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May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Insitutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
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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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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Reviews of Gore:
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May
10, 2002
Invisible Corporate
Crime
Criminalizing the
Victims
by John Jonik
Pennsylvania's senate has proposed making it a
crime for a person under 18 to purchase cigarettes. At this date,
it is just a crime for the vendor to sell cigarettes to under-age
customers. It is not a crime anywhere, yet, to make and sell
smoking products that are packed with untested, often known toxic
and cancer-causing non-tobacco substances...with no warning to,
or informed consent from, the consumer.
State legislators know that the public
generally has been taught to dislike disobedient, inconsiderate,
rebellious and dirty smokers. So, using the old tactic of dumping
the worst laws on people that few mainstreamers would care to
defend, kids with cigarettes will now be criminals. The brats
deserve it, right?
It's a step-by-step, nickel and dime
process, of course. The news said nothing about likelihood of
police now being freed to stop, check and search any smoker they
"reasonably" believe to be under-age. Liquor stores
post notices about how they have the right to check the ID of
anyone under 30 years old. Police can do the same. You want to
smoke, and you're under about 30 or 35 years old, now you'll
have to carry your ID or risk being held for lengthy periods
while ID can be confirmed. This is a lot of people who police
can play with.
If a person is driving, maybe not with
a cigarette but a lollypop that may appear, from a distance,
to be a cig, a cop could enact a stop. On some Pennsylvania highways,
police are reportedly required to do a full check of all local,
state and federal records...to make sure they don't have a terrorist
on their hands. Cops can ask to search the car. Refusal can mean
further waits as sniffing dogs are procured to do a "non-intrusive"
search. One with a cig, or a lollypop, can be held up for a minimum
of about 45 minutes. Got a joint in the ashtray, or no proof
of having patronized the private insurance industry?...say good-bye
to freedom and car.
There's been no word yet of "tobacco-sniffing"
dogs at high-schools. Far off? Who would object and risk being
painted as supporting addiction and illness in kids?
There are significant problems with all
of this, besides the affront to civil rights.
For starters, "concerned" state
legislators haven't done one solitary thing to address the matter
of untested, often known toxic and carcinogenic non-tobacco adulterants
of typical cigarettes. Cig manufacturers could dump nuclear waste
into Marlboros and Newports and find absolutely zero prohibitions
against it. Nor are there any laws to even reveal such deadly
ingredients to Public Health officials or consumers. Amazing
but true: it's illegal, by Federal Law, for anyone to reveal
the still Top Secret cig ingredients! This insult to the idea
of Informed Consent is so great that it is, apparently, too big
for most to see or believe. Maybe folks are simply afraid of
angering the complicit industries or their well-funded friends
and supporters in government...the ones who still allow this
massive consumer endangerment.
Speaking of nukes...it so happens that
there is radiation in typical industrial cigarettes. Some is
natural, it's in many soils, but the rest is from Still Legal
phosphate fertilizers. No less than former Surgeon General Koop
once warned that this radiation is cause of most upper respiratory
cancers. Nothing happened. There's no rad symbol on cig warning
labels. It's still legal as pie...no doubt, to protect the "good
name" of the various radiation/nuke industries and to protect
the cigarette makers, the fertilizer firms and their insurers
from massive liability obligations. To remove it would be to
admit it was unsafe; if unsafe, liability city. Can't allow that.
Better to put the blame and burden of law onto the uninformed,
unprotected and insufficiently-warned victims...and the also
unwitting, uninformed vendors in stores, restaurants and elsewhere.
How bad are these highly-processed, multi-ingredient
products? Very. There's an astonishing 450 tobacco pesticides
that are still legal. Residues of roughly two dozen may be in
a typical cig. About a third of these are chlorinated, thus bringing
known, <U.S.-acknowledged> carcinogen, dioxin, to consumers...who
are still being persuaded that the products are just tobacco,
no different that what native Americans used for 10,000 years.
Not by a mile. According to U.S. Patents, some from Philip Morris,
a cig may not necessarily contain any tobacco at all but, instead,
be all or part Fake Tobacco made from various kinks of industrial
waste cellulose, including Municipal Paper Waste, Food Processing
Waste, Timber Products Waste and so forth. It's no mystery why
this, or info about radiation, is not on the "warning label".
It would be tantamount to saying "Sue Us" and, also,
"don't buy this product." Bad for business. The vague,
uninformative, essentially meaningless "warnings" don't
dissuade anyone from smoking...and they even offer the weak "we
warned you" excuse used by industry.
As for protecting the kids...this may
be the most despicable part of the matter. The dioxin, which
is a by-product of man-made chlorine, is in the typical (non-organic)
products at high levels. It's from not only pesticide residues
but from the bleached paper, any number of the many hundreds
of non-tobacco additives, and from just about all of the industrial
cellulose used for the Faux Tobacco. It is particularly harmful
to young, growing people...and to pregnant mothers and fetuses.
The officials who now pompously propose to "protect the
kids" by making them criminals have access to this information.
The Environmental Protection Agency has it, as does the Dept.
of Health and Human Services and so forth. Officials choose to
ALLOW this secret poisoning of kids, and everyone; to protect
the cigarette manufacturers and the chlorine interests from negative
publicity and prosecution, and to protect the insurers from deservedly
heavy liabilities. Of course, officials revealed to have facilitated
or ignored all this may worry about being elected again. They
prefer to bust people, never even the worst corporate criminal.
These officials have available the info
about the many hundreds of non-tobacco cigarette additives. Cig
makers themselves revealed about 600 of them. A great many are
sweet, flavorful and aromatic...to better attract young smokers.
Some additives are there to increase addiction...but all additives
increase the withdrawal effects in any case. Other additives
smooth the roughness of the smoke to, despicably, short-circuit
one's natural defenses against irritation. "Burn accelerants"
are still allowed in cigarettes despite the number of kids killed,
injured and made homeless every year by fires. This is all legal
and of no concern in state or federal legislatures. People are
tricked by deceptive (but also legal) advertising into smoking
what they are told is tobacco, tricked into consuming untold
numbers of non-tobacco toxins and carcinogens, tricked into blaming
the as-yet unstudied tobacco plant for all resultant illnesses...and
then turned into heavily restricted, legislated-against, fined,
and tax-swamped pariahs. To add great insult to great injury,
people buy health insurance from often the very insurers that
have multi-million dollar holdings in the cigarette cartel that
is making them sick. This vile protection racket is still sanctioned
by law. But who knows this stuff? It's not on TV.
If anyone has concerns about industrial
toxins and carcinogens in the environment, this is the area of
most, even global, health concern in which to show the danger
and effects of dioxins. It doesn't matter how one feels about
smokers...it's about how one feels about the chlorine cartel,
big oil/pesticides, big insurance, massive liability evasions,
equally massive denial of compensation to victims, denial of
consumers' Right To Know, Guinea-pigging of consumers by untested
chemicals and novel product elements, the threat of yet another
natural plant prohibition...and corruption of public governing
by some very harmful private industries.
John Jonik
lives in Philadelphia.
He can be reached at: jejonik@juno.com
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