Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
Recent
Stories
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
30, 2003
After the Blackout,
A NAFTA For Energy?
Sucking
Up Mexico's Power
By JOHN ROSS
MEXICO CITY.
Although the historic August 14th blackout shut
down crucial industrial and financial centers in two out of the
three North American Energy Alliance nations, and virtually killed
the prospects for the privatization of electricity in a third,
consolidating that strategic alliance continues to be a dominating
Bush-Cheney policy goal.
George W. Bush first proposed the creation
of a "North American Energy Market" during his 2000
presidential campaign and quickly obtained endorsement from Mexican
president-elect Vicente Fox. Integral to the deal was the privatization
of Mexico's state-run electricity generating and petroleum sectors
and both initiatives came to form the building blocks of Fox's
energy program which, as later revealed by the national daily
La Jornada, was partially designed by the late Enron Corporation
whose former CEO, Kenneth Lay, was a long-time Bush crony.
Not unexpectedly, the creation of a North
American Energy Alliance (NAEA) has been a key Bush White House
project. In May 2001, the White House-directed "North American
Energy Alliance Working Group", chaired by veep Dick Cheney,
the once and future chief honcho of the Halliburtan oil empire,
issued a report that since has become administration energy policy,
urging Mexico and Canada to formally join a North American Energy
Alliance. Creation of the NAEA would provide the United States
with a "stable" source of energy and insure "U.S.
energy security" Cheney Inc. concluded.
One example of such "stability":
under Alliance strictures, the price of oil supplied by Mexico
and Canada would be fixed below the world market price
Mexican critics of the proposed alliance,
often described as "a NAFTA for Energy", argue that
such energy integration serves Washington's needs at the expense
of the delivering countries. The U.S. is the fattest energy hog
on the planet, snorkling up a quarter of the world's daily petroleum
output every 24 hours - 20,000,000 barrels.
Flanked by cabinet ministers, business
bigwigs, and officials of the government's Federal Electricity
Commission (CFE) this past August 14th, Vicente Fox utilized
a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a Tamaulipas state electricity generation
plant constructed by private enterprise, as a springboard to
launch his annual pitch for the privatization and deregulation
of Mexico's electricity industry. The new facility, which will
add 10,000 kilowatts to the nation's generating capacity, is
one of 17 being built by private sector consortiums that include
such transnationals as Mitsubishi, Westinghouse, and Siemens.
With 70% of its generating facilities
set to reach 30 year operating longevity capacities by 2010,
Mexico needs $60 billion USD in private sector investment over
the next decade just to stay abreast of the demand for electricity,
Fox warned at the Tamaulipas ceremony. pleading for increased
private sector investment.
Not an hour after the Mexican president
wrapped up his pep talk on the wonders of privatization, the
privatized and deregulated U.S. electricity infrastructure collapsed
into unprecedented blackout, a $6 billion a day catastrophe that
spread chaos and panic throughout North America without Al Qaeda
even having to lift a finger. "Allah has sent a thunderbolt"
one Baghdad resident told the New York Times - that city has,
of course, been on permanent blackout since the U.S. invaded.
Under the Mexican constitution, electricity
generation is the exclusive domain of the CFE but a 1992 modification
imposed by then-president Carlos Salinas as a stepping stone
to the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the door for
major corporation participation in the construction of generating
facilities to run their own factories and manufacturing operations
- with the stipulation that all excess energy be sold back to
the CFE for general public distribution.
Under Fox's proposed changes, private
energy producers would now be able to sell their own juice to
a select group of customers. Opponents of the reform like the
very vocal and venerable Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME)
insist this schema would permit private producers to walk away
with the CFE's 400 largest consumers, decapitalize the public
sector, and create a two-tier delivery system with low-end Mexicans
being left in the dark. At present, 7% of Mexican households
have no electricity and for millions more, climbing rates limit
illumination to a single dim light bulb.
Fox's fixation with the privatization
and deregulation of Mexico's energy sector first emerged in a
much-heralded "Plan for the Reorganization of the National
Electricity Industry", a document which incorporates verbatim
chapters of an Enron proposal entitled "Clear Rules for
Energy Development." Before its collapse, the Houston megacorp
operated 64 subsidiaries in Mexico, most of them incorporated
in the Caiman Islands, and Fox's political opponents insinuate
that Enron partially financed his winning 2000 presidential campaign.
Despite Fox's pleas for privatization,
the President continues to run head-on into a legislative road
block thrown up every year by a congress in which the once-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the left-center Party
of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) play the nationalism card
to beat back efforts by Fox's out-numbered National Action Party
(PAN) to push through the reforms. Now the colossal August blackout
on the east coast of North America, attributed as it is to infrastructure
deficiencies aggravated by deregulation and private energy speculators,
has once again driven a coffin nail through the president's plans.
Nonetheless, a worried SME decries the
"silent" privatization of the industry. Between 15
and 30% of Mexico's electricity generation is now in private
hands and CFE documents obtained by the union speak of an eventual
50% share. Such inroads are a key Bush-Cheney North American
Energy Alliance goal.
But the NAEA is conceived of as a two-way
street, both of them leading right back to the U.S. Not only
are U.S. transnationals moving into Mexico with an eye to dominating
the distribution of electricity to Mexicans, much as Anglo-American
entrepreneurs did under dictator Porfirio Diaz a century ago
- but now these energy giants have carte blanche to set up south
of the border and sell energy back to U.S. customers.
Despite an acute deficit in electricity
distribution throughout rural northern Mexico, U.S. energy corporations
are now pumping tens of thousands of kilowatts from that region
further north into California to keep San Diego households whirring
with the latest modern appliances. U.S. per capita consumption
of kilowatts is seven times that on the Mexican side of the border.
This August, the California-based Sempra
Energy conglomerate's 600 megawatt generating plant went on line
out in the scrub desert west of Mexicali Baja California - all
of the power generated will flow north to what Mexicans call
"the Other Side." The Sempra project is one of 20 that
such energy kings as Shell, British Petroleum, Phillips, and
El Paso Natural Gas have on the drawing board for this stretch
of the northern border.
Sempra and Inter-Gens, whose Mexican
subsidiary Azteca Energy X is about to inaugurate a pair of huge
generating plants a few miles from the Sempra facility, say they
came to Mexico because construction costs were low, labor cheap,
licensing quick, and environmental regulations lax. "That's
what free trade is all about" an unidentified Inter-Gens
executive recently told the New York Times.
According to Greenpeace studies, in addition
to drying up what little water remains under the desert, the
Sempra plant alone will generate 180 tons of Carbon Monoxide
emissions annually (Mexico has no Carbon Monoxide limits) and
200 tons of Sulfur Dioxide ("acceptable" Mexican levels
are twice as loose as they are a few miles north on "The
Other Side.) "These energy maquiladoras are one more example
of environmental racism" charges J.P. Ross, California Greenpeace
spokesperson. San Diego Democratic congressperson Bob Filner
is even more explicit, labeling the Sempra and Inter-Gens operations
"19th Century Imperialism."
Both Sempra and Inter-Gens have admitted
their culpability in the notorious 1999 California energy swindle
which has cost the state an estimated $60 billion USD and driven
Governor Gray Davis into a suicide recall. While other perps
like Enron have gone belly up, Sempra and Inter-Gens continue
to sell energy to California - although they had to move to Mexico
to do so. During the 1999 skam, energy speculators deliberately
held electricity off line to cause power blackouts, so they could
inflate the price of their product.
Beach heads in the North American Energy
Alliance, the Mexicali facilities will be powered by natural
gas delivered from Bolivia and Indonesia to soon-to-be-built
liquid natural gas re-gasification terminals along the pristine
Baja California coastline between Tijuana and Ensenada. Marathon
Oil of Houston already holds permits for the construction of
port facilities and LNG terminals in the tourist corridor north
of Ensenada. What natural gas is not sold to Sempra and Inter-Gens,
will be pipelined up to southern California.
The prospect of LNG terminals in their
own backyard alarms the locals. LNG regasification is considered
so volatile that no such terminals have been opened in the U.S.
since the 9/11 terror attacks because they are so vulnerable
to sabotage.
"We used to be the center of the
tourist trade" cracks Tijuana congressional rep Jaime Martinez
Veloz (PRD), "now we will be the center of the terrorist
trade." Martinez Veloz speculates that Bush could use the
pretext of the proposed North American Energy Alliance to send
in the Marines to safeguard the LNG terminals.
Natural gas interconnection between Mexico
and the U.S. are another vertebrae of the NAEA and the silent
and not-so-silent privatization and deregulation that accompany
the Alliance.
Despite Fox's repeated pledges never
to privatize PEMEX, whose purview includes natural gas development
and production, the national petroleum monopoly now contracts
with 300 transnational corporations for services it cannot afford
to perform for itself. Now with drilling about to begin in the
enormous Burgos dry gas fields, a tri-state region along the
northeastern border, PEMEX is promising transnationals "Multi-Service
Contracts" (MSC) - constitutionally outlawed "risk"
contracts in which the driller takes home a percentage of the
find.
Among those U.S. transnationals participating
in the Burgos project are Fluour Daniel (which also won a $300
million contract to drill in the revived Chicontepec oil fields),
and the ubiquitous Halliburton Corporation. In addition, Halliburton,
whose KBR division is making out like Ali Baba in "reconstructing"
Iraq after an invasion designed by the company's ex-CEO, has
won a $23 million contract to build a gas separator in Reforma,
Chiapas, not far from rebel Zapatista autonomous zones. Zapatista
"autonomias" in the Lacandon jungle sit on PEMEX-proven
deposits of natural gas.
Off-shore, Halliburton has become the
chief purveyor of technology for the Cantarell complex out in
the Sound of Campeche, Mexico's most abundant oil field. Some
critics complain that PEMEX's Exploration and Development division
has virtually been taken over by Halliburton.
All of this activity is heartwarming
news for Dick Cheney and George Walker Bush, the architects of
the North American Energy Alliance. Access to Mexican oil is
very much what the NAEA is all about - although such access has
hardly been denied by Fox.
For much of 2002-03 during the run-up
to the Iraq invasion, Mexico was Washington's number one petroleum
supplier but curiously, after Bush declared victory in May, the
Saudis once again became the top dogs in the oil basket. Together,
Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Canada account for 52% of all U.S.
imports - the U.S. imports more than half its oil from 13 petroleum-producing
nations and this July sucked up a record-breaking 320 million
barrels.
Although Fox heeded Bush's injunction
to up export production quotas to fuel the U.S. war machine and
keep gas prices within reason at the pump up north, Washington
yearns for more direct control over Mexico's oil industry in
order to "insure (the) U.S. energy security" which
is at the core of the Cheney-Bush North American Energy Alliance.
But such control may be short-term. According to recent PEMEX
studies, Mexico's proven reserves are expected to give out in
the next 11 to 13 years at the current rate of extraction.
John Ross
is revving up to cover the World Trade Organization carnival
in Cancun Sept. 10th-14th.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
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