After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
Sign up for email alerts, from breaking news to weekly commentary:
Find more content in these topics: Political corruption
Visit Hightower's General Store, to buy high-power Hightower books and other goodies like that.
Home | Contact | RSS | Privacy policy | Copyright Public Intelligence, Inc., all rights reserved 2003-2007
Dick cheney's dirty hands
Remember Halliburton Inc.? That's the multibillion-dollar oilfield company that Dick Cheney was head honcho at until Little George Bush plucked him from the corporate world to run Bush World, previously known as the U.S. government.
Halliburton is one of the few disgraced U.S. companies that still does business with the totalitarian rulers of Burma, thugs who overthrew democracy and hold onto power through human-rights violations so severe that they give brutality a bad name.
In the 1990s, the repression got so repulsive that dozens of corporations pulled out. But with Cheney at the helm, Halliburton brazenly defied human-rights advocates and the Burmese democracy movement by continuing to do business there.
One of its joint projects was building the Yadana pipeline, for which peasants were conscripted and forced to work at gunpoint. In return, the military thugs will pocket hundreds of millions of dollars from Halliburton and other foreign partners.
Asked about this, Cheney said dismissively, "You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that's not consistent with our principles here in the United States."
No, you don't! Moral people—even CEOs—don't have to abandon their principles just to make a buck. It's a choice—and one that Cheney makes all too easily.