between unionized
auto workers in the United States and the auto industry. He proposed
slashing worker wages from $27 an hour to a mere 10 bucks.

In a fit of staggering arrogance, Miller and Delphi simultaneously
proposed huge bonuses for company executives.

Delphi is the world's largest auto parts supplier. In a strange
arrangement, it was spun off from General Motors in 1998. Roughly
half of its business remains supplying GM. Many critics say GM
separated Delphi for the purpose of dumping unwanted expenses on the
new company. But GM agreed to guarantee certain Delphi obligations —
including healthcare and pension costs — in the event the new
company was unable to meet them.

Delphi enters bankruptcy not in any severe financial crisis, but
having experienced steady losses over the last several years.

In its bankruptcy filings, the company stated that three problems
are driving down revenues: the wages and benefits guaranteed under
existing union contracts, declining sales from GM, Delphi's main
buyer, and rising commodity prices. Through bankruptcy, it sought to
address only the first issue — that is, to attack the living
standards of its workers.

Delphi workers have reacted with predictable dismay and anger. "It's
difficult to see our middle-income jobs go away like this," said Ron
Garrett, 54, who has worked at Delphi's Dayton facility for 21
years. "It's very tough to see them go out the door." Workers have
picketed and demonstrated against Delphi's proposals.

Their outrage has been stoked by the executive compensation plan
Delphi has proposed in bankruptcy court.

Although Steve Miller has touted the fact that he has agreed to
accept a salary of just $1 a year (he also received a signing bonus
of $3 million after taking over the company in the summer, and
$750,000 in salary before making the $1 pledge, and is due an
unspecified bonus from the board of directors when the company
emerges from bankruptcy), the executive class at Delphi will make
out great.

Delphi has proposed in bankruptcy court through a "Key Employee
Compensation Plan" that executives be given $43 million in incentive
bonuses during the two years the company expects to undergo
reorganization, that the top 500 executives pocket $88 million when
the company emerges from bankruptcy, and that the top 600 get 10
percent of the shares of the post-bankruptcy Delphi.

Rationales for this?

Well, the company argued in bankruptcy court, "many of the company's
incentive-based compensation programs failed to provide salaried and
executive workforce with total compensation that is competitive with
the industry norm."

Got that?

Because the company did poorly, executives made less money. The new
plan is intended to remedy this perceived inequity.

Unfortunately, Delphi proposes the opposite deal for its workers.

Also, "the commencement of a bankruptcy case heightens employee
concerns regarding possible job loss, and often increases employee
responsibilities, creates longer hours, and imposes other burdens of
an employer's status as a debtor-in-possession." In the dire time of
bankruptcy, the company needs the "continued efforts and loyalty" of
its executives, so they need big bonuses.

Workers' "continued efforts and loyalty" are apparently thought
available on the cheap.

Dupont

So, we kill Stanley Tookie Williams for killing four people.

And we fine DuPont $16.5 million for two decades' worth of covering
up company studies that showed it was polluting drinking water and
newborn babies with an indestructible chemical that causes cancer,
birth defects and other serious health problems in animals.

Sounds like rough justice to us.

A public interest group in Washington, D.C., the Environmental
Working Group (EWG), brought the disaster to the attention of the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

And the EPA sued DuPont in a civil action in July 2004.

No crime here, right?

EWG reported on the case of Glenn Evers.

Evers was a DuPont employee of 22 years, one of the company's top
technical experts and the chair of an invitation-only committee of
its 40 best scientists and technical experts.

He holds six patents, and his work has, to date, made the company an
estimated $250 million in after-tax profits. Evers was, by his own
description, a dedicated "company man."

According to EWG, he was also the company's top chemical engineer
involved with designing and developing new uses of grease-resistant,
or perfluorinated, chemical-based coating for paper food packaging.

Chemicals from these coatings and related sources are now in the
blood of 95 percent of people in the United States.

DuPont has claimed that it does not know how the chemicals got
there — and that it is not aware that the company's product is
responsible.

"If we had any reason to believe that [there] was a safety issue for
fluorinated telomers-based product, we wouldn't have commercialized
them," DuPont Director of Planning and Technology Robert Ritchie
told the Wilmington News Journal in 2003.

But Glenn Evers told EWG how his former employer hid for decades
that it was polluting people's blood with a hyper-persistent
chemical associated with the grease-resistant coatings on paper food
packaging. (For a complete history, see www.ewg.org.)

The EPA boasted that the $16.5 million fine was the largest
administrative fine it has ever levied under a weak toxic chemical
law.

But as EWG noted, the fine is less than half of 1 percent of
DuPont's after-tax annual profits from the Teflon product when
averaged over the 20-year cover-up.

"What's the appropriate fine for a $25 billion company that for
decades hid vital health information about a toxic chemical that now
contaminates every man, woman and child in the United States?" asked
EWG President Ken Cook. "What's the proper dollar penalty for a
pollutant that will never break down, and now finds its way into
polar bears in the Arctic and human babies in their mothers' wombs?
We're pretty sure it's not $16 million, even if that is a record
amount under a federal law that everyone acknowledges is extremely
weak."

We're pretty sure it's not just a fine.

The poison is in the blood of 95 percent of people in the United
States.

How many cancers has it caused?

ExxonMobil

Here is what ExxonMobil has to say about global warming:

ExxonMobil recognizes that although scientific evidence remains
inconclusive, the potential impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on
society and ecosystems may prove to be significant.
And this:

The earth has experienced a warming trend in global surface air
temperatures during the twentieth century, but the cause of this
trend and whether it is abnormal remain in dispute. Although recent
temperatures are elevated, they are not unprecedented in the
geological record, which shows considerable variation as well as
previous periods that were as warm as or warmer than today.
Here is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a
UN-affiliated grouping of 1,800 of the world's climatologists —
often needled for the extraordinarily cautious language it employs —
says about global warming:

The Earth's climate system has demonstrably changed on both global
and regional scales since the pre-industrial era, with some of these
changes attributable to human activities.
Globally, it is very likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade,
and 1998 the warmest year, in the instrumental record (since 1861).

There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed
over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

Recent regional changes in climate, particularly increases in
temperature, have already affected hydrological systems and
terrestrial and marine ecosystems in many parts of the world.

The rising socio-economic costs related to weather damage and to
regional variations in climate suggest increasing vulnerability to
climate change.

The projected rate of warming [over the twenty-first century] is
very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000
years.

The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon
developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and
thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to
adequate food, clean water and other resources.

Unfortunately, so far, the cynical, profit-motivated, short-term and
self-interested views of ExxonMobil have mattered more than the
evidence-based perspective of the IPCC.

That's because the most profitable corporation on Earth has lots of
political power and is skilled at amplifying its views, and the
climatologists do not and are not.

ExxonMobil has funded dozens of front groups, think tanks, industry
associations, corporate-friendly research centers, and purportedly
independent scientists to spread its denialism. Greenpeace has
documented the company's support for a web of more than 100
organizations — from the American Council on Science and Health to
the Washington Legal Foundation — that work to cast doubt on global
warming science and likely consequences.

It hasn't hurt ExxonMobil to have a (failed) oilman and the former
head of Halliburton, an oil services company, as president and vice
president of the richest, most powerful and biggest greenhouse-gas-
emitting country, the United States. The company was not without
influence during the Clinton administration, but has been able to
gain complete access and shape policy during the Bush era, in ways
large and small.

ExxonMobil, for example, in 2002 urged the Bush administration to
push to have Dr. Robert Watson removed as chair of the IPCC,
according to company documents obtained by the Natural Resources
Defense Council. Soon after, the Bush administration announced its
opposition to the respected scientist who ExxonMobil said had
a "personal agenda," and a new chair was selected.

The company has also collaborated with the administration on the
basic denialism project. A former lobbyist for the American
Petroleum Institute and chief of staff of the White House's Council
on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, resigned in June 2005 after
the New York Times revealed he had edited government reports to
challenge the link between carbon emissions and global warming. A
week later, Cooney was on ExxonMobil's payroll.

ExxonMobil is not just fiddling while the world burns. The company
is raking in record profits — more than $36 billion in 2005, the
highest ever earned for a single company in one year — as it
benefited especially from the spike in oil prices after Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita.

Given the company and the oil industry's obscene profits, many are
calling for a windfall profits tax. (If just 3 percent of
ExxonMobil's 2005 profits were taxed and invested in solar energy
technology development, it would constitute a quintupling of the
U.S. government solar R&D budget.)

But lubricated with oil industry cash, the Bush administration and
Congress have chosen what might generously be called a different
path. In July, the Congress passed an energy bill that showered tax
breaks and other goodies on the industry — more than $4 billion
worth, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

ExxonMobil is completely unashamed about this state of affairs.
Outgoing CEO Lee Raymond testified before Congress about gas price
hikes and industry super-profits in November. "If we are to continue
to serve our consumers and your constituents, corporate and
government leaders alike cannot afford to simply follow the ups and
downs of energy prices," he told a Senate Committee. The basic
message: don't tax us more, we need the huge earnings to find more
oil to meet rising energy demand. Alternative energy is nice, but
not serious.

Of course, it is not only by blocking efforts to address global
warming that ExxonMobil is making the world a worse place.

It continues to stonewall on paying roughly $5 billion to fishing
communities and Native Alaskans in punitive damages assessed for the
impact of the Exxon Valdez spill.

It is lobbying hard for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.

And through a major oil development and pipeline in Chad, it is
funding a dictatorial government that is using oil money to buy
weapons. Amnesty International says that the ExxonMobil-led
consortium operating the Chad project negotiated a deal enabling the
oil companies "to effectively sidestep the rule of law in Chad and
Cameroon, and limits the ability of those countries to develop
effective human rights protection for their citizens over the next
several decades."

For more details on ExxonMobil's sordid performance, see
ExposeExxon.org, a website maintained by a coalition of
environmental and public interest groups seeking to pressure
ExxonMobil to "shed its past as an irresponsible oil company."

Ford

One block from the White House, on Washington, D.C.'s 15th Street,
Northwest, embedded in the sidewalk, in front of The Old Ebbitt
Grill, is a bronze medallion honoring the life of Booker T.
Washington.

The medallion has a picture of Booker T. and reads:

"As an influential African American, living in a time of escalating
segregation, Booker T. Washington negotiated a course between
accommodation and progress in advocating greater civil rights for
blacks. His philosophy of `request' not `protest' allowed him to
gain the respect of presidents and politicians, but sometimes
alienated those of his own race. Washington believed education was a
cornerstone for the advancement of blacks and his efforts to raise
money for his beloved Tuskegee Institute helped secure its well-
deserved reputation as a leading educational institution for African
Americans."
"My life work is the promotion of education of my race."

— Booker T. Washington
Sponsored by Ford Motor Company

The Booker T. medallion is one of a growing list of U.S. volunteer
pioneers being honored by the Points of Light Foundation.

Ultimately, the medallions will form a mile-long pathway in the
heart of Washington, D.C.

There are now 20 medallions embedded on the sidewalks of 15th Street
and G Streets in downtown Washington.

The monument — known as The Extra Mile — was dedicated on October
14, 2005 with great fanfare in a ceremony attended by former
President George Bush and many extended family members of the
honorees.

Each medallion is sponsored by a major U.S. corporation.

The one honoring Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers
of America, was also made possible by Ford Motor Company.

His plaque reads in part: "Under his leadership of nonviolent
protest, the UFW was able to secure improved wages and benefits,
more humane living and working conditions, and better job security
for some of the poorest workers in America."

Obviously, the company is no fan of Cesar Chavez — or Booker T. for
that matter.

Ford is doing it to buff its image, as they say.

Why?

For one, officials in New Jersey are calling for an investigation of
the company for environmental crimes.

It turns out that over a period of years, Ford Motor Company dumped
millions of gallons of paint sludge into a now-residential area of
northern New Jersey.

The paint sludge was from the Ford Motor Co.'s factory in Mahwah,
once the largest auto assembly plant in the nation, according to an
investigative report published in October in the Bergen Record.

The Record has put out a series of investigative reports on the
dumping. They are compiled at www.toxiclegacy.com.

According to the series, before closing in 1980, the plant spat out
six million vehicles and an ocean of contaminants — including enough
paint sludge to fill two of the three tubes of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Millions of gallons of paint sludge were dumped in the remote
section of Ringwood, which is now a residential area.

Children played in it.

Streams washed over it.

And early this year, New Jersey officials announced some cancer
rates in the area are unusually high.

Tests commissioned by the Record found lead, arsenic, and xylenes in
the sludge — some at 100 times the levels the government considers
safe.

The Record found that Ford repeatedly dumped in poor communities and
failed to clean up its mess.

Reporters with the Record dug up documents showing that Ford
executives knew as early as 34 years ago that its waste had
contaminated a stream that feeds the Wanaque Reservoir.

The documents show that the company tried to evade responsibility by
presenting tainted land as a "gift" to the state, the paper
reported.

The Record interviewed truckers who hauled Ford's waste — they say
that mob-controlled contractors dumped anywhere they could get away
with.

They bribed, threatened, even murdered to maintain control of Ford's
waste, the paper reported.

Millions of gallons of hazardous waste vanished in their hands.

According to the Record, Ford says its dumping in Ringwood was
legal.

Ford says others dumped in Ringwood and share responsibility for the
pollution.

Well, let's have a federal prosecutor decide.

There are points of light. (www.extramile.us)

And there are points of darkness.(www.toxiclegacy.com)

Getting cheap publicity by putting your name on a plaque is one
thing.

Paying for the human and environmental wreckage you've caused in
northern New Jersey is something else. (Not to mention matching your
rhetorical concern with climate change and environmental well-being
with company actions that help take the planet off the SUV-hardened
fast track to planetary overheating. See www.jumpstartford.com.)

In honor of Booker T., we "request" that the U.S. Attorney in Newark
take seriously the New Jersey hazardous waste case and open a
criminal investigation of the company.

Halliburton

Try as we might, we couldn't keep Halliburton off a list of the
worst companies two years running.

The company has effectively made a business model of crooked
dealings with the U.S. government. Getting caught, over and over,
doesn't seem to affect things much.

Here are the company's lowlights for the year, via HalliburtonWatch:
January 10: Halliburton admitted that it expanded economic relations
with Iran despite the Bush administration's insistence that the
nation finances terrorism.

February 8: The U.S. Army agreed to pay Halliburton's KBR subsidiary
nearly $2 billion for work that nobody can prove ever took place.
Army auditors determined in 2004 that 43 percent of the $4.5 billion
requested by Halliburton under a major contract could not be
verified under normal accounting procedures. Despite recommendations
to withhold 15 percent of payment from Halliburton, the Pentagon
decided to pay the company what it requested. "This is indeed great
news for KBR," said Andy Lane, chief operating officer of
Halliburton, in a news release. "The Army and KBR have agreed to
continue working closely together to resolve any remaining billing
issues."

March 2: The U.S. Justice Department opened a criminal inquiry into
possible bid-rigging on foreign contracts by Halliburton, the
company revealed. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the company said "information has been uncovered" that
former employees of KBR "may have engaged in coordinated bidding
with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction
projects and that such coordination possibly began as early as the
mid-1980s." These bribes involve contracts in Nigeria, and occurred
in the 1990s, when Vice President Cheney headed Halliburton.

March 14: Pentagon auditors found another $108 million in
overcharges by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary for provision of oil in
Iraq, according to a disclosure by Representative Henry Waxman, D-
California.

March 16: The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) will investigate complaints by one of its
engineers who said the agency purposely tampered with environmental
science in order to shield a lucrative drilling technique, pioneered
by Halliburton and known as hydraulic fracturing, from pollution
laws.

April: the State Department issued a report concluding that
Halliburton's repair work in Iraqi oil fields is plagued by serious
cost overruns and "poor performance."

June 29: At a Congressional hearing, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, then
the senior contracting specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers,
testified, "I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to
contracts awarded to KBR [Halliburton's subsidiary] represents the
most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the
course of my professional career." In August, Greenhouse would be
demoted for her testimony.

At the hearing, Representative Waxman released a previously secret
military audit criticizing an extra $1.4 billion in "questioned"
and "unsupported" expenditures by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary in
Iraq.

July 22: Halliburton announced that its KBR division, responsible
for carrying out Pentagon contracts, saw profits jump 284 percent
during the second quarter of the year.

September 8: The Washington Post reported that former head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Joseph Allbaugh, now a
lobbyist for Halliburton, is in Louisiana helping his clients obtain
disaster relief contracts.

But Allbaugh insisted he's not in Louisiana seeking contracts for
clients. "I don't do government contracts," he told the Post.
Instead, he said he's "just trying to lend my shoulder to the wheel,
trying to coordinate some private-sector support that the government
always asks for."

September 15: Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey reiterated his
call for Vice President Dick Cheney to forfeit his continuing
financial interest in Halliburton. Lautenberg points out that
Cheney's Halliburton options are worth more than $9 million. Cheney
insists he has no ongoing financial entanglement with Halliburton
because he will donate the profits from stock sales to charity.

September 20: Former KBR employees and water quality specialists Ben
Carter and Ken May told HalliburtonWatch that KBR knowingly exposes
troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq's Euphrates
River. One internal KBR email provided to HalliburtonWatch says
that, for "possibly a year," the level of contamination at one camp
was two times the normal level for untreated water.

October: Senator Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, charged that a
Halliburton subcontractor had hired as many as 100 undocumented
immigrants to clean up areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The
president of the subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, is Retired U.S.
Navy Admiral David Nash. Nash was head of the U.S. office in Baghdad
which handed out Iraq contracts. "There is no connection between the
hurricane-related work we are doing in Mississippi and Louisiana and
Nash's involvement in Iraq," a BE&K spokesperson told Reuters.

November 15: Halliburton's KBR subsidiary and its subcontractors
illegally abuse immigrants and undocumented workers in hurricane-
damaged areas of the Gulf Coast, Roberto Lovato of Salon.com
reported.

In an article titled "Gulf Coast Slaves," Lovato writes of his
travels throughout the storm-ravaged region where KBR's cleanup
contracts currently amount to $124.9 million.

He observed "squalid trailer parks where up to 19 unpaid, unfed, and
undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per
person, per week." Many suffer from work-related health problems,
including diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts, and bruises acquired
while working for KBR. Halliburton denies violating labor laws, but
immigration enforcement officials discovered undocumented workers at
the Belle Chasse facility in October.

November 19: The Washington Post reported that a criminal
investigation of Army practices that allegedly favored Halliburton
over competitors during the pre-war contract award process has been
referred to the Department of Justice (DOJ). This probe follows on
allegations made by Army Corps of Engineers whistleblower Bunnatine
Greenhouse.

In a written statement to the Post, Halliburton said it "continues
to cooperate fully with the Justice Department's investigation of
certain issues pertaining to our work in Iraq." "As the
investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment
further at this time."

December 2: The Army Corps of Engineers paid $38 million in bonuses
to Halliburton for oil transport and repair in Iraq even though the
Pentagon's own auditors declared $169 million in costs for the work
to be "unreasonable" and "unsupported," Representative Henry Waxman
revealed.

December 27: The Chicago Tribune reported that Pentagon contractor
trade groups are blocking a Pentagon proposal prohibiting defense
contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution
and labor. The contractors do not want to be responsible for
trafficking undertaken by their subcontractors. Halliburton
subsidiaries have been linked to trafficking-related controversies.

After the Tribune reported in October on the kidnapping of a dozen
Nepali men and their transport to work for Halliburton
subcontractors in Iraq, Halliburton said it was not responsible for
the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors.

The U.S. Army, for its part, said questions about alleged
misconduct "by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those
firms, as these are not Army issues."

KPMG

It is all about perception, isn't it?

KPMG was charged in August with one felony count of conspiracy.

The Attorney General of the United States said that KPMG "has
admitted to criminal wrongdoing in the largest-ever tax shelter
fraud."

Yet, there was no conviction. There was no plea agreement.

For individuals, partners, or executives who commit major crimes —
yes. If there is a crime, there is an indictment. And there is a
plea agreement. Or there is a trial.

But for major U.S. corporations or other large entities, like KPMG,
if you commit a crime, you get a prosecution deferred.

Now, it's almost automatic.

Ask Skadden Arps partner Robert Bennett. He's the king of deferred
prosecutions.

At the insistence of Bob Bennett, KPMG gets a deferred prosecution
agreement.

Why?

Because if you indict KPMG, you might drive it out of business, à la
Arthur Andersen.

But no matter, you can charge the company with a felony. And the
Attorney General can get on national television and say that KPMG
has admitted to criminal wrongdoing.

The U.S. Attorney in New York wanted to pursue criminal charges. But
he was overruled by his higher ups at the Justice Department.

There is no doubt about it. KPMG engaged in criminal wrongdoing.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said so. But because of
possible "collateral consequences," there is no conviction.

Corporate crime is now crime without conviction.

It's all about perception.

What collateral consequences? What law says that if you are
convicted of a crime, you are driven out of business?

When reporters walked into the seventh floor conference room at the
Justice Department for the press conference announcing the KPMG
deal, they were handed a number of documents.

They were handed the Justice Department press release.

This informed us that KPMG has admitted to criminal wrongdoing and
agreed to pay $456 million in fines, restitution and penalties as
part of an agreement to defer prosecution of the firm.

The press release also informed us that "in the largest criminal tax
case ever filed, KPMG has admitted that it engaged in a fraud that
generated at least $11 billion in phony tax losses which, according
to court papers, cost the United States at least $2.5 billion in
evaded taxes."

Reporters were also handed a tough statement by IRS Commissioner
Mark Everson. "Simply stated, if you had a multi-million dollar tax
liability, KPMG would find a way to wipe it out even when the firm's
own experts thought the transactions would not survive IRS
scrutiny," Everson said. "The only purpose of these abusive deals
was to further enrich the already wealthy and to line the pockets of
KPMG partners."

"Since the income tax first came into being under President Lincoln
during the Civil War, the wealthy have always paid more than average
citizens," Everson said. "But not according to KPMG. KPMG's actions
were a direct assault on our progressive system of income taxation,
and, left unchecked, would have badly eroded the faith of hard
working, taxpaying Americans in the fairness of government itself."

"At some point such conduct passes from clever accounting and
lawyering to theft from the people," Everson said. "We simply can't
tolerate flagrant abuse of the law and of professional obligations
by tax practitioners, particularly those associated with so-called
blue chip firms like KPMG that, by virtue of their prominence, set
the standard of conduct for others. Accountants and attorneys should
be the pillars of our system of taxation, not the architects of its
circumvention."

They can't tolerate this grand theft, but they did.

If they didn't tolerate it, they would have indicted KPMG and forced
a guilty plea.

Reporters were also handed an indictment of eight KPMG partners and
an outside tax attorney. These were the nine individuals behind the
crime, prosecutors said.

The entity gets a deferred prosecution for criminal activities. It
must pay $456 million in fines and restitution. But there is no loss
of freedom to operate.

The individuals face a loss of freedom. That's what prison is all
about.

Why the double standard?

True, the entity must hire a monitor, in this case, former
Securities and Exchange Commissioner Richard Breeden.

But who pays Breeden? KPMG.

How much? KPMG decides.

KPMG's public response to the deferred prosecution makes clear the
firm does not view the deal as imposing serious punishment (let
alone deterrence). It was as if the company was required to stay
after school for a day.

"KPMG LLP is pleased to have reached a resolution with the
Department of Justice. We regret the past tax practices that were
the subject of the investigation. KPMG is a better and stronger firm
today, having learned much from this experience," said KPMG LLP
Chair and CEO Timothy P. Flynn. "The resolution of this matter
allows KPMG to confidently face the future as we provide high
quality audit, tax and advisory services to our large multinational,
middle market and government clients."

What documents were reporters not handed at the Justice Department
news conference?

They were not handed a 10-page, single-spaced statement of facts
that laid out the criminal activity in detail. And they were not
handed the information charging KPMG with a felony. They came only
later, after the Attorney General was asked, Where's the charging
document against KPMG?

Roche

Until recently, Swiss drug maker Roche's sales of Tamiflu were doing
dismally. (Roche makes the drug on license from the patent holder,
the San Francisco-based company Gilead.)

In 2001, sales of Tamiflu, an anti-viral intended to alleviate the
flu, were $76 million. Health advocates criticized the drug as
offering few benefits, and encouraged people concerned about the flu
to instead get a flu shot.

Then along came avian influenza, and the threat of an outbreak of
bird flu among humans. There is no available vaccine for bird flu,
and Tamiflu appears to be the best available pharmaceutical defense
for those exposed to the disease.

For now, avian flu is not communicative among humans. More than 150
people have been infected with bird flu since 2003, when the first
bird-to-human transmission was recorded, and more than half of those
infected have died.

Many public health experts believe that an outbreak among humans is
virtually inevitable.

An outbreak could have extremely dire consequences. In the United
States, the Centers for Disease Control reports that, a "`medium-
level' pandemic could cause 89,000 to 207,000 deaths, 314,000 to
734,000 hospitalizations, 18 to 42 million outpatient visits, and
another 20 to 47 million people being sick. Between 15 percent and
35 percent of the U.S. population could be affected by an influenza
pandemic, and the economic impact could range between $71.3 and
$166.5 billion." The illness and death toll would be much worse in
developing countries.

Slowly, the message has begun to penetrate government officials' and
the public's consciousness, and governments are, very belatedly,
looking to stockpile Tamiflu in advance of a potential outbreak.

That has provided a windfall for Roche. 2005 sales of Tamiflu are
expected to top $1 billion.

It has also created a bit of a problem for Roche, because it cannot
make enough Tamiflu to meet demand.

Given the public health urgency of stockpiling the drug, Roche could
have simply announced that it would license other companies to
manufacture it, conditioned on payment of a reasonable royalty.

Instead, it chose a different course.

With no prospect of the company satisfying growing demand, it
announced that it would not license others to produce the medicine.
Nor could others easily make the drug, the company claimed. It said
that the manufacturing process was extremely complicated and
dangerous, and that the key ingredient to make the drug was in short
supply.

As it turned out, all of these claims turned out to be deeply
misleading, or worse.

As late as October 13, Roche insisted that it would not license the
product to competitors, and that it was too complicated for them to
make. These claims deterred officials at the World Health
Organization from pushing for compulsory licenses enabling
competitors to manufacture Tamiflu. ("There will be no way in the
next two years a company would be able to produce generic Tamiflu,"
the head of WHO's influenza program said on October 6.)

Roche "fully intends to remain the sole manufacturer of Tamiflu,''
company spokesperson Terry Hurley told reporters. He said that the
company would not reveal production figures, on the grounds that
such information was "commercially sensitive." All drug makers are
able to track other manufacturers' sales through commercial
databases — but the information is not made available to public
officials. Hurley also offered the company line on the complexity of
making the drug. Manufacturing Tamiflu involves 10 complicated
steps, and would take two-to-three years for a new entrant, he
alleged.

But October 13 would be the last day Roche could make these claims.

On October 14, the New York Times reported that the Indian drug
maker Cipla had reverse-engineered the drug two weeks earlier, and
would have small commercial quantities available by early 2006.

With the spread of bird flu being reported daily, countries in
Southeast Asia, where the epidemic among birds originated, started
clamoring for the right to acquire greater quantities of Tamiflu.
Following Cipla's announcement, many other firms soon said they
could produce the drug as well.

Taiwan's National Health Research Institutes announced it had
figured out how to synthesize Tamiflu in September — in 18 days.

In Thailand, the Government Pharmaceutical Organization announced in
November that it had capacity to manufacture 1 million Tamiflu
tablets in 10 days.

Roche's claim that making Tamiflu involved a dangerous and
potentially explosive step also was revealed to be an exaggeration.
Reported the Wall Street Journal: "that step — which involves a
chemical reaction with sodium azide, whose explosive potential has
made it the common choice in automobile air bags — turns out to be
relatively routine, according to some pharmaceutical executives and
scientists familiar with the chemistry. Although it is still
dangerous, the process is well within the abilities of university
chemistry labs, let alone the world's top generic-drug makers, these
scientists say."

The shortage of a key ingredient in Tamiflu also proved a chimera.
The drug is made with shikimic acid, which is found in the Chinese
plant star anise (used as a spice in Chinese cooking). The limited
supply of star anise placed a constraint on how much Tamiflu could
be made, Roche had claimed. But it turns out that a Michigan State
University professor had developed a technique to make shikimic acid
without star anise — and that Roche had been using the technique
under license for years.

With it increasingly plain that dozens of generic companies were
capable of manufacturing Tamiflu, Southeast Asian countries were
prepared to issue compulsory licenses to enable new manufacturers to
start making the product.

With its posture of "fully intend[ing] to remain the sole
manufacturer of Tamiflu" no longer tenable, Roche announced it would
license other companies to make the drug. In December, it said it
would enter intense negotiations with a dozen firms.

Many countries, it turned out, did not need to seek a license from
Roche, compulsory or otherwise. As countries began moves to
authorize generic competition by issuing compulsory licenses, Roche
explained that Tamiflu was not patented in those countries. The
governments themselves did not know what was patented, and Roche had
conveniently let them operate under misperceptions that patents had
been granted. This occurred in the Philippines and Indonesia, among
other countries.

While production is expanded — and in addition to the generic
entrance into the market, Roche has announced it has increased its
manufacturing capacity 10 times over — there remains a shortfall to
meet the stockpiling standard urged by many public health officials.
The U.S. stockpile, for example, is sufficient to provide
medications to less than 2 percent of people in the United States —
about a tenth the coverage recommended by public health officials.

"Roche has had plenty of time to figure out what its options are
regarding the licensing of the patents," says James Love, director
of the Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Project on Technology. "There
are too many potential suppliers to undertake individual
negotiations with each company. Roche needs to simply identify the
relevant terms it will impose on generic suppliers and offer open
licenses to anyone who can comply."

If Roche refuses such an approach, says Love, "governments should
issue the appropriate compulsory licenses in order to assure the
competitive generics sector they can legally sell generic copies of
the drug."

Suez

One of the continuous challenges of Big Business is to develop
stories that explain why the private sector is good and efficient
and the public sector is bad, wasteful, and incompetent.

Given the scandals, criminality, and wastefulness that pervades so
much of corporate activity, this is no easy matter. It certainly
poses a major challenge for Suez, the French services giant that is
one of the world's largest private water companies.

Suez has been a leading purveyor and beneficiary of the global trend
of water privatization — the selling off of public water systems to
private entities, or the turning over of control and management of
public systems to corporations such as Suez.

In negotiations over the World Trade Organization's services
agreements, Suez has worked through trade associations to ensure
that the European Union works to pry open water service markets
around the world to private and foreign corporations.

And the company has worked hand in glove with the World Bank to
encourage developing countries to turn control over their water
systems to private business.

However, Suez walks a fine line on the public-private divide. The
company wants to extract profits from water service provision, but
it wants to limit its investment obligations and maintain strong
public bodies that can impose high prices on consumers, and make
them pay. And, if and when things go bad, it wants to blame public
agencies.

Thus Suez Chair and CEO Gerard Mestrallet talks not about
privatization, but "public-private partnerships."

"The success of public-private partnerships rests primarily on a
sharing of roles between those parties whose skills are best suited
to fulfilling them," he says. "It is perfectly clear that the
decision-makers in these arrangements are the public authorities,
and whether or not they seek the expertise of the private sector is
entirely their decision."

To those who complain about the failure of Suez and other companies
to expand and provide water service to the poor and lower-income
groups, Mestrallet's line is clear: blame the public sector. "At
present, 95 percent of water services worldwide are provided by the
public sector, so it is hardly the fault of the private sector if
1.2 billion people have no access to water and 2 billion people have
no sanitation services."

Things look a little different in the municipalities and regions
where Suez has had responsibility for water provision, however.

As Public Citizen's Water for All Campaign (now part of a new
organization, Food and Water Watch) shows in an April 2005 corporate
profile, Suez has raised service charges, underinvested and
mismanaged water projects around the globe. City after city has
found out the hard way what exactly Suez has in mind by "public-
private partnership."

In El Alto, Bolivia, mass demonstrations in January 2005 led the
Bolivian government to cancel a water privatization contract with
Aguas del Illimani, of which Suez is a major shareholder. "The Suez
contract is a classic example of `ring fencing,' where the contract
obligates service delivery only in specific areas of the city,"
explains the Water for All Campaign in its report. "What is termed
the `served area' in the Suez contract focuses water service
provision on profitable customers and removes obligation from
extending service to the newest and most marginal settlements — the
areas most in need of improvements." For those who did seek new
connections, the price was $445, more than eight times the monthly
minimum wage. With the contract cancelled, Suez is threatening to
sue Bolivia for $90 million in lost investments and future profits.

In Atlanta, the Suez subsidiary United Water signed a 20-year deal
to operate the city's water system. Maintenance backlogs
accumulated, with broken water lines sometimes taking two months to
fix. United Water improperly billed the city. Although privatization
was supposed to avert a rate hike, combined water and sewer bills
rose by about 25 percent. After only five years, Atlanta opted out
of the contract.

In Manila, the Philippines, pressure by the World Bank led the
government to privatize the water system to two concessions, one led
by Suez, in 1997. Within five years, water rates for Manila
residents had tripled. Both the Suez and other concession won
contract amendments that would weaken their performance
requirements. Still, because the value of the Philippines peso
dropped sharply with the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s,
Suez wanted steeper rate increases. When the Manila authorities
refused — the drop in the exchange rate of the peso didn't mean
Manila residents had more pesos to spend — Suez sought to
renegotiate or abandon the contract. The company claims it is owed
hundreds of millions of dollars by the Manila water authority, while
the government claims Suez owes it money.
"Suez, the world's largest water corporation, places profit over the
human right to water," says Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch.

W.R. Grace

What does it take to get federal prosecutors to indict an asbestos
company for endangering the health of the community?

If 2005 is any guide, it takes activist citizens who pressure their
elected officials to "do something" to bring justice.

It takes conscientious federal officials who shrug off bureaucratic
inertia and demand that justice be done.

And first and foremost, it takes editors and reporters who are
willing to stay with a story.

One such reporter is Andrew Schneider, now deputy assistant managing
editor for investigations at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Before moving to St. Louis, Schneider was a reporter at the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, where, in 1999, he broke the story of how W.R.
Grace's vermiculite mine was killing its workers and residents.

He has written a couple hundred stories about Grace since then and
was in Billings, Montana for the February announcement of the
indictment against Grace.

With David McCumber, Schneider is the author of An Air That Kills:
How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National
Scandal.

Schneider told us that federal prosecutors and witnesses
were "terrified" that Bush administration corporate connections
would derail the indictment.

Prosecutors and witnesses were "terrified that it was going to be
derailed at any moment," Schneider said.

"They worried about Vice President Dick Cheney, who of course had
his relationship with Halliburton, which had $4.3 billion worth of
asbestos claims against them," Schneider said. "They worried about
his influence in killing off this prosecution. They worried about
the asbestos legislation on the Hill that President Bush has been
touting. Bush wins the election and goes on the stump talking about
the poor corporations that have been bankrupted by these bogus
cases. And that frightened the hell out of the investigators and a
couple of the prosecutors."

The criminal charge against W.R. Grace and seven of its current or
former executives represents the first time in the history of the
industry that criminal charges have been filed against an asbestos
manufacturer for endangering the lives of residents.

And Schneider says the Grace indictment may well serve as a
blueprint for prosecutors in other areas of the country to
criminally prosecute Grace for endangering the lives of residents in
their jurisdictions.

"How widespread it will be, I don't know," Schneider said. "But I
know there is a great deal of interest from prosecutors in what
actually went down. I'm just basing that on the number of calls that
I received from prosecutors in different states."

The indictment handed down against Grace in Billings charged the
company and seven current and former Grace executives with knowingly
endangering residents of Libby, Montana, and concealing information
about the health affects of its asbestos mining operations.

Federal officials alleged that Grace and its executives, as far back
as the 1970s, attempted to conceal information about the adverse
health effects of the company's vermiculite mining operations and
distribution of vermiculite in the Libby, Montana community.

The seven individual and one corporate defendant were also accused
of obstructing the government's cleanup efforts and wire fraud.

Federal officials said that approximately 1,200 residents in the
Libby area have been identified as suffering from some kind of
asbestos-related abnormality.

Schneider says that more than 200 Libby residents have died from
asbestos-related disease.

"We will not tolerate criminal conduct that is detrimental to the
environment and human health," stated Thomas Sansonetti, assistant
attorney general for the Justice Department's Environment and
Natural Resources Division.

"A human and environmental tragedy has occurred in Libby," said
William Mercer, U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana. "This
prosecution seeks to hold Grace and its executives responsible for
the misconduct alleged."

W.R. Grace operated a vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana from 1963
to 1990, as part of its Construction Products Division, which was
headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vermiculite was used in many common commercial products, including
attic insulation, fireproofing materials, masonry fill, and as an
additive to potting soils and fertilizers.

The vermiculite deposits in Libby were contaminated with a form of
asbestos called tremolite.

Studies have shown that exposure to asbestos can cause life-
threatening diseases, including asbestosis, lung cancer and
mesothelioma.

Federal officials alleged that health studies on residents of the
Libby area show increased incidence of many types of asbestos-
related disease, including a rate of lung cancer that is 30 percent
higher than expected when compared with rates in other areas of
Montana and the United States.

The government claims that the defendants, beginning in the late
1970s, obtained knowledge of the toxic nature of tremolite asbestos
in its vermiculite through internal epidemiological, medical and
toxicological studies, as well as through product testing.

Despite legal requirements under the Toxic Substances Control Act to
turn over to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the
information they possessed, "W.R. Grace and its officials failed to
do so on numerous occasions."

In addition to charging that the company concealed information from
EPA, the indictment alleges that W.R. Grace and its officials also
obstructed the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health
(NIOSH) when it attempted to study the health conditions at the
Libby mine in the 1980s.

Despite their knowledge of the hazards of asbestos, the company and
executives "distributed asbestos-contaminated vermiculite and
permitted it to be distributed throughout the Libby community" by
allowing workers to leave the mine site covered in asbestos dust,
allowing residents to take waste vermiculite for use in their
gardens and distributing vermiculite "tailings" to the Libby schools
for use as foundations for running tracks and an outdoor ice skating
rink.

And after W.R. Grace closed the Libby mine in 1990, it sold asbestos-
contaminated properties to local buyers without disclosing the
nature or extent of the contamination. One of the contaminated
properties was used as a residence and commercial nursery.

In response to the groundbreaking series of articles in 1999 by
Schneider documenting the hazards posed the Grace mine, "W.R. Grace
and its officials continued to mislead and obstruct the government
by not disclosing, as they were required to do by federal law, the
true nature and extent of the asbestos contamination."

Ultimately, the Libby mine and related W.R. Grace properties were
declared a Superfund site by EPA, and as of 2001, EPA had incurred
approximately $55 million in cleanup costs. If convicted, the
defendants face up to 15 years imprisonment on each endangerment
charge, up to five years imprisonment on each of the conspiracy and
obstruction charges, and 10 years on prison on the wire fraud
charge.

W.R. Grace could face fines of up to twice the gain associated with
its alleged misconduct or twice the losses suffered by victims.

Federal officials alleged that Grace enjoyed at least $140 million
in after-tax profits from its mining operations in Libby. Grace also
could be ordered to pay restitution to victims.

Grace denies the charges. In a company statement released after the
indictment was handed down, Grace said it "categorically denies any
criminal wrongdoing."

"As a company and as individuals, we believe that one serious
illness or lost life is one too many. That is why we have taken so
seriously our commitment to our Libby employees and the people of
Libby," the company said.

"The entire W.R. Grace team is supportive of the citizens of Libby.
We hope that our continued and dedicated support for their long-term
health care, combined with their characteristic strength and
determination, will help them through these difficult times."

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate
Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-
based Multinational Monitor. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors of
On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).








________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message 4
   From: "Robert Sterling" robalini@aol.com
   Date: Tue May 2, 2006 11:31am(PDT)
Subject: KN4M 05-02-06

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

The Bible's All Wrong, Again
The surprising Gospel of Judas proves you just can't be too sure
about all that God stuff
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, April 14, 2006

Is it not just tremendous heaps of casually blasphemous fun to
learn, once again and for the thousandth time, that the Bible --
that happy mish-mashed messed-up hodgepodgey cocktail of myths and
folklore and revisionist propaganda and who's-your-daddy reproaches
intermixed with lovely stories of redemption and hope and oh yes sin
and hellfire and death -- is so full of colorful holes it might as
well be a bedsheet from Baghdad Target?

Is it not some sort of curious intellectual delight to hear about
the discovery of yet another Gnostic gospel, this time the Gospel of
Judas, a scruffy ol' tract that's been lying around for years, which
would seem to reveal Christianity's second-favorite villain to be,
well, not at all the sniveling ass who turned Jesus over to the cops
for a fistful of hummus money, but actually a sly and secret
conspirator of his pal Jesus, much in the way Biff helped young
Christ learn Zen Buddhism and martial arts and got him drunk (and
very nearly laid) in Christopher Moore's fabulous "Lamb: The Gospel
According to Biff: Christ's Childhood Pal"? Of course it is.

If the Bible is the gold brick in the American spiritual sidewalk,
then you simply have to ask: What is the relevance in the fact that
Christ might not have been betrayed at all? That he may have
orchestrated his own arrest? What does this say about his divine
wisdom? About Bible stories as a whole? More importantly, how does
the new and improved Judas story pinch the ass of our collective
mythology? Does it or does it not kick out one of the shaky support
beams of the modern Church? Shouldn't it?

The answer, of course, is it depends on just how deep your personal
stick is stuck in the divine mud. Because now more than ever, hard-
core religious and political types think it's all clear and
righteous and straight, that life's moral codes and cultural
guidelines have all been correctly (and homophobically, and
misogynistically) spelled out in grainy divine ink, in ancient
ironclad stories that would deign to tell us how to think and feel
and live.

It's the prevalent, simpleminded ideology: God somehow spoke in
perfect English through some sort of giant megaphone (the original
podcast), which was then beamed straight into a number of deep
believers, whose myriad stories were then perfectly transcribed by
some honest and devout and in no way corrupt or politicized or
sexually frustrated bishop's pen about 2,000 years ago, and there is
no debate don't you dare question its legitimacy and motives lest
you be cast into the hellpit of Sodom. Or maybe, you know, San
Francisco.

These are the Bible literalists, those who blindly take the Bible as
the exact word of God (of whom our president is one, as are many of
his fundamentalist minions), and they only look at discoveries like
this new gospel and stare numbly, uncomprehendingly, as fluid
divinity swirls around them like some sort of frustrated mist.

The truth is, the Church was formed to serve people just like this,
those who are unable to grasp nuances and unable to think beyond a
certain scope, those who are unwilling or unable follow what is
perhaps the singlemost powerful and significant of all Christ's (and
Buddha's, and the Tao's, etc.) teachings: that is, to seek God
within. Not in a priest. Not in a building. Not in an organized
institution. Within you.

So let us delight in how the new version of Judas reveals, merely by
its very existence, exactly that. Let us calmly relish how we are
reminded, once again, that belief and faith and the dusty ancient
oral-tradition stories that attempted to define them are, and always
have been, and always will be, suspect, and fluid, and problematic,
and wonderful, and dubious and malleable as pita bread on a warm
summer's day.

In other words, it may not matter that the Gospel of Judas entirely
reframes the classic tale of Christ's betrayal and hence will keep
scholars busy for ages as to what it might mean. It may not matter
that the vast majority of "true" believers won't be swayed in the
slightest by this discovery, that it wouldn't matter if Christ's
body were unearthed tomorrow and Jesus were found to have an "OM"
symbol tattooed on his sacrum and an Astarte pendant around his neck
and an ancient iPod with lots of old Sabbath and Leonard Cohen
songs. Most staunch Christians would still adhere to current codes
like nervous kittens huddling in a leaky life raft.

But here's what does matter, now more than ever: We do not always
know what we think we know. The Bible certainly does not always say
what we think it says. Faith and divinity and even entire religions
are not static and fixed; they should move and dance and inbreed and
adapt with time, with culture, with intellectual evolution. Simple
enough? Did you already know? Judas is winking in your direction.

Hell, it's only been about 65 years since the publication of the
last earthshaking, goddess-cranking Gnostic tract, the Gospel of
Mary Magdalene, a truly landmark find that rocked the Christian
world and sucker-punched the misogynist Church and revolutionized
Magdalene scholarship and inspired Tom Hanks to grow his hair long
so he could appear in "The Da Vinci Code," much of which was based
on the discovery of Mary's truly astounding gospel.

It's a breathtaking piece of writing that essentially paints Jesus'
favorite consort as quite deeply informed of a rich and particularly
mystical version of Christ's message -- one that, it must be said,
essentially defies just about everything the modern Church stands
for, in how it extols the virtues of finding God, once again, not
through a church or priest or blind faith but by raw self-
exploration and unique individual spirit. You gotta love it.

And all this only 60 years after the big daddy of recent biblical
discoveries, the massive Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic gospels, an
astonishing collection of delicious, banned writings from one of the
more mystical, pro-sexual, pro-women, open-minded sects of early
Christianity, one of many that offered radically differing versions
of Christ's story and message, but which, like the rest, eventually
lost out to the more militant and dogmatic Church many of us know
and recoil from today.

(Remember, like history, religion is written by the victors. It is
then revised by the powermongers, leveraged by the fearful and
wielded as a nasty weapon by the conservatives. Same as it ever
was.)

Is it not perhaps the single greatest fallacy of all time? That
mankind is somehow a meek and inferior quasi-deity ever struggling
to live up to some hideously puritanical idea of the sacred and the
enlightened? That morality and religion are somehow clean and
flawless in their messages and that God is somehow scowling down
every day, watching and taking notes?

Or that the Bible -- make that all bibles, of every shape and kind,
from any culture, are merely ever-shifting kaleidoscopes through
which you may observe the world and absorb some lovely wisdom and
moral color, but which you should never, ever mistake for real life?
Can I get an amen?

*****

Report: Chernobyl Toll May Top 90,000
By MARA D. BELLABY, Associated Press Writer
Tue Apr 18, 2006

Greenpeace said Tuesday in a new report that more than 90,000 people
were likely to die of cancers caused by radiation from the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster, countering a United Nations report that predicted
the death toll would be around 4,000.

The differing conclusions underline the contentious uncertainty that
remains about the health effects of the world's worst nuclear
accident as its 20th anniversary approaches.

A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded
on April 26, 1986, spewing radioactive clouds over much of Europe.
The fallout was particularly severe in northern reaches of Ukraine,
western Russia and Belarus.

Areas immediately around the now-inoperative plant remain off
limits, but people in other areas that received significant fallout
are anxious about their health.

A report by the Chernobyl Forum — a group comprising the
International Atomic Energy Agency and several other U.N. groups —
last year said only 56 deaths thus far could be connected to
Chernobyl and about 4,000 deaths total would ultimately be linked to
the accident.

But Greenpeace, in a report citing data from Russia, Belarus and
Ukraine, harshly disagreed and suggested the Chernobyl Forum report
was deliberately misleading.

"It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the
most serious nuclear accident in human history," Ivan Blokov of the
environmental group's Russia office said in a statement. "Denying
the real implications is not only insulting to the thousands of
victims but it also leads to dangerous recommendations and the
relocation of people in contaminated areas."

The Chernobyl Forum report had suggested that many of the health
problems and complaints in the regions around Chernobyl were
connected with unhealthy lifestyles, including heavy drinking and
smoking, and with a culture of victimization.

Greenpeace countered that statistics from Belarus indicate there
will be 270,000 cases of cancer attributable to Chernobyl radiation
throughout the region and that 93,000 of those are likely to be
fatal.

Greenpeace also cited a report by the Center for Independent
Environmental Assessment of the Russian Academy of Sciences that
found a sharply increased mortality in western Russia over the past
15 years, suggesting the rise was due to Chernobyl radiation.

"On the basis of demographic data, during the last 15 years, 60,000
people have died additionally in Russia because of the Chernobyl
accident and estimates of the total death toll for Ukraine and
Belarus could be another 140,000," Greenpeace's international office
said in a statement.

The report also finds that "radiation from the disaster has had a
devastating effect on survivors" other than cancer cases — "damaging
immune and endocrine systems, leading to accelerated aging,
cardiovascular and blood illnesses, psychological illnesses,
chromosome aberrations and an increase of deformities in fetuses and
children."
___
On the Net:

Greenpeace International: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/

Chernobyl Forum:
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2004/consequences.html

*****

From our "Size Does Matter" Department...

Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen
Wed Apr 19, 2006
AP

Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in
sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the New York Stock Exchange
yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet.

At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by
Samsung and LG.

Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs
400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it,
you'll want professional installation.

He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an
even bigger screen before long.

*****

Under Hu, China Tightening Media Reins
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
4-21-6

From Rolling Stone to online essayists to a scrappy Beijing
newspaper, a wide range of media have felt the pressure of an
official campaign to tighten controls on what Chinese see and read.

Under President Hu Jintao, who was in the United States this week,
the communist government is challenging a growing public appetite
for information with a stepped-up campaign to block content deemed
politically or morally dangerous.

Hundreds of small publications have been shut down. Regulations on
Web site content have been tightened. Dozens of journalists have
been jailed, while others have been fired or demoted.

"All Chinese journalists to whom I have spoken say that freedom has
vastly decreased since 2003," the year Hu became president, said
Ashley Esarey, a scholar of Chinese politics and media at Middlebury
College in Vermont.

Hu appears committed to media policies aimed at ensuring one-party
rule by restricting free speech and reducing exposure to Western
concepts of multiparty democracy and human rights.

Freezing Point, a weekly supplement in the Communist Party's China
Youth Daily newspaper, was ordered to halt publishing after it
printed an article in February questioning the official approach to
history.

Editor Li Datong and his deputy, Lu Yuegang, were fired. When the
supplement reappeared a short time later, it lacked its pointed
content.

The government used to distribute regular memos to editors telling
them not to report on sensitive topics. Now publications are
instructed "not to sensationalize," said an editor in Shanghai, who
asked that neither she nor her publication be identified for fear of
official retaliation.

Esarey said a survey he led of more than 10,000 Chinese newspaper
articles published since the 1980s showed a steady decline in
content critical of the government.

He said Hu's lack of popular support may be making him even more
inclined toward tight control.

Activists have accused foreign companies of cooperating with Chinese
censors in their zeal to win access to a market with 111 million
Internet users and hundreds of millions of potential magazine and
other customers.

Yahoo! Inc (Nasdaq:YHOO - news). handed over e-mails that Chinese
prosecutors used to convict dissidents. Microsoft Corp. agreed to
shut down the blog of a Chinese user. Google Inc.'s new Chinese
search engine filters out results for sites banned by Beijing.

Rolling Stone's troubles appeared to be political, though not due to
its content.

The Chinese edition was launched in March, but was quickly dec...

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