[Am-info] Who killed the DOJ suit against Microsoft? Remember?

[Gene Gaines]

Apologies to those on the list not in the U.S., but this U.S.
   presidential election is unusual in that it has the potential
   of having a substantial effect on the world.

   Is this off-topic? I do not think so. If the then-new Bush
   administration had not intervened in the lawsuit brought by
   the U.S. Department of Justice against Microsoft, we would be
   in a different position today.

   I propose that between now and the Nov. 2 election, we permit
   each person on this list to send no more than three political
   statements to the list, including responses to the statements
   made by others.
   
   I greatly value the opinions of every person on this list. I
   would welcome hearing the views of others on this list,
   whether we agree or not.

   Trading insults is not useful. Trading views and information
   is. Listen to me and I will listen respectfully to you.

   And all should vote.



Below is my first personal statement.

About me. I am an Independent voter, but I have strong feelings
about this election. Perhaps because I am in Washington DC and
spend time on Capitol Hill, I observe some things close-in
that might not be seen by others. Things I know to be true
because I see them first-hand -- not but because I am told them
by others, or am fed them in overly simplistic sound bytes.

I plan to vote against Bush (for Kerry) in 2004.  John Kerry
is an honest, responsible, thinking man who will make a good
president.

The statement below best summarizes my thoughts about the
national election, set out in a well-documented, rational
address given last week in Washington DC. I do not care about
the reaction of the audience or the number of flags flying in
the background; I care about whether the views are based on
facts, and those facts can be verified.

Do not read it unless you welcome my view. I look forward to
hearing the views of others.

Note. It is important we respect each other. Example. For
several years recently, I was the president of our Homeowners
Association. During this time, I spent many hours of my time,
mired in mud and in water sometimes 2.5 feet deep, cleaning
drains around the house of one of our homeowners whose house had
been built with a drain defect. I did this because he travels
much of the time and he needed the help. He is an executive with
Microsoft, but I can respect the man and his personal life
separate from my views of his company. Same applies to politics!

Gene Gaines
gene.gaines@gainesgroup.com
Sterling, Virginia



Transcript: The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush

Remarks as delivered by former Vice President Al Gore
Gaston Hall at Georgetown University
Monday, October 18, 2004

   Text at:  www.algore04.com
   Video at: www.c-span.org/Search/basic.asp?BasicQueryText=gore&SortBy=date

Thank you. I really appreciate that enthusiastic and warm
welcome. And I want to thank Eli Pariser for his generous
introduction, also even more for the tremendous energy that he
and his colleagues at MoveOn.org have brought to the democratic
process in America. I'm really a big fan of Eli and all of those
who work with him at Move On. And I want to say a special word
of thanks to Gerard Alolod who is the Lecture Fund chair, and I
wish to thank Georgetown University for the courtesy of allowing
me to speak here, and president John DeGioia. Allow me also to
express my condolences to the family of the student who had an
accidental death on Friday, and condolences to the student body.

This is a great, great university. I have spoken here before,
and it is always an honor, particularly to come to this
magnificent hall. So, again, thank you very much. So I come, as
I have said at other occasions, as a recovering politician. I'm
on about step nine, and an enthusiastic welcome like that always
presents the danger of a relapse, so I'm on my guard. I came
here because I have made a series of speeches about the policies
of the Bush-Cheney administration with regard to Iraq, the war
on terror, civil liberties, the global environment, and other
issues, a series that began more than two years ago with a
speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, prior to the
president's decision to invade Iraq.

During this series of speeches, I have tried hard to understand
what it is that gives so many Americans an uneasy feeling that
something very basic has gone wrong in our democracy. There are
many people in both political parties who worry that there is
something deeply troubling about President Bush's relationship
to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about
new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the
problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the
country.

One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart
enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact
from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his
personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he
relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I
disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those
cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while
I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it's
an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as
it is for me, and for most of you, I'm convinced that most of
the president's frequent departures from fact based analysis
have much more to do with right-wing political and economic
ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to
be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so
strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even
debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the
source of this troubling inflexibility.

Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country
stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the
infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts
the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and
above the interests of the American people. It is love of power
for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

The surprising current dominance of American politics by right-
wing politicians whose core beliefs are usually wildly at odds
with the opinions of the majority of Americans is a dominance
that has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of
interest groups that have little in common with each other
besides a desire for power that can be devoted to the
achievement of a narrow agenda.

The two most important blocks in this coalition are, first, what
I would call the economic royalists, those corporate leaders and
high net worth families with vast fortunes at their disposal who
are primarily interested in an economic agenda that will
eliminate as much of their own taxation as possible, and an
agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and any competition
they might face from smaller, newer firms in the marketplace.
They provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the
now extensive network of foundations, think tanks, political
action committees, media companies, and front groups capable of
simulating grassroots activism.

The second of the two pillars of this coalition are social
conservatives, many of whom want to roll back most of the
progressive social changes of the 20th Century, including many
women's rights, social integration, the social safety net, the
government social programs of the progressive era, the New Deal,
the Great Society, and their coalition includes a number of
powerful interest groups like the National Rifle Association,
the anti-abortion coalition, and other groups that have agreed
to support each other's agendas in order to obtain their own.
You could call it the 300 musketeers, one for all and all for
one. And, indeed, those who raise more than $100,000 are called
not musketeers, but pioneers.

Now, Bush's seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by
people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the
strength of his conviction when, in fact, it is this very
inflexibility based on a willful refusal to even consider
alternative opinions or conflicting evidence that poses the most
serious danger to our country.

By the same token, the simplicity of many of his pronouncements,
which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has
penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly
the opposite because they usually mark his refusal to even
consider complexity. And that's a particularly difficult problem
in a world where the challenges America faces are often quite
complex and require rigorous sustained disciplined analysis.

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an
astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and
political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral
authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and
genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he
convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that
actually hurt their families and their communities.

Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language
of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in
American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American
people, and give as much of it as possible to the already
wealthy and privileged. And these wealthy and privileged look at
his agenda and they say, as Dick Cheney said to former Secretary
of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, "this is our due."

The central elements of President Bush's political as opposed to
religious belief system are actually plain to see. First, the
public interest is a dangerous myth according to Bush's ideology
-- a fiction created by those hated liberals who use the notion
of public interest as an excuse to take away from the wealthy
and powerful what they do believe is their due. Therefore,
government in this system of beliefs, government of, by, and for
the people is bad -- except when government can help members of
his coalition. Laws and regulations are also therefore bad,
again except when they can be used to help members of his
coalition. Therefore, also, whenever laws must be enforced and
regulations administered, it is important in their view to
assign those responsibilities to individuals who can be depended
upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion that there is
such a thing as the public interest, those who will instead
reliably serve the narrow and specific interests of industries
and interest groups.

This is the reason, for example, that President Bush put the
former chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of vetting all of
the Bush appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Enron had already helped the Bush team with such favors as
ferrying their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt
the counting of legally cast ballots. They flew on the Enron
plane. And then, after members of the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission were appointed with Mr. Lay's personal review and
approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric rate payers of
California and other states without the inconvenience of federal
regulators protecting citizens against their criminal behavior.

Or, to take another example, this explains why all -- virtually
all -- of the important EPA positions have been carefully filled
with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in
their respective industries in order to make sure that those
polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of
the law against excessive pollution.

In Bush's ideology there is an interweaving of the agendas of
large corporations that support them and his own ostensibly
public agenda for the government that he leads. Their
preferences become his policies, and his politics become their
business.

Any new taxes in this ideology are of course bad, especially if
they add anything at all to the already unbearable burden placed
on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions tot his rule
of course for new taxes that are paid by lower income Americans,
which have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the
burden of paying for government from the wealthy, and then also
potentially recruiting those presently considered to pay to pay
taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon.

In the international arena, treaties and international
agreements are also considered bad, because they can interfere
with the exercise of power the same way domestic laws can. The
Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting
torture were both described by President Bush's White House
counsel as "quaint," and then effectively discarded as a
constraint, so that Bush and Rumsfeld could institute policies
that resulted in the widespread torture of detainees in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Guantanamo and numerous secret locations elsewhere.
And even though new information has now confirmed that Donald
Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific
extreme measures authorized to be used by interrogators, he has
still not been held accountable for the most shameful and
humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory --
(applause) -- because this president never holds anyone in his
administration accountable no matter what they do.

Most dangerous of all, this Bush ideology promotes the making of
policy in secret, based on information that is not available to
the public and in a process that is insulated from any
meaningful participation by Congress or the American people.
When Congress's approval is required under our current
Constitution, it is to be given without meaningful debate. As
Bush said to one Republican senator in a meeting described in
Time magazine -- and I quote from the magazine's account --
"Look, I want your vote -- I'm not going to debate it with you."

At the urging of the Bush White House, Republican leaders in
Congress have even taken the unprecedented step of routinely
barring Democrats from serving on many important conference
committees, and then allowing lobbyists for special interests to
actually draft brand- new legislative language introduced in
conference committees, language that has not been considered or
voted upon in either the House or the Senate.

It has also become common for President Bush to rely on special
interests for his basic information about the policies important
to them. And he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view
that might emerge from public debate. He has in effect
outsourced the truth.

Most disturbing of all: his contempt for the rule of reason and
his early successes in persuading the nation that his
ideologically based views accurately describe the world have now
tempted him to the hubristic an genuinely dangerous illusion
that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with
clever public relations and propaganda skills; and, where
specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a
turnkey operation from the industries most affected.

George Orwell said, and I quote, "The point is that we are all
capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then
when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts
so as to show that we were right." Intellectually it is possible
to carry on this process for an indefinite time. The only check
on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against
solid reality -- usually on a battlefield.

In one of the speeches that I have a year ago last August, I
proposed that one reason why the normal processes of our
democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that our nation acquired
a large number of false impressions about the choices before us
including for example that -- the false impression that Saddam
Hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking us on
September 11th, 2001. According to Time magazine again, 70
percent thought that in November of 2002. Or, to take another
example, an impression that there was a tight linkage and close
partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein, between the terrorist group al Qaeda, which did attack
us, and Iraq which did not. And the impression that Saddam had a
massive supply of weapons of mass destruction and that he was on
the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to
give nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group, which
would then use them against American cities. Also the impression
was widely shared that Iraq would welcome our invading army with
garlands of flowers. And even though the rest of the world
opposed the war when it began, they would quickly fall in line
after we won, and then they'd contribute lots of money and
soldiers, so there wouldn't be a risk that our taxpayers would
foot the whole bill. And, in any case, there would be more than
enough money from Iraqi oil supplies which would flow in
abundance quickly after the invasion -- we could use that money
to offset expenses, and the net cost to America would be zero.
The impression also was widespread was that the size of the
force required would be relatively small and would not put a
strain on our military or our reserves, and would not jeopardize
other commitments we have around the world. Now, of course every
single one of these impressions was wrong.

And, unfortunately, the consequences have been catastrophic for
our country. And the plague of false impressions seem to settle
on other policy debates as well. For example, in considering
President Bush's gigantic tax cut, many somehow got the
impression that first the majority of that tax cut would not go
disproportionately to the wealthy but would go to the middle
class; second, that it would not lead to large deficits, because
it would stimulate the economy so much it would pay for itself;
and, third, not only would there be no job losses, but we would
have big increases in employment as a result. And of course, as
everyone knows, here to every one of these impressions was
completely wrong.

Now, last year I did not accuse the president of intentionally
deceiving the American people, but rather noted the remarkable
coincidence that all of his arguments turned out to be based on
falsehoods. But since that time we have learned from information
that has become public in a variety of ways that in virtually
every case the president chose to ignore, and indeed often to
suppress studies, reports, information, facts, that were
directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process
of giving to the American people. In most every case he chose to
reject information that was prepared for him by objective
analysts and to rely instead on information that was prepared by
sources of questionable reliability who had a private interest
in the policy choice that the president was recommending -- a
choice that was conflicted with the public interest. For
example, when the president and his team were confidently
asserting that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes that had been
acquired in order to enrich uranium for atomic bombs, numerous
experts at the Department of Energy and elsewhere in the
intelligence community were certain that the information being
presented to our country by the president was completely wrong.
The true experts on uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, where
most enrichment has taken place in the U.S., in my home state of
Tennessee. They told me early on that in their opinion there was
virtually zero possibility that the tubes in question were for
the purpose of enrichment. And yet they received a directive at
Oak Ridge forbidding them from making any public statement that
disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by
President Bush.

In another example, we now know that two months before the Iraq
war began, President Bush received detailed and comprehensive
secret reports warning him that the likely result of an
American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for
Islamic fundamentalism, deep divisions in Iraqi society, high
levels of violent internal conflict and guerrilla warfare aimed
at U.S. forces.

And yet in spite of those analyses, President Bush chose to
suppress those warnings, conceal that information, and instead
went right on conveying to the American people the absurdly
Pollyanna-ish view of highly questionable and obviously biased
sources like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted felon and known
swindler, who the Bush administration put on its payroll and
gave a seat adjacent to First Lady Laura Bush at the State of
the Union address, who they then flew into Baghdad on a military
jet with a private security force, but then the following year
decided was actually a spy for Iran who had been hoodwinking the
president all along with phony facts and false predictions.

There is a growing tension between President Bush's portrait of
the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on
the ground. In fact, his entire agenda is collapsing around his
ankles. Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and
a growing prospect of a civil war, with the attendant chaos and
risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state.

America's moral authority in the world has been severely
damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead
has virtually disappeared. The latest to announce they are
beginning to withdraw from the coalition are Poland and Italy.
Our troops, because they are already bearing more than 90
percent of the burden borne by non-Iraqis, are stretched thin,
under-supplied, and placed in intolerable situations without
adequate equipment or training.

In the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis,
only 2 percent say they view our troops as liberators. More than
90 percent of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of what they
describe as an occupation.

Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently
Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy
blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon
officials have conducted this war.

This war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists
who use it as their most damning indictment of the United States
and of U.S. policy. The massive casualties suffered by civilians
in Iraq and the horrible TV footage of women and children being
pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes, shown
routinely and constantly on the Arab television stations
throughout the Middle East, this has been a propaganda victory
for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest dreams. And it is tragic,
and it was avoidable.

Moreover, America's honor and reputation have been severely
damaged by President Bush's decision to authorize policies and
legal hair-splitting that resulted in the widespread torture by
U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and others in
facilities from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Astonishingly and shamefully, investigators also found that more
than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were completely
innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever.

The prestigious Jaffe think tank in Israel released a
devastating indictment just last week of how this misadventure
in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on
terror.

We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen by President
Bush to be in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately
following the invasion, that he was repeatedly telling the White
House that there were insufficient troops on the ground to make
the policy a success.

And yet at the time Bremer was telling the White House his
views, President Bush was simultaneously repeating -- repeatedly
asserting to the American people that he was relying on those
Americans in Iraq for his opinion -- confident opinion, of
course -- that we had more than enough troops and no more were
needed.

We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a
comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely
consequences of the invasion accurately predicted the chaos,
popular resentment and growing likelihood of civil war, and that
this analysis was presented to the president and that other
similar analyses were stacked in front of the president's team
on the desk in the Cabinet Room in the White House, even as the
president continued to confidently assure America that the
aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of
representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful
Iraqis.

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