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Today's Stories

February 5, 2004

Cockburn / St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!

 

February 4, 2004

Brian McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's Last Round Up?

Mark Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel

Judith Brown
Palestine and the Media

Frederick B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's Junta?

Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating the Spooks

M. Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract

Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?

Kevin Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It

 

February 3, 2004

Alan Maass
The Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"

Nick Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded in Iraq

Rahul Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure

Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?

Laura Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures

Jordan Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New Mexico

Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts Fairness Campaign

Hammond Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless

Website of the Day
Waging Peace

 

February 2, 2004

Gary Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail

Justin E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free Environment

Tom Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee

Winslow Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget

Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth

Leonard Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is Rigged

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean

Website of the Day
Resistance: In the Eye of the American Hegemon


Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004

Paul de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities

Bernard Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium

Jack Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks

Christopher Reed
Broken Ballots

Michael Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear

Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War

Lee Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement

George Bisharat
Right of Return

Ray McGovern
Nothing to Preempt

Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks

Conn Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs

Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons

Phillip Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit

Christopher Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read

John Holt
War in the Great White North

Mickey Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley

Mark Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key

Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif

Ben Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please

Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert

 


January 30, 2004

Saul Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List

Michael Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in the Woods

Elaine Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo

David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton

Mike Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression

David Miller
The Hutton Whitewash

Sam Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake", Senator Kerry?


January 29, 2004

Patricia Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist

Ron Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized" Immigration

Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq

Greg Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on Moon and Mars

Norman Solomon
The State of the Media Union

Cockburn / St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?

 

January 28, 2004

Kathy Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of Torture and Assassination

 

 

January 27, 2004

Steve Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with CNN's Aaron Brown

Daniel Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the Lies from the Inside

C.G. Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected President?

Josh Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke Screens

Greg Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again

Gilad Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art

Mike Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad

Hammond Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day

 

 

January 26, 2004

Sean Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's Drug War Zealot

Gary Leupp
David Kay's Admission

January 24/5, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"

Laura Flanders
State of the Conservative Union

Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala

Dave Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George

Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace

Alexander Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris 0

 

January 23, 2004

Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out

Standard Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben Protests US Travel Policy

Josh Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's Vermont

William A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious

 

January 22, 2004

Sam Smith
Howards End?

Patricia Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space

Alexander Lukin
Putin and the Clans

Katherine van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations and Bush's Mind

Forrest Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia

 

January 19, 2004

Justin E. H. Smith
Inside America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution

Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.

Ray McGovern
Bush's State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?

Werther
SOTUS: the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura

Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War

Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?

Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water

Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism: a Practical Manual

Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State

 

January 17 / 18, 2004

Fadi Kiblawi and Will Youmans
The Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists

Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins

Blaming the Symptoms

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear Plant

Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq

Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq

M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians

Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise

Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp

Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court

Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov

Carol Norris
Arnold and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up

Joe Quandt
Suicide Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities

David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75

Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies

Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review

Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister

Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum

Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie

 

January 16, 2004

Kathy Kelly
A Visit to Umm Qasr Prison

William S. Lind
More Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare

Gillian Russom
So. Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"

Ari Shavit
Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris

Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris

Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich

Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2

 

January 15, 2004

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Memo to the President: Your State of the Union Address

John Chuckman
Dry Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc

Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter

Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon

Gary Leupp
The Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan

 

 

January 14, 2004

Greg Moses
Happy Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to Bigots

Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights

Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional Dems (and Dean)

Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to Clinton

Alexander Cockburn
Bush, Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last

 

 

January 13, 2004

William S. Lind
How 2004 Looks from Potsdam

M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?

Mickey Z
Snipers: No Nuts in Iraq

Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro: The Prisoner and the Presidents

Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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Alexander Cockburn
Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

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The Death Train of the WTO

Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens as Model Apostate

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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
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The Erosion of the American Dream

Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution

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February 5, 2004

A Boom Year for Corporate Crime

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003

By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and ROBERT WEISSMAN

2003 was not a year of garden variety corporate wrongdoing. No, the sheer variety, reach and intricacy of corporate schemes, scandal and crimes was spellbinding. Not an easy year to pick the 10 worst companies, for sure.

But Multinational Monitor magazine cannot be deterred by such complications. And so, here follows, in alphabetical order, our list for Multinational Monitor of the 10 worst corporations of 2003.

Bayer: 2003 may be remembered as the year of the headache at Bayer. In May, the company agreed to plead guilty to a criminal count and pay more than $250 million to resolve allegations that it denied Medicaid discounts to which it was entitled. The company was beleaguered with litigation related to its anti-cholesterol drug Baycol. Bayer pulled the drug - which has been linked to a sometimes fatal muscle disorder -- from the market, but is facing thousands of suits from patients who allege they were harmed by the drug. In June, the New York Times reported on internal company memos which appear to show that the company continued to promote the drug even as its own analysis had revealed the dangers of the product. Bayer denies the allegations.

Boeing: In one of the grandest schemes of corporate welfare in recent memory, Boeing engineered a deal whereby the Pentagon would lease tanker planes -- 767s that refuel fighter planes in the air -- from Boeing. The pricetag of $27.6 billion was billions more than the cost of simply buying the planes. The deal may unravel, though, because the company in November fired for wrongdoing both the employee that negotiated the contract for Boeing (the company's chief financial officer), and the employee that negotiated the contract for the government. How could Boeing fire a Pentagon employee? Simple. She was no longer a Pentagon employee. Boeing had hired her shortly after the company clinched the deal.

Brighthouse: A new-agey advertising/consulting/ strategic advice company, Brighthouse's claim to infamy is its Neurostrategies Institute, which undertakes research to see how the brain responds to advertising campaigns. In a cutting-edge effort to extend and sharpen the commercial reach in ways never previously before possible, the institute is using MRIs to monitor activity in people's brains triggered by advertisements.

Clear Channel: The radio behemoth Clear Channel specializes in consuming or squashing locally owned radio stations, imposing a homogenized music play list on once interesting stations, and offering cultural support for U.S. imperial adventures. It has also compiled a record of "repeated law-breaking," according to our colleage Jim Donahue, violating the law -- including prohibitions on deceptive advertising and on broadcasting conversations without obtaining permission of the second party to the conversation -- on 36 separate occasions over the previous three years.

Diebold: A North Canton, Ohio-based company that is one of the largest U.S. voting machine manufacturers, and an aggressive peddler of its electronic voting machines, Diebold has managed to demonstrate that it fails any reasonable test of qualifications for involvement with the voting process. Its CEO has worked as a major fundraiser for President George Bush. Computer experts revealed serious flaws in its voting technology, and activists showed how careless it was with confidential information. And it threatened lawsuits against activists who published on the Internet documents from the company showing its failures.

Halliburton: Now the owner of the company which initially drafted plans for privatization of U.S. military functions -- plans drafted during the Bush I administration when current Vice President and former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense -- Halliburton is pulling in billions in revenues for contract work -- providing logistical support ranging from oil to food -- in Iraq. Tens of millions, at least, appear to be overcharges. Some analysts say the charges for oil provision amount to "highway robbery."

HealthSouth: Fifteen of its top executives have pled guilty in connection with a multi-billion dollar scheme to defraud investors, the public and the U.S. government about the company's financial condition. The founder and CEO of the company that runs a network of outpatient surgery, diagnostic imagery and rehabilitative healthcare centers, Richard Scrushy, is fighting the charges. But thanks to the slick maneuvering of attorney Bob Bennett, it appears the company itself will get off scot free -- no indictments, no pleas, no fines, no probation.

Inamed: The California-based company sought Food and Drug Administration approval for silicone breast implants, even though it was not able to present long-term safety data -- the very thing that led the FDA to restrict sales of silicone implants a decade ago. In light of what remains unknown and what is known about the implants' effects -- including painful breast hardening which can lead to deformity, and very high rupture rates -- the FDA in January 2004 denied Inamed's application for marketing approval.

Merrill Lynch: This company keeps messing up. Fresh off of a $100 million fine levied because analysts were recommending stocks that they trashed in private e-mails, the company saw three former execs indicted for shady dealings with Enron. The company itself managed to escape with something less than a slap on the wrist -- no prosecution in exchange for "oversight."

Safeway: One of the largest U.S. grocery chains, Safeway is leading the charge to demand givebacks from striking and locked out grocery workers in Southern California. Along with Albertsons and Ralphs (Kroger's), Safeway's Vons and Pavilion stores are asking employees to start paying for a major chunk of their health insurance. Under the company's proposals, workers and their families will lose $4,000 to $6,000 a year in health insurance benefits.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action, a corporate accountability group. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Weekend Edition Features for February 1, 2004

Paul de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities

Bernard Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium

Jack Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks

Christopher Reed
Broken Ballots

Michael Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear

Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War

Lee Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement

George Bisharat
Right of Return

Ray McGovern
Nothing to Preempt

Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks

Conn Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs

Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons

Phillip Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit

Christopher Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read

John Holt
War in the Great White North

Mickey Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley

Mark Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key

Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif

Ben Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please

Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert


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