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June 21, 2002
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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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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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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Reviews of Gore:
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|
June 21,
2002
Southern
Cross:
The US Takes
Aim at Brazil
by Chris Floyd
So who's next on the Bush team's hit parade? Besides
Iraq, of course. It's abundantly clear that the Chickenhawk-in-Chief
and his corporatic cronies will be slapping hot iron all over
Saddam Hussein just as soon as the poll numbers are right. The
whole saucy crew have been on a sustained propaganda offensive
for weeks, methodically preparing the public to accept the wholly
un-American notion of aggressive war. Those droopy invertebrates
known as Congressional Democrats are already on board, so it's
body bags for Baghdad any day now. Collateral damage, here we
come!
But we all know that the Righteous Runner-Up
has a broader vision for the world. A world in which no banker
has to go to bed hungry--or even slightly peckish--in any
of the homes he owns. A world in which no multimillionaire corporate
trough-feeder--like, say, the Secretary of the Treasury, the
Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of
the Army, the National Security Advisor, the White House Chief
of Staff, the President and Vice President of the United States,
etc.--has to sacrifice even one single penny of unearned profit
to clean up the land and air he has despoiled with his noxious
evacuations. A world where bribery, tax evasion, capital flight,
money laundering, false accounting and fraud are protected by
law and rewarded by government. A world where the manufacture
and use of even the deadliest weapons have been loosed from the
profit-choking constraints of international treaties and sworn
agreements. A world where even the poorest women--or rather,
only the poorest women--are free to die in a pool of their
own blood, liberated from an enervating dependence on basic health
care in childbirth, all to serve the maniacal misogyny of religious
extremists allied with unelected rulers. A world in which every
government has the power and duty to strip away the outmoded
and unproductive regulations that once protected its natural
resources, its national economy, its working people, its poor
and elderly, its schools and hospitals, its way of life, even
the very air that it breathes and the water that it drinks from
unfettered exploitation by small bands of predatory elites.
It's a bold and far-reaching agenda,
this quest to remake the world in the image of a profoundly ignorant
pipsqueak frat boy and his fellow barons in the New Feudalism
that is engirdling the earth. But President Pip has publicly
committed the full might of the United States to this cause;
he certainly won't be content with just mopping up the Iraqi
mess left behind by the feudal baron whose title he has inherited.
So who will next feel the glint of his--dare
we say it?--global eye? Well, if you're the betting type, you
might want to lay some good money on Brazil, the largest jewel
in the Bush family's traditional fiefdom of Latin America. It
seems those southern silly-billies have drawn the ire of the
Great White Father in Washington--and his paymasters on Wall
Street--by giving the presidential candidate of the (gasp!) Workers'
Party a 20-point lead in the polls.
At the moment, Luis Ignacio da Silva--or
"Lula," as he is universally called--is thrashing the
candidate of the ruling right-wing coalition, which has been
hobbled by a series of--what else?--corruption scandals. Lula
is leery of Bush's proposed pan-American "free trade zone,"
which would subject the entire hemisphere to the "Washington
Consensus" cult of Enron-style "deregulation,"
Chubias-style "privatization" and the NAFTA-style "liberation"
of powerful business interests from national laws governing commerce,
zoning, the environment, even the judiciary.
Instead, the Workers' Party wants to
increase public investment in the national infrastructure--such
trifles as sewers, roads, education, health and small-scale agriculture--while
lowering interest rates to help the country's ailing industrial
base, a move backed by many Brazilian business leaders and long-term
foreign investors. The party's "moderate and efficient"
administration of the local and state governments it already
controls has been praised by that Bolshevik terrorist tract,
The Financial Times.
But all this is so much tinkling brass
to the Bush Regime and its cream-skimming cronies. Infrastructure?
Sewers? Get real. All they want are high-interest yields on sweetheart
deals pimped for them by government bagmen. (That is the textbook
definition of "globalization," isn't it?) And oh yes--slavish
devotion to the foreign policy dictates of His Pipness. It seems
that here, too, Lula falls short: he favors "an independent
foreign policy"--i.e., he might want to pay a visit to Cuba
sometime, just like Jimmy Carter.
So when Lula began soaring in the polls,
the White House went to work, through its proxy armies on Wall
Street. Major firms (and Bush donors) like Morgan Stanley Dean
Witter and Merrill Lynch took time out from their various Enron
entanglements and criminal investigations to sniffily downgrade
Brazil's investment rating--citing Lula's potential victory as
the reason. The move--derided as a mistake by the Financial Times
and others--sent the Brazilian stock market tumbling, destroying
millions of dollars in local investments.
This economic terrorism by the Bush Regime
is just the opening salvo in a dirty war that will doubtless
continue until the October election. The Regime may have fumbled
its first attempt at a foreign coup--the ham-handed farce in
Venezuela--but Brazilians should take little comfort in that.
As we saw in November 2000, when these boys set their minds to
it, they know how to gut a democracy.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times. He can be contacted at cfloyd72@hotmail.com
ANNOTATIONS
"Bush
to Formalize a Defense Policy of Hitting First," New
York Times, June 17, 2002
"Hill
Leaders Back Bush Order on Hussein," Washington Post,
June 16, 2002
"President
Broadens Anti-Hussein Order," Washington Post, June
15, 2002
"Preemptive
Strikes Must Be Decisive, Powell Says," Washington Post,
June 14, 2002
"Bush's
Texas: Dark Heart of the American Dream," The Observer,
June 16, 2002
"The
Zealots Behind Bush's UN Family Planning Sellout," Salon.com,
June 13, 2002
"Treaty
Offers Pentagon New Flexibility," New York Times, June
14, 2002
"The
Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century,"
The Nation, October 15, 2001
"Crony
Capitalism Goes Global," The Nation, April 1, 2002
"GOP
Is Moving to Slow Action on Tax Loophole," New York
Times, June 18, 2002
"Rumsfeld
Sold Up to $91 Million in Stock in 2001," Salon.com,
June 18, 2002
"Islamic
Bloc, Christian Right Team Up to Lobby UN," Washington
Post, June 16, 2002
"EPA
Proposes to Ease Rules on Clean Air," Washington Post,
June 13, 2002
"Bush
Shows True Colors by Targeting Population Fund," Newsday,
March 7, 2002
"Bush's
Biggest Donors Had Links to Enron," Commondreams.org,
Feb. 15,
"Trouble
Brewing for Merrill Lynch," Forbes.com, April 10, 2002
"Brazilian
Leftist Roils Presidential Elections," Pacific News,
June 6, 2002
"Brazilian
Democracy Faces Obstacles From the North," Commondreams.org,
May 8, 2002
"Market Turmoil Sparked by Panic
Over Lula Victory Tarnishes Central Bank," Associated Press,
June 6, 2002
"Free
Trade in the Americas: A Disappointing Decade," Center
for International Human Rights, April 18, 2001
"Focus on US Cash in Venezuelan
Coup Attempt, San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 2002
"OPEC
Chief Warned Chavez About Coup," The Guardian, May 13,
2002
"Exxon
Mobil-Sponsored Terrorism?" The Nation, June 14, 2002
"Richest
Cabinet in History Would Benefit from Bush Tax Cuts,"
The Guardian, Feb. 27, 2001
"Another
Tale of Corporate Greed," Salon.com, May 7, 2002
"Women's
Rights: Why Not?" New York Times, June 18, 2002
Today's
Features
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations: Kosovo 2002
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