Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
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
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
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.
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September
18, 2003
The Poor Must Press
Lula to Keep His Promise
Brazilian
Land Reform Offers Hope
By ANGUS WRIGHT
Across Brazil's vast landscape, poor people, in
groups of hundreds, are moving onto land that is claimed by others.
The poor are demanding that land be distributed to them as part
of an ongoing national agrarian program.
Powerful landholders are threatening
to drive the occupiers off at gunpoint. Governors of several
states have announced that if necessary they will mobilize police
and military to keep the peace and enforce the law in the countryside.
President Luis Inacio da Silva's new
center-left national government, known as Lula, is committed
to agrarian reform, but it is also committed to international
bankers for a favorable investment climate and support of agricultural
exports.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal
and the Christian Science Monitor have run stories portraying
these events in ominous terms. Do the land occupations foretell
a crisis? Will the Lula government's promises of stability, growth
and credit worthiness be undermined by help to Brazil's poorest
people?
The story of the organization leading
the wave of recent land occupations provides much of the answer.
The MST, whose Portuguese name translates
as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers, has settled more than
1 million people, some 350,000 families, on more than 20 million
acres. It educates thousands of teachers, agricultural extension
agents and health workers. In spite of many difficulties and
disappointments, the settlers enjoy higher living standards,
including in schools and health care. Not only are they eating
better themselves, they are providing basic food to regional
markets.
Their organization, which started with
the chemical and machine intensive methods of Brazil's thriving
agribusiness, has now officially turned to an "agro-ecological
model." The MST promotes strong land conservation measures.
Its farmers market organic produce in many cities. Seventy percent
of them work individually, by choice, though the movement continues
to experiment with cooperative and collective production.
Most of all, participation in the MST
and the experience of becoming productive farmers have turned
tens of thousands of people who were passive victims into active
citizens. Before they were called "the marginalized"
and "the vagabonds." Now they are voting and holding
political offices. These people, along with millions of others
in Brazil's newly flourishing social movements, are shaping a
democracy that is still recovering from years of military dictatorship.
The landless movement that would officially
become the MST in 1984 arose from collaboration by progressive
Catholic priests, secular political activists and the rural poor,
beginning in the late 1970s. They discovered that they could
make creative use of the force of numbers and Brazilian law to
force the government to redistribute land.
For centuries, landowners had so ruthlessly
abused the land, exploited labor and twisted the law that legislators,
even the generals operating through decree law, began requiring
that ownership be subjected to a test of whether the land was
"serving its social function." If it can be proven
that land is held fraudulently or is not being used productively,
or that it is not being used in accordance with labor and conservation
laws, a counter-claimant can move onto it and serve legal notice
in demand of title.
This has brought violent reaction. The
Catholic Church's Pastoral Commission on Land reports that more
than 1,000 of the landless have been assassinated in land conflicts
over the past 20 years. Only a handful of these cases have gone
to trial. The landless themselves have only rarely been violent.
Keeping law and order in Brazil will
require going forward with agrarian reform, not suppressing it.
And the health of the Brazilian economy will be best served by
encouraging the formation of small and medium scale family farms,
found by various independent studies to be the most productive
farms in the country.
The message of agrarian reform in Brazil
is one of hope. The poor must keep pressuring the government
to meet all its fundamental commitments, not just the ones it
made to the international bankers.
Angus Wright
is a member of the Prairie Writers Circle at The Land Insitute
in Salina, Kan. He is co-author with Wendy Wolford of "To
Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement in the Struggle for
a New Brazil." Wright teaches environmental studies
at California State University, Sacramento.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 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
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