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From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
July
23, 2003
David
Lindorff
On Cleaning Out the Barn: New Meanings
for Old Headlines
Uri
Avnery
Caesar's Favor
July
22, 2003
Diane
Christian
Bad Guy / Good Guy: War Forces;
Peace Frees
Jeremy
Brecher
Solidarity and Student Protests in Iran
Steve
Kretzmann
and Jim Vallette
Plugging Iraq into Globalization
Sam
Smith
Greening the Golden Triangle
James
Plummer
Smile, You're on Federal Camera
Lucretia
Stewart
This Day Shall Not Define My Life:
January 18, 2003
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of the Day
Iraq Coalition Casualties
July
21, 2003
Edward
Said
Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping
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Ron
Jacobs
Shut Up and Shoot
Allan J.
Lichtman
Why is George Bush President?
Elaine
Cassel
How's the Occupation Going? Ask the People of Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
History Recapitulates: Guantanamo and the Japanese Internment
Camps
Bruce
Jackson
Third and Arizona, Santa Monica
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of the Day
John Dean: Taking Apart Bush's State of the Union Speech, Claim
by Claim
July
19 / 20, 2003
Arthur
Mitzman
Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable
Than the Dot.com Bubble?
Julian
Bond
We Shall be Heard
Cynthia
McKinney
Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad
Mel
Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?
Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz
Mickey
Z.
History Forgave Churchill
Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message
Jon
Brown
Whipping the Post
Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps
Steven
Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC
Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters
Khaldoun
Khelil
Capturing Friedman
Jeffrey
St. Clair
You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed
Lenni
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Sitting in with Mingus
Vanessa
Jones
Three Dog Night
Adam
Engel
Video Judas Video
Poets'
Basement
Foley, Smith and Curtis
Website
of the Weekend
Illegal Art
July
18, 2003
David
Vest
Drowning in Deep Doo-Doo
Rahul
Mahajan
Deceit Runs Deep
John Chuckman
Enron-style Management in a Dangerous World
Harold
A. Gould
The Bush-Musharraf Conclave
Alvaro
Angarita
In the Eye of the Storm: Colombia's War on Journalists
David
Grenier
Sovereignty and Solidarity in Indian Country...Rhode Island
Dave Lindorff
Bush and Hitler: a Response to the Wall Street Journal
Website
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Murder of a Whistleblower? Timeline in David Kelly Affair
July
17, 2003
Ron
Jacobs
Sometimes Even the President of the
United States Has to Stand Naked
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Bush Country: the Venom and Adulation of Ignorance
Martin
Schwarz
Bush Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine is the Bane of Non-Proliferation
Watchdogs
Heidi
Lypps
Better Justice Through Chemistry? Forced
Drugging and the Supreme Court
Norman
Madarasz
Third Ways and Third Worlds: Lula at the Progressive Governance
Conference
Pankaj
Mehta
Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush, War Lies & Impeachment: the
Boy Who Cried Wolf
Hammond
Guthrie
(Dis) Intelligence Revisited
Website
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No Force, No Fraud: the Soul of Libertarianism
July
16, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Told White House to Hype
Dubious Uranium Claims
William
Cook
Defining Terrorism from the Top Down
Elaine
Cassel
Judge Brinkema v. Ashcroft: She Whom
Must Not Be Obeyed
Jason
Leopold
How Can They Justify the War If WMDs Are Never Found?
Linda Heard
Bondage or Freedom?
Raymond
Barrett
From Detroit to Basra
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Back to the Future in Guatemala:
The Return of Gen. Ríos Montt
July
15, 2003
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Why We Resigned from VIPS
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft's War on Legal Whistleblowers:
the Ordeal of Jesselyn Radack
Chris
Floyd
Barge Poles: Oil Wars and New Europe's Mercenaries
Jason
Leopold
CIA Warned White House Last October that Niger Docs were Forgeries
Gaius Publius
Considering the Obvious: Fool Us Once, Fool Us Twise...Please
John
Troyer
The Niger Syndrome
Becky Gillette
No Conspiracy at Coffeen Nature Preserve: a Response to David
Orrr
Uri
Avnery
The Bi-National State: The Wolf Shall
Dwell with the Lamb
Website
of the Day
Cost of Iraq War
July
14, 2003
Lisa
Taraki
Hot Days in Ramallah
Walter
Brasch
Bush: the Pretend Captain
SOA
Watch
Training Colombia's Killers in the US
Dan Bacher
Yurok Tribe Denounces Klamath River Salmon Killers
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Intelligence Unglued
Website
of the Day
Coalition for Democratic Rights and Civil Liberties
July 12 / 13, 2003
Arthur
Mitzman
The Double Wall Before the Future
Standard
Schaefer
The Coming Financial Reality: an
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John Feffer
A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang
Ron
Jacobs
Shades of Gray in Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights
Tom
Stephens
Civil Liberties After 9/11
David Lindorff
New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On"
Jason
Leopold
The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11
Lee Sustar
What's Behind the Crisis in Liberia?
Mickey
Z.
AIDS Dissent and Africa
Sam Hamod
Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group
Ramzy
Baroud
Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller
Adam
Engel
Parable of the Lobbyist
Robert
Sanders
A Review of Ralph Lopez's American Dream
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Witherup, Guthrie
July
11, 2003
Conn
Hallinan
The Coin of Empire
Tim
Wise
God Responds to Bush
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
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Edward
S. Herman
Whitewashing Sandra Day O'Connor
David Orr
Coffeen-gate: What's Going on at the Sierra Club Foundation?
David
Lindorff
An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary
Website
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Dead Malls
July
10, 2003
Ron
Jacobs
Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody
Profits of General Dynamics
Sean
Donahue
Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia
Yemi
Toure
Who Outted Bush in Afrika?
Robert
Jensen
Politics and Sustainability: an Interview
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Ali
Abunimah
US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated
Joanne
Mariner
Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions
Website
of the Day
Electronic Iraq
July
9, 2003
David
Lindorff
Is the Media Finally Turning on
Bush?
David
Krieger and Angela McCracken
10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Mickey
Z.
Why Speak Out?
Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud
John
Chuckman
The Worst Kind of Lie
Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq
Website
of the Day
Hail to the Thief:
Songs for the Bush Years
July
8, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological
Dissents of Scalia
Alan
Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor
Chris
Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag
Linda
S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice
Brian
Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders
Charles
Sullivan
Bush the Christian?
Saul
Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
Website
of the Day
Occupation Watch
July
7, 2003
William
Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Harvey
Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
Iran
Lesley
McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
Uri
Avnery
The Draw
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
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Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
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Civil Liberties
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Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
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The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
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July
23, 2003
A Petro-Military-Commerce
Mission
Bush in South
Africa
By PATRICK BOND
In addition to the pomp and ceremony associated
with the second post-apartheid state visit by a U.S. president,
a string of protests greeted George W. Bush when he met South
African president Thabo Mbeki in Pretoria on July 9. It was a
complicated welcome from many perspectives. South Africa had
not joined the "coalition of the willing" against Saddam
Hussein, and former president Nelson Mandela remains a staunch
opponent of Bush's foreign policy. On the other hand, Pretoria
profited nicely from the hostilities, not merely through selling
arms but also by taking advantage of Bush's attempt to restore
some legitimacy on this trip. Mbeki's muddled reaction to the
<U.S.-led> war on Hussein's Iraq deserves a review, because
continuing ambivalence in the political sphere is contradicted
by closer <U.S.-South> African economic relationships that
threaten the rest of Africa.
Most constructively, perhaps, a few leaders
from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) engaged in occasional
anti-war picketing at U.S. consulates in Cape Town, Durban, and
Johannesburg during the invasion of Iraq. On July 9, several
hundred demonstrators from the ANC and its allies protested U.S.
policies in Pretoria. However, this represented a far smaller
number than the broader, and more radical Anti-War Coalition,
whose gathering of more than 2,000 at the U.S. embassy, and 700
at the ANC office in Johannesburg a few days earlier, sent the
explicit message that Bush should leave Africa.
Although South Africa was officially
opposed to the war, had Washington's bullying of several Security
Council swing votes been successful, Pretoria would have fallen
into line. In the days prior to the <U.S./UK> bombing,
Mbeki deployed deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad and a technical
team to assist the UN with inspections for Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. None were located.
Mandela offered a tough critique as early
as January: "All Bush wants is Iraqi oil... Their friend
Israel has got weapons of mass destruction but because it's their
ally they won't ask the UN to get rid of it... Bush, who cannot
think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.
If there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities,
it is the United States of America... They don't care for human
beings."
In June, Mandela met French foreign minister
Dominique de Villepin and condemned Bush again: "Since the
creation of the United Nations there has not been a World War.
Therefore, for anybody, especially the leader of a superstate,
to act outside the United Nations is something that must be condemned
by everybody who wants peace. For any country to leave the United
Nations and attack an independent country must be condemned in
the strongest terms."
Notwithstanding the Security Council's
laudable opposition to the invasion itself, the merits of the
UN as a site for adjudicating U.S. power were thrown into serious
question after Saddam's regime collapsed and reconstruction control
was debated. A commentator in the Jordan Times, Hasan Abu Nimah,
explained: "The latest Security Council resolution on Iraq,
1483, has been a flagrant betrayal of the UN Charter, a scandalous
resultant of power politics and opportunistic superpower compromises,
and a dangerous submission to the fait accompli of war and aggression,
at the expense of principle and international legality. Earlier,
in the weeks leading to the war, the council had stood firm in
the face of immense American and British pressure, boldly refusing
to prematurely undercut the arms inspection program in favor
of a resolution providing legal international cover for the military
action against Iraq which was already planned by the U.S. and
Britain... It is amazing how, on May 22, the council dramatically
abandoned its steadfast position by suddenly legitimizing aggression,
endorsing devastation of an innocent country and its weary people,
and by licensing their indefinite, unwarranted occupation."
Thus Pretoria's official opposition to
U.S. militarism is not taken terribly seriously in South Africa,
as reflected in tensions with the independent-left activists.
Leadership of the anti-war movement was initially claimed by
the ANC, SA Communist Party, Congress of SA Trade Unions, and
SA Council of Churches, which convened a "Stop the War Campaign"
just before the war began. One of the coordinators, ANC policy
director Michael Sachs, rightly argued the need for "uniting
around the broadest possible alliance in opposition to war and
imperialism... George W. Bush has drawn a line in the sand, and
we must all decide on which side we stand."
However, South Africa's new left--a coalition
of independent community and solidarity groups--quickly formed
the Anti-War Coalition and won the endorsements of 300 organizations.
The left did far more mobilizing for demonstrations and regularly
pulled many thousands into the streets in the largest cities.
Sachs told a February meeting aiming to reconcile the two groups
that ANC leaders were uncomfortable with the more vigorously
anti-imperialist language of the Anti-War Coalition. Then, once
Sachs claimed credit for the February 15 protest in the media,
the Coalition drew its own line in the sand, refusing to allow
ANC speakers on the stage at the Johannesburg rally of 15,000.
The line was so stark because Pretoria
had so obviously decided to stand on the side of war profits,
ignoring Anti-War Coalition calls to withdraw permission for
three Iraq-bound warships to dock and refuel in Durban, and to
halt sales of sophisticated armaments to the <U.S./UK>
regimes. Pretoria's state-owned arms manufacturer Denel often
stated its vision of being "an acknowledged global player."
In the months before the war, it contracted to deliver $29 million
in ammunition shell-casing, $169 million in artillery propellants,
and 326 hand-held laser range finders to the British army. Denel
also sold the U.S. Marines 125 laser-guidance sights.
Although Bush canceled a few million
dollars worth of military cooperation funds to Pretoria on July
1, because of Mbeki's failure to agree to a non-extradiction
treaty with the U.S. designed to sabotage the International Criminal
Court, the Pentagon has ambitious plans for Africa and needs
Pretoria's support. NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe,
Gen. James Jones, confirmed U.S. interests in a May briefing
to defense industry journalists: "The carrier battle groups
of the future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future
may not spend six months in the Mediterranean Sea but I'll bet
they'll spend half the time down the West Coast of Africa."
Within weeks, that coast was graced by
3,000 U.S. troops deployed offshore from Liberia, with potential
bases planned for Ghana, Senegal, and Mali, as well as the North
African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The oil-rich
Gulf of Guinea is particularly compelling as a site where off-shore
drilling rigs may need protection. Another military base in the
small Horn country of Djibouti was occupied by 1,500 U.S. troops.
Although Botswana and Mozambique also play a role in the Pentagon's
strategy, South Africa remains the crucial southern African partner,
in part because the U.S. is so wary of sending troops to Africa
(e.g. in Liberia, where calls for peace-building forces continue
amidst carnage). Already in Central Africa, Pretoria is lining
up as the main proxy for western geopolitical interests.
But there are many more African victims
of U.S. economic power. The Bush regime's attitude to Mbeki's
"philosophically spot-on" New Partnership for Africa's
Development has not been matched by serious trade, aid, and financial
concessions. Bush clearly only wants Pretoria to continue wrenching
open the continent's markets, as he hinted during a June 2003
Corporate Council speech: "I look forward to going to South
Africa, where I'll meet with elected leaders who are firmly committed
to economic reforms in a nation that has become a major force
for regional peace and stability." Mbeki's commitment to
Washington-friendly "economic reforms"--blunt neoliberalism
that drove unemployment up from 15% to 30%, made white people
15% richer, and black people 19% poorer since liberation--is
unquestioned.
Since the World Trade Organization's
November 2001 Doha ministerial summit, Washington has set up
its own unfair-trade rules. Treasury undersecretary John Taylor
explained the Bush regime's hypocrisy on the subsequent steel
tariffs and agricultural subsidies quite casually: "You
take steps forward and move back. That's always the case."
Just before the June 2003 G8 Summit at Evian, France, Bush announced
opposition to a French plan to halt dumping of subsidized Western
food in Africa. Yet he proposed increasing his own government's
aid-related subsidies on agricultural exports and also argued
that "European governments should join--not hinder--the
great cause of ending hunger in Africa," by both dropping
their internal agricultural subsidies and permitting trade in
genetically modified foodstuffs.
As a result, according to six leading
African global justice movements that met near Evian, "The
2003 G8 was ultimately a disaster for African farmers. It failed
to adopt even limited proposals for a moratorium on reducing
European and American tariff duties and subsidies for U.S. and
European agriculture. These policies are perverse. While millions
of African farmers' livelihoods are ruined by these policies,
European livestock are ensured major state subsidies."
Ironically, at this very point of maximum
U.S. hypocrisy, South Africa's neoliberal trade minister Alec
Erwin emphasized bilateralism with Washington: specifically,
a <U.S.-Southern> African Customs Union free trade area
that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick began promoting
energetically in early 2003 at a Mauritius trade conference.
Yet that arrangement would give Pretoria and its neighbors practically
no additional benefit beyond the Africa Growth and Opportunity
Act (AGOA) agreement in existence--and in any case, the gains
to South Africa from AGOA far outstripped those of other African
countries, whose trade to the U.S. increased by only a quarter
as fast as South Africa's (10% from 2001-02). In 2001, 84% of
all exports from sub-Saharan African countries--which total just
1% of all U.S. imports--emanated from only four countries: South
Africa, Nigeria (oil), Kenya, and Angola (oil).
The AGOA, which in mid-2003 applied to
39 countries (the others being ineligible for various reasons),
has come under intense criticism. Washington's conditions included
adopting neoliberal policies, privatizing state assets, removing
subsidies and price controls, ending incentives for local companies,
and endorsing U.S. foreign policy. On the latter point, Burkina
Faso was ruled ineligible because, according to Washington, the
country "undermined... U.S. foreign policy interests."
Numerous civil society groups across Africa and the U.S. have
opposed the deal, many decrying it as a vehicle for U.S. imperialism.
Most AGOA job creation is short-term, low-paid, and unstable,
especially where it involves Asian firms relocating merely for
trade benefits. Practically no backward-forward linkages exist
between the new exports and the rest of the economy.
Another example of the Bush regime's
imposition of unsustainable development on Africa was the genetically
modified (GM) food controversy. The EU, Australia, Japan, China,
Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia had banned GM trade and production,
so Bush was clearly desperate for new markets in Africa, as he
revealed to the U.S. Africa Business Summit shortly before his
July 2003 trip: "To help Africa become more self-sufficient
in the production of food, I have proposed the initiative to
end hunger in Africa. This initiative will help African countries
to use new high-yield biotech crops and unleash the power of
markets to dramatically increase agricultural productivity. But
there's a problem. At present, some governments are blocking
the import of crops grown with biotechnology, which discourages
African countries from producing and exporting these crops."
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's
Global Trade Watch, interpreted: "The Bush administration
is not straightforward. It is not poverty in Africa that is the
most important issue for the administration, but business considerations
on behalf of the U.S. technology and agricultural sector."
As InterPress Service reported, "Zambia, citing health concerns,
rejected GM corn in both grain and milled forms. One year later,
President Levy Mwanawasa announced last week that this year Zambia
will nearly double the 600,000 tons of grain it harvested last
season, providing new fuel to the argument that GM technology
is not necessary for reducing hunger in Africa."
The most important example of how <U.S.-dominated>
trade rules generate underdevelopment--indeed mass death--must
be the application of intellectual property patent rights that
prevent widespread use of affordable medicines. In South Africa
alone, 600 people die each day from AIDS because they cannot
afford to buy anti-retroviral medicines which would keep them
alive. According to a Johannesburg Business Day newspaper report
shortly before Bush's visit, Erwin conceded that "a key
issue for the developing world was agreement to allow developing
countries to import or manufacture generic drugs to deal with
major public health crises without running into patent problems.
Erwin urged those pharmaceutical companies which were applying
pressure to block a deal to come on board. The U.S. government
is holding up a deal, under pressure from its pharmaceutical
lobby."
Even if Erwin himself has been unwilling
to challenge international corporate power by licensing local
production and import of generics, this was a fair criticism.
Although Bush promised $15 billion in new AIDS funding from 2003-06,
this would be mainly to the benefit of U.S. pharmaceutical corporations.
In any case, Bush quickly backpedaled on his pledge by cutting
the 2003-04 allocation in half and under-funding the Global Fund
set up to combat AIDS, Malaria, and TB by the United Nations.
A few weeks earlier, the main NGOs active
on medicine access accused the Bush regime of having "an
almost blind belief in the Intellectual Property system, without
regard for the reality for patients in desperate need of newer,
more effective health technologies and access to existing essential
medicines. In view of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the massive problems
expressed by many World Health Assembly delegates in guaranteeing
equitable and sustainable access to affordable antiretroviral
medicines, this text gives the impression that the U.S. has lost
touch with reality." While the U.S. insisted that intellectual
property protection was the best way to promote pharmaceutical
research and development, according to NGO critics, "Of
the 1,393 new drugs approved between 1975 and 1999, only 16 (or
just over 1%) were specifically developed for tropical diseases
and tuberculosis, diseases that account for 11.4% of the global
disease burden."
In addition to these problems, the oppressive
roles of the World Bank and IMF continue, in part because Bush's
Treasury Department maintains micro-managerial control. (As chair
of the Bretton Woods Institutions' Development Committee, Mbeki's
finance minister Trevor Manuel has manifestly failed to raise
the Third World voice.) In relation to the contradictory problem
of Zimbabwe, both Bush and Mbeki favor a top-down, elite approach
to pseudo-democratization, even though they have been on opposite
sides of the divide. In spite of hot anti-Mugabe rhetoric by
Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell in the days before the
Africa trip, Mbeki won an endorsement on July 9 by apparently
falsely claiming progress in talks between Mugabe and the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change. That party's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai,
once again accused Mbeki of prolonging Mugabe's tyrannical rule,
and Bush is now complicit as well.
For progressive internationalists, the
point of this review of the issues and political maneuvers is
that Pretoria continues to be among the least reliable opponents
of the Bush regime in practice, notwithstanding fine rhetoric
from Mandela and even Mbeki. Pretoria makes repeated calls for
global economic transformation, democratization of the UN and
other multilateral agencies, regional autonomy for African development,
and more general Third World political leadership. Yet since
liberation in 1994, a great many opportunities have arisen to
put words into action. In their first seven years of democratic
nation-state power and legitimacy, South African officials presided
over the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
the Commonwealth, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization
of African Unity and African Union, the Southern African Development
Community, the board of governors of the IMF and World Bank,
the Bretton Woods Institutions' Development Committee, the World
Commission on Dams, and many other important international and
continental bodies. But little came of these, save to reinforce
neoliberal policies and power relations.
Since September 2001, South African politicians
have had hosting or leading roles at the Durban World Conference
Against Racism, the World Trade Organization's Doha ministerial,
the UN's Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, and
the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. In
addition, the New Partnership for Africa's Development was launched
by Mbeki to great acclaim in late 2001 and given standing at
the annual G8 summits, the Davos World Economic Forum, and other
important meetings of the world's political and business elites
during 2002-03.
None of these initiatives have begun
to alter what even Mbeki terms "global apartheid."
That is why the most advanced social forces in South Africa and
across the continent will not trust Mbeki and his colleagues
to speak truth to Bush in future meetings. Moreover, the U.S.
delegation left Pretoria with backslapping statements of mutual
admiration, and a clear sense that Mbeki has agreed to tighten
the relationship between imperialism and subimperialism that
Bush's father--first as CIA director, then Ronald Reagan's vice
president, then president--helped maintain during the apartheid
era.
On the other hand, with the recent protests
and many more to come, the world's progressive community has
a worthy proxy in South Africa, one which turns its rage at inequality,
injustice, and environmental destruction against the Bush and
Mbeki regimes alike.
Patrick Bond
is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and an
associate of the Center for Economic Justice. He can be reached
at: pbond@sn.apc.org.
Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003
Arthur
Mitzman
Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable
Than the Dot.com Bubble?
Julian
Bond
We Shall be Heard
Cynthia
McKinney
Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad
Mel
Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?
Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz
Mickey
Z.
History Forgave Churchill
Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message
Jon
Brown
Whipping the Post
Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps
Steven
Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC
Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters
Khaldoun
Khelil
Capturing Friedman
Jeffrey
St. Clair
You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed
Lenni
Brenner
Sitting in with Mingus
Vanessa
Jones
Three Dog Night
Adam
Engel
Video Judas Video
Poets'
Basement
Foley, Smith and Curtis
Website
of the Weekend
Illegal Art
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