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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:
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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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 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
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
17, 2002
War, Incorporated
By Mike Ferner
"So what is our mistake? We are
also human beings. Treat us like human beings," says Gulalae,
a 37 year-old Afghan mother living in the dust, hunger and fear
of the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan. She calls Osama
bin Laden an "outsider" and says that because of him,
"Afghanistan is made into a hell for others."
Grim does not begin to describe the conditions
Gulalae and her family endure. In one three-month period, in
just one district of Shamshatoo, bacteria-related dehydration
killed a child nearly every day. The misery in this refugee
city is like a grain of sand on the beach of suffering that is
Afghanistan. But Americans know little of it.
If you only watch mainstream press accounts
you'd never know that within the first three months of "America's
New War," civilian deaths from U.S. bombing in Afghanistan
surpassed 3,700-more than were killed in the attacks of September
11. The toll from unexploded cluster bombs, land mines, destroyed
water and sewer systems and depleted uranium shells will no doubt
reach into the hundreds of thousands. Add the additional innocents
marked for retaliation as the international cycle of violence
continues, and our war to end terrorism seems calculated to do
just the opposite.
So why are we fighting? Of all
the ways we could have responded to the attacks in New York and
Washington, why war?
Numerous psychological, cultural and
historical arguments can be mustered to answer that question,
but the following does as well as any and better than most: "War
is a racket. It always has beenA racket is best described as
something that is not what it seems to the majority of people.
Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted
for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many."
Words of a radical peacenik? Only if
a Marine Corps Major General qualifies as such. In his twilight
years General Smedley Butler unburdened his soul as did other
career militarists, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who admitted
that fathering the nuclear Navy was a mistake and Robert McNamara,
who almost found the words to apologize for overseeing the Viet
Nam war. Unlike Rickover and McNamara, Butler named names and
exposed for whom the system works.
"I helped make Mexico safe for American
oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent
place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics
for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for
the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American
fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it
that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." Butler acknowledged
that he'd spent most of his 33 years in the Marines as "a
high class muscle man for Big Business, Wall Street and the bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
Thus did Butler simply and effectively
expose a largely unknown truth-how the military serves the strategic
interests of property in the corporate form.
Much more commonly known is the corrupt
practice of war profiteering.
"...Only twenty-four at the (Civil)
war's beginning, (J. Pierpont) Morgan perceived from the first
that wars were for the shrewd to profit from and poor to die
inHe received a tip that a store of government-owned rifles had
been condemned as defective and with the simplicity of genius
he bought them from the government for $17,500 on one day and
sold them back to the government on the next for $110,000...A
Congressional committee investigating his little deal said of
him and other hijacking profiteers, 'Worse than traitors are
the men who, pretending loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten
on the misfortunes of the nation.'"
Lest examples from yore lead one to believe
such traditions are no longer observed, consider the case of
Eagle-Picher Technologies Corp. The company produces sophisticated
batteries to power the guidance systems of "smart"
bombs. Workers claim they were ordered to cover up defects on
millions of batteries-defects that would ultimately cause the
guidance systems to fail. How many Afghani civilians were killed
by bombs "guided" by defective Eagle-Picher Corp. batteries?
In Afghanistan as in every war, corporations
play a central role to protect their interests-whether those
interests are the profits from waging war or the geostrategic
spoils of war.
Forget for a moment the indictable war
profiteers like J.P. Morgan and consider just one instance of
how war wealth, generated legally, empowers the few "inside
the racket" to benefit economically and politically at the
expense of the many. The du Pont Corporation will suffice.
Compared to some of its fellow racketeers,
the du Pont Corporation's profits during WWI look downright patriotic.
The company whose gunpowder saved the world for democracy saw
its average annual pre-war profit jump from $6,000,000 to nearly
10 times that amount during the war.
By the mid-1920's the du Pont family
had bought nearly a quarter of all General Motors Corporation
stock. Not only did this investment pay off handsomely during
GM's successful campaign to destroy urban mass transit systems
, but who better than a du Pont to run President Eisenhower's
Bureau of Public Roads and develop the National System of Interstate
and Defense Highways along with Eisenhower Defense Secretary
(and former GM President), Charles Wilson?
If war profits are invested this carefully, imagine how much
planning goes into the geostrategic spoils of war? For a peek
inside this game there are few better tour guides than President
Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Having also served on President Reagan's
Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy,
Brzezinski is well-qualified to write The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. It's one of those
books that begs the question, "why would anybody actually
put this stuff in writing?"
Brzezinski describes the Europe-Asia
landmass as the key to global dominance. He asserts that the
fall of the Soviet Union cleared the way for the U.S. to become
the first non-Eurasian power to dominate this critical area,
"and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how
long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent
is sustained..."
In 1977 he named the Central Asian "stans"
as the next center of conflict for world domination, and in light
of expected Asian economic growth, he called this area around
the Caspian Sea "infinitely more important as a potential
economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and
oil reservesdwarf(ing) those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or
the North Seain addition to important minerals, including gold."
The former member of Reagan's National
Security Council reasoned: "It follows that America's primary
interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control
this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered
financial and economic access to it."
He further deduced: "That puts a
premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the
emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to
challenge America's primacy." Leaving nothing to doubt,
he clarified "To put it in a terminology that harkens back
to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives
of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain
security dependence among the vassals, to keep (satellites) pliant
and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."
For those foolish enough to imagine an
Earth not ruled by the U.S., he warns that "America's withdrawal
from the world-or because of the sudden emergence of a successful
rival-would produce massive international instability. It would
prompt global anarchy."
Brzezinski warns to "keep the barbarians
from coming together," and predicts "global anarchy"
if U.S. dominance is threatened. The cold warrior's language,
while picturesque, is not as precise as that used by Thomas Friedman,
foreign affairs columnist for the NY Times. "Markets function
and flourish only when property rights are secure and can be
enforcedAnd the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
With a Silicon Valley reference, Friedman
updates General Butler's "I helped make Mexico safe for
American oil interests" comment. But updates aside, oil
retains its century-old rating as the imperial standard-with
now Afghanistan at center stage. And UNOCAL Corp. for one does
not hesitate to demand that Afghanistan be made safe for American
oil interests. "From the outset, we have made it clear that
construction of our proposed ($2.5 billion Afghanistan) pipeline
cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has
the confidence of governments, lenders and our company. UNOCAL
envisions the creation of a Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortiumthat
will utilize and gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure
in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia."
Smedley Butler learned that in war "nations
acquire additional territory if they are victorious. They just
take it." With today's popularity of corporate leasing
programs, getting the use of additional territory-call it property-can
be more profitable than actually acquiring it. But the end result
is the same. "This newly acquired territory is promptly
exploited by the few-the self-same few-who wrung dollars out
of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill."
A modicum of historical perspective explains
why America's New and Improved War is not a surprise. It's not
just oil. It's not just acquiring territory or the use of territory.
It's property and property rights consistently trumping human
rights. The names change. The song has remained the same throughout
our history.
For instance, check out a few lines of
our Constitution: Article 4, Section 2. Imbedded into the most
fundamental law of our land is the duty to return property-in
the form of slaves and indentured servants-to its owners. Or
read Article 1, Section 10, the Contracts Clause. According
to Peter Kellman, "The meaning is clear: the obligation
of the government, as stated in the Preamble to the Constitution,
to promote the 'general welfare' is secondary to the private
law, the law of contracts." Or ask yourself why First
Amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not apply
when you're at work? Or why corporations have more free speech
rights than people?
Try this at home. Make your own list
of how our world would look if America was a functioning democracy,
actually governed by "we the people;" if human rights
trumped property rights; if the vast decency, wisdom and compassion
of the American people and not the interests of the propertied
elite guided our foreign and domestic policies.
Here are a few things I'd put on my roster:
We wouldn't be bombing one of the poorest
nations on earth, killing thousands of civilians who had absolutely
nothing to do with the inexcusable attacks of September 11.
General Motors Corp. would not be allowed
to replace mass transit systems with oil-addicted highways and
automobiles.
Representatives from UNOCAL and other
corporations would not be able to buy their way into congressional
offices and write legislation.
Not only could we generate a stunning
agenda, we can actually begin making some fundamental improvements
once we start finding ways to make the peace movement a democracy
movement, and the environmental movement a democracy movement,
and the labor movement a democracy movement, and
You get the picture.
Mike Ferner
is coordinator of the Program
on Corporations, Law and Democracy . He served in the U.S.
Navy Hospital Corps from 1969-73 and as an independent member
of Toledo City Council from 1989-93. He is a member of Veterans
for Peace and the Labor Party. He can be reached at: mferner@utoledo.edu
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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