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Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
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
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.
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November
6, 2003
An Open Letter to
John Ashcroft
It's
Time to Deal with Corporate Crime
By RALPH NADER
and LEE DRUTMAN
Dear Mr. Ashcroft:
Recently, your Federal Bureau of Investigations
released its annual "Crime in the United States" report,
which pulls together comprehensive data on eight crime indexes:
murder and manslaughter; forcible rape; robbery; aggravated assault;
burglary; larceny-theft; motor vehicle theft; and arson. The
report is obviously useful in empowering law enforcement professionals
and the public; it helps them to better understand and respond
to criminal trends.
Conspicuously absent from this report,
however, is an assessment of corporate crime. The report contains
no statistics on the accounting, securities, and financial services
crimes that have rocked the economy in the last two years. It
does not list details on the litany of food safety violations,
product safety violations, workplace safety violations, environmental
pollution and countless other crimes that kill, injure and sicken
millions of Americans each year.
Certainly, as attorney general of the
United States, you should understand the problem of corporate
crime. After all, in a September 27, 2002 address to the Corporate
Fraud/Responsibility Conference, you said that "the malignancy
of corporate corruption threatens more than the future of a few
companies -- it destroys workers' incomes, decimates families'
savings and casts a shadow on the health, integrity and good
name of business itself." You warned that "We cannot
-- we will not -- surrender freedom for all to the tyranny of
greed for the few." You told prosecutors that "with
each act of justice, you send the unmistakable message that no
board room is beyond the law, no executive is above the law."
Yet, because the FBI does not collect
data on corporate crime, both the American public and the law
enforcement community lack good information on what has become
a pressing national problem - a corporate crime wave. Comprehensive
data on corporate crime would help law enforcement officials
to better analyze patterns and better direct resources. Information
is also a powerful tool for public support of strong law enforcement,
and the lack of it hampers your efforts to stay true to your
tough words on corporate crime.
Corporate crime, as you surely recognize,
is no small problem. Where the costs have been estimated, the
numbers are staggering. Most credible estimates confirm that,
in the aggregate, white-collar and corporate crimes cost the
U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually - far more than
conventional categories of crime such as burglary and robbery
- and cause many preventable deaths, injuries, and disease.
Using conservative numbers issued by
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, criminologist Jeffrey
Reiman, a professor at American University, estimated that the
total cost of white-collar crime in 1997 was $338 billion. The
actual cost is probably much greater. For instance, the General
Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates
that health-care fraud alone costs up to $100 billion each year.
Another estimate (by University of Cincinnati Criminal Justice
Professor Francis T. Cullen) suggests that the annual cost of
antitrust or trade violations is at least $250 billion. By comparison,
the FBI estimated that in 2002, the nation's total loss from
robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson
was less than $18 billion - less than a third of the estimated
$60 billion Enron alone cost investors, pensioners and employees.
But corporate crime isn't just about
the money. It's also about people's lives. The national murder
rate has hovered around 16,000 per year in recent years (In 2002,
the FBI reported 16,204 murders). But statistics from a respected
group of occupational health and safety investigators, led by
Professor J. Paul Leigh, have estimated that in 1992 alone there
were 66,971 total job-related injury and occupational disease
deaths. These numbers do not include the thousands of annual
deaths caused by cancers linked to corporate pollution, deaths
from defective products, tainted foods, and other corporate-related
causes. Though we can begin to estimate, it is hard to know how
many deaths are caused by corporate crime, since again, we have
no official numbers or annual reports.
There is now a growing consensus that
corporate crime is a mammoth problem threatening the stability
of our economy and the security of millions of Americans. But
how mammoth exactly? This is what millions of Americans would
like to know through official and authoritative sources from
a government that should be acting to diminish such public dangers,
not ignore them.
Mr. Ashcroft, if you are indeed serious
about enforcing the rule of law fairly and justly in this country,
we urge you to direct the FBI to expand its annual "Crime
in the United States Report" to actually describe all the
crime in the United States, not just street-level criminal activity.
Corporate crime is a huge problem, with far more impact on society
than street crime. The major media has recognized this point
more and more in the past three years in headlines and cover
stories and editorials. And with the help of more comprehensive
data, we could gain an even better understanding of the problem,
which is essential to solving it.
We expect you to take this matter seriously
and look forward to your timely response.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
Founder,
Citizen Works
Lee Drutman
Communications Director,
Citizen Works
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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