while bushco can't be blamed for nafta passing as that was clinton's fault (hillary was for it before she was against it) he could have at least acted like he is for the u.s. instead of for multinational companies.
alas, it is not to be.
http://webmail.pas.earthlink.net/wam/msg.j...mp;x=-411784370
this is from today's e-mail.
keep on rootin' for the republicans and republican-lites they're all for the u.s.
until they're not.
Full Version: Palast collects another little gem
sorry, bird, you might as well cite it in full as the link will not work.
you could dropping in into tiny url or embed the link.
you could dropping in into tiny url or embed the link.
thanks to tritumi for pointing out the problem.
below is the story which one copied from the e-mail link which would not work.
José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast
Monday April 21, 2008
(for TomPaine.com)
Psst! George Bush has a secret.
While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.
You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.
Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”
Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.
Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.
The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
Say what?
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.
Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.
I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.
Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.
The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.
So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.
Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.
Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”
below is the story which one copied from the e-mail link which would not work.
José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast
Monday April 21, 2008
(for TomPaine.com)
Psst! George Bush has a secret.
While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.
You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.
Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”
Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.
Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.
The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
Say what?
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.
Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.
I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.
Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.
The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.
So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.
Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.
Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”
Thanks to Palast to bring this to light. Most of the worst policies are made behind closed doors or far away from the Keystone Press.
They're looking for "harmonization", eh? Reminds me of my favorite "Prisoner" episode.
Perhaps government will give us some hallucinigenic drugs to make us accept this policy.
They're looking for "harmonization", eh? Reminds me of my favorite "Prisoner" episode.
Perhaps government will give us some hallucinigenic drugs to make us accept this policy.
fwiw, the no levee is leaking.
QUOTE
Yesterday, the Times-Picayune carried a very restrained story about a potentially inflammatory subject: the Corps of Engineers has discovered a persistent leak in the 17th St. Canal floodwall, the very structure that breached disastrously in the wake of Katrina, flooding a good part of the city. Despite the restraint, the story gets ominous when you hit this quote:
"There's no reason for anyone to worry," (Corps section chief Brett) Herr said. "That floodwall isn't going anywhere."
Coming from the agency which denied, for months, any responsibility for the disaster in 2005, which vilified the engineers who, on a pro bono basis, painstakingly uncovered the Corps' litany of mis- and malfeasance in connection with the design and construction of the flood protection system, that's about as reassuring as Alberto Gonzalez insisting that "we don't torture". Down at the end of the story is the reason why this announcement might well be cause for concern:
The corps spent about $25 million repairing the breach in the months after Katrina, and extra clay was added to the site at that time, said Kevin Wagner, a corps' senior project manager for levees and floodwalls.
In spite of the clay cap, a small amount of water has continued to appear.
NOTE: A small amount of water was reported on the residential side of the canal floodwall by homeowners for a year and a half before the breach. It bubbled up in their backyards, and Corps officials weren't concerned about that, either.
"There's no reason for anyone to worry," (Corps section chief Brett) Herr said. "That floodwall isn't going anywhere."
Coming from the agency which denied, for months, any responsibility for the disaster in 2005, which vilified the engineers who, on a pro bono basis, painstakingly uncovered the Corps' litany of mis- and malfeasance in connection with the design and construction of the flood protection system, that's about as reassuring as Alberto Gonzalez insisting that "we don't torture". Down at the end of the story is the reason why this announcement might well be cause for concern:
The corps spent about $25 million repairing the breach in the months after Katrina, and extra clay was added to the site at that time, said Kevin Wagner, a corps' senior project manager for levees and floodwalls.
In spite of the clay cap, a small amount of water has continued to appear.
NOTE: A small amount of water was reported on the residential side of the canal floodwall by homeowners for a year and a half before the breach. It bubbled up in their backyards, and Corps officials weren't concerned about that, either.
QUOTE(Plastic Turkey @ Apr 21 2008, 12:58 PM) 
Thanks to Palast to bring this to light. Most of the worst policies are made behind closed doors or far away from the Keystone Press.
They're looking for "harmonization", eh? Reminds me of my favorite "Prisoner" episode.
Perhaps government will give us some hallucinigenic drugs to make us accept this policy.
the drug of choice is the "other". the other is to blame for our problems. the other being liberals, gays, unions and regulation. further added psychotropics are "my country: right or wrong" and "support the troops". all of course consumed with nationalistic and " correct" religious (read: evangelical protestant) music in the background.
just don't look out the window when the coffins come home or when your wages hit bottom.
the drug of choice is megalomania
Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.
By Susan Jacoby
LA Times opinion piece. I see it here, needless to say.
Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.
By Susan Jacoby
QUOTE
As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public's increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing -- or any hearing at all -- to opposing points of view.
LA Times opinion piece. I see it here, needless to say.
QUOTE(tritumi @ Apr 21 2008, 04:56 PM)
the drug of choice is megalomania
Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.
By Susan Jacoby
LA Times opinion piece. I see it here, needless to say.
quite true. the other drugs one mentioned are applicable precisely because there is no discourse.
QUOTE(tritumi @ Apr 21 2008, 05:56 PM)
the drug of choice is megalomania
Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.
By Susan Jacoby
LA Times opinion piece. I see it here, needless to say.
Considering that most conservative message boards ban all liberals, it's safe to say conservatives are more closed-minded than liberals.
QUOTE(Bird @ Apr 21 2008, 12:41 PM)
thanks to tritumi for pointing out the problem.
below is the story which one copied from the e-mail link which would not work.
José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast
Monday April 21, 2008
(for TomPaine.com)
Psst! George Bush has a secret.
While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.
You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.
Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”
Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.
Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.
The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
Say what?
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.
Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.
I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.
Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.
The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.
So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.
Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.
Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”
This is OUTRAGEOUS and CANNOT STAND. These agreements MUST be put before Congress for approval! We have GOT to raise HELL over this to Congress and anyone who will listen. The cynicism of this article and this passage, in particular, is MIND NUMBING. It will be our downfall if we allow this type of cynicism to frame this important topic and to define our own attitude towards it...
QUOTE(prairiemermaid @ Apr 21 2008, 06:16 PM)
This is OUTRAGEOUS and CANNOT STAND. These agreements MUST be put before Congress for approval! We have GOT to raise HELL over this to Congress and anyone who will listen. The cynicism of this article and this passage, in particular, is MIND NUMBING. It will be our downfall if we allow this type of cynicism to frame this important topic and to define our own attitude towards it...
QUOTE(tritumi @ Apr 21 2008, 04:46 PM)
move along. nothing to see here.
nature seems to be a little more persistant than the engineers thought.
or maybe they didn't think.
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