Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Bush: a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action
Figure?
Recent
Stories
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
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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August
26, 2003
Bush at the Helm
A
Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
By SAUL LANDAU
KB Toys has released a George W. Bush "Action
Figure" entitled "Naval Aviator," produced by
Blue Box Toys in China. It sells for $39.99 and it commemorates
the "historic" May 1 Bush dressed-as-combat-pilot landing
on the USS Lincoln. We won, he said. Hostilities in Iraq were
over.
When some Iraqis resisted, Bush taunted
them. "Bring `em on." Scores of dead U.S. soldiers
have paid the price for Bush's challenge. Hey, that's war! Leaders
lead and soldiers die!
Similarly, Bush appears to scoff at Nature.
The President, a feisty sort of guy, fears no one and nothing.
Then again he spends most of his time in the White House, his
Texas ranch or at fundraisers. Is he a flesh and blood, wind-it-up-and-it-talks
toy, or should we compare him to the skipper who commanded the
literary ship Pequod in Herman Melville's tale?
Like Ahab, Bush pursues personal crusades
behind a religious facade. Cursed Al Qaeda! Cursed whale! Ahab
defied the white beast, God's symbol of power in the ocean. Bush
took on Osama bin Laden--for a short time--and now has switched
his attention to God's earthly resources.
"We'll smoke 'em out," he might
have goaded the trees in the forests as he boasted about getting
Osama bin Laden; or was he referring to the Virgin lands on which
he planned to order new oil and gas drilling?
Melville's indomitable sea creature may
have represented the inscrutable power, will and presence of
God, as if to say: "You may go so far with your exploration
of ways to dominate  Nature and no further." Speaking
through Moby Dick, God had warned Ahab by biting his leg off.
Ahab dismissed the warning and continued his unnatural hunt.
God or Nature tuned all species to persevere;
thus, most animals know instinctively not to foul their nests
or commit acts that endanger the species. Biologists have even
explained the behavior of the supposedly suicidal lemmings, the
Norwegian rodents that seem to commit suicide by marching into
the ocean every so often.
According to University of Connecticut
biologist Peter Turchin, writing in the June 2000 Nature, lemmings
appear to respond to scarce food supply rather "than the
widespread belief that the furry rodents commit suicide en masse
when their numbers grow too large." These predators eat
moss, but "as their numbers grow, lemmings deplete their
forage in arctic and alpine habitats more rapidly than the slow-growing
mosses can replenish themselves. Faced with a desperate shortage
of food, the lemmings attempt to migrate in search of areas where
food may still be remaining."
But the humans running the United States
sneer at the environment. Do they have something to prove like
Ahab in his mortal struggle with the whale? That man can exert
his will over His domain?
When global warming, thinning ozone layers,
melting ice caps in the Andes and Mt. Kilimanjaro occur in a
short period of time, alongside the breaking up of arctic ice
blocks, the recurrence of El Nino and growing desertification,
the proverbial global alarm clock has rung.
We cannot trust the corporate CEOs to
take responsibility for the earth's environment. Even the best
and brightest of the corporate CEOs prove themselves more dedicated
to the bottom line than to the public welfare.
The much-heralded GE CEO Jack Welch responded
testily to 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl about his company's policy
of dumping dangerous chemicals in the Hudson River.
"The word 'dump' is used! We didn't
dump! We had a permit from the U.S. government and the State
of New York to do exactly what we did. Do you think I'd come
to work in a company that would do that or condone that? I wouldn't
do it, Lesley! This is nuts!" (CBS News Transcripts, 60
Minutes, October 29, 2000).
In fact, GE's "dumping" violated
the permits and the water quality laws, ruled a New York State
administrative law judge in 1976. Indeed, in 1970, Monsanto,
the manufacturer of the deadly PCBs, had warned GE not to emit
PCBs into the environment. GE nevertheless continued to dump
the lethal substances until 1977.
Welch's behavior followed from earlier
capitalists. Before the Peqod left port, Bilbad, one of the ship's
owners, counsels the crew: "Don't whale it too much a Lord's
day men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting
Heaven's good gifts." Some code of ethics!
"Rejecting Heaven's good gifts"
means don't waste money to properly neutralize toxic waste. Welch
and others have "dumped" PCBs or hydrofluorocarbons
in the water, air and soil. Or, they looked the other way as
branch-plant managers in Third World countries engage in those
practices. The successful CEOs in the main offices don't want
to know the details: no environmental "excuses" will
improve a bad bottom line.
In Ecuador, the oil companies created
havoc. A May 2, 2003 Reuters dispatch states that between 1971-1992,
Texaco Petroleum Co, a subsidiary of Texaco Inc., which merged
with Chevron in 2001, dumped almost 19 billion gallons of "oil-laden
water into unlined pits, estuaries and rivers during its operations
in Ecuador's Oriente province."
Years later, thousands of Ecuadorians
sued the company, charging that Texaco/Chevron had polluted "sources
of drinking water, caused health problems, and led to deaths
of farm animals."
Chevron/Texaco officials predictably
denied the allegations, claiming they treated the water properly
before replacing it. "Texaco made a decision to dump these
toxins into the Amazon in order to save money and increase its
profits," said the plaintiff's attorney Steven Donziger,
who estimated that Texaco between 1964 and 1992 had "increased
its profits $4.5 billion by dumping the produced water instead
of re-injecting it."
Reluctantly recognizing, thanks to the
efforts of environmental activists, that corporations had no
intention of stopping--or could not stop--their global fouling
of the human nest to make profits, governments of most nations
signed the 1989 Montreal Protocol to force industry to stop producing
and using materials that thinned the ozone layer.
Not a moment too soon! In southern Chile,
where the layer had grown flimsiest, residents began to develop
skin cancers in record numbers. Indeed, without ozone to protect
human skin from ultraviolet radiation, life itself becomes unsustainable.
When past "civilizations" ignored
Nature's rules, they devastated the environment. The Spaniards
unleashed their pigs onto the delicately balanced landscapes
of the Aztecs in Mexico. The U.S. tested A-bombs on ecologically
fragile Pacific atolls in the 1940s and 50s. Cancer and habitat
destruction resulted.
Since then, strong reaction to environmentally
destructive policies by activists led governments to face the
issue in Kyoto in 1997. After President Clinton made overtures
to get the Treaty approved, Congress dissented. Some fifty Senators,
many of whom sat on energy committees, coincidentally received
more than $10 million in donations from oil and gas companies.
Ah, "Heaven's good gifts" again!
In 2001, Bush simply dismissed the treaty
signed by the United States and 54 other nations. Government
leaders and environmentalists around the world wring their hands.
The energy company CEOs rejoiced!
Kyoto aimed to limit emissions by industrial
nations of greenhouse gases. "I will not accept a plan,"
Bush said defiantly on March 30 2001 (UPI), "that will harm
our economy and hurt American workers." The vast majority
of relevant scientists declared that more than sufficient evidence
existed that global warming would lead to devastating consequences.
Governments had to contain environmental threats. Bush sneered.
Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe
suggested that global warming might be "the greatest hoax
ever perpetrated on the American people." Ranting Rush Limbaugh
spoke on radio for countless other Bush supporters when he declared
global warming to be a liberal plot.
NY Times columnist Paul Krugman (August
8, 2003) charged the Administration with "pursuing a strategy
of denial and deception." Krugman cited a Fall 2002 memo
from Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, "about how to
neutralize public perceptions that the party was anti-environmental."
The memo acknowledged that although scientists
had practically closed the debate on global warming, but that
the Republicans still have a narrow window. "There is still
an opportunity to challenge the science," Luntz offered.
Lobbyists for industries that have a stake in de-regulating emissions
(cars and trucks, coal, oil and gas for examples) keep fibbing
about science's uncertainty. Recall the tobacco lobbyists' sneering
at evidence that smoking caused cancer.
Bush, a religious, born-again Rapturist,
also shows little concern for what scientists predict as dire
consequences due to U.S. industrial policies. In an August 8,
2003 e-mail, Beah Robinson described Rapture for the Christians
she knew growing up "as a sort of protection from God's
wrath on the hard headed sinners of this world. Because "born
agains" have a 'personal' relationship with Jesus, they
look to Him to spare them from the end time battles. They feel
their job is to be good Christians, follow the Bible, and be
prepared for the end times to come at any moment."
I'm not concerned with my final destiny.
But I'm worried now. The President and those around him seem
to covet destruction. Ahab destroyed his crew and ship in pursuit
of vengeance or conquest. Bush's impulse to dominate Nature may
go beyond his obligations to the fossil fuel burning industries.
Rapture may have captured him. Or is he no more than a model
for a company that manufactures its toys in China?
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. For more of Landau's writing visit:
www.rprogreso.com.
His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, will be published
in September by Pluto Books. Landau can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
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