Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
23, 2003
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
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
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.
|
September
23, 2003
Dancing with the Diva
Streisand,
the Recall and the Suppression of an Acclaimed Environmental
Project
By BERNARDO ISSEL
Non-Profit Watch
Barbara Streisand is typically attacked from the
right for her support of liberal concerns. However lately she's
been criticized for her lawsuit against an environmental project, California Coastal
Records Project which creates a photographic internet database
of California's coast. Streisand's Complaint: Not Of My Back
Yard--that is no photo of her cliffside mansion. Her stance
and lawsuit have placed her at odds with a project that was begun
as an effort to help the Sierra Club protect California's coast.
The project has been has received environmental acclaim -- eco-guru
Paul Hawken raved about it.
Adelman's oceanfront web project signals
a breakthrough that will, within a decade or more, begin to remake
government planning and land ownership regulations--even international
law and multilateral environmental treaties.
Regarding the lawsuit, Mark Massara,
the director of the Sierra Club's Coastal program, makes a strong
case against Streisand's lawsuit.
It is starkly ironic that someone who
proclaims herself an environmentalist would threaten to dismantle
one of the greatest high tech projects to protect the California
coast in all time just because they chose to place their backyard
on a coastal bluff. At some point, someone needs to sit her down
and tell her the public interest is at stake here."
In Streisand's lawsuit prevails, developer
and other anti-environmental interests benefit from Streisand's
role as a Trojan horse. Moreover, Streisand's role as a funder
of environmental and other public interest nonprofits protects
her from criticism from these organizations in regards to her
lawsuit--would they bite the hand that feeds them by "sit[ting]
her down and tell[ing] her the public interest is at stake here"
as urged by the Sierra Club's Mark Massara.
Streisand and the
California Recall
In the California campaign to recall
Governor Gray Davis, there has been extensive accusations regarding
fundraising from corporate and other special interests whose
financial support is extended with expectation of exerting influence
at the expense of the public good. In this regard, Huffington
has been a vocal critic of Bustamante and Schwarzenegger.
Will recall candidates sit Streisand
down for a chat about the public interest? Not likely. Barbara
Streisand has given $1000 each to Huffington, Bustamante and
Davis. Also, Marge Tabankin, who heads Streisand's foundation,
has been described as involved in the Huffington campaign. While
these donations are small relative to the total amounts that
these candidates have received, Streisand's support can be viewed
as having greater weight than the amount would suggest. Were
candidates to speak out against Streisand in regards to her lawsuit
agains the California Coastal Records Project, there could well
be a Hollywood backlash as friends and professional contacts
of Streisand would refrain from supporting a candidate critical
of Streisand.
Davis and Bustamante are hardly environmentalists
and could be expected to take money from any source. However
Arianna Huffington is another case.
Huffington and Streisand
Arianna Huffington is running for governor
of California on a progressive standard. In the last decade
Huffington has shifted from a rightwing supporter of Gingrich
to a leading critic of the corrupting effect of special interests
upon politics and the common good, as epitomized by her recent
book Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption
Are Undermining America
Her platform and concerns evokes the
memory of Upton Sinclair's run for governor in 1934. In fact,
earlier this year she was awarded the Upton Sinclair Award by
the Liberty Hill Foundation.
When Sinclair ran for governor, he faced
a cavalcade of attacks from establishment interests, including
and especially Hollywood which produced newsreels against his
candidacy and raised money from its employees to fund the candidacy
of his opponent.
In contrast to Sinclair, Arianna is being
generously supported by Hollywood glitterati. As pointed out
by the New York Times,
". . . Arianna Huffington owns Hollywood.
Ms. Huffington, the liberal-come-lately newspaper columnist
who has frequently opened her Brentwood home to stars, talent
agents, producers and studio executives, has clearly struck a
chord among the Hollywood set with her candidacy for governor
of California. . . . Ms. Huffington has already won the heavy,
if not overwhelming, support of the entertainment industry here."
Huffington's Hollywood base is by no
means piddling or middlebrow, including James Wiatt, president
of the William Morris agency; Ron Meyer, president and chief
operating officer of Vivendi Universal Entertainment; Tom Freston,
chairman of MTV Networks, Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax,
Ari Emanuel, partner in Endeavor (a top Hollywood talent agency),
and Larry David, formerly producer of Seinfeld.
It may seem unfair to take Arianna to task about this matter,
however please note that she has made progressive concerns including
environmental ones major components of her writings in recent
years and that she has set a high standard, as exemplified by
her taking New York State's attorney general Elliot Spitzer to
task for not going far enough in his settlements with Wall Street
firms.
Huffington has made progressive concerns
including environmental ones major components of her campaign
as well as writings in recent years. Furthermore, Huffington
has set a high standard for herself, as exemplified by her taking
New York State's attorney general Elliot Spitzer to task for
not going far enough in his investigations of Wall Street firms
in regards to corporate malfeasance.
It is easy to throw stones at others
for not challenging their donors, but does Huffington have the
gumption to do so herself?
This matter is reminiscent of the controversy
over the Ballona Wetlands over which several years ago Dreamworks
was challenged about its development plans. In this matter,
few Hollywood actors were courageous enough to speak out, no
doubt out of concern for risking the ire of the company's moguls
Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg. About this controversy, NonprofitWatch.org
prepared a report critical of the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), noting that the group's accommodation of the development
plans undermined grassroots opposition and coincided with a variety
of conflicts of interests, including NRDC's strong support from
Hollywood actors who would look askance at their environmental
charity challenging the Hollywood moguls that gave the actors
jobs. Also, NRDC received generous financial support from David
Geffen, whose by the way has been criticized for getting a an
environmentally questionable sea wall approved by the California
Coastal Commission (another case of a liberal serving as a Trojan
horse).
Ironically but perhaps appropriate to
her warm relation with Hollywood, Huffington's commendable campaign
against low-mileage SUV's is now a project of NRDC. We doubt
that NRDC would be comfortable with Huffington taking a critical
view of Streisand, especially as the diva donates lavishly to
NRDC.
Bernardo Issel
is director of Nonprofit
Watch. He can be reached at: hellobernardo@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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