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Today's
Stories
October
30 / 31, 2004
Winslow
T. Wheeler
Spartacus Tells
October
29, 2004
Harry
Browne
No Justice for Peace Activist in County
Clare
October
28, 2004
Forrest Hylton
"The Gas is Ours:" Bolivia's
Ghosts of October
Col. Dan Smith
Rebellion
in the Ranks
Alan Maass
Jon Stewart v. the Pundits
Ron Jacobs
Ecstasy
in Red Sox Nation
Alexander
Cockburn
Kerrycrats and the War
October
27, 2004
Jules
Rabin
Crammed with Distressful Politics
Dave
Lindorff
Bulgegate: the Lies Continue
Katherine
Van Tassel
On the Home Front: Both Parties
Ignore Working Parents
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Bi-Partisan Politics of Oil
October 26,
2004
Brian Cloughley
Three
Weddings and Lots of Funerals: Atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan
William Blum
Fear
Factors
Lenni Brenner
The
1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Lessons for 2004
Ben Tripp
The
Chicken Salad Election
Fidel Castro
After the Fall
Greg Bates
The Nation's Flawed Calculus
Walter Brasch
Gag the Public: the War on Dissent
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
An Open Letter to Pat Buchanan
Mickey Z.
Rumble in the Jungle at 30: Ali, Foreman and the Congo
Amir Taheri
The Boom in Conspiracy Theories
Alexander Billet
Say It Ain't So, Bruce!: the Boss Endorses Kerry
Doug Giebel
The Religion of G.W. Bush
Kathleen Christison
Why
I Liked Thomas Friedman's Latest Column Before I Didn't
October 25,
2004
Ralph Nader
Letter
from a Minnesota Highway
Werther
West
Texas Wahabbism
Dave Zirin
Boston's Killer Cops: Death of a Fan
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Oregon Revokes Dr. Leveque's License
Omar Barghouti
Executing Another Child in Rafah
William J. Nottingham
Lori Berenson's Story
John Chuckman
A Foolish Consistency
Uri Avnery
On
the Road to Civil War
October 22
/ 24, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
You
Can't Blame Nader for This
Rev. William Alberts
On Bended Knee: Faith-Based Deceptions
Willliam A.
Cook
Killing for Christ
Saul Landau
George W. Bush: a Man of His Words?
Bill Quigley
I Held the Bullet in My Palm: Masked Haitian Police Shoot Children
While Arresting Priest
Christopher Brauchli
Seal It With a Frown: What Compassionate Conservativism Really
Means
William S.
Lind
Fallujah and the Moral Level of War
Sharon Smith
Guilt Trippers for Kerry
Greg Bates
Kerrynomics: "Hurt the Ones Who Vote for Us"
Justin E.H. Smith
Is Lesser Evilism a Compromise with Evil?
Rebecca Evans
Tarnished Legacy: Pinochet and the Chilean Military
Mike Whitney
Al Hurra TV: the Second Invasion
M. Junaid Alam
Purchasing Individuality in America
David Krieger
Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and
Kerry
David J. Ledermann
The Emperor's New Crumbs
Lawrence Reichard
Same Old FBI Story
Website of
the Weekend
Lie Girls: the Real Coalition of the Willling
October 21,
2004
Ben Tripp
The
Undecided Voter Examined
Joshua Frank
Kerry
and the Environment:
It's Not Easy Pretending to be Green
Stan Cox
What
the Left Doesn't Get About Small Businesses
Bill Martinez
State
Depart and Cuban Visas: Only Anti-Castro Agitators Need Apply
Mark Engler
The War and Globalization
Lina Britto
and Lucia Suarez
Bolivia:
a Year After the October Insurrection
Website of the Day
Two Pampered Children of Wealth
October 20,
2004
Yitzhak Laor
"Did
You Two Squabble?": a Bullet Fired for Every Palestinian
Child
Jason Leopold
Sinclair
Broadcasting's Air War: a Long History of Journalistic Deception
Jesse Sharkey
A
Teacher's Account of How Military Recruiters Prey on High School
Students
Col. Dan Smith
Choking
Free Speech About the Draft
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Using My Religion
David Vest
If
Bush Wins, Blame Me
Jack Random
The Jackson 17: Reflections on a Mutiny
Ron Jacobs
Time
to Kick It Up a Notch
James Brittain
Plan Patriota and the FARC: a Change in the Countryside?
Christopher
Dols
Bombing Madison: Michael Moore's Fright Fest
Dave Lindorff
First They Came for the Nurses...
Website of
the Day
Banana Republican Catalogue
October 19,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Party
Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe
Jeff Taylor
Confessions
of a Swing State Voter
Matt Vidal
American
Myopia: "More Money in Your Pocket"
Victor Kattan
"It's Not Who You're Against; It's Who You're For":
Palestine Takes Center Stage At Euro Social Forum
William Loren
Katz
What Goes Around Comes Around
Sean Carter
O'Reilly Should Shut Up About Extortion Claiims
CounterPunch Wire
Who's Really in Bed with Republican Funders: Kerry or Nader?
October 18,
2004
Saul Landau
Facts
and Lies; Slogans and Truth
Dave Lindorff
Bulletin
on the Bush Bulge
Diane Christian
Sheep
and Goats: On the Language of Goodness
Greg Bates / Dave Lindorff
Betting on War: a Wager on the Fallout of a Kerry Presidency
Uri Avnery
Ariel
Sharon's Philosophy
Peter LaVenia
Leaving the Greens So Soon? a Response to Josh Frank
Mike Whitney
O'Reilly at the Whipping Post
Elaine Cassel
The Other War: Civil Liberties Three Years After 9/11
October 16
/ 17, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Free Speech Movement and Howard Stern
Leslie Brill
Unmerciful Judge, Merry Executioners: the Death Penalty as the
True Measure of Bush's Character
Jules Rabin
Reckoning Deaths in an Agitated World
Dave Lindorff
About the Bush Bulge: Was There a Pucker in That Jacket or Was
the President Just Glad to be There?
Peter Linebaugh
Judging Judges: a Few Pages from The Mirror of Justices
Gary Leupp
Iran and Syria: How to Effect Regime Change and Expand the Empire
M. Shahid Alam
America, Imagine This!
Ron Jacobs
Trying to Cross Lake Champlain
Fred Gardner
The Flu Vaccine Question: How Bush Blew It
Jenna Orkin
The Toxic Legacy of 9/11
Dave Zirin
Name the DC Baseball Team: Contest Results
David Hamilton
Alone and Exposed: Bush as a Strong Leader?
Ralph Nader
Criticizing Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Doug Giebel
Thinking the Unthinkable
Mark Engler
Crimes in Freedom's Name: Dick Cheney's El Salvador
Derek Tyner
Blacks Didn't Get the Vote by Voting: an Interview With Clarence
Thomas on the Million Worker March
Evan Jones
Gimme That Ole Time Religion: Cash and "The Mind of the
South"
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Klipschutz and Albert
Website of
the Weekend
No More Bush Girls
October 15,
2004
Paul Craig
Roberts
Where
Did These "Conservatives" Come From?: The Brownshirting
of America
Laura Carlsen
Wal-Mart
vs. the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
Greg Bates
Empire of Insanity: Kerry's Iraq Troop Numbers
Michael Donnelly
News from a Swing State: Does Anyone Here Have a Spine?
Katherine Lahey
The Venezuelan "Threat": Why Do Kerry and Bush Fear
Hugo Chavez?
Robert Jensen
/ Pat Youngblood
Election Day Fears
Leah Caldwell
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib: the Masterminds of Torture and Abuse
Website of
the Day
An Anti-Billionaire Policy? Why That Would Be Economic Racism
October 14,
2004
Darcy Richardson
The
Other Progressive Candidate: the Lonely Crusade of Walt Brown
Willliam A.
Cook
Turning
Myths into Truth
Laura Santina
Water, Women and War
Evelyn Pringle
Free Speech Banned by Big Pharma: What You Can't Say About Drug
Importation
Alan Farago
Lessons
from Nature
Rep. Maxine Waters
A Letter to Colin Powell on Haiti
Nicole Colson
Maimed
for Oil and Empire
October 13,
2004
Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton and Bill Quigley
Aftermath
of a Coup: The Other Disaster in Haiti
Sharon Smith
Barak
O-Bomb-a?: Democrats Target Iran
Christopher Brauchli
God and the Bush Administration
Mike Whitney
The Real Meaning of the Hamdi Case
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: a False Beacon?
Website of
the Day
Operation
Truth
October 12,
2004
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Greg Bates
The Year of Voting Dangerously: a Survey Request of Nader Voters
in Swing States
Steven Conn
Progressives as Pawns: Kerry's War on Nader
Jason Leopold
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from
UN Oil-for-Food Program
Security Scholars
for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Time for a Change of Course
Timothy J. Freeman
Dying for a Mistake
Pierre Tristam
Deconstructing Bush
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 2nd Debate: the Blurring of Act and Audience
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Israel as Sideshow
Website of the Day
John Kerry's Personal Off-Shore Tax Shelters
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
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.
|
Weekend Edition
October 30 / 31, 2004
When the Hippies
Invaded Northern California
Notes
from the Big Empty
By
BRUCE ANDERSON
[This
essay is excerpted from Dime's
Worth of Difference.]
Democrats in action? How about in Mendocino
County, California, a great big rugged rural place with 85,000
people strewn over an area larger than Vermont.
The short history of the Democratic
Party takeover of Mendocino County goes like this: Beginning
in 1967, thousands of hippies drove north on Highway 101 from
the Bay Area, headed "back to the land". The land they
were going back to was cheap, and got cheaper the farther north
their used Volvos carried them. But when the urban refugees,
themselves refugees from the suburbs and everything represented
by suburbs, got back to the land, there was no hippie way to
support themselves other than dope production, and dope's a high
stress enterprise given the cops, thieves and the IRS. So a lot
of the hippies dusted off their diplomas, cleaned up and drove
down out of the hills to get themselves public jobs, which in
the perennially tight
economy of Mendocino County are the only jobs that pay college
people the kind of money college people think they deserve.
The hippies were re-entering
the society they'd spent their youths being contemptuous of.
And being middle-class and civic-minded, they soon elected other
hippies, or hip-symps, to a few low-level offices, then some
mid-level offices, until Mendocino County's public jobs were
entirely dominated by the love generation.
And public policy in Mendocino
County grew crueler by the year, in
direct proportion to the re-entry return of the formerly estranged.
For $30,000 a year, a flower child would put the figurative,
the programmatic boots to anybody a rung down the ladder.
Pay an old hippie with a law degree $140,000 a year with the
full fringe package for him and Mrs. Lib and the kids, and he'll
kill, which is what Mendocino County's seven liberal judges,
all of them Up From Hippie, do five days a week every week in
the Mendocino County Courthouse.
"Life without, punk,
but I feel your pain".
Congressman Mike Thompson picked
up a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He said when he got home a hippie
spit on him. Thompson runs unopposed for re-election. The Republicans
don't bother putting money into an opponent because they've got
Thompson who's just as good.
Thompson presides over an apparatus
of career officeholders like himself who replace each other when
one of them moves on to another public office.
If no public office is immediately
available to a term-limited old boy, the Democrats park him or
her on a state board of some kind at a hundred thousand a year
for one meeting a week until another old boy leaves another safe
seat open.
The electoral base camp for
rotating offices consists almost entirely of
public employees, whose funding depends on Democrats at the state
and federal levels. The edu-bloc votes as one for Democrats,
the Democrats send money and promise to send more without raising
taxes. People employed at various levels of government
and that's a lot of people in Mendocino County, one third of
everyone employed vote Democratic because the Democrats
can be depended on to make more government, especially of the
kind that keeps on re-electing them. What the Democrats have
managed to do on the North coast is create an old fashioned political
machine that creates jobs for people who believe that Democrats
are "progressive". Maybe they are in some places, but
not here. Here, in real life practice, Democrats are Bush Republicans.
To use one of their favorite words, Democrats are "facilitators"
of environmental and social destruction.
This is the county whose sheriff
and district attorney, libertarian
Republicans, ran for office promising to decriminalize marijuana.
Which they did, and both were re-elected by even greater margins
the second time they ran. They've also passed out more concealed
weapons permits than any DA and Sheriff in the state. They're
at odds with Democrats and Republicans on most issues, but you
won't hear a critical word from either of them ever on the deficiencies
of the career officeholders of the Democratic machine.
We have a thriving Green Party
that votes for Democrats and steadfastly avoids running candidates
for local office. When the rare Green takes on the Democrats,
he's either stabbed by Democrats or denounced by Greens for not
having been sanctioned by them. When Green guy Dave Severn took
on a semi-psychotic Democrat for county supervisor, the Mendocino
Green Party refused to endorse Severn. When an elected school
board trustee and registered Green signed up for the Green Congressional
primary this year hoping to oppose Congressman Thompson in the
general election in November, a recreational candidate who runs
for office on one minority party ballot or another every election,
just happened to find $500 to register to run
against the viable Green in the Green primary. The recreational
candidate, who is neither seen nor heard on any issue between
elections, beat the legitimate Green in the primary because she's
a woman and she has a Mexican-sounding surname. The legit Green
would have caused incumbent Thompson some serious anxiety in
his re-election race against a token Republican because Thompson,
like Gore and Kerry on the national level, inspires either zero
enthusiasm or negative enthusiasm of the I'll-vote-for-the-Greens-just-to-screw-things-up-for-the-two-party-dictatorship
variety.
Congressman Thompson, Wine
Country representative all the way and the industry's main man
in Washington, was instrumental in getting the ban on methyl
bromide delayed for five more years on behalf of his industry
padrones. Thompson, not deigning to take out the necessary permits,
bulldozed a parcel of land he owns in nearby Lake County so he
could put in his own little vineyard, rightly assuming the authorities
would pretend not to know he did it.
The wine people are heavily
Democratic because Democrats, they seem to think, have panache;
Republicans don't. It is hard to imagine John Ashcroft at a wine
tasting, not hard to imagine Bill and Hillary at one, the crazed
AG is not a likely white wine and brie guy. But a rhetorically
liberal upscale couple would be right at home in a setting of
the superficial and the silly.
Pumped down into the soil to
depths of 12 feet, methyl bromide sterilizes the earth as grape
vine site prep. Immigrant Mexicans, dressed in protective moonsuits,
apply the lethal stuff, and often die in industry accidents involving
ag or industrial wine chemicals, especially nitrogen, because
the wine people, thanks to Democrats, are basically exempt from
industrial safety standards.
The wine industry, heavy consumers
of pesticides and herbicides, is
environmentally devastating and socially indifferent; they clearcut
large swaths of land with a thoroughness the most demented logger
can only dream of doing, then lay on the chemicals year round.
Socially, the industry provides little to no worker housing for
the immigrant labor upon which depends. The wine industry, which
seldom pays better than minimum wages for seasonal work, rises
up as one to crush UFW organizing attempts like so many grapes,
and fires any worker who complains without so much as promising
anything resembling a fair hearing. Congressman Thompson, a Democrat
who'sinterchangeable with Republicans on most votes, is the wine
industry's national go-to guy.
One spring morning back in
the 1970s, as a clusters of little hippie
kids waited for the big yellow school bus to carry them to classrooms
as dull and reactionary as the ones their alienated parents had
fled for
California's backwoods, a Louisiana-Pacific helicopter, spraying
the
freshly-logged hills with herbicides to prevent non-commercial
re-vegetation, heedlessly sprayed the little Rainbows and Karmas
as they waited for their school buses. The hippies mobilized
and passed an aerial spray ban. Within months, state Democrats,
including those elected from this area, led by Willie Brown,
all of their pockets stuffed with corporate ag cash, passed legislation
that decreed that individual counties couldn't regulate herbicides
and pesticides only the state could decide on the big ticket
stuff like who could poison the kids and who couldn't. You don't
like Garlon dropped on your kid? Take it up with Sacramento.
Among the re-entry hippies
who dominate Mendocino County's public
institutions are too many lawyers. Law degreed hippies were quick
to note that Mendocino County's far-flung communities were served
by one-day-a-week justice courts whose judges were "lay
persons", i.e., non-lawyers. Nobody in Mendocino County
was unhappy with the lay judges in any organized sense of unhappiness;
lay judges were a non-issue. People living in the deep outback
liked their judges and their courts the way they were, but the
lawyers scented opportunity. The lawyers, especially the under-employed
ones barely able to earn enough to support the hepatitis lifestyle
they'd moved to the country to pursue, began to say, "The
quality of justice is likely to be inferior if the person dispensing
it isn't properly trained. We really should have lawyers sitting
as judges in these justice courts". The law was changed,
and the lay judges, who had dispensed Mendocino County justice
for a hundred years, were gone. Trained legal professionals,
fresh from the big naked solstice piles up in the hills, took
over Mendocino County's justice courts.
There's been a dramatic change
in the quality of justice. Not only are
more people than ever going to jail, a new lawyer judge fell
in love with an armed robber defendant and, time and again, tossed
the charges against his boy friend until people said, "Hey!
If this guy would rob people over the hill we wouldn't mind you
sleeping with him, your honor. But we live here!"
The lawyer judge went, but
the judge who replaced him, an exhibitionist, kept flashing his
court's female staffers. He finally went off for "counseling",
but came back after a few months of working as a judge an hour
away; his judicial pals said privately they'd told him to be
sure to wear clothes under his robes, and keep his gonads off
the scales of justice.
Lay judges made $300 a month
for one-day-a-week. The lawyer judges make $140,000 a year plus
fringes for themselves and their families. They can work or not
work, as they please; they can stay home and draw their base
pay or travel around the state at public expense to sit as visiting
judges.
We've got more of these $140,000
judges than any population our size in the state. And the justice
courts? They're gone, centralized so the judges don't have to
travel much. The elevation of hippie judges to superior court
status was sold as "reorganization" and "increased
efficiency". The Democrat-dominated state legislature sold
us that one.
The quality of justice now
that long-time pot smokers are presiding? If you can afford a
well-connected lawyer you get off; if you can't you go to the
state pen, and the people sending you are all NPR listeners,
Democrats, liberals, Clintonians.
A 19-year-old kid recently
got sent off on, as they say, on an L-WOP, life without the possibility
of parole. He got a one-day jury trial during
which his public defender called no witnesses on his behalf,
assigned no investigators to look at the facts of the case, wrapped
up by denouncing the kid as a very bad person who'd committed
a very bad murder. Her defense? The boy hadn't been properly
read his rights. The jury was back within minutes with a unanimous
guilty verdict. Even the cops were stomping indignantly around
the Courthouse at the Public Defender's grotesquely inept defense.
The L-WOP boy's two accomplices,
one of whom did the crime, murder, got 15 and 19 years respectively.
Everyone involved in the case's second murder, the judicial murder
of this L-WOP kid now buried for life at Soledad, is a registered
Democrat. The sentencing judge is an active Democrat whose wife
works in the local Democrat Assemblyperson's office.
We even have an "alternate
public defender's" office, a jobs program for under-employed
but hip-lib lawyers. The way this works, and it works at enormous
additional expense to taxpayers, is when one of the regular public
defenders claims "a conflict of interest", the "alternate"
is summoned. The conflict can be as vague as a remote commercial
association from, say, five years ago when the defendant attended
the same wedding as one of the attorneys in the public defender's
office. The faux scrupulousness is really just a way to spread
the legal work around the Democrats who, of course, delude themselves
into thinking they're fighters for the underdog.
We also have a family court
magistrate; and two court administrators;
and privatized court reporters (two of whom are girlfriends of
sitting
judges), and family court mediators, invariably ex-hippies whose
own lives are hopelessly fucked up but drawing nice pay to help
other fucked up people with their marital woes, usually making
them worse, and we have victim witness coordinators; and a triple-sized
probation department; and family court advocates; and on and
on at least a thousand 'helping professionals', and not
a Republican in the bunch, and the whole mob of them committed
Democrats of the type who write letters to the editor denouncing
Ralph Nader.
Mendocino County, having gone
big time for Dean, later went big time for Kerry. Our local public
radio station, partially funded by WalMart and the local wine
industry, both of which are entirely dependent on grotesquely
exploited labor, bills itself as "Free Speech Radio, Mendocino
County". It's dominated by Democrats, and there are exactly
two hours a month of aggressively vetted semi-free speech. Pacifica
Network-type Stalinists answer the phones, and if you aren't
talking Kucinich or Kerry or Mumia or their local surrogates,
you don't get to talk. No dissent is allowed on air. Ever. But
the Democrats get all the air time they want, and since there
are no Republicans who either tune in or call in during the two
whole hours a month any old body can reach right out and audio
touch a tax-paid censor, it's all Democrats all the time.
As in the rest of America,
the Democrats stay in office here in Ecotopia by routing funding
to public employees. School people and public employees vote
as a bloc for Democrats because Democrats fund them. Local food
banks estimate that a minimum of 20% of Mendocino County children
under the age of five don't get enough to eat, and many Mendocino
County schools fail to meet prevailing educational standards,
low as they are. The Mendocino County Jail, because it has had
to take over the care and feeding of the ill because Mendocino
County's helping professionals, many of them active Democrats,
and all of them Democratic voters although occasionally registered
Green, aren't equal to the task; the jail is so overcrowded it
regularly releases its least violent inmates after they've served
a third to half their sentences.
The proprietor of a fancy,
ocean view inn is "environmental chair" of
California's Democratic Party. During grassroots demonstrations
against the possibility that the Pacific off the Mendocino Coast
might eventually be drilled for oil, Democrats like Gray Davis,
known locally as Eraser Head, showed up in chauffeur-driven gas
guzzlers for environmental photo-ops. The inn owner, previously
unengaged in the agitation to keep oil rigs out of her viewshed,
inserted herself into the turmoil, sedate as it was, and was
soon appearing in the New York Times as the lady who's
saving the sea from Chevron. Her inn became a regular pit stop
for bigwig Democrats, and she became the person who kept the
derricks off the North coast. The grassroots people, who'd hoped
for a permanent ban on offshore drilling, were shoved
aside, and the safety of sea creatures has been in the well-oiled,
well-funded hands of Democrats ever since.
So have the forests, what's
left of them. When the North coast grassroots drew national attention
to the grim fact that outside timber corporations were cashing
in Mendocino and Humboldt county trees for short-term profit
and long-term environmental and employment devastation, the grassroots
turned to their Democratic officeholders for help. The Democrats,
always ready to oblige, helped the corporations mop up what was
left of both the private and public trees, and then, with public
money freed up by Clinton, bought up untouched acres of forest
at twice their already inflated value from Charles Hurwitz, a
junk bond tycoon based in Texas who does big business deals with
Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband.
The Democrats and their local
gofers also negotiated a set aside of thousands of acres of land
at Big River, just south of tourist ground zero, Mendocino Village.
The newest set aside was dedicated to two active Democrats who'd
always been among the missing when environmental push had come
to environmental shove. It's as if long time environmentalists
like Ron Guenther, who literally risked his neck to take on the
timber corporations and was the first local person to protest
timber harvest plans on their merits, was ignored as Democrats
and their officeholders held a self-congratulatory hand-over
ceremony at Big River beach.
The New York Times-owned
Santa Rosa Press Democrat serves as major media
stenographer for local Democrats. The paper was distraught at
Gray Davis's recall as California's governor. "We just can't
allow voters to monkeywrench things like this", the paper
wailed editorially. "What if the mob goes after Wes or Patti
or Mike and the rest of our progressive friends? It's too terrible
to contemplate".
The Davis recall lost in Mendocino
County. The Democrats managed to
convince the minority of eligible voters who bothered with the
recall
election that Davis was better than the alternative. The alternative
was, of course, a lateral move, electorally considered, and here
we are again with the Democrats telling us that it's Kerry or
another four years of Bush.
In Mendocino County, it's another
four years of Thompson as methyl
bromide's national advocate, while here with the home folks,
Thompson's in-county rep, long ago secretly anointed by the Thompson
Democrats to become a supervisor and thus begin her climb upwards
to the imported brie, easily defeated an unblessed male Democrat
to get the job.
In November, the Mendocino
County Board of Supervisors will consist of five Democrats: a
gay woman; a recovering alcoholic; a retired rock and roll musician;
a trust fund hippie; and a Bly Guy who changed his name to Wildman:
rural multiculturalism, Democrat style.
Bruce Anderson was editor of The Anderson Valey Advertiser,
headquartered in Boonville, Mendocino County, northern California.
After 23 years, in August of this year he and his wife Ling headed
for Eugene, OR, craving rain and that brand of blood-thirsty
self-righteousness that Oregonian liberals have successfully
patented to alternate with the vindictive barbarism of the local
Republicanism. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new
book Dime's
Worth of Difference. His new paper, AVA Oregon, will
be launched in November. You can reach him at: AVA39@msn.com
Weekend
Edition Features for October 22 / 14, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
You
Can't Blame Nader for This
Rev. William Alberts
On Bended Knee: Faith-Based Deceptions
Willliam A.
Cook
Killing for Christ
Saul Landau
George W. Bush: a Man of His Words?
Bill Quigley
I Held the Bullet in My Palm: Masked Haitian Police Shoot Children
While Arresting Priest
Christopher Brauchli
Seal It With a Frown: What Compassionate Conservativism Really
Means
William S.
Lind
Fallujah and the Moral Level of War
Sharon Smith
Guilt Trippers for Kerry
Greg Bates
Kerrynomics: "Hurt the Ones Who Vote for Us"
Justin E.H. Smith
Is Lesser Evilism a Compromise with Evil?
Rebecca Evans
Tarnished Legacy: Pinochet and the Chilean Military
Mike Whitney
Al Hurra TV: the Second Invasion
M. Junaid Alam
Purchasing Individuality in America
David Krieger
Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and
Kerry
David J. Ledermann
The Emperor's New Crumbs
Lawrence Reichard
Same Old FBI Story
Website of
the Weekend
Lie Girls: the Real Coalition of the Willling
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