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in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
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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September
20, 2003
WTO Collapses in Cancun
Autopsy
of a Fiasco Foretold
By JOHN ROSS
Luis Ernesto Derbez, the commerce-minded Mexican
foreign minister and the official host of the fifth ministerial
meeting of the World Trade Organization, slid behind the podium
of the great auditorium at the ultra-modern convention center
here last Sunday evening, and, in a profoundly somber voice,
proclaimed the Cancun trade summit of 148 sometimes sovereign
nations adjourned without having reached agreement on any of
the do-or-die issues confronting this would-be arbiter of the
corporate globalization of the Planet Earth. Then, pounding his
wooden gavel sharply, Derbez dismissed the remaining delegates
and the sound that emerged was like that of nails being driven
into the WTO's coffin.
But not all those present were quite
so funereal. Led by Oxfam, British NGOs gathered to warble Beatles'
tunes with slightly altered librettos such as "Can't Buy
My World" and, behind police barriers five miles away down
Kulkulkan Boulevard, Cancun's Rodeo Drive, 'globalphobes' from
many nations danced a wild jig as news of the collapse spread.
"This is the WTO's waterloo"
grinned Walden Bello, the Philippino activist who has been locking
horns with the Geneva-based organization since its founding in
1995. "The World Trade Organization is like a bicycle--if
it doesn't move forward, it falls down."
The stunning fracaso in Cancun left U.S.
trade rep Robert Zoellick sputtering. In a high dudgeon, the
normally low-key veteran negotiator accused the developing country
bloc known as G-21 of contaminating the Cancun talks with harsh
"rhetoric." With agriculture the centerpiece bone of
contention in the Doha or "Development" round of WTO
trade liberalization negotiations, the G-21--really 23 developing
nations led by Brazil, India, and China--had demanded the abolition
of huge first world farm subsidies and high agricultural tariffs,
a concession the Bush administration apparently regarded as suicidal
as the U.S. enters an election year.
But what Zoellick labels "rhetoric"
is reality for poor and developing nations where the overwhelming
majority of the world's impoverished peoples barely survive on
$1 to $2 USD daily while Japan allocates $7.50 per diem to every
cow in its archipelago. With seven out of ten of the world's
poor dependent upon agriculture, hunger, disease, and illiteracy
are endemic in the rural south of the world.
According to World Bank bean counters,
the refusal of the U.S., the European Union, and Japan to cut
subsidies and tariffs means that 144 million farmers and their
families who might have been lifted out of poverty by first world
concessions, will find no relief in the foreseeable future.
Orchestrated by the world's commercial
giants, the collapse at Cancun was a fracaso foretold. Arrogantly
rejecting G-21 proposals, the U.S., U.E., and Japan abruptly
switched agendas, shoving agriculture to the back burner when
they realized they would not get their way, and substituting
instead demands to open third world economies to protected foreign
investment (the so-called 'Singapore Themes' in trade jargon),
an issue viewed as a poison pill for many developing countries.
As the talks crept into their final hours
September 14th, the ambiance inside the inner sanctum Green Room
was reportedly aflame with mutual accusations. Sub-Saharan cotton
producers like Mali and Burkina Faso which thought they had a
deal to cut $3 billion annual subsidies to U.S. cotton farmers
until Zoellick and his associates changed the subject, threatened
walk-out. By mid-afternoon, Kenya, Uganda, and 100 other poor
and developing nations abandoned the talks. When Derbez dismissed
the closing session, few delegates were left in the auditorium.
Although the collapse at Cancun was hailed
by anti-globalization forces as sweet victory, the real triumph
was the surprising solidarity of the South, despite rampant contradictions
between regions (Brazil, for example, has some of the highest
cotton tariffs in the world.) But India, Brazil (under the leadership
of foreign minister Celso Anorim, the real star of the show),
South Africa, China, and their many co-conspirators inside and
out the G-21 and the Africa-Pacific--Caribbean bloc (APC) refused
to buckle before first world inflexibility. In its debut WTO
summit, China, a rich country with millions of poor farmers,
for once stood solidly with the developing world. The collective
walk-out, much in the tradition of Latin Americans marketplace
bargaining where the customer walks away and the seller soon
follows with a better offer, will strengthen the G-21's hand
in future negotiating sessions--if such sessions ever evolve
from the Cancun fracaso.
This new-found solidarity was forged
in the face of Zoellick's Machiavellian maneuvering to split
the G-21 and their APC allies asunder and pit poor against not-so-poor
economies and big agricultural exporters (the Cairns group) against
very poor net food importers. The U.S. trade rep reportedly applied
tourniquet-like pressure to the six countries with which Washington
currently entertains bi-lateral "free trade" pacts,
including Mexico, a member of G-21 which suffers grievously from
grotesque U.S. ag subsidies--and which, despite the fact that
90% of its trade is with its northern neighbor, joined with the
south on this issue. In fact, Zoellick was successful only in
splitting tiny El Salvador, a client state, from the pack--meanwhile,
third world powerhouses Nigeria and Indonesia joined the G-21.
One mark of the U.S.'s desperation: on
the eve of calamitous disagreement, assistant trade rep Peter
Allgeier cited a previously unheard-of 'Group of 32' (he could
only remember one country--Honduras--as being a member) which
purportedly did not endorse the G-21/APC demands. Under reporters'
incessant questioning, the new group was unmasked as a Bush administration
invention.
The White House is quite right to be
in a sweat over the Cancun debacle. George W. Bush's failure
to foist a bad deal on the WTO will only swell the U.S.'s record-busting
$100 billion trade deficit. Moreover, this latest blow to Washington's
plans for the commercial domination of the globe comes at a difficult
economic moment for the U.S. Commander-in-Chief who is seeking
to browbeat congress into tacking nearly $100 billion onto an
already unprecedented half trillion dollar budget deficit to
finance his no-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The Cancun blow-up will also set back
predicted trade job gains as the U.S. unemployment rate soars
to its highest levels since the first Bush was forced out of
the White House. Like the father, the dismal state of the U.S.
economy may well dump the son in 2004.
The fall-out from Cancun also threatens
Bush's cherished Free Trade Area of the Americas (or ALCA in
its Spanish acronym.) Reverberations from the WTO revolt will
surely surface at the upcoming FTAA ministerial meeting this
December in Miami. The key role played at Cancun by Brazil, now
governed by ex-steel worker Luis Inacio da Silva, "Lula",
who has been the most adamant obstacle to projected FTAA 2005
start-up, is not a good omen for U.S. plans to extend the dubious
benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) all
the way to Tierra del Fuego. Failure to implement the FTAA by
2005 will mean expiration of the White House's "fast track"
negotiation authorization, without which no deal can be struck.
The Cancun collapse also torpedoes time
tables for the Doha round and seriously compromises the WTO's
credibility. Technical talks are scheduled to resume in mid-December
in Geneva where the big power Quad (the U.S., U.E., Canada, and
Japan) may ask for rule changes to limit groups of countries
like G-21 from blocking consensus. "The WTO operates like
a medieval institution" grumbles U.E. trade minister Pascal
Lamay.
One underlying reason the U.S. and its
accomplices were unable to impose their will upon the rest of
the world in Cancun was palpable resentment at the White House's
unilateral aggression in Iraq, predicated as it was on the diminishment
of the United Nations as a multilateral forum. The subsequent
hate waves that have spread throughout the third world since
Bush's Shock & Awe show over Baghdad, were translated into
commercial rejection on the Mexican Riviera. Having burned multilateralism
in Iraq, Bush was burned by multilateralism--with a distinctly
southern flavor--in Cancun.
As in Iraq, Zoellick's blunt response
to the failure to reach agreement was that the U.S. would go
it alone, imposing bi-lateral "free trade" treaties
upon its client states, if the WTO does not soon come to its
senses.
On the opening day of the Cancun conclave,
a despondent Korean farm leader, Lee Kyung Hae, climbed a police
barrier and thrust a dagger deep into his heart. Shocking as
it was, Mister Lee's suicide is not uncommon amongst farmers
all over the world--in India's Karmataka state, over 200 poor
farmers have reportedly taken their lives since crops failed
in April and a Mexican campesino recently set himself on fire.
The Korean farmer's suicide cast him
as an instant icon of agrarian desperation in the third world
and more than metaphorically, proved to be a dagger to the heart
of the Cancun talks. According to delegates interviewed as they
exited the convention center last Sunday, Mister Lee's death
stiffened the resistance of poor and developing nations and ultimately
produced historic rejection of Washington's imperial imperatives.
The Cancun collapse is unquestionably
a victory for those who oppose corporate globalization but it
is not one to get drunk on. The lack of an agreement only sharpens
contradictions between rich and poor agricultural producers and
allows the first world to continue to lavash $300 billion in
annual subsidies that are flattening the farmers of the south.
Mexican campesinos know well this dark
side of the money. Washington's hand-outs to its big farm combines
allows them to dump 6,000,000 tons of below-cost, mostly genetically-modified
corn on this side of the border. Unable to compete in the internal
market, campesinos abandon their plots and migrate north. Since
NAFTA, that beacon of globalization, kicked in ten years ago,
over 3000 Mexicans, many of them displaced farmers, have died
trying to get across the U.S. border, more than the number of
those who lost their lives in the 9/11 terror attacks on New
York and Washington.
John Ross's
chronicle of the WTO debacle, "Mister Lee Comes to Cancun"
will be released shortly.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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