"Dear President Bush: On September 11, or maybe September 12, I plan to hijack several airplanes and fly them into a building or two in lower Manhattan, and maybe a military facility of some sort in Northern Virginia. Consider yourself warned. Yours sincerely, Osama"--Michael Kinsley, The Hindsight Saga, SlateMagazine, May 20, 2002

We have developed a culture of lying, and this has been my first thought as I read the article "Deny it" by Paul Corrigan. I never thought that lying, and therefore corruption, was to become embedded into our Free Market of making money with money.

Corrigan's article makes a lot of sense to me and indirectly it would be worth for everybody to learn our endemic social problem of lying. Corrigan says that lying is institutionalized as in our schools students are evaluated by their "grade point average" rather than the substance of their work and their ability to think, and as corporations want workers who lie and cheat.

Corrigan is really upset about our democracy as American leaders have been lying under oath: President Ronald Reagan and President George H. W. Bush in regard to the Iran-Contra scandal, Jeffrey Skilling in regard to the accounting frauds at Enron, Cardinal Bernard Law in regard to the widespread sexual scandals in his diocese of Boston, and President William Jefferson Clinton for saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Today, we have reached the apex of corruption as President George Bush Jr. and his administration are all lying in regard to their prior knowledge of the events leading to the 9-11 attacks.

I ask myself how we can ever have peace if we have a culture of lying. We must replace this culture of lying as this culture of lying is a natural consequence of the so-called Free Market. In the Free Market, we make money with money and therefore we use money to divide the rich from the poor; in the Free Market we use the power of money to fight a lie with a bigger lie, and eventually in the Free Market we use the power of money and therefore the power of guns to fight violence with violence.

Everybody in the Bush administration is predicting future terror attacks on a scale equal or larger than the 9-11 attacks, and this is not a surprise to me as the United States is experiencing a war based economy characterized by the absurdity of being the highest foreign debtor in the world at $2.3 trillion, by the absurdity of having a chronic annual foreign trade in the order of 4 percent of its economy, and by the absurdity of running a governmental deficit.

I agree with Corrigan's contention that lying is our main societal problem and I am of the opinion that the Bush administration is taking the world to a precipice as a result of their continuing lies and consequential domestic and foreign policies. But our neoclassical Canadian economists, including Royal Bank CEO Gordon Nixon, are happy today May 21, 2002: the Canadian dollar bursted through 65-cent US level!

References

Deny It, by Paul Corrigan, May 19, 2002 http://www.bear-left.com/original/2002/0519denyit.html

All the desperate lies and spin don't change the fact that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks By Larry Chin, Online Journal Contributing Editor, May 19, 2002 http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin051902/chin051902.html

Cheney: Future attack on U.S. 'almost certain' CNN, May 20, 2002 http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/05/20/cheney.terrorism/index.html

The United States as a HIPC (Heavily Indebted Prosperous Country)- how the poor are financing the rich. A report from JUBILEE RESEARCH at the New Economics Foundation by Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, April 2002 http://www.jubileeplus.org/analysis/reports/usa190402.htm

2002 Deficit May Be $30 to $70 Billion Higher than Expected, GOP Budget Staff Director Questioned Bush's Commitment to Returning to Balance. http://www.democrats.org/brokenpromises/deficit.html

Tuesday's world markets: Canadian dollar bursts through 65-cent US level; markets decline By Malcolm Morrison, May 21, 2002 http://ca.news.yahoo.com/020521/6/mjtj.html