September 11, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

A CASE FOR LEISURE

On a somber day like the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks maybe it's good to chill out a little. This is an article about the benefits of leisure. We have it drilled into us in this country that you always have to be "productive." You have to "multitask." I have a manager who would have fit in on the Roman galleys. Stroke to the beat of the drum--stroke, stroke! He tries to track our every second of our days, afraid he might lose a few cents here and there. It's ironic that we're here in the 21st century with all this technological advancement and we work more than people in hunter-gatherer societies. This article by Eric Weiner is at www.latimes.com:

A recent survey found that the typical American worker wastes slightly more than two hours a day, not including lunch and scheduled breaks. The insurance industry is particularly rife with time wasters (can you blame them?) and Missouri, for reasons not entirely clear, is the state with the highest percentage of slackers.

The No. 1 time-wasting activity is surfing the Internet and sending personal e-mails (a finding perhaps skewed by the fact that the survey, conducted by AOL and salary.com, was Web-based), followed by socializing with co-workers, conducting personal business and just plain "spacing out." All of this loafing is supposedly costing employers $759 billion a year in lost productivity.

The findings were greeted, predictably, with much hand-wringing about the declining American work ethic. I find the survey disturbing too, but for a different reason. American workers, it turns out, are wasting less time than they did just a couple of years ago -- 19% less. We must stop this dangerous trend.

The elevation of hard work to the status of noble pursuit is, in the sweep of human history, relatively recent. The ancient Greeks and Romans viewed hard work as a curse.

BUSH IGNORED TERRORIST ATTACK THREAT

In the years since the attacks on 9/11, with all the posturing about the "war on terror," it's easy to forget how ho-hum the Bush administration regarded the terrorist threat back in 2001. Back then Bush was more interested in appeasing his right-wing base by stopping serious efforts at stem cell research. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

Another big part of the problem was the lack of urgency at the top. Counterterrorism coordinator Clarke said the 9/11 attacks might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in “shaking the trees” by having high-level officials from the FBI, CIA, Customs and other federal agencies go back to their bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.

If they had, they might well have found the memos from the FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota.

Clarke contrasted President Clinton’s urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and his national security team.

“In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks,” Clarke said in an interview. “President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.

“Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.