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March 21, 2002
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
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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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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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Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
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March 22, 2002
Corporate Power Is the Enemy
of Our Democracy
By Robert Jensen
GEORGE W. BUSH says he likes to put things in simple terms.
Let's adopt his strategy and ask: Do Americans want to struggle
to create a rich democracy, or are we going to roll over and
accept a democracy for the rich?
Never has the question been placed in
front of us more starkly. Let's run down some of the "highlights"
of the Bush administration's first year:
Tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit
the most wealthy. Environmental regulation
gutted in favor of "voluntary" efforts by corporations.
An obsession with an unnecessary and unworkable national missile
defense, which will defend little except the profits of the
weapons industry. An energy policy plotted with the companies
that will profit, through a consultation process the administration
wants to keep secret.
Could there be a pattern here? Could
it be that politicians, who are supposed to represent we the
people, sometimes pursue agendas that benefit only the few people
and corporations with the resources to put (and keep) them in
power?
Could the obvious be true - that a country
with an economy dominated by large corporations will find itself
stuck with a politics dominated by those same corporations -
and that ordinary people don't fare very well in such a system?
Perhaps we should ask the question from
the other angle: So long as corporations rule the economy, how
could it be any other way?
When the Enron debacle broke, politicians
eager to distance themselves from the mess argued it was a business
scandal, not a political one. One lesson of Enron is that there
is no distinction: A business scandal involving a large corporation
is by definition a political scandal in a nation where corporations
dominate the political sphere.
By law and tradition, corporations exist
for one reason only: to maximize profit. Neither history nor
logic gives any reason to think that profit-maximizing leads
to meaningful democracy. Corporations are undemocratic internally
and usually hostile to democracy externally.
As anyone who has ever worked in one
knows, there is no such thing as democracy within a corporation.
Authority is vested in the hands of a small number of directors
who empower managers to wield control. Those managers on occasion
might solicit the views of folks below; it is usually called
"seeking input." But input does not translate into
the power to effect change, implement policy or control our
own lives.
U.S. corporations do their best to subvert
meaningful democracy at home through bribes to politicians,
commonly called campaign contributions. They have shown repeatedly
in other countries that they prefer dictatorships and oligarchies
to real democracies; authoritarian governments are much easier
to cut a deal with.
Although politicians and pundits are
often very good at avoiding the obvious, it's hard not to notice
that this concentration of economic power in the hands of a
few has long had a corrosive effect on democracy. In the Bush
administration, that corrosion has accelerated. It's not that
Bill Clinton was - or the Democrats, in general, are - fundamentally
different, only that the Bush boys and many of today's top Republicans
are so brazen about it.
Looking back at the 20th century, we
can see two powerful trends: the growth of democracy and the
growth of corporate power. People of conscience and principle
fought to enrich democracy in the United States by expanding
the franchise to women and non-white people, carving out space
for free expression and organizing popular movements to pressure
politicians. At the same time, corporations went about the business
of enriching themselves by expanding their powers through the
strategic use of laws and politics. Let's celebrate the expansion
of people's formal rights, but not be naieve about how concentrations
of wealth and power have made those formal rights increasingly
irrelevant as corporate money saturates the system.
Borrowing one more time the Bush simple-and-to-the-point
style: Are corporations and democracy compatible?
A Business Week survey during the last
election showed how clearly people are coming to understand
that the answer is no. Nearly three-quarters of the Americans
surveyed said business has gained too much power over too many
aspects of their lives. The trick now is to use those rights
- speaking, organizing, voting - and take back democracy from
the corporations.
Campaign-finance reform, while a reasonable
first step in and of itself, won't solve the problem. Like water
that finds cracks in a dam, corporate money will find a way
to pervert our politics until we deal with the fundamentally
anti-democratic nature of the corporations.
At its core, democracy is about spreading
power as widely as possible, while corporate capitalism is about
concentrating power. That means the struggle to make American
democracy ever more democratic in practice will have to be a
struggle against corporate power.
Robert Jensen is
a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin,
a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.
His pamphlet, "Citizens of the Empire,"
is available at http://www.nowarcollective.com/citizensoftheempire.pdf.
Other writings are available online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~r
jensen/freelance/freelance.htm. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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