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By John S. Lemberger
Oshkosh-Today in the United States all news outlets are owned by a handful of mega-corporations that offer homogenized, pro-corporate views of the daily events. Our democracy rests on the free and open debate of ideas. A Second Opinion believes the major news corporations have failed to create that debate, but have rather tried to propagandize issues to their own benefit. News stories are spun to make pro-corporate politicians look good.
Facts are left out or misrepresented. Other stories are not reported at all. Editorial pages are filled with columns by right-leaning journalists. Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Sykes are given almost unlimited air-time on the radio. The principle of equal time for opposing views has been squashed by right-wing interests.
A Second Opinion believes that without debate the interests of the people and our democracy cannot be saved. We feel it is important that you hear both sides of issues rather than just those of the right-wing. There are important issues affecting the quality of your lives that must be discussed. Our goal is to create a healthy debate by presenting the other side of the story. We do not want to replace the Northwestern, rather we encourage you to read it. Inform yourself about what they have to say regarding local, state and national issues. Then get A Second Opinion.
By Will Pitt
At the same time foreign intelligence agencies were warning the CIA about an impending terrorist attack on America (July 2001), Attorney General John Ashcroft was told to stop flying on commercial airlines. Why?
A major newspaper, The Toronto Globe and Mail, reported on May 21st that a White House official has admitted that the recent terrorism warnings, "do not reflect a dramatic increase in threatening information but rather a desire to fend off criticism from the Democrats." Why are they exploiting your fears for political gain?
A Deputy Director of the FBI named John O'Neill, who was the chief Bin Laden hunter in America, resigned in protest weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He stated in his resignation letter that the Bush administration was thwarting his anti-terror efforts to appease the concerns of powerful petroleum nations like Saudi Arabia. Why were our anti-terror efforts restrained?
George W. Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice have publicly denounced any open Congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks. The security gaps that allowed the attack to take place are still there, and thousands are dead. Why are they against an investigation that will make us safer?
These are four questions. There are many more. Ask why.
The story begins in 1998, with an American petroleum corporation called Unocal. Unocal was heavily invested in a planned pipeline that would run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, and out to a warm water port. From there, natural gas piped down from the Caspian Sea would be made available for sale to American and Asian markets. The deal required approval from the governments of all three nations, including the Taliban. If terms could be met, Unocal and its investors stood to reap enormous profits.
The deal was destroyed along with two American embassies in Africa, victims of terror attacks by Osama bin Laden Because bin Laden was based in Afghanistan and supported by the Taliban, the Clinton administration forbade any American company from dealing with them. A blizzard of cruise missiles soon followed this order, and Unocal was forced to wait for calmer days before it could continue to pursue the pipeline deal. Without Afghanistan,
the puzzle piece at the center of the arrangement, everything crashed to a halt.
On a frigid, rainy January day in 2001, Unocal was given reason to rejoice. George W. Bush had just taken the oath of office, and was now President of the United States. The power of the American government was immediately brought to bear in the situation. Enter Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad, who in the early 1990s served Unocal as an advisor on the nascent pipeline project. In 1997, Khalilzad was present with Unocal representatives when they hosted a delegation of Taliban officials in Houston.
Khalilzad was part of a full-court press by the Bush administration to see the pipeline deal through to completion. Their main objective was to bring the Taliban, who had become decidedly disinterested in then project, back on board. The American pitch to the Taliban, which was still hosting Osama bin Laden, became so intense that the Taliban hired an American public relations expert named Laila Helms to broker negotiations. High-level meetings between the Bush administration and the Taliban continued through August of 2001, with little gain. The Taliban simply was not interested in becoming part of the deal.
Pakistani news agencies reported in the weeks before September 11th that America had threatened war against the Taliban if they did not agree to the pipeline deal. "Accept our carpet of gold," the Bush administration is reported to have said, "or be buried under a carpet of bombs."
At the same time, John O'Neill was quitting his job in protest. A Deputy Director of the FBI, O'Neill was America's chief bin Laden hunter. He had been in charge of the investigations into the bin Laden-connected bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of an American troop barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack upon the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Simply put, no one person in America's counter-terrorism apparatus knew more about Osama bin Laden than John O'Neill.
Two weeks before September 11th, John O'Neill left the FBI in anger and disgust. He believed his government was actively hindering his ability to pursue dangerous Islamic terrorists because such investigations were discomforting Mideast regimes like the Taliban that were being courted by American petroleum interests. O'Neill is quoted as saying, "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." Connections between the Taliban and Saudi Arabia, a nation bin Laden and a dozen of the 9/11 hijackers once called home, are too glaring to ignore.
Upon leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as head of security for the World Trade Center, and was killed doing his job on September 11th.
Credible Sources
The difference in coverage between what is reported in the American news media and what is reported in the foreign and alternative press is vast. As Dan Rather of CBS News has recently admitted, the American press is not asking the questions about 9/11 that need to be asked.
The greatest sedition is silence. Ask the questions. Demand the answers. Here are some news sources that are doing so. Find out what you are not being told.
Greg Palast, chief news anchor on the BBC
The Guardian, a respected British newspaper
Alternative media: www.Truthout.org, www.BuzzFlash.com,
www.OnlineJournal.com, www.AlterNet.org, www.LegitGov.org,
If you feel as though you are alone in your doubts about 9/11 and Bush, take heart: there are many others like you in America. Come to www.DemocraticUnderground.com and join an informed community of patriots seeking the truth.
(Editor's Note: one of the first official acts of the new, American backed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, was to sign an agreement with the president of Pakistan allowing the building of an oil pipeline across their countries.)
By John S. Lemberger
Oshkosh-The Northwestern has printed a series of articles by the Heritage Foundation promoting the idea of a flat tax. The flat tax is part of a greater agenda that involves restructuring the tax code at all levels to favor large corporations and the very wealthy individuals that run them. We offer our readers a perspective of the Heritage Foundation.
Informed citizens in our democracy should be aware that the Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich with money from Richard Mellon-Scaife (heir of the Carnegie-Mellon fortune) and Joseph Coors (the beer magnate). The Heritage Foundation receives money from Amoco, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank and right-wing groups like Olin and Bradley. It also receives money from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's World Unity Church (one of its largest contributors). It is the mouth piece for large corporations and the very wealthy people who run them.
According to its website, the Heritage Foundation wants a second American Revolution of "cultural independence" to overthrow our current multicultural society. In other words they believe that what America needs is a darned good ethnic cleansing. It should be of no surprise then that Mr. Weyrich has sympathies with neo-Nazi, white supremacists like Roger Pearson, organizer of the Nazi Northern League of northern Europe and a former editorial board member of Policy Review, the Heritage Foundations' monthly publication. The Reverend Moon is committed to the establishment of a single world government ruled by a Christian Political party, at least Christian by his definition.
Why is this collection of misanthropists pushing the flat tax idea? The Heritage Foundation, among other things, is committed to replacing our democracy with a theocracy controlled by a small ruling class anointed by God to lead us into their version of a Christian future. A flat tax, along with the elimination of the inheritance tax and other changes in the tax code, would insure the preservation of wealth within the ruling families of this new American theocracy forever. The dangers inherent in this situation are why the Founders insisted on an inheritance tax in the first place.
Historically, when the top income tax rate has gone up the economy has boomed; when it has gone down the economy has suffered. This is because when the top income tax rate is cut more money collects in the pockets of the wealthiest Americans. Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few leads naturally to recession because the purchasing power of the majority of Americans is reduced. We are experiencing this down cycle now as a result of the Bush tax cut that lowered the top income tax rate. A flat tax as proposed by the Heritage Foundation, would cut the top rate in half again. The result would almost certainly be a serious depression. A tremendous amount of wealth would stay in the pockets of a few individuals. This would severely under fund a variety of essential government programs that redistribute some of the wealth hard working Americans generate and contribute to the collective good like education, transportation, medical and scientific research, clean air, and safe food to name a few. Under a flat tax, average Americans would be required to accept huge sacrifices in all these areas.
In Wisconsin we operate a tax system that allowed the ten largest Wisconsin corporations to pay no taxes in the tax year 2000. That's right, ZERO dollars. Governor McCallum is asking us to give up or cut back services vital to our communities to avoid asking these corporations and the wealthy people who run them to pay a fair tax for the services they receive from the state. Every day working people struggle to put bread on their tables. It's time to demand these large corporations pay their fair share of taxes. It's the place to start when addressing the budget deficit. It's the right thing to do. As for the Heritage foundation, their goals are clear. A Second Opinion suggests you read their future editorials with a warranted skepticism.
By John S. Lemberger
Oshkosh--Now that the great uproar is dying back, it's time to take a broader look at the issues raised by the Pledge of Allegiance flap. We must begin by remembering that the Founders knew only too well the horrors of religious persecution that results from state sponsored religions. Northern Ireland, Israel, and Kosovo are modern reminders of what proceeds from state sponsored religion. We must also remember that living within our borders are Christians of many stripes, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and a host of smaller religions right down to modern day Druids. We also have among us sizeable numbers of theists, agnostics and atheists. Within this diversity lie the seeds of trouble. The Founder foresaw that probability and, by creating a secular state, they insured for us the ability to worship (or not worship) however we please, securely and in peace. It's a Constitutional guarantee embedded in the Bill of Rights.
Historically, the words, under God, were inserted into the pledge at the urging of the Knights of Columbus in 1954. This is just one example of a religious interest attempting to insert their brand of God and/or religion into our individual belief systems. There are other examples. Recently there have been attempts to post the Ten Commandments in public schools. Creationists are relentless in their attempts to get the Bible's genesis stories imposed into the science curriculum. Furthermore, Christian Fundamentalists have used the issue of school prayer as a way to demonstrate how our public schools are failing in their duty to create a moral society populated by ethical adults. Recent corporate scandals like Enron seem to support the Fundamentalist argument.
Fundamentalists are quick to point the finger of blame at the lack of God in our public schools, but aren't they primarily responsible for creating moral and ethical adults? The current cascade of corporate scandals is not a failure of the public schools, but a failure by members of the religious establishment to do their jobs.
If Sunday school teachers weren't using their time teaching a lot of non-sense about a 10,000 year old earth and other creationist fiction, or pushing fables like Noah's ark, Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, and instead focused on the meaning of Jesus' message, we may yet achieve the moral society they claim to espouse. Children who are already getting a good dose of Biblical fables on Sunday grow up to be Enron executives, or even President of the United States.
Jesus didn't spend his time on earth pushing creationism, or Noah's ark stories. He had more important things to do, like bringing hope to the poor by asking the rich to share their wealth. But in modern America greed has become a virtue. Greed is good! In Bill Bennets' neo-conservative Book of Virtues fairness and justice are not even mentioned.
Contrast Bill Bennets' focus on greed as virtue with Jesus' parable of the workers hired at different times of the day. The workers hired early in the day felt they deserved more that the workers hired at the end of the day. This parable is extremely difficult to understand in a culture where greed has been normalized.
To understand Jesus' point, you have to understand that the wages offered were a standard day's wages for that time in Palestine. The workers who worked the full day had no reason to expect more. What then of those who only worked a few hours? Was it fair and just that they should be given a full days wage too? Jesus used this story to argue that everyone should be guaranteed their daily bread, and no more. This is a hard lesson to accept for people in a capitalist society where greed has become a virtue. But there it is. It would be a difficult job to convince a majority of Americans that Jesus was right. No wonder Fundamentalists want to focus on creationism and other cute Bible stories, but let's keep them out of our schools. As for the pledge, almost anyone could write a better one. How's this?
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I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, the Constitution and Bill of Rights and the values they guarantee, liberty, equality and justice for all. |
A Second Opinion has been formed in Oshkosh, to giving you facts-based opinions about current events.
John S. Lemberger, Managing Editor