Corruption...in the Media

Major oversight for me to not include a link the comments from New York Times reporter John Burns about the media's performance leading up to the war in Iraq. I'll leave the subject alone and get back to the markets. But Burns tackles the issue head on. You can read the whole thing here or go to http://209.11.49.220/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1979014 Here's the money quote: "There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers." While I'm at it, let me pass on a link from a translation of an article that appeared in the French daily Le Figaro. I can't vouch for the whole translation, sinch my French is poor. But it's suprising, nonetheless, coming from a Frenchman, even though Le Figaro has a reputation for being "right wing" unlike Le Monde. You can fine the whole thing here or by going here...http://cinderellabloggerfeller.blogspot.com/2003_09_14_cinderellabloggerfeller_archive.html . The piece in question is from Monday, the 15th, titled "The Birth of the First American Empire," by Guy Sorman. Here's the quote... In sum, the great adventure of the burgeoning century is not the clash of civilizations, which was never anything but a Hollywood-style metaphor with no real basis in fact; it will be the demonstration of the failure or the universality of the three great principles embodied by the first American empire: democracy, individualism and consumption. Facing it, there no longer exists either a Soviet model, or a Chinese or an Islamist one, nor a European alternative, not even a utopia. There only really remains the question posed by the American empire: to be Americanized or not to be? The century, it is true, is only three years old.