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July 17, 2002
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith-based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al-Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Days That
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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:
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
17, 2002
Drivel
and Squawk
( A Weekly
Review of the 4th Estate)
Can Jeff Gerth Save the White
House?
By Alexander Cockburn
The right is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew
complain on the popular NewsMax site that in the two weeks since
the Harken story went critical, "the prestige press"
(Limbacher's odd phrase, which presumably means he's excluding
The National Enquirer) has given the affair fifty times more
coverage than it gave the Whitewater deal after the New York
Times broke that story on March 8, 1992.
Limbacher moans that Whitewater showed
up only 14 times in the wake of the Times story, while from
June 28 to July 12 of this year there have been over 700 stories
on the Harken sale.
C'mon, Carl. The reason Whitewater got
off to a slow start was because for months no one could figure
out what the New York Times's Jeff Gerth was writing about.
Reading any Gerth story is like bicycling through wet sand,
but in the case of Whitewater he surpassed himself. As readers
sank up to their armpits in the sludge of Gerth-prose, interest
in Whitewater for that electoral year flickered and died. Gerth
saved Clinton's ass. Ultimately Whitewater did make it into
the headlines, but in truth it always lacked sex appeal. There
just wasn't that much meat in the stew. Not like Hillary's commodity
trades.
Just like those trades, Harken is really
easy to understand. Guy (the future-and-hopefully-once President)
makes a bundle selling stock in his company which is going belly
up, acting on insider knowledge of the books, and also culled
because his dad was in the Oval Office. Guy forgets to tell the
SEC.
Same way with Cheney. No need to put
in those daunting phrases like "complex transactions"
The simple numbers have serious panache. Here's one precis of
the situation that's going the rounds.
"Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton:
$36,086,635.
Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton:
91% Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that
occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000.
Number of the seven official US "State
Sponsors of Terror" that
Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7.
Pages of energy plan documents Cheney
refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500.
Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney
presidential campaign: $1,800,000."
But if anyone can save Bush and Cheney
it will be Gerth. Last week he and another Times scrivener called
Richard Stevenson managed the truly amazing feat of making the
Harken story complicated and boring.
Here was the first paragraph: "President
Bush received two
low-interest loans to buy stock from an oil company where he
served as a board member in the late 1980's. He then
benefited from the company's relaxation of the terms of one
loan in 1989 as he was engaged in the most important
business deal of his career."
Only 52 words and already the air is
whistling out of the tire. On and on the story trundled, until
it approached the famous SEC non-probe. You'll recall from the
700-plus stories lamented by Limbacher that Bush Jr's prolonged
failure to report to the SEC the sale that netted him $840,000
was viewed with indulgence by that agency, whose boss had been
appointed by President G. Bush, and whose counsel had worked
for Bush Jr. negotiating the purchase of the Texas Rangers.
It's hard to bore people with material like that, as Paul Krugman
is discovering each week. Here's how Gerth and Stevenson approached
this bit of the saga:
"The June 1990 Harken stock sale led to an investigation
by
the Securities and Exchange Commission _ during his father's
administration _ of whether Mr. Bush had knowingly sold the
stock in advance of worse-than-expected financial results
that temporarily drove down Harken's share price.
"The S.E.C. took no action against
Mr. Bush."
Harken is not a new story. Charles Lewis
of the Center for Public Integrity dealt with it long ago in
his book "The Buying of the President 2000,". Even
back then Lewis speculated that the mystery institutional buyer
of Bush's stock might have been Harvard Management -- the overseer
of the school's
multi-billion dollar endowment. Lewis wrote that "A month
after Bush came on board, Harvard Management agreed to invest
at least $20 million in Harken. It would come to own some ten
million shares of Harken stock, making it one of the company's
largest investors. The Bush name may have helped seal the
deal.Harvard's Harken investments in oil and gas would eventually
generate nearly $200 million in losses for
the endowment."
The broker involved, Ralph Smith of Sutro
& Company, has refused to name the buyer of Bush shares,
though he has said it was an institutionlal investor. Lewis
reported that "at the bottom of a spreadsheet Smith used
to record his calls to Bush was the name of Michael Eisenson,
along with the telephone number of Harvard Management."
In other words Harvard Management lost
staggering amounts in a bum investment that saved the ass of
the president's son.
The broker involved, Ralph Smith of Sutro
& Company, has refused to name the buyer of Bush shares,
though he has said it was an institutional investor. Lewis reported
that "at the bottom of a spreadsheet Smith used to record
his calls to Bush was the name of Michael Eisenson, along with
the telephone number of Harvard Management."
None of this alluring stuff holds appeal
for Gerth and his colleague, who simply wrote "In the case
of the sale of his Harken stock, Mr. Bush benefited from the
action of an investor who remains unknown even today."
A few days later Gerth and Don van Natta
Jr were at it again, this time paralysing Times readers with
a narcotic narrative about Halliburton. The lead was promising.
"The Halliburton Company, the Dallas
oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting
and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the United
States efforts to combat terrorism.
"From building cells for detainees
at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba
to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly
relying on a unit of
Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg
Brown & Root."
Reading the story was a bit like walking
around some familiar room in the dark, tripping over and then
gradually recognizing bits of furniture. Through the choking
fog of Gerth-pros one could dimly descry the familiar landscape
of Pentagon corruption, with cost-plus bids, non-competitive
contract awards, manic over-billing and so forth. Senator Charles
Grassley's staff will be only too glad to send you thousands
of pages of testimony on such endemic corruption and fraud,
a goodly part of which stemmed from Al Gore's efforts to reinvent
government by having recourse to the discipline and efficiency
(heh heh) of the private sector.
Another reason for the sense of familiarity
was that the story was broken, and furthermore told in an exciting
and accessible way several months ago by Jordan Green of the
Institute for Southern Studies, published in Facing South, the
institute's internet newsletter, with a shorter version in the
Institute's Southern Exposure magazine. Contrast Gerth-tedium
with Green's pioneering and far richer treatment, under the title
"To the Victors Go the Markets: Halliburton's Claim On Central
Asia".
"Last December, the US Department
of Defense made a no-cap, cost-plus-award contract to Halliburton
KBR's Government Operations division. The Dallas-based company
is contracted to build forward operating bases to support troop
deployments for the next nine years wherever the President chooses
to take the anti-terrorism war The Pentagon posts all contract
announcements exceeding $5 million on its Website, but in Halliburton's
case declined to disclose the estimated value of the award. A
spokesperson for Halliburton gave $2.5 billion as the amount
the company earned from base support services in the 1990s, acknowledging
that the contract value could exceed that number assuming that
the scope of US military actions widens in the next decade The
first increment of Halliburton's award is being subcontracted
to Oshkosh Truck Corporation in Wisconsin and King Trailers in
Market Harborough, England. Because of Prime Minister Tony Blair's
invaluable service of persuading Britain's reluctant public to
go along with the American campaign and in providing British
peacekeepers to secure Afghanistan, America's junior partner
has been rewarded with a boost to its manufacturing base.
"But the major rewards are reserved
for the Texas oil oligarchy. Halliburton Company has close connections
with the Bush family. Aside from Cheney, there is Lawrence Eagleburger,
a Halliburton director and former deputy secretary of defense
under Bush Sr. during the Gulf War. In its earlier incarnation
as Brown & Root Services, the company sponsored Texan and
future president Lyndon B. Johnson's stolen election to the US
Senate in 1948, building the state's spectacular political-industrial
muscle."
That's how to write a story. But then
both Green and the executive director of the Institute, Chris
Kromm, are both former interns of mine. (But surely, you'll be
asking, Gerth and his associate reminded Times readers the colorful
saga of Brown & Root. No they didn't.)
But even the Gerth treatment may not
save Cheney, who's gone to ground again, just as he did after
9/11, though this time the enemy will take the form of a subpoena-server
rather than the shock troops of Al Qaeda. What then? How can
Bush freshen up the White House's battered image and his own
terrible performance. Each time he opens his mouth the markets
take a dive and the dollar slumps against the Euro. I thank
Almighty God on a daily basis that my daughter elected to get
married in Geneva last year, when my dollars were able confront
the bill for the wedding feast in relatively good heart, with
a side trip to Paris thrown in.
When Cheney totters into hat good night,
may we not expect to hear the call for a hero of NYC's darkest
hour, the former mayor, Mr Rudy Giuliani, a man whose marital
upheavals have now been settled with a handsome pay off to the
injured wife and the charges of abominable cruelties sealed forever.
Vice president Giuliani. How does that sound?
Terrifying? Of course, because Giuliani's
anti-civil libertarian instincts would mesh in perfectly with
the totalitarian propensities of the Bush regime. But as the
public temper sharpens against the corporate culture that saw
Cheney haul off $36 million from Halliburton in 2000, Giuliani's
famous prosecutorial forays against Wall St figures in the 1980s
offer a resume in sync with the new mood.
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
Bush,
Burqas and the Oppression of Afghan Women
Pierre Tristam
Faith-based Capitalism's Plunge into
the Abyss of the Market
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