Bush Defends Himself Against NAACP
Mon Jul 8, 7:24 PM ET
HOUSTON (AP) - The day after the NAACP chairman assailed President Bush's
record on civil rights, its other top leader chided him for skipping a
chance to speak at the group's annual convention.
"You can't be the president of all the people when you only want to deal
with some of the people," NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said Monday during a
speech at the convention.
Bush addressed the meeting as a presidential candidate in 2000, but has
declined written invitations Mfume for the past two years.
Mfume called Bush "a likable fellow," but added he doesn't like "his
presidential practice of divide and conquer when it comes to black
organizations and black people."
At a White House news conference, Bush was asked to respond to the NAACP's
feeling that he has slighted the group, and to general criticism that his
civil rights record has been lackluster.
Referring to his black secretary of state and national security adviser,
Bush replied: "Let's see there I was sitting around the table with foreign
leaders, looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice." He punctuated the comment
by shaking his head in disgust.
Julian Bond, the NAACP board chairman, opened the group's convention Sunday
night with a speech that attacked the Bush administration's record on civil
rights.
Two years ago, Bush "promised to enforce the civil rights laws," Bond said.
"We knew he was in the oil business — we just didn't know it was snake oil."
*****
Merckgate
http://www.mediawhoresonline.com
NEW RIP-OFF BOMBSHELL!!
MERCK PHARMACEUTICALS INFLATED STATEMENTS BY $$$ BILLIONS MERCK CEO IS TOP
BUSH ADVISOR: THE LATEST GOP KENNY BOY BUSH UP TO HIS NECK IN MERCK MUCK
DUBYA'S ENRON ACID REFLUX
In a thermonuclear revelation on the eve of George W.
Bush's "corporate responsibility" speech, the Wall Street Journal, Financial
Times, and other sources are reporting yet another new and huge corporate
rip-off scandal linked to Bush, this one involving the Merck pharmaceutical
corporation, and its CEO Raymond Gilmartin.
According to breaking coverage, Merck booked $12.4 billion in revenues in
the past three years, which it never received.
That's twelve BILLION four hundred MILLION dollars in phony receipts, over
three years.
On average, over four BILLION dollars per year.
More to the point: Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin, just like Enron's Kenneth
"Kenny Boy" Lay, is a major Republican contributor with extremely close ties
to George W. Bush and his administration. During the Bush transition, when
energy policy was being dictated by Enron and the energy corporations, Bush
appointed Merck's Gilmartin to his top advisory committee for formulating
health policy, including pharmaceutical and Medicare policy, for the new
administration.
Thereafter, Gilmartin triggered tens of millions of dollars to support front
groups to back a phony Republican prescription drug bill for seniors and to
counter the Democrats' substantive plan. The money has gone to pay for,
among other things, TV ad campaigns against Democrats.
The Merck revelations have accelerated the political meltdown of the Bush
Administration and the Republican Party, coming in the aftermath of jumbo
scandals that have hit Enron and Trent Lott's WorldCom.
The numbers tell part of the story:
In the 1999-2000 and 2001-2002 (to date) election cycles, Merck's Political
Action Committee donated, respectively, $319,578 and (again, to date) $259,
653 to federal political candidates.
In 1999-2000, 72 percent of the total went to Republican candidates and PACs
in 2001-2002, so far, 64 percent of the total has gone to Republican
candidates and PACs.
Merck's CEO, Raymond Gilmartin, is also a big individual G.O.P. donor.
Since 1999, Gilmartin has contributed $74,000 of his own money to federal
political campaigns.
More than half of that amount -- $40,000 -- has gone directly to the
Republican National Committee.
Another $20,000 of it has gone to individual Republican candidates and their
PACs.
A total of $10,000 has gone to Merck's pro-G.O.P. PAC.
Which leaves a whopping $4,000 -- about five percent of the total -- for
Democrats.
But it is the direct and close political clout that Merck and Ray Gilmartin
received in dictating Bush policy that make this latest scandal look like
Enron redux -- or, befitting the corporation involved, Bush's Enron acid
reflux.
It turns out that on two of the most pressing issues facing the nation,
energy and prescription drugs, Dubya put his Administration's policy early
on in the hands of two corporate mega-contributors -- who turn out also, it
seems, to be corporate mega-crooks! Bush, Lay, and Gilmartin. A trifecta
of corporate sleaze buddies.
A bunch of crooks well schooled in the arts of corporate deception and stock
pumping that Dubya apparently learned when he was on the audit board of
Harken Energy.
AND THESE ARE THE MEN RUNNING THE SHOW AT THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE!!
Bush has managed so far successfully to stonewall over energy and Enron.
Will he succeed with Merck and medicine as well? will Gilmartin become
Bush's "Ray Boy"?
Or will the Media Whores finally, FINALLY, get real?
The meltdown accelerates.
Developing radioactively.....
*****
http://www.salon.com
Look out, George!
In his new gloves-off daily journal, Joe Conason pounds President Bush for
his evasive and ever-changing accounts of his own stock scam.
Editor's note: Salon is proud to present the first installment of Joe
Conason's daily Web journal. Salon's longtime political columnist will bring
his gloves-off approach to the news -- and to the Bush administration --
every day, updating it as events demand. One day a week, it will be
available exclusively to Salon Premium subscribers.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
July 9, 2002 | What a time it is -- in this new dawn of "corporate
responsibility" -- to be writing a daily journal online. My first deadline
became easier to contemplate as I watched the president dodge his way
through the Monday post-holiday White House press conference that punctuated
his journey from the Kennebunkport golf course to Wall Street. George W.
Bush, the ultimate American insider, has no desire to discuss the ways he
made his millions. And his impatience with such impertinence is beginning to
show.
Reading from an aggressive text prepared by Karl Rove, Bush tried to strike
a tone of command within moments of stepping to the podium. Rather than
badger him about ethical problems from his business career, he suggested,
those Senate Democrats ought to get back to the nation's real business. They
are playing politics, he suggested, while our troops languish without
critical funding in a time of war. They should be passing his trade
legislation, his energy bill, his pension protections and his defense
appropriations, rather than asking questions about him.
But the ordinarily docile White House press corps, while chuckling
appreciatively at the president's wisecracks, wasn't entirely buying that
line. "This is recycled ... stuff," he said in response to the first
question about his 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock, and the reporters
laughed. The questions continued, however, and the answers weren't impressive.
George W. Bush has offered varying accounts over the past decade of his
dealings as a Harken director. Back when he was running for Texas governor
in 1994, he blamed the Securities and Exchange Commission for misplacing the
disclosure forms he was supposed to file about his insider sale of 212,000
shares of Harken stock. At another point, he blamed the Harken lawyers, even
though the filing wasn't their responsibility at all. Lately, his spokesman
has tried to blame his own attorney (who now serves as the U.S. ambassador
to Saudi Arabia). "I still haven't figured it out completely," Bush shrugged
on Monday afternoon.
In other words, everybody was responsible for his failure to observe the
securities laws except him. It sounded a bit tinny when he reminded those
listening to his press conference that his very favorite theme is "a renewed
sense of [personal] responsibility."
As we all know by now, Bush's corporate maneuvering has been "fully vetted."
He expanded that line of defense when he claimed that the SEC examined all
the aspects of his conduct at Harken "in a very thorough way." Exactly how
thorough we may never know, since he declined to answer whether he would
allow the SEC to release the entire file of its investigation into his
controversial Harken trades. "This is old politics," he replied, complaining
that the issue comes up every time he runs for office.
It keeps coming up, of course, because his story is so implausible. On
Monday he tried to argue that he had actually lost a windfall by selling
when he did, because 14 months later the stock had risen to twice the amount
he realized from the June 1990 sale. That left out the most relevant
financial history -- notably, that within two months after he sold his
shares, Harken reported a devastating second- quarter loss of more than $20
million, and moreover that by December 1990 those same shares were trading
at $1.25, or less than a third of the $4 price he had gotten when he got out.
Someone did have the temerity to inquire whether Bush had played any role in
Harken's dubious "sale" of an entity called Aloha Petroleum (as in "aloha,
suckers") to its own officers, a sham transaction that put lipstick on
Harken to attract gullible investors. The president couldn't remember what
he thought about the Aloha deal, saying he would have to consult the
directors' minutes. Anyway, he added, that incident "and all matters
relating to Harken were fully looked into by the SEC." And besides, the
company had restated its phony earnings when ordered to by the SEC some time
later. So what was the problem?
What the president didn't mention -- perhaps because nobody asked -- was
that his father's appointees and his own personal attorney were running the
SEC when he was investigated. The agency's chairman was an ardent loyalist
named Richard Breeden, who had served as a top domestic policy aide to
George Herbert Walker Bush. (He is now the court-appointed overseer of
WorldCom.) Its general counsel was James Doty, the laywer who had handled
the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team to Dubya's syndicate only two
years earlier.
A few years ago, such obviously compromised presidential relationships would
have provoked exclamations of outrage on the editorial pages of the nation's
great newspapers, culminating in demands for a congressional investigation
and even an independent counsel. Reporters would have camped out at the SEC
to ambush the chairman with arms outstretched, harassing him to deliver
those files about the president. The laughter in the press room and the
newsrooms and the TV studios would have been anything but friendly, and the
chatter would soon have turned to dark musings about the character of the
man inhabiting the Oval Office. But that was when the president's name was
Clinton, not Bush.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Joe Conason writes a daily journal for Salon. His column runs in the New
York Observer.
*****
http://www.thenation.com
COMMENT | June 24, 2002
Going Down the Road
Dressed for Success
JIM HIGHTOWER
Couple of years ago, Susan DeMarco and I were doing our radio talk show,
Chat & Chew, on the topic of sweatshop goods. A lady from Jackson,
Mississippi, called to say that whenever she goes into a store to shop for
clothing, she always tries to find a manager and asks, "Can you tell me
where your made-in-the-USA section is?" Good question. Go into any clothing
department and everything in there-- from overcoats to undies, hats to
shoes--bears labels that shout: made in China, Bangladesh, El Salvador, the
Philippines...everywhere but the US of A. This is not only in the Wal-Marts
and Targets but also in the upscale Talbotses and Abercrombie & Fitches.
It's not that Americans are unable to make quality stuff, but the ugly fact
is that corporations have abandoned US workers and communities in hot
pursuit of ever-fatter profits, rushing off to the lowest-wage hellholes
they can find to cut and sew their garments.
Instead of paying even a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour here, they can get
wage slaves at 13 cents an hour in China--then ship the goods back here
without lowering the price they charge us. The corporations gleefully pocket
the difference in labor costs--and claim that this is the "magic" of the new
global market at work. It is certainly magic for them.
For us it is globaloney--just the same old greed. But what's a consumer to
do? Even if a garment is made in the United States, some companies also run
sweatshops here, with workers, usually recent immigrants, crammed into
basement "contract shops," making less than minimum wage. How can we combat
the scourge of sweatshops everywhere? Government could take action, but
even under Bill Clinton, it was Nike, Gap, Ralph Lauren and other bigwigs
that dominated the discussion, so Washington did nothing but dabble and
dawdle. Of course, under King George the W, even discussion has stopped.
SweatX Is Chic
The good news is that people themselves--especially children and young
people--see sweatshops as a moral abomination, putting them (yet again) well
ahead of officialdom. Major groups like United Students Against Sweatshops,
the National Labor Committee, Global Exchange and the garment union UNITE
have been aggressively exposing, agitating and organizing against sweatshop
labor. As this political organizing expands, an important assault on
sweatshops has come from the one place the multibillion-dollar industry
least expects: The marketplace itself.
SweatX is a new brand of garment in every sense of the word. The Hot Fudge
Social Venture Fund, set up by Ben Cohen, the puckish entrepreneur and
social activist of Ben & Jerry's ice cream fame, has invested $1 million to
date in a brand-new garment business in Los Angeles. The business, called
teamX, is based on a thoroughly radical principle: "Garment workers don't
have to be exploited in order to operate a financially successful apparel
factory." Imagine.
Inspired and informed by Spain's Mondragon Industrial Cooperatives (a
fifty-year-old network of successful employee-owned businesses: www.mcc.es),
teamX is organized as a worker-owned co-op that (1) is a union shop
organized by UNITE; (2) pays a living wage starting at $8.50 an hour; (3)
provides good healthcare, a pension and a share of profits through co-op
ownership; (4) practices the "solidarity ratio," in which no executive is
paid more than eight times what the lowest-paid worker gets; and (5) intends
to make a profit, grow and spread its progressive seed.
This is no touchie-feelie, froufrou social exercise but a bottom-line
business initiative to show that doing well can also mean doing good. Pierre
Ferrari's twenty-five years in the corporate world ranges from being VP of
Coca-Cola to being director of Ben & Jerry's...to now being CEO of teamX.
These entrepreneurial folks believed that there had to be a better way than
sweatshops. Ferrari immersed himself in the economics of garment production.
His most shocking (and enlightening) discovery was that a sweatshop worker
in the United States gets about 25 cents to make a T-shirt that retails for
as much as 18 bucks. Let's say that a worker grosses about $9,000 a year.
Poverty. What if you doubled the wage--to 50 cents per shirt? The increase
would not affect the buyer, but that worker would suddenly be getting
$18,000 a year. Not exactly a fortune, but a livable wage. "Come on," says
Ferrari, "they're exploiting people for a lousy 25 cents?"
Building the Brand
This March, twenty teamX employee-owners, many of whom previously had been
sweatshop workers, began production in Los Angeles on their company's first
line of stylish shirts, shorts, caps and other casual wear, working with
state-of-the-art equipment in a brand-new factory. "I've been working in
clothing for twenty years, and I never had a paid holiday before this," one
of the employees told the Los Angeles Times. A small, experienced team of
managers has been assembled, drawing especially on some older managers who
are not merely chasing bucks but looking to add a moral dimension to their
work lives.
To build the brand identity, teamX is initially targeting the activist
community--campuses, unions, churches, local governments, nonprofits, etc.
(The T-shirts for my Rolling Thunder Downhome Democracy Tour proudly bear
the SweatX label.) This "market of conscience" alone has a huge and
virtually untapped potential--as Ferrari discovered, for example, unions buy
a lot of T-shirts for rallies, organizing drives and such. After Oprah
recently featured teamX on her show, the phones began ringing off the hook
with orders, and Ferrari now expects this upstart startup to break even by
July-- an investment miracle by anyone's standards.
By tapping this growing market of conscience, SweatX not only can be
successful but will put the lie to the garment industry's cynical assertion
that low wages are an inevitable component of globalization. We can help by
talking to our local organizations, clothing store managers, school board
members and others, introducing them to the SweatX possibility
(www.sweatx.net), showing with our dollars that commerce and conscience can
cohabitate.
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