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Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
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Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
Published on January 5
MEET GALE NORTON
She Sought Out
James Watt, Was
Enthralled by Ayn
Rand, Did Battle
Against Gays, For
Big Tobacco, Wanted
To Trash Endangered
Species Act, Now
To Head Interior
MUZZLING WHISTLEBLOWERS
EPA Cracks Down
On Hugh Kaufman
For Telling the Truth
About Browner and
Al Gore
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Jesse Jackson
Takes a Dive
Hate Crimes and
Behavior Modification
in Albuquerque
Published on December 5
VOTING WHILE
BLACK
How Florida Kept
More than 100,000
Blacks and Other
Minorities From
Voting
CRIMINALIZING
YOUTH
The Unrelenting
War Against
America's Teens
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Kathryn, Dubya
and Jeb
Al Gore Disses
His Secret Service
Agents
Published on Nov. 1
THE PAY-OFF
The Nader/Green Surge
Has Given Many Young Folk a Taste for the Excitement of Radical
Organizing. People Carry Such Hours and Days with Them for the
Rest of Their Lives
JIM CROW AT
EPA
Carol Browner Heads Up
a Racist Sinkhole
JESSE VENTURA
Fun Guy, But
What's He Done?
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Studs Terkel
Describes a Dinner
With Churchill
Gen. Wesley Clark
and His '67 Mustang
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New Stories:
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January 25,
2000
Transition?
What Transition?
Is Ashcroft an Extremist?
The
liberal public interest outfits have rushed to the Senate Judiciary
Committee to testify on the theme that John Ashcroft, Bush's
nominee to run the Justice Department, is athwart the national
consensus, "too extreme" to be confirmed as US Attorney
General, as Ralph Neas of People for The American Way put it.
This alleged athwartness is attributed to Ashcroft's Christian
fundamentalism, support for the Second Amendment and imputed
racism. Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority has
taken the same tack:"Women's organizations are justifiably
outraged over Bush's appointment of right, wing, anti-women's
rights extremists. Both Ashcroft and [Wisconsin governor Tommy]Thompson
[Bush's nominee to run HHS] want to criminalize abortion and
make it a felony."
Among other malfeasances Ashcroft is
charged with the liberals as being the driving force behind "charitable
choice," the contracting-out of federal functions to private
religious organizations not covered under federal anti-discrimination
law. One witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee was Professor
Dunn who teaches at the divinity school at Wake Forest. In the
hearings, he harshly denounced Ashcroft as "the principle
architect of charitable choice legislation" and stated correctly
that "Having one's tax dollars taken by government coercion
and turned over to pervasively sectarian outfits to do good threatens
everyone's civil and religious liberties." No doubt about
it. Ashcroft is hot for charitable choice and for a big role
for "faith-based organizations". So is George Bush,
who made them a very big feature in his sparse list of campaign
specifics.
But who accepted charitable choice as
part of the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, the welfare
reform law that Al Gore pressed Bill Clinton to sign, and which
Gore ringingly praised him for signing all last year? In his
recent campaign Gore spoke about a larger role for faith-based
organizations almost as often as Bush, despite the obvious fact
that in practical terms this means funneling federal dollars
to religious groups in the business of discriminating against
religious or sexual preferences they don't care for. There are
many very fine faith-based organizations, but this doesn't mean
we have to approve of God-thumpers running drug rehab programs
with federal money, hectoring addicts or former addicts that
the only way forward for them is to acknowledge the existence
of a Higher Power and to take Christ into their lives.
So where's the "extremism"
of Ashcroft? Given the Christian pietism that is compulsory in
Washington, he looks entirely mainstream to me, except he appears
to take his religion seriously. Scaremongering about Roe v Wade,
Gore's central strategy last fall, is an increasingly threadbare
tactic, particularly since First Lady Laura Bush has made it
her initial investment of political capital to insist that it
shouldn't be touched by her husband or his administration. (As
for Bush's reversal of government policy on financing population
control overseas, I for one do not lament any discomfiture of
the Malthusians. Let them get private money from the Rockefeller
crowd, always zealous to fund such enterprises.
Even before Laura Bush made her ringing
pronouncement Ashcroft had told the Senate Judiciary Committee
he would never mess with Roe v Wade. The Republicans aren't crazy,
as Senastor Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania made clear in those
same hearings when he said, "We do have very firm commitments
on the record from Senator Ashcroft that he's not going to move
to overturn Roe v Wade by constitutional amendment. And the fact
is, he couldn't if he tried. We've had a Republican Congress
for six years and now going into eight years, and nobody has
even made an effort, at least not a serious effort. And there's
a firm commitment that he's not going to use a litmus test. And
with the 50/50 split I think that's an enforceable commitment
both as to the president-elect and as to Senator Ashcroft if
he is in fact confirmed."
(Senator Specter was in witty form in
these Ashcroft hearings. Addressing one testifier against Ashcroft
he benignly remarked, "Ms. Michelman, you're a pragmatist.
I know that because I see you working out in the gymn with some
regularity.")
All the old Democratic warhorses rallied
round to do some dutiful barking at Ashcroft. But to watch Ted
Kennnedy or Joe Biden do their numbers was like hearing one of
those car alarms that go off at 3 am. They make a lot of noise,
but no one pays the slightest attention and in the end they stop,
having achieved no greater purpose than the advertisement that
at least in some notional, symbolic sense they are on guard.
Y'all Don't Come Back
Now
Off
he rushed to the airport and thence to Chappaqua, but if ever
there was a man who left a sour taste in the mouth by the manner
of his parting it was surely Bill Clinton. From time to time,
against my better judgement I've thought kindly of the man, and
time after time he's brusquely brought me to earth with some
bleak reminder of his rottenness.
Try Colombia. Less than 48 hours before
Clinton quit the White House with a legal deal covering his own
ass , his administration announced that it would employ a highly
questionable legal interpretation of "Plan Colombia"--the
$1.3 Billion in aid going mostly to the Colombian military. The
interpretation allowed the Administration to dodge entirely any
certification or waiver of human rights conditions attached to
the aid, thus circumventing the whole certification process in
providing money to the Colombian government.
Now, these human rights certifications
were the object of fierce lobbying by human rights groups last
year. After the certification was added, proponents of the Plan
tried to undermine human rights stipulations by adding the "waiver"
option to the aid. You can argue that the experience of similar
lobbying in the 1980s over aid to Central America swhould have
instructed the groups in the folly of expecting any administration
to honor such commitments, but this doesn't diminish the squalor
and cynicism of that the Clinton team did in its dying hours.
Last August, Clinton waived four of the
five human rights criteria laid out by Congress to release the
first chunk of S781.5 million. A certification or waiver was
also required for the second installment of 56.4 million dollars.
In mid-January wo Democratic Senators, Paul Wellstone and Tom
Harkin, called on Clinton as late as last week to reject a waiver
for the second slice because the Colombian government had "failed
to make significiant progress" on human rights.
But Boucher said the Clinton administration
had decided that because the second slice of aid was not included
in "regular funds" but rather in an emergency spending
bill the certification and waiver process did not apply.
So, with virtually no opportunity for
the human rights community to respond, the Clinton Administration
has effectively created a way to avoid the whole question of
human rights in Colombia. As Jack Laun of the Colombia Support
Network said bitterly, "This unilateral interpretation trivializes
the role of Congress in allocating funds and undermines the work
of countless human rights organizations that have testified time
and again to the need to consider human rights abuses in Colombia."
There's bipartisanship for you, in the
deeper sense. George Bush SR quit office in 1993, having signed
Christmas pardons for Reagan-Bush era officials who'd broken
the law by breaching congressional prohibition on aid to the
Nicaraguan contras. Here we have Clinton and Albright doing a
last-minute end run around a modest congressional road-block
against sending US dollars destined in considerable part to Colombia's
para-military death squads.
And then there were those final pardons,
also those final non-pardons. The man who campaigned in New Hampshire
in 1992 by running home to Arkansas to preside over the state
killing of the mostly brain-dead Rickey Ray Rector left office
as the man who pardoned that Navajo scoundrel Peter MacDonald,
while leaving Leonard Peltier to rot. Many a bit player in the
Whitewater and Espy scandals got Bill's manumission from the
slammer or a felony record, but Clinton didn't forget a bigger
fish, in the form of the seriously sinister Marc Rich, a billionaire
commodities trader was convicted in the early 1980s on 51 counts
of conspiracy, tax evasion, racketeering, fraud charges involving
the purchase of discounted oil from Iran during the hostage crisis
and breaking US sanctions against South Africa. Rich fled to
Switzerland before he came to trial and Switzerland refused to
extradite him.
In mid-January Al Gore went to New York
to attend a Democratic fund-raiser organized by Denise Rich,
just divorced from the fugitive. Among those gawping on 63rd
street at the limousines and cops lined up for the convenience
of the Democratic grandees was the political columnist Richard
Reeves, who later described the scene: "What's up?"
"Vice President Gore," said a cop. "Yeah,"
came from a voice in the crowd. "He saw a $ 10 bill blowing
down the street." He may have done that, but both he and
his boss knew well that across the last six years Ms Rich has
given just under $250,000 to the Democratic National Committee.
The pardon of Rich came in due course, Bill's final reminder
to us on the topic of campaign finance reform, whose muted expression
in the form of the McCain-Feingold bill is being fiercely opposed
by our new president.
Transition? What transition?
The Inaugural's Hidden
Laureate
Unless
you count Ricky Martin as a metric presence, there was no poet
laureate to give metric dignity to Bush's inaugural ceremonies,
no successor to Clinton's laureate, Maya Angelou, or to Robert
Frost, attended with such impolite impatience by Jack Kennedy
back at Camelot's dawn in 1961. But last Saturday there was the
echo of a poet who began his life as a radical and who ended
as Britain's true blue laureate.
Bush's well-written speech invoked "uncounted,
unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom".
In "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey",
his great poem written in 1797, William Wordsworth, still an
supporter of the French revolution, wrote: "These beauteous
forms, / through a long absence, have not been to me / as is
a landscape to a blind man's eye:/ but oft, in lonely rooms,
and 'mid the din / of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
/ in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / felt in the blood,
and felt along the heart;/ and passing even into my purer mind,
/ with tranquil restoration: feelings too / of unremembered pleasure:
such, perhaps, / as have no slight or trivial influence / on
that best portion of a good man's life, his little, nameless,
unremembered acts / of kindness and of love."
The new president no doubt has the same
emotions about rural Texas though in the same poem Wordsworth
insists that he's "a worshipper of nature" which makes
him an odd choice as the laureate of the new age of Bush, since
the latter's Interior Secretary, Gail Norton, takes the view
that nature's "beauteous forms" look all the better
if embellished by a fast food franchise, oil derrick or cyanide
leach pit.
In Norton's eyes and probably Bush's
too, Wordsworth's view of the morally enhancing powers of nature
would count as New Age paganism, in marked contrast to the proper
role of Almighty God, frequently invoked by Bush in that same
speech and culminating in that vulgar Reaganesque flourish about
the angel and the whirlwind. CP
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