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Today's
Stories
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel
and the Bush Team
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
February 28 / 29, 2004
Water, Land and Cotton
Unmasking
a Secret American Empire
By AL KREBS
As a native Californian I often remind outsiders
that unless they understand the politics of land and water, they
don't understand the history and politics of the state.
For those who fear I exaggerate I enthusiastically
recommend a reading of Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman's excellent
new The
King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American
Empire (Public Affairs, New York: 2003).
This 558-page book is more than the story
of a family of titans who owned and controlled more agricultural
acreage and more river water than any other agribusiness land
barons in the West.
It is also the ever unfolding story,
minus the colorful facade of history usually associated with
the Golden State, of how California earned the title --- in the
words of author Joan Didion --- the nation's heaviest subsidized
state.
Dating from the fraudulent Mexican land
grants to the building of the railroads, from the harnessing
of the state's abundant rivers to the providing of slave laborers
for harvesting its plentiful crops, California has continued
to enjoy the federal government's never ending largess.
Synonymous with such subsidies has been
the J.G. Boswell family and their making of a secret American
empire.
Others, notably long-time San Joaquin
Valley activist George Ballis and his National Land for People
colleagues, have in the past given us rare glimpses of the Boswell's
machinations and water schemes. But Arax and Wartzman have now
provided us in their publisher's words a "sweeping lyrical
narrative" of how the Boswell's, a Georgia slave-owning
family, migrated to  California
in the early 1920's, drained one of the nation's largest lakes
--- once 800 square miles --- and became the richest cotton producer
in the world.
"For five years," they write,
"we had kept a grand ledger book in our minds to try and
reckon the Boswell empire --- and by extension Big Ag --- in
a way that broke free of the dogmatic screeds of the 1930's and
1940's. What were the pluses? What were the minuses?
"We had studied the works of Carey
McWilliams and Paul Taylor and read one of the masters of historical
scholarship, the Frenchman Ferdnand Braudel, who had looked at
the development of the Mediterranean world and concluded that
valleys almost always led to a plantation-like system that produced
slaves and oligarchies.
"To conquer the plains had been
a dream of man since the dawn of history, but the dream required
more than man himself. The reclamation of the flatlands, draining
swamps and controlling rivers, relied on large-scale government
investment. And that investment rarely, if ever, worked its way
down to the working class. Land that was flat and endless became
the easy domain of the machine. In such a place, the rich became
very rich and the poor became very poor."
In several places throughout this book
a reader senses that the authors are preparing to present a Boswell
apologia, ready to accept agriculture's "conventional wisdom"
that bigger is better and more "efficient" only to
find in the next sentence or paragraph a skillfully worded rejoinder.
The two Los Angeles Times reporters,
for example, reflect after their first meeting with Jim Boswell,
the reigning patriarch of the empire:
"Now we had before us the biggest
grower in America; and if he was no ribboned duke, he did have
a difficult time coming clean on the downside of his empire.
The scale of his farming was truly stunning, but at what cost
to the environment and at what benefit and cost to his community?
Perhaps Boswell was one of those builders who couldn't afford
the impulse to stop and consider the questions. If such an impulse
did exist, he might never have built it."
The questions, the paradox, the pro and
con arguments, the naked greed for land and water that face agriculture
today both on a national and international scale are all confronted
in some manner or form in this book written in a journalistic
style sorely absent from today's reporting and commentary on
farm and fiber issues.
Admittedly, for personal reasons, I was
not prepared to like this book since first being approached by
one of the authors over three years ago as I was led to believe
at that time their project was destined to be just another flailing
by the media of agriculture's favorite whipping boy --- subsidies.
But I was wrong !
It is perhaps the best treatment of the
history and influence of corporate agribusiness on water and
labor issues, the environment and how these issues have historically
impacted on the western political landscape since McWilliams
Factories in the Field.
Yet, it is also a book that captures
those elements that have inspired naturalists, poets, writers
and artists to extol California's natural beauty and splendor
in their creative works.
"It was easy to misgauge the [San
Joaquin] valley," Arax and Wartzman reflect. "Many
surveyors had come during drought or at the tail end of summer,
when the rivers ran low and the soil had baked dry. Behold that
same ground in spring, a mountain-to-mountain meadow of every
color of wildflower, and it held all the virtues of loam.
"John Muir, the naturalist who immigrated
to California from his native Wisconsin to `study the inventions
of God,' stood frozen in stupefaction the first time he laid
eyes on the valley, a sweet bee garden in the flutter of spring.
It was `one smooth, continuous bed of honey bloom, so marvelously
rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance
of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred
flowers at every step.'
"For [James Henry] Carson,"
they continue, "turning these fleeting fields of purple,
gold and blue into another Italy or France was a simple matter
of alchemy, requiring little more than the bending of water.
The spoils, as Carson saw it, went to those who controlled the
movement of rivers. Whether India, Egypt, China or ancient Mesopotamia,
it was water that turned dust in to civilization. Stand in the
middle of the valley and gaze east and see the towering peaks
and bottomless canyons of the Sierra Nevada. These mountains
weren't blue for nothing They happened to hold the greatest water
fields of the west."
Any serious student studying the history
of California, the evolution of agricultural policy as it has
affected the nation's number one state in food and fiber production
who neglects a careful reading of The King of California does
so at their own peril.
Al Krebs
is the editor of the Agribusiness
Examiner, one of CounterPunch's favorite newsletters. He
can be reached at: avkrebs@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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