Letter to Thomas L Friedman, NY Times OpEd columnist

Note: Written in response to Friedman's OpEd column, "War of the Worlds", in today's—February 24, 2006—NY Times.

Why do you lie to us? Are you such a house slave of wealth and power that you hold us, the common citizen, in contempt?

The port operator (talk with people who run American Stevedoring Inc—http://www.asiterminals.com/) is in charge of securing the cargo while it is on the dock from the time U.S. longshoremen unload the cargo from the ship onto the dock until it leaves the dock on a truck.

With not more than 5% of the cargo we receive being inspected, the entire chain of control—from point of origin of the cargo itself (before it is even readied for shipping) to the point of delivery—needs to be as tightly controlled as possible. It is a bogus argument to say that things will not change when "things" are so bad in terms of security that they should change, and change—like in "improve"—radically.

Placing ownership of the management contract at the bottom of a list of security problems does not make it "not a problem". It points a powerful light at the list of problems!

By the way, there is no such thing as "free" trade in markets where money is the medium of exchange. There is, however, the simple truth: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

I would think that you would want to be remembered for trying to get at the truth in some objective fashion, rather than the "truth" as the designated conventional wisdom churned out by the holders of wealth and power to quiet the common folk.