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Politics : John EDWARDS for President -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (362)	2/21/2004 6:24:06 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1381

Hi Ann, It is perhaps some indication of how skewed the politics of the U.S. have become that I strike you as a leftist. In Europe, I'd be considered a centrist. One of my favorite political commentators is Thom Hartmann whose motto is "Uncommon Sense for the Radical Middle". My choice for President this year was Howard Dean, who had a record as a fiscal conservative and who drove the progressives in Vermont batty by constantly keeping them in check and not expanding government social programs to unsustainable levels. So, it is only on the perversely skewed political spectrum in the dangerously right-leaning America that I come across as a leftist. You know what. I'm proud of it. I think that the current fashion for stripping community assets from public ownership and privatizing everything from water supplies to sewer system to schooling is nuts. For centuries we've known that public systems were better managed, better constructed and better for customers. But a madness has taken over the right wing who want to privatize everything in the world, all for the sake of greed. You can see the insanity of this from the riots in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where Bechtel tried to force the citizens to cease collecting rainwater from their own roofs to Bochum, Germany were a sewer system became a tax scam for Wachovia, an American bank that cheated the American taxpayer by privatization schemes. I don't expect you to reconsider your antipathy for the UN. But I do hope that you will think about how you are being cheated as a taxpayer by schemes like Wachovia's, which are becoming fashionable throughtout all of corporate America. Here's a couple links for the background: marketplace.org Segment: "Tax Me If You Can" series - America's largest corporations shelter all of their income A study by the nonprofit Institute for Taxation found some of the largest companies in America are paying no taxes at all -- but unraveling the deals that allow these firms to elude the IRS isn't easy. Enter Cary Allen, an IRS agent who discovered one of the largest illegitimate tax shelters in the last 10 years. At the heart of the shelter scam was a complicated system of foreign leases made by U.S. companies. Problem is, even though the IRS has made some of these deals illegal, the same companies are at it again. Reporter: Hedrick Smith Frontline: "Tax Me If You Can" pbs.org ******* I, for one, understand exactly what Eleanor Roosevelt and her generation were thinking about and hoping for with the creation of the United Nations, and I find the goals to be noble and benign. What I cannot understand is the great antipathy to the UN among American conservatives. Clearly, conservatives didn't want to become part of the International Criminal Court, because they feared prosecution. Conservatives didn't want to be part of the Kyoto Protocol because of greed and a lack of concern about future. Conservatives don't want to be part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty because they want to proliferate a new generation of nuclear weapons. Why don't they want to be part of the United Nations? My guess is that it boils down to greed, lust for foreign resources and a disdain for "the lesser races". But it could be more. Or it could be less.