Connect the Dots for a Disturbing Picture

NEW YORK -- There's been a lot of talk recently about connecting dots--at least when the enemy is terrorism. Connecting the dots: That's what the FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest of the so-called intelligence agencies failed to do before Sept. 11. Important facts got to somebody's files, but the crucial work of interpreting them, of connecting them to other important facts, never happened, and so the full picture remained hidden. Thanks to whistle-blowers and belatedly mobilized members of Congress, the difference between dots and pictures is now well understood.

But let's look at our other current troubles. There are plenty of other dots going unconnected, seemingly isolated facts about current and future hazards of every variety--corporate corruption, economic fragility, ecological damage, alliance ruptures, foreign policy calamities. But these many vexations are not, in fact, disconnected. At the heart there is a pattern. The big, unacknowledged picture is this: The people in power represent an economic clique whose interests are only superficially tied to the well-being of the country as a whole. In collusion with their delighted big-money supporters, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their Cabinet-level entourage spent years lining their pockets with sweetheart loans, option deals and golden parachutes from oil companies and other related industries. They built political careers thundering against regulation, fueled by a cozy camaraderie with Enron and like companies that grew fat on--surprise!--deregulation. In office, these men make energy policy in cahoots with their ultra-wealthy sponsors, a club of very special Americans whose membership list they still keep secret. They consistently fight to secure America's energy dependency on oil and related fuels. Toward that end, defying the understanding of virtually everyone else in the world, they have denied the existence of global warming, willfully distorting the scientific evidence. When its own government scientists sounded alarms, the Bush posse dismissed them as ''the bureaucracy" and kept galloping down the oily path toward even more catastrophic global climate changes associated with petroleum dependency