"Mr. Bush is tainted by his association with Jim-Crow-style selective disenfranchisement and executive strong-arm tactics in a southeastern province controlled by his brother," said Mr. Arafat, who was elected with 87% of the vote in 1996 elections in the West Bank and Gaza, declared to be free and fair by international observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. "Our count shows that he would have lost the election if his associates hadn't deprived so many thousands of African-Americans, an oppressed minority, of the right to vote. He is not the man to bring peace to the Middle East."
This is rich:
Said [Hamid] Karzai [Afghan leader] , "In Afghanistan, we have the loya jirga. In the United States, you have your own process -- as we understand, it's traditional over there for corporations to play a large part in electing officials and writing legislation. We're very interested in looking into that kind of system ourselves."
Nine months after the attacks of 11 September, leading American political cartoonists say they are under intense pressure to conform to a patriotic stereotype and not criticise the actions of Mr Bush and his "war on terror". Those who refuse to bend to such pressure face having their work rejected, being fired or even publicly humiliated by the President's press secretary...
...Last month the veteran TV anchor Dan Rather sparked controversy when he said the patriotism engulfing the country had stopped the media asking difficult questions of America's leaders, and admitted he personally was guilty of such self-censorship. Now cartoonists, often the most biting political commentators of all, say they are feeling the same pressures.
"Who cares what you think?"
-- former Texas governor George W. Bush to a citizen who told him he's doing a poor job, July 4, 2001
++++
Once again the Yes Men unlock the Doors of Consumption:
Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?... The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that... Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City... The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand. - Former World Bank Chief Economist Lawrence Summers (and current Harvard University President! ), quoted in The Economist in an article titled "Let them eat pollution" (February 8, 1992). See also http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/SAP.asp.
posted by Brad Larcen 6/26/2002[edit]
