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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
CounterPunch Coverage of Election 2000
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
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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Al Gore:
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Reviews of Gore: a User's Manual
Whiteout:
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A Pocket Guide to
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by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
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January 18,
2001
Farewell, Bill
and Hill!
Limo Talk
A
Friend of CounterPunch was recently traveling in a limo from
Baltimore to a town in West Virginia and fell into conversation
with the driver, who related some of his ferryings to and fro
of various bigwigs. One of these was Hillary Clinton. "An
ornery woman," the driver commented. "And what a mouth
on her!"
The driver went on to describe an occasion
on which he was driving the First Lady and a couple of her (female)friends
through a poor area of Washington DC. They passed a beggar, and
as they did so the First Lady expressed her disgust for the mendicant,
adding "He wouldn't be a bum if he had a piece of ass."
The driver was able to shed no light on how or why she had arrived
at this conclusion, stunned as he was by the coarse nature of
her observations. Then they passed two young black women with
babies. "There go two welfare cases. They make me sick.
They're too lazy to work", said Senator Clinton, champion
of mothers and children everywhere.
Bill on Al
Attending
the annual Texas Monthly bash, George W was asked what he and
Bill Clinton had talked about in their White House photo op.
George W described how he had askede Clinton why Al Gore was
taking his defeat with such poor grace. "It's been eight
years," Clinton genially replied, "and we still haven't
figured out Al." Bill added hastily: "But he's been
a great vice president."
Jeb The Creep
From
a senior member of the Bush clan, via two trusted intermediaries,
comes this vital intelligence. As kids Jeb, now the Florida governor,
was the snitch and goody good. George W. was the manly little
tyke who would take the fall, as in, "It was I, Papa, who
cut down the cherry tree", even though the true culprit
was Neal.
Most undignified move of the week was
undoubtedly Christy Tod Whitman's gift of a Scotty to the impending
First Couple, even though they already have a dog. The hairy
little bribe landed Whitman the top job at EPA. If she'd given
the Bushes a Great Pyrenees she'd probably have been in contention
with Rumsfeld for the Defense Department.
Jeb's Pal
Among those loyally cheering Bush's coronation
will no doubt be Florida's electors, among them the Cuban American
National Foundation's treasurer, Feliciano M. Foyo, who happens
to be agood friend of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. As Jane Franklin
reminds us in a useful piece in December 22 issue of the Cuban
newspaper Granma, Foyo has another friend named Luis Posada Carriles,
one of the most notorious terrorists among Cuban expatriates.
In an autobiography published in Honduras in 1994, Posada names
Feliciano Foyo as one of his financial backers.
Franklin asks, "What does it mean
to be one of Posada's financiers?" and gives us some of
Posada's bloodstained resume, which most recently features his
detention by Panamanian authorities, along with three other well-known
terrorists, on November 17 for an alleged plan to assassinate
President Fidel Castro while the Cuban leader addressed thousands
of students at the University of Panama. According to Franklin,
"If the plastic explosive discovered in Panama had been
used, hundreds of people could have been killed or injured."
This is not the first time Posada has
tried to kill Castro, with previous efforts occurring in Chile,
Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Peru. A sales representative
for Firestone Tire and Rubber in Cuba, Posada started working
for the CIA at least by 1960. In June 1976, while George H. W.
Bush (the elder) was head of the CIA, a CIA operative, Cuban
expatriate Orlando Bosch, founded and led the Commanders of United
Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Posada was one of those "commanders."
Franklin cites FBI and CIA documents, showing CORU was involved
in more than 50 bombings and, quite likely, political assassinations.
This reign of terror culminated in October 1976 when a Cubana
passenger plane was blown up after it took off from Barbados
headed for Cuba, killing all 73 people aboard, including 57 Cubans.
Posada and Bosch were imprisoned in Venezuela
for this, but Posada later claimed that Miazmi money helped him
bribe his way out. Felix Rodriguez, a CIA buddy of Bush SR secured
his services in the arms supply operation for the Nicaraguan
contras.In a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Tom Harkin said
the American people "deserve a full accounting of [then
Vice President] Bush and the vice president's office and its
knowledge of Luis Posada's role in the secret contra supply operation."
Senator Harkin wondered "why Bush never bothered to use
his good offices to investigate charges of Posada's links with
the supply operation and Felix Rodriguez even after the press
reported them in late 1986."
The Bush Team
Different Players,
Same Game
But
hold! Isn't it the demand of enlightened people that all within
these borders have a right to work without being hassled by the
INS or kindred agency of the state? You can argue whether Linda
Chavez treated Marta TK, her sometime Guatemalan employee well
or badly, and that such poor treatment might disqualify her as
secretary of labor. But the spectacle of Democrats like Senator
Tom Tom Daschle solemnly denouncing Chavez for giving work to
an undocumented Latina was nauseating.
Here's Chavez, who has appalling views
on almost every issue relevant to the job for which she was briefly
nominated, and the Democrats go after her for the one decent
deed on her record, if you believe the testimony of Marta, to
whom Chavez appears to have behaved well.
Chavez has been cruelly taken from them
but what an immense favor Bush-Cheney did the Democrats by putting
up Aschcroft and Norton! It's hard to stir up liberal passions
over Powell at the State Department or Rice as national security
director, or even O'Neill at Treasury. How could you be worse
than Madeleine Albright or Samuel Berger? And who cares about
O'Neill when the effective ruler of the economy is over at the
Fed.
But with Ashcroft scheduled for the Justice
Department there are rich political and fund-raising opportunities
for the Democrats, painting lurid scenarios of the Klan Grand
Wizard taking up residence in the DOJ and telling the Naderites,
We told you so. Here comes the Beast: Ashcroft, the foe of choice;
Ashcroft the militia-symp; Aschcroft the racist hero of the old
confederacy. What can you say for the guy, except that he's probably
marginally to the left of Eminem, great white hope of the rap
crowd and currently in line for his fifth Grammy.
But will Ashcroft be effectively worse
than Attorney General Janet Reno. This time eight years ago she
was four months away from incinerating the Branch Davidians at
Waco, and on the edge of a tenure that has seen her fervent support
for the "war on drugs", aka a war on the poor, most
especially the blacks; her contributions to the crime bill of
1994; the targeting of minority youth; her complaisance towards
expansions in the power of the prosecutorial state, and onslaughts
on the Bill of Rights? It's a tough act to follow.
The
environmentalists see similar rich opportunity with Gale Norton,
graduate of the Mountain States Legal Center, an anti-environmental
think tank based in Denver, Colorado, headed by James Watt, greatest
fund-raiser for environmental causes in our history. No doubt
about it, Norton is scarcely nature's friend. Her dreams are
of Exxon's Grand Canyon and Disney's Yosemite. But once again,
we should retain our perspective.
Consider, for example, Bill Clinton's
exit order, banning roads and logging on national forest "roadless"
lands. Then look at the exceptions: Clinton's ban excludes timber
sales now in the pipeline, which can be grandafathered in over
the next six years. Other huge loopholes include an okay for
logging for "ecological reasons", such as fire-breaks
and habitat for deer. It's amazing how much timber you can harvest
out of these so-called "fire-breaks". In the California
Sierra they make the breaks up to quarter of a mile wide. There's
also an okay in Clinton's order for roads for mining and grazing
allotments, and for fire control. In all, the order envisages
a 2.5 per cent reduction of total timber sales in the national
forests, which isn't much
If she's smart, Norton will reverse the
order simply by opting for one of the other options offered in
the environmental impact statement what formed the basis of Clinton's
order.
There's likely to be a big fight over
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where outgoing Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt has just done Norton and the oil industry
a big favor by advising Clinton that to designate ANWR a national
monument would be "a meaningless gesture" that would
invite the Republicans to reverse all such designations made
in Clinton time. You can read this as a startlingly forthright
admission that national monument status doesn't mean much, which
is true, also that Babbitt is as gutless as ever. To have made
ANWR a national monument would have drawn the line in the sand,
or in this case, the snow a bit deeper and made the forthcoming
onslaught on ANWR a little tougher for the Bush-Cheney crowd.
What else can Norton do that Babbitt
hasn't already set in motion? Not much. Last year Babbitt put
a moratorium on the listing of endangered species, and he's smiled
on the privatization of public assets through land trades, whereby
timber corporations get old growth and we get the cut-over terrain.
Salmon protection? The Clinton administration has let the Republicans
off the hook on that one, insisting that the dams on the Snake
River won't be breached. Oil leasing off the continental shelf?
For Bush-Cheney it would be political suicide. Reagan tried,
and had to back off. Norton will go after the National Environmental
Protection Act, but here again Babbitt and Gore paved the way,
with their Habitat Conservation Plans that have ushered so many
corporate foxes into the coop.
Over at EPA it's hard to demonize Christy
Todd Whitman, and at USDA could anyone be worse than Dan Glickman,
friend of factory farms and saboteur of organic standards?
So,
all in all, the Bush-Cheney directorate has done a fine job of
rallying the Democrats, just as the Democrats, with their weak-kneed
surrender to the Florida putsch and talk of bipartisanship, have
given ammunition to the radicals denouncing the two-party consensus.
For the activists, there's plenty of opportunity. Militant green
groups, including the reinvigorated Greenpeace, are fired up,
and right here on the doorstep is the prospect of a national
fight for microradio, whose prospects have been sabotaged by
the National Association of Broadcasters. The NAB successfully
shepherded through a legislative rider late last year that effectively
outlaws new low power stations in most urban areas.
So we're back where we were in the dawn
of Clinton time, with courageous people asserting their rights,
and defying corporations and the state. What else is new? Welcome
to Bush-Cheney time. The basic map hasn't changed. CP
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