June 10, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

President Theodore Roosevelt talked about "malefactors of great wealth" and in his day there was an effort to break up the big monopolies. In the Bush era, however, it appears that anti-trust enforcement is a bad thing. This article talks about how the Microsoft company has found an ally in the Bush Justice Department. The article by Stephen Labaton is at www.nytimes.com:

“With the change in administrations there has been a sharp falling away from the concerns about how Microsoft and other large companies use their market power,” said Harry First, a professor at the New York University School of Law and the former top antitrust lawyer for New York State who is writing a book about the Microsoft case. “The administration has been very conservative and far less concerned about single-firm dominant behavior than previous administrations.”

Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for Google, declined to comment about the complaint.

Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel at Microsoft, said that the company was unaware of Mr. Barnett’s memo. He said that Microsoft had not violated the consent decree and that it had already made modifications to Vista in response to concerns raised by Google and other companies.

He said that the new operating system was carefully designed to work well with rival software products and that an independent technical committee that works for the Justice Department and the states had spent years examining Vista for possible anticompetitive problems before it went on sale.

THE PERVERSION OF DEMOCRACY

George W. Bush and his cronies mouth pieties about democracy all the time. We went into Iraq and started an unjustified war, but we were going to give them "democracy." We've heard about how terrible Cuba is or how bad Hugo Chavez is in Venezuela. But we don't hear about the Saudis, good friends of the Bush family, although the Saudis are one of the most repressive regimes in the world. This article by Chris Floyd is at www.chris-floyd.com:

If a nation is not compliant with Washington's will -- why, then, it is no longer a legitimate democracy. Venezuala, for example, is often referred to in Establishment circles as a "dictatorship," despite the several open elections won by Hugo Chavez and his coalition -- and despite the fact that remains immeasurably freer in every regard than, say, Saudi Arabia.

Which brings us to the second point of the Establishment's true attitude toward democracy: if a regime plays ball with Washington, it doesn't matter in the least how tyrannical and un-democratic it is. Bandar Bush's Saudi Arabia again stands as the prime example of this. Bush will quite literally kiss Saudi leaders on the lips and stroll with them hand-in-hand, and never say a word about the regime's Venezuela strictures, which give the Taliban a run for their money. Why? Because the Saudis play ball -- and because they enrich the Bush Family and the American elite. Is there any doubt that if Vladimir Putin cut the Bushes or other Establishment elites in for a juicy slice of Gazprom, he too would find his "democratic" credentials miraculously restored?