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December 12, 2003
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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
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December
12, 2003
Another Two Worlds
are Possible?
Contrasts
Between the Ibero-American Presidential Summit and the Alternative
Social Forum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia
By BENJAMIN DANGL
At this year's Ibero-American Presidential Summit
and parallel Alternative Social Forum, two opposing forces in
Latin America's fierce polemic over the direction of its own
social and economic progress were well defined. The twenty one
presidents of Latin America were lodged in the most luxurious
hotel in Boliva to participate in the XIII Ibero-American Presidential
Summit. Meanwhile, blocks away in the same city, activists, farmers,
NGO's, professors and opposition leaders from all over Latin
America set up their Alternative Social Forum in the city's Autonomous
University of Gabriel Morenos. The politicians slept in $200
USD a night hotel rooms with shiny bathrooms, room service, armed
guards and air conditioned conference halls to talk about trade
agreements, poverty, social exclusion and national debt. Those
at the university slept on the floor, shared bathrooms and food
and discussed, in the heavy tropical heat, trade agreements,
poverty, social exclusion and national debt. The slogan for both
the Presidential Summit and the Social Forum was "Another
World is Possible."
The two events approached the same issues
from opposite view points. The Alternative Social Forum where
the activists and farmers were meeting, rejected the FTAA agreement,
harsh anti-terror and protest laws, the continuation of Bolivia's
Gas agreement and coca eradication laws. Those at the Ibero-American
Presidential Summit were primarily supportive of the FTAA, united
in thier "war on terror", ready to discuss changes
in Bolivia's current gas agreement, but not wholly reject it,
and planned to continue with the same stance on coca eradication
as stipulated by intense US pressure on the issue.
The Ibero-American
Presidential Summit
After the initiative of Juan Carlos I,
the king of Spain, the first Ibero-American Presidential Summit
took place in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1991. Since then, the Summits
have taken place each year in cities across Central and South
America, and have always included presidents from all over the
continent, as well as those from Portugal and Spain. Every year
the meetings are based on a different set of issues, such as
health care, education, participative democratic procedures,
globalization and regional integration, tourism, environmental
issues and national debt.
This year, in Santa Cruz, the streets
and intersections around the Tajibos Hotel where the Ibero-American
Summit took place were roped off and lined with hundreds of police
and military officials. People who lived and owned businesses
near the hotel had to evacuate the area during the Summit. Only
the presidents and thier officials, the workers at the Summit
and the press were allowed to enter the hotel.
The Presidential Summit was all very
well planned and controlled. Unlike the Social Forum, there were
no improvised discussions, debates or panels. For the most part,
when the official program called for their appearance, the presidents
and their armies of consultants, advisors and body gaurds came
out of their comfortable hotel rooms only to give pre-scripted
and vague opinions on various issues.
Good Intentions, Fancy
Hotel
Despite the highly controlled atmosphere
and uninspiring meetings, some useful contacts between political
leaders were made and politicians displayed good intentions in
regards to the recent conflict in Bolivia. For example, Evo Morales,
Bolivian congressman and coca farmer leader, spoke with Kofi
Annan. The United Nations leader invited Morales to participate
in an indigenous rights conference in New York City. However,
Morales was unable to attend the meeting due to the fact that
the US embassy in Bolivia refused to grant him a visa for the
trip.
Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela spoke
of the issue of impunity: "There is great guilt for what
took place here in Bolivia in October. Those guilty people should
be tried...Just as the men and women of Latin America should
judge the savage neoliberalism that is putting an end to the
people of this continent." Many of the other president's
reserved and careful speeches paled in comparison to Chavez's
fiery discourses.
Fidel Castro could not make it to the
Summit due to "agenda problems", so the vice-president
of Cuba, Carlos Lage, was sent his place. After stating that
Castro was to double the amount of scholarships that were to
be sent to Bolivian students to allow them to study in Cuba,
Lage said, "Solidarity isn't giving a limousine to someone,
it is sharing what you have with others."
However, for many, the gap between the
rich facilities of the presidents and the extensive poverty in
Bolivia, was hard to ignore. Maria Rodriguez, an activist student
from the Autonomous University of Gabriel Morenos, commented
on the Presidential Summit, "Yes, there are some good leaders
at the Summit. They talk and talk about solutions, and many have
good intentions, but why do they have to spend millions of dollars
on security, travel costs, food and air conditioning, when there
are people all over the continent going hungry?"
The Alternative Social
Forum
The Alternative Social Forum in Santa
Cruz was a smaller version of what took place at the World Social
Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil last year. This forum's goal was
to "construct democratic debates of ideas, elaborate proposals,
establish a free exchange of experiences and articulate effective
actions that oppose neoliberalism and the domination of countries
for transnational capital or for whatever form of imperialism."
The Autonomous University of Gabriel
Morenos, where the Forum took place, operates on a very low budget
and is made up of run-down buildings that have been used for
decades. Throughout the Social Forum its classrooms were packed
with people from all over Latin America and the world. Delegations
at the Forum included representatives from Brazil's Landless
Movement, an ATTAC coalition from Spain, indigenous groups from
Ecuador, worker unions and activists from Chile and Argentina,
students from all over Bolivia, cocaleros and farmers, human
rights NGO's and Bolivian congressmen and women.
"The idea isn't just to protest
the President's Summit," Maria Rodriguez said. "This
is an alternative forum where people from all sectors of society
can come and exchange ideas and try to educate each other."
The events at the Forum revolved around
topics such as the FTAA, environmental issues, the history of
Latin America Social Movements, poverty, Indymedia, feminism,
coca eradication, homeless children, agriculture and land issues.
Though haggard from the traveling it took to get there, many
participants were smiling, energetic and involved in deep discussions,
some strumming guitars and selling leftist pamphlets and Che
Guevara T-shirts.
Rafael Lopez, a Sociology Student at
the University where the Social Forum was taking place, and who
worked as an organizer for the event, spoke about his thoughts
on the Presidential Summit, "I was going to try to work
at the Presidential Summit," he said, "just to see
what it was like. But you needed to pass a special exam in order
to work there." He could not afford the $40 USD fee to take
the exam. "If you didn't pass the exam," he continued,
"you could not work at the Summit and would not even get
a refund for your 40 dollars. This in itself limited the participation
in the Summit to only certain economic classes."
For weeks, Lopez and other organizers
had been planning for the Social Forum, inviting speakers, renting
sound equipment, reserving classrooms, and publishing flyers
on the events. Lopez spoke about his participation, "We
organized events with various institutions that indentify with
the pueblo, the people of Latin America, and not with the elite
politicians, such as the case with the Summit. This Forum is
free and anyone can come here - the political elite, the opposition
leaders, everyone is welcome. It is for all classes of people."
Strength Through Exuberance
One morning at the Alternative Social
Forum, a panel on the landless movement began in the center of
the campus, under a huge tent. Representatives from Bolivia and
Brazil's landless movement spoke to a crowd made up primarily
of farmers who, like everyone else, had traveled hours to arrive
there.
"[Carlos] Mesa (Bolivia's new president)
just wants to tranquilize us so he can go ahead and do the same
as Goni (the ex-President). He has a different discourse; he
listens to the people, but the system has not changed,"
said one of the Bolivian Landless Movement leaders. Many of the
speakers on the panel were chewing coca from a huge pile of the
green leaves which was spread out on the table in front of them.
In a nearby classroom, a panel was taking
place to discuss the FTAA. The panel included a bearded man in
sandals, a well dressed professor, a farmer with his hat backwards
and an aging union leader. The union leader shook his fist in
the air, "We are a colony of the US, we don't own anything.
We are at the mercy of US companies and neoliberalism, the monster
with a thousand heads." The crowd nodded. A fan on the cieling
rotated weakly. Outside, a volunteer wandered past with an armload
of foam sleeping pads. A bystander walked by with a shirt on
that said, "Fertile Land For Everyone."
There seemed to be a sublte, but notable
overlap in vocabulary usage between George W. Bush's discourse
against terrorism, and the left's discourse against neoliberalism
and imperialism at the Social Forum. Leftist speakers were using
the same vague and powerful words that Bush uses such as "evil",
"good and bad", "justice" and "freedom",
to describe their "war against colonization." The differences
between the Bushites and the leftist opposition leaders in Latin
America are huge. But it is hard to ignore the fact that a common
enemy and scapegoat strengthens any movement or platform. It
is also convenient for the left, and often well founded, to base
all guilt for the poverty, social turmoil and economic instability
in the region on "neoliberalism, the monster with a thousand
heads."
In other talks, people spoke about their
theater projects with homeless children, and about forming neighborhood
groups and unions. One class discussed community protection of
the environment, and another was entitled, "Resisting the
Criminalization of Social Movements."
Often the people in the panels were speaking
to the choir. Still, in a country where many cannot afford to
go to college or buy newspapers, these classes and panels were
valuable. They clarified complex issues and talked about the
laws, companies and systems of power that are pressuring many
countries in the region.
At the Alternative Social Forum, seminar
locations changed at the last minute and often even the organizers
didn't know where certain events were taking place. An impromptu
concert would start up next to a soccer game while a children's
theatre production went on in the shade. At one point, a student
next to an upside down American flag and a table of Trotskyist
literature gave a fiery speech through a megaphone to a crowd
of two people. What the Social Forum lacked in organization it
made up for in enthusiasm and persistence.
Political Tourism
In the end, the final declaration of
the Ibero-American Presidential Summit, which all participating
presidents signed, cited social inclusion as a principal mechanism
for the development of Ibero-American countries. The declaration
also maintained that all participating countries opposed the
US trade blockade against Cuba. It stressed the importance of
debt reduction, the fight against corruption and the importance
of education as a way to improve social inclusion and end poverty.
(Opinion, 11/16/03)
Andres Oppenheimer, a journalist for
the Miami Herald who has reported on twelve Ibero-American summits,
warned that if the president's are not forced to comply with
the promises made at the summits, these expensive meetings could
turn into simply an "exercise in political tourism."
He wrote, "They sign a declaration that many don't have
any intention to follow, nor demand that the others follow. How
absurd! What sense does it make that Spain, Portugal and the
twenty one Latin American countries that form the Ibero-American
community continue with this yearly exercise of political hypocrisy?"
(El Nuevo Herald, 11/18/02)
Though the reality gap between the Presidential
Summit and the Social Forum was significant, some interesting
exchanges between the two did occur.
The new president of Bolivia, Carlos
Mesa, was invited to give a speech at the Alternative Social
Forum. When he arrived, a writhing mass of activists waving anti-FTAA
signs were there to greet him. During his speech, he spoke of
the importance of justice for the victims of Bolivia's Gas War
and about the necesity to include more sectors of Bolivian society
in the democratic processes of the country. When he said that
his administration would analyze the FTAA and not oppose it entirely,
the crowd began booing. Mesa yelled into the crowd, "You
are not going to listen to promises I cannot keep!" Many
nodded their heads in agreement.
On the other side of the city, Eduardo
Medina, a Natural Medicine professor and organizer of the Alternative
Social Forum in Santa Cruz was asked to speak at the Presidential
Summit as a representative from the Forum. Medina gave his speech
in front of the twenty one presidents of Latin America. Among
the conclusions from the Social Forum, Medina spoke about the
rejection of the FTAA, a modification of the Bolivia's hydrocarbon
law, an end to impunity for crimes the state has committed against
the people, a fair distribution of land and an end to the violence
that has developed out of the US's war on drugs.
In an interview after the speech, Medina
said that the declaration he read "was not created just
to protest, it was created to suggest proposals. We, the people
of Bolivia, and those who were at the Social Forum, need to participate
actively and speak out."
Long winded speeches and self congratulation,
something that neither politicians nor activists are safe from,
were abundant at both events, showing that the biggest challenge
for each party may be transforming their words into actions.
At the end of the weekend, each president from the Summit left
in separate private jets to thier respective countries and political
parties. Those from the Social Forum headed home in overpacked
buses over bumpy roads. In this way, the participants from both
events shoved off to thier other possible worlds.
Benjamin Dangl
is a journalist working in Bolivia. He can be reached at: theupsidedownworld@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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