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Volume II, Number 472 December 2002

This Week's Article:

An American Myth: Bush is a Conservative

Paul Corrigan

Conservative citizens, beware. The Bush administration is not what you think it is. George W. Bush is not a conservative. The Bush administration does not serve the principles of democracy and liberty, nor does it believe that less government is better government. In both the government and corporate sectors, power is being concentrated in fewer hands. It does not matter that the political concentration of power is blessed by an election instead of a right of birth; elections in the United States of America have been reduced to form over substance. What matters is that the accumulation of political power (legislative, executive, and judicial) and economic power (corporate and cultural) is a threat to both democracy and liberty. True conservatives understand that power corrupts. True conservatives are not blind to the corruption in the Bush administration.

[Click on the link to read the whole article.]

Older Articles:

Articles from previous weeks are in our archives. If you're not careful, you might learn something.

Links of the Week

  • In Terror War, Second Track for Suspects: The Bush administration is establishing a separate legal system for all terrorism suspects, the Constitution be damned (Charles Lane, Washington Post).
  • Wal-Mart Values: Worldwide, women bear the brunt of Wal-Mart's incessant cost-cutting (Liza Featherstone, The Nation).
  • Iraq Inspections "Could Last a Year": The head arms inspector for the United Nations believes that inspections could last into late 2003 (Brian Whitaker, The Observer).
  • Searching for Safe Haven: Of the more than 6 billion human beings, some 240 million are uprooted, mostly because of war (Michael Flynn, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).
  • Once Again, Africa Has Become tghe Battleground for Somebody Else's War: Al-Qaeda, like many outsiders, cares not a damn about Africans (Fergal Keane, The Independent).
  • Falling Prices Put Fed on Guard: The specter of deflation scares economics, and it should scare all of us (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post).
  • Lethal Indifference: The combination of incompetent counsel and unaccountable courts in Texas makes the death penalty both hideously unjust and astonishly farcical (Texas Defender Service).
  • Fences and Windows: Real globalization transcends the efforts of global capital to make all things private (Naomi Kleim, In These Times).

Links of Previous Weeks are in our voluminous archives.

Check out our Link Library for news, opinion, and just plain interesting stuff!

Fact of the Week

In an effort to avoid pressure from corporate sponsors to ease its ban on female members, the Augusta National Golf Club cut ties with its corporate sponsors. Now, press reports indicate that some homeowners, who are used to renting out their homes during "Masters week," are finding no takers for the upcoming tournament.

Don't cry too hard for these poor Augusta homeowners. For years, they have benefitted from a special subsection—280A(g)—of the Internal Revenue Code. Under its provisions, any rent from property rented for 14 or fewer days in a year is not subject to income tax, no matter how lucrative the rent might be. For years, the United States has handed a very special tax subsidy to Augusta residents rich enough to own houses attractive enough for America's corporate elite.

Sources:
New York Times, 17 November 2002;
Baltimore Sun, 24 November 2002;
United States Internal Revenue Code.

 

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