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May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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May
23, 2002
Attack of the
Clowns
The Real Bush is Back
by Dean Baker
After the latest morbid turn in the Chandra Levy
mystery, it appears that politics has now come back full circle
to where it was before September 11th. With the recent scandals
and miscues, the President is no longer Winston Churchill or
Franklin Roosevelt, he is once again the bungler from Texas who
finished second in the presidential race. This return to reality
is good news - the nation should be paying attention to the president's
agenda, not engaging in mindless hero worship.
And the agenda isn't pretty. At the top
of the list is an ill-defined quest to combat an "axis of
evil." While we all want  to stop terrorism, it is not clear that
attacking the countries on the president's list is the best way
to go about this task. The public has never been given much of
an explanation of the president's plans. We just know that they
will take a long time, cost a lot of money, and probably lead
to a lot of deaths. Some of the dead will presumably be terrorists,
but many others are likely to be innocent civilians, like the
people killed in the World Trade Center, and others will be our
soldiers.
Domestically, the top of the president's
list still seems to be more tax breaks for the wealthy. To President
Bush, this means not just the old-fashioned tax breaks passed
by Congress - like the tax breaks from last summer - but also
giving the wealthy and corporations the opportunity to simply
not pay taxes if they choose.
The papers have been filled with stories
of corporations that escape most of their income tax liability
by opening a post office box in Bermuda. This rip-off could easily
be remedied by a law closing this loophole. But President Bush
supports the loophole - corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes,
if they find it inconvenient to do so. In the same vein, the
<I.R.S>. has cut back on its audits of wealthy taxpayers,
in order to spend more time auditing the returns of the working
poor.
The President is also a vigorous supporter
of a new bankruptcy law, the main effect of which will be to
put credit card and finance companies in more direct competition
with kids seeking child support from divorced parents. If the
current laws made it too easy for scofflaws to escape their debts,
our mailboxes wouldn't be filled with credit card offers every
day.
However, just as Bush has sought to make
taxes voluntary for the rich, he has done the same with repaying
debts. The bankruptcy bill has a clause that will allow people
to use real estate to shield an unlimited amount of wealth from
creditors. This means that a millionaire Bush supporter can own
a $10 million home - with no mortgage - declare bankruptcy, and
then tell his local grocer to get lost when she tries to collect
on his tab.
President Bush has also come out in support
of crony capitalism accounting rules that allow corporate executives
to write down almost anything they want on their financial statements.
This puts him at odds with just about every serious authority
on financial markets, including Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffet,
and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the accounting
profession's internal policing body. He prefers standards that
will allow for many more Enrons.
President Bush has also opposed efforts
to re-regulate California's electricity market, even as companies
like Enron were developing their "Death Star" trading
strategies to rip off California's consumers. To the president,
higher profits for Enron were good news, even if it meant soaring
electric bills for small businesses and homeowners.
And of course, we can't forget the president's
efforts to dismantle Social Security. At a time when many stock
certificates are looking like lottery tickets, the day after
the drawing, tens of millions of workers recognize Social Security
as the only reliable source of retirement income.
But where the rest of us see retirement
security, the President sees money that could be going to Wall
Street. President Bush is trying to scare us into supporting
his scheme by questioning the program's health, even though the
Social Security trustees (four of whom are President Bush's cabinet
members) report that Social Security is in better shape than
at any point in the first four decades of its operation.
The bottom line is that in President
Bush's America, the only genuinely safe investment is a contribution
to his re-election campaign. Stopping this assault on the nation's
well-being will not be easy, but the first step is recognizing
that the guy in the White House is running a scam for his rich
friends.
Dean Baker
is co-Director of the Center
for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
He is co-author (with Mark Weisbrot) of Social
Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press)
and writes the Economic Reporting Review, a weekly analysis of
media economic coverage.
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