Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
October
31, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
October
30, 2003
Forrest
Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip
Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert
Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander
Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October
29, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence
Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine
Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October
28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane
Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert
Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason
Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris
White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27, 2003
William
A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David
Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine
Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert
Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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.
|
Halloween
Edition
October 31, 2003
Settling for Peanuts
Democrats
Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
After years of playing the hapless Charlie Brown
as Lucy Democrats pulled away the protection football time after
time, it's perhaps only fitting that the best the hapless environmental
movement can muster following its major defeat on Bush's Healthy
Forests Initiative, now forever enshrined as the Cochran-Wyden-Feinstein
Act, is to hold a cartoon protest.
Halloween will see folks meeting outside
the offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Diane Feinstien (D-CA),
both darlings of the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) who
maintain their 80% positive rating from the group precisely because
the Democrat Party front group LCV studiously avoids using such
votes in their calculations.
Will the folks be tearing down the walls
to get at their "champions?" Will they be "locking
down" to show their displeasure? Will they demand that no
one ever support the conniving Democrats again?
No. They'll be participating in the Great
Pumpkin Protest, taking out their frustration on innocent pumpkins
rather than their turncoat senators. The too cutely named Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (get it? nudge, wink) protest will run under
the "Carve Pumpkins, Not Forests" slogan.
It used to be that one could count on
the oil-foundation-paid Democrat sycophants in the green movement
to come up with clever, if mendacious, pro-Democrat distractions
-- like the worse-than-useless Roadless Rule that Big Green dreamed
up to take the 2000 election-year focus off of the horrid environmental
record of the Clinton/Gore administration. After sucking up all
available funding and all the air time for over a year, the Roadless
Rule was finally put in place by Clinton -- literally hours before
he left office. Of course, it protects nothing.
As Denise Boggs of the Utah Environmental
Congress noted when informed of the Great Pumpkin Protest, "I
still think the dumbest thing was the Roadless Rule--short-sighted;
no strategic thinking; opened roadless areas to pressures we
had largely stopped {in some areas}; and redefined the definition
of roadless to weaken it. Now that's STUPID! And we ended with
nothing actually protected on the ground."
Now, some would say that rather than
stupid, it was a stroke of genius for the Democrats, the Big
Greens and the foundations that fund them. Some have said that
"nothing actually protected on the ground," was one
of the intents in the first place.
But, again, stuff like the Roadless Rule
came out of the minds of some pretty awful, twisted, yet, at
least intelligent, self-promotional characters. This Great Pumpkin
"response" to such a Senate ass-whupping really hits
a new low. As if a few wingnuts carving pumpkins outside their
offices will make them think twice -- once they get over their
laughing fits. The Roadless Rule was/is an Enron-worthy scam.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre frivolity fall more on the side of
color-copier counterfeiting.
In all fairness, the Halloween "Day
of Action" was planned by over 140 young activists in mid-September,
not specifically as a response to the Cochran/Wyden/Feinstein
Bill. Like the Darwin Award winner who obviously had no buddies
to say, "Wait a minute. That might not be a good idea,"
these activists obviously had no one to point out the silliness
last month. They didn't even know that the Timber Industry has
called big, old growth trees "pumpkins" since before
Paul Bunyon. "Carve pumpkins?" Good Gaia, Charlie Brown.
The horrid Forest Health Initiative (Cochran-Wyden-Feinstein
Act) unveiled by Bush on August 22 last year and met with a year
of vocal opposition in what the combined Big Greens called their
"number one priority," passed the Senate's only true
poll, an early vote on Cochran/Wyden/Feinstein by a 97--1 vote
Oct. 29th with solely Sen. Jack Reed from Rhode Island voting
Nay. Don't hold your breath waiting to see if Reed will now be
the sole Senator to maintain his 100% LCV rating. Defeated Democrats
know how it works and, in the end, final passage was Oct. 30th
by an 80--14 vote, with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) the sole vote
west of Iowa -- an historic and heroic vote, given the long-standing
Big Timber toadying of Western Democrats.
Is it even possible that there could
be any other advocacy group in DC who could lose their "number
one priority" so soundly? Could there be any others that
have their "number one priority" undermined by their
own "champions?" Pretty unlikely.
But then again, given that the combined
Big Greens called Clinton's 1994 resumption of Old Growth logging
our "greatest victory" when it allowed for logging
over half of our remaining fragments of Ancient Forests, how
can anyone (certainly not the Democrats) take their claimed priorities
seriously?
Not Getting Nader
What it really boils down to is this:
the Democrats and their Big Green sycophants still do not get
Nader. It is precisely this type of no accountability for Democrats
on the environment that led to Nader's garnering 77,000 Oregon
and 419,000 California votes in the 2000 Presidential Election.
Is it inevitable in our winner take all
system that ALL onetime advocacy groups become wedded to a party
that then takes them for granted, or worse yet, runs Machiavellian
games (monetary and strategic) on them?
Maybe. But look how America's African-American
Community has responded to the bland crop of Democratic candidates
who have yet to address the concerns of Black America, even when
invited to debate in Black America's capital to do just that.
Just this week, in a scathing opinion
piece, Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley takes the
assembled dissemblers to task. In a Detroit forum that was supposed
to focus on urban issues, Left darling Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
showed his ignorance by overstating Detroit's already dreadful
murder rate. Kucinich alleged that some 300 people died on the
streets of Detroit in September, when the true figure is 35.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick responded by angrily leaving the
auditorium.
Riley wrote her response capturing the
debate thusly: "What Detroit got -- and the country watched
-- was a debate made of Wonderbread, its slices no different
from those at the last debate in Phoenix."
She ended with: "Sharpton is no
Jesse Jackson. The other candidates are no Al Sharptons.
And urban America is still without a
true candidate."
How's that for a response? Sure beats
taking it out on pumpkins.
This Democrats sticking-it-to-the-environment
and getting a free pass from Green Central is nothing new. For
years in the 70s and 80s, the charge against our forests was
led by Reps. Tom Foley (D-WA), Al Ullman (D-OR), Les AuCoin (D-OR)
and Sen. Henry Jackson (D-WA).
Just last month, Big Greens were all
over the media touting their champion Sen. Hilary Clinton's vow
to keep her "hold" on the Bush nomination of Utah's
Mike Leavitt as head of the EPA. Clinton, along with presidential
candidates Sens. Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards made
a media splash with their efforts on September 11th--a simple
Google search turns up over 100 published accounts of Clinton's
vow. Yet, again, when it came down to it, Leavitt was confirmed
Oct. 28th by an 88--8 Senate vote, including Clinton's Yea. (Lieberman,
Kerry and Edwards failed to vote, as they also failed to do on
the Cochran/Wyden/Feinstein bill, thus preserving their records
of not taking any environmental stands this election season.)
Bill Clinton and Al Gore also campaigned
as champions of the environment. Yet, it was on their watch that
Ancient Forest logging was resumed (one in six old growth trees
that existed BEFORE Clinton is now a stump), the Alaska National
Petroleum Reserve (twice the size of ANWR) was opened to the
oil companies with nary a peep from Big Green.. the list is long.
To see a larger list and the Big Green(washing) response go to:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/101000-103.html)
Such double-dealing on the environment
by Democrats and the Big Greens has a long, tired history. So
when push came to shove on the Cochran/Wyden/Feinstein Bill,
Green Central put out a last-minute letter to their Senate allies.
Fifteen national conservation groups
-- League of Conservation Voters · Alaska Coalition ·
Alaska Rainforest Campaign · American Lands Alliance--Center
for Biological Diversity · Earthjustice · Defenders
of Wildlife · National Environmental Trust--Natural Resources
Defense Council · National Forest Protection Alliance
· National Wildlife Federation--Sierra Club · The
Wilderness Society · U.S. Public Interest Research Group
· World Wildlife Fund -- called on the senators to vote
No on H.R. 1904 (they can't quite force themselves to call it
by name) which they still call the "Bush Administration's
misnamed Healthy Forests Initiative" and Yes on Bustamonte--oops
I mean Yes on a series of eight amendments they say will improve
the awful Bill.
As in CA, the results are in: these fifteen
"green" groups went 0--9 on their "Number One
Priority."
If they were managing the Red Sox, they'd
be long gone.
When it became known that Wyden was the
architect behind the unHealthy Forests bill, local activists
met to discuss what to do. Some folks wanted to reprise the Weenie
Roast they held outside Wyden's office to protest his past bad
actions. But, the Sierra Club was mortified and blocked it stating,
"We can't do that. He's our friend. He was quite wounded
the last time someone did this."
So, weenies (and the Weenie) remain safe,
but look out pumpkins.
MICHAEL DONNELLY
of Salem, OR has been a long-time defender of our Public forests.
For his version of a Healthy Forests Act (written one week after
Bush unveiled his version) go to: http://www.counterpunch.org/
Donnelly can be reached at: Pahtoo@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|