Letter Never Sent

From the Independent:

Italian police planted two Molotov cocktails in a school where anti-globalisation pro-testers were sleeping to justify a brutal crackdown during last year’s G8 summit in Genoa.

A policeman has confessed that he planted the explosives following a year of acrimony over the handling of security at the summit where a protester was shot dead by the police.

Who would benefit from the privatization of Social Security? Bush and the rest of those bloodsucking elites he surrounds himself with. It’s outright corruption and Americans are bending right over for it and asking for seconds. From the NYTimes:

But there may be a third reason. Ask yourself: Who would benefit directly from the creation of “personal accounts” under Social Security?

Those personal accounts won’t be like personal stock portfolios. The Social Security Administration can’t and won’t become a stockbroker for 130 million clients, most of them with quite small accounts. Instead it’s likely that a privatization scheme would require individuals to invest with one of a handful of designated private investment funds.

That would mean enormous commissions for the managers of those funds. And those who would be likely to benefit showed their appreciation, in advance: During the 2000 election, according to opensecrets.org, campaign contributors in the two categories labeled “securities and investment” and “miscellaneous finance” (basically individual wheeler-dealers) gave Mr. Bush almost six times as much as they gave Al Gore.

Here, too, Mr. Bush’s past is prologue. I reported in an earlier column the story of Utimco, the University of Texas fund that, while Mr. Bush was governor and the current secretary of commerce, Donald Evans, headed the U.T. regents, placed more than $1 billion with private funds, many with close business or political ties to Mr. Bush himself. Among the beneficiaries were the Wyly brothers, who later financed a crucial smear campaign against John McCain. (“Bush reveals his poisonous colors” was the headline of a piece about that campaign, written by the online pundit Andrew Sullivan.)

Could America’s retirement savings really be used to reward the administration’s friends? Ask the teachers of Texas. In one of many odd deals during Mr. Bush’s time as governor, the Texas teachers’ retirement system sold several buildings without open bids, taking a $70 million loss, to a company controlled by Richard Rainwater, a prime mover behind Mr. Bush’s rise to wealth.

Ordinary murderers get the death penalty in Texas, and this corrupt shitheel gets to be president of the most powerful nation on earth. Life sure has a way of kicking you in the nuts.

Harken Energy is likely a CIA front, according to well-known left-wing rag (haha), Fortune Magazine:

Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left. CEO Mikel Faulkner and COO Bruce Huff, CPAs who have been with the Harken since 1980 and 1990 respectively, pursued a variety of deals to jump-start its operations. But without much luck. The company’s Latin American operations in particular were a drag, and Harken lost some $263 million over the past five years. And in a complex series of transactions, Harken recently moved its South American operations into a British company called Global PLC, of which Harken owns 92%. “It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection,” says Gheit of Fahnestock. “That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn’t add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front.” That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.

Of course, only rumor.