“LITTLE girls are not meant to die the way Samantha did,” Sheriff Mike Carona, wiping off his tears, said as he turned to the flower-decked casket of the five-year-old strangled at the hands of a hulk 23 years her senior, a pervert.
California’s shocked community came to Mantha’s, (as her mom calls her) funeral and silently sobbed at losing a lovely little girl, with cascading red hair and a smile that could melt any heart. Carona was called to the White House last week and decorated by Bush for catching Samantha’s murderer within 24 hours.
More than grief is the anger that consumed America, because Samantha became America’s little girl and Alejandro Avila (her killer) became America’s number one enemy.
Ever heard of Ifra and Iqra? Whose little girls are they? Are the two-year-old Ifra and five-year-old Iqra Pakistan’s little girls? Who will save the two (and thousands more) from being bartered and their frail little bodies thrown before hungry perverts several decades older than them?
The closest comparison I can draw to Sheriff Mike Carona is our sheriff of Supreme Court, Justice Shaikh Riaz Ahmad! The man (maybe he has daughters and granddaughters) took a suo motu notice after reading in the newspaper how the Mianwalli elders had brokered a deal between the families of four murderers on death row and the aggrieved.
Unlucky for Ifra and Iqra — they happened to be on the wrong side — related to the four murderers, they and another six virgins were to be sacrificed to the family of the victims, among them was an 18-year-old who was to become the wife of an 80-year-old! Dead is what he should be with shame. Are Pakistan’s little girls meant to be used as sex objects for dirty, old sick predators? Avila assaulted Samantha for which he will pay with his life. What about our men who marry minors and then assault them?
Musharraf and his coterie are seized with the urge to keep their powered seats warm and snug, why then would they waste their sunshine moments worried sick about the fate of little girls? While feudals like Malik Asad make light of murder and happily broker and barter women in their domain at their whim, the rest of Pakistan carries on.
Marrying little girls to old geysers, who have already ravished through their other wives and are left lusting for more, is akin to murder. Can our society with a conscience condone such an egregious wrong? Had this happened to Ifra and Iqra in the US, the lacerated community would have raised hell and seen the perpetrators of such a crime handcuffed and jailed. Civilized societies do not cower under a veneer of indifference when such an outrage breaks.
On another front, even George W. Bush is attracting boomers! POTUS, as in ‘President of the United States’, and his VPOTUS Dick Cheney can be struck with lightning and end up charred for their remaining two years as crooks who led the way in the money grubbing game and cheered on the CEOs who cooked their books to get unimaginably rich while their eighty-five million American investors went down the tube. When America goes to the polls in November to elect members of the Congress whose terms are up, Bush and his buddies in the Republican Party can get a pummelling they had not planned on. That’s the only way of getting back at them. Not like in Pakistan, where we elect the same old corrupt again and again even when we catch them with their hands in the kitty.
“Infectious greed” calls it Greenspan, the high priest of finance. He’s referring to the CEOs of mega-corporations, banking institutions, investment bankers, accounting firms, the whole hoopla of white-collar criminals who have milked their investors and made $7 trillion evaporate from the stock market by insider trading and cashing their stocks before the stock market collapsed and left millions penniless.
The largest in a series of accounting scandals that have shaken faith in corporate America is WorldCom, which owns the nation’s number two long-distance carrier MCI. Gone bust, it has filed for bankruptcy. All because $3 billion vanished! While the number-crunching, now fired, chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan is busy building a $15 million mansion in Florida, WorldCom sacked 17,000 of its employees in one swoop. And guess what? It loaned its former CEO, the bearded Bernie Ebbers $408 million. How many mansions can the fella build? How many glitzy parties can he throw and how much of his snitched wealth can he splurge?
Meanwhile, what about the millions of little guys who have had their pension funds, hard-saved life earnings tied up in stocks? They are now left holding the stocks which is worthless paper today. “I lost everything and I am now back at work,” says an 80-year-old woman at a retail store where she is putting in a 40-hour-week to survive and hang on to her health insurance, without which she is dead meat!
Another senior says: “The wonderful generation of baby boomers, the ‘me’ generation, the ‘I’ generation, the ones who would roll over their best friends to get ahead. And whom have they betrayed now? They’ve betrayed their parents, the ones in their 60s, 70s and beyond, who always played by the rules.”
Bush is one such baby boomer who allegedly did not play by the rules, neither did his fishy VP, Cheney, who got filthy rich as CEO of Halliburton by doing exactly what WorldCom Ebbers did: turning a loss into a reported profit! The White House duo are being looked upon as terribly oily while the engulfing oil spill slimes towards them. Stumbling and bumbling when the press here grills POTUS about his shady past, he slouches, looks uneasy and says archly: “What’s important in life? You know the bottom line about this corporate America stuff... is that important? Or is serving your neighbour, loving your neighbour like you’d like to be loved yourself?” But the media continues to hammer on with its “gotcha” tone.
And so do the Americans who are collective victims of financial predators. They are in an ugly mood and have no ear for George Bush’s preachy homilies. They don’t want him massaging his stories. Instead, what they want is a presidential mea culpa as they checklist some of his murky dealings: What’s the real story behind the sudden sale of his Harken stock — was it not insider trading? Wasn’t the man who cleared Bush as the head of Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), Richard Breeden appointed by daddy Bush when he was POTUS? How come that Harken (George W. Bush was a director here) which had never drilled a well overseas, outbid Amoco to drill oil in Bahrain? What does Bush know about the shady deals involving Aloha Petroleum? And finally the $200 million bankrolled by the tax-payers to build a stadium and handed over to Bush and the owners of the Texas Rangers shows Bush involved in land grabbing.
“He didn’t become a millionaire, just like that,” second guesses an insider familiar with crony capitalism and people bumming for inside stock tips.
“LITTLE girls are not meant to die the way Samantha did,” Sheriff Mike Carona, wiping off his tears, said as he turned to the flower-decked casket of the five-year-old strangled at the hands of a hulk 23 years her senior, a pervert.
