NP? worth reading today

[Doug Millison]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,757099,00.html
Unarmed village women stormed four ChevronTexaco pipeline stations as
protests against the oil giant spread in south-eastern Nigeria, ethnic
activists said yesterday.
Kingsley Kuku, a spokesman for the ethnic Ijaw youth council, said that
hundreds of Ijaw women captured four pipeline flow-stations in boats on
Tuesday.



http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0718-02.htm
"Corporate socialism" -- the privatization of profit and the socialization
of risks and misconduct -- is displacing capitalist canons. This condition
prevents an adaptable capitalism, served by equal justice under law, from
delivering higher standards of living and enlarging its absorptive capacity
for broader community and environmental values. Civic and political
movements must call for a decent separation of corporation and state."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,757217,00.html
[...]  "I've got great confidence in the vice-president. He's doing a heck
of a good job. When I picked him, I knew he was a fine business leader and
a fine, experienced man," Mr Bush said.  Others are also confident that Mr
Cheney will be exonerated by the SEC, but that is largely because it is run
by a Bush appointee, Harvey Pitt, who has already been criticised for his
lax approach towards corporate fraud. [...]


http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/198/editorials/Ashcroft_vs_AmericansP.shtml
Ashcroft vs. Americans
By A Boston Globe Editorial, 7/17/2002
OPERATION TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - is a
scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated. Plans for its pilot
phase, to start in August, have Operation TIPS recruiting a million letter
carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access
to private homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any
activities they think suspicious.  This is not an updating of George
Orwell's ''1984.'' It is not a satire on the paranoid fantasies of
right-wing kooks who see black helicopters swooping across their big sky.
It will be a nationwide program run by Attorney General John Ashcroft's
Justice Department. If it is allowed to start up and gather steam, it will
begin in 10 cities and then expand everywhere, enrolling millions of
Americans to spy on their neighbors. [...]

http://www.reformer.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,102%257E8860%257E736322,00.html
"We used to laugh at the old Soviet Union idea where everybody reported
everybody else," said Leahy. " ... We don't need to have it happen here. "


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=513&u=/ap/20020717/ap_on_go_ot/
operation_tips_8&printer=1
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Postal Service has decided not to take part in a
government program touted as a tip service for authorities concerned with
terrorism, but which is being assailed as a scheme to cast ordinary
Americans as "peeping Toms." [...]


http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/52710.htm
uly 17, 2002 -- U.S. military recruiters have the authority to demand that
education officials turn over the names, addresses and phone numbers of
high-school students under a new federal law. [...]


http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020718-174815.htm
High-level State Department officials have circulated e-mails accusing Rep.
Dan Burton and Bush administration officials of McCarthyism and neo-Nazism
for criticizing the visa system's failure to keep the September 11
terrorists out of the country.


"Brock [...] leaning darkly in above her like any of the
sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture." (Vineland, p. 287)


"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The
murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.
It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be
taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more
prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just
ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while
they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
markets." (GR 105)

"Unfortunately, young people," recalls the Revd, "the word *Liberty*, so
unreflectively  sacred to us today, was taken in those Times to encompass
even the darkest of Men's rights [...] This being, indeed and alas, one of
the Liberties our late War was fought to secure." (M&D, 307)