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June 19, 2002
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:
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 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 20,
2002
The South at War
A Tour Through
the Heart of the US Military-Industrial Complex
by Chris Kromm
In 1938, President Roosevelt commissioned an investigation
into conditions in the U.S. South - and he didn't like what he
saw. "The low income belt of the South," the study
somberly concluded, "is a belt of sickness, misery, and
unnecessary death."
Yet only six years later, the U.S. War
Production Board made its own appraisal, and saw a completely
different region: "The South has rubbed Aladdin's lamp,"
they said, poised to enter "the vanguard of world industrial
progress."
Connecting these warring views of the
South's fortunes, of course, was World War II - the moment where
the U.S. South made the devil's bargain of getting a quick economic
fix, in exchange for becoming the heart of the nation's military-industrial
complex.
Today, the South remains at the center
of the U.S. war economy. More than any other part of the country,
the region is ensnared by President Bush's anti-terror crusade,
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the expansion of U.S. military
power abroad. For example:
The South represents only a third of
the nation's population, but supplies 42% of the country's enlisted
soldiers - and 56% of troops in the continental U.S. are stationed
in the South.
Southern politicians are Congress's biggest
hawks, tilting U.S. foreign policy away from peace and diplomacy.
62% of Southern senators scored in the bottom fifth of the legislative
scorecard for Peace Action, a non-profit watchdog.
Anchored by defense boom centers in Virginia,
Texas and Florida, the South produces more weapons than any other
region, landing 43% of U.S. arms contracts in 2001.
Based on these findings and more, the
Institute for Southern Studies took to the road in April-May
for "The South at War" tour, drawing on the Institute's
most recent issue of Southern Exposure magazine, "Missiles
and Magnolias: The South at War." The tour visited such
military hot-spots as Atlanta, Georgia, and Fort Worth/Dallas
Texas.
"The costs of administering U.S.
empire have been high," says Jordan Green, a Southern Exposure
editor and Institute researcher. "Not only to victims of
U.S. aggression abroad, but also in warping social priorities
here at home."
As conflict spirals in the Middle East,
a special focus of the tour was the South's close ties to Israel's
illegal 35-year occupation and recent offensive in Palestinian
territories, which has drawn widespread condemnation from the
world community and human rights advocates including former President
Jimmy Carter.
Of the $3 to $6 billion in financial
support the U.S. government provides to Israel each year, up
to half is used to buy arms, mostly from U.S. weapons manufacturers.
Over two-thirds of the arms used by Israel come from Southern
arms corporations, led by Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas,
which recently landed a $1.3 billion award to build the F-16
jet fighter, one of several U.S. weapons used by Israel against
U.N. conventions in occupied Palestinian territory.
"Southerners and U.S. taxpayers
are not only footing the bill, but also supplying the firepower
for Israeli aggression that most of the world is calling a crime
against humanity," says Rania Masri, an Institute project
director who was also a delegate to the World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre, Brazil. "Our campuses and cities must examine
their relationship to corporations who profit from Israel's illegal
occupation and violence against Palestinians."
"The South is the heart of the military
beast," says Jordan Green. "The tour was a chance to
not only show the deadly consequences of the war economy, but
to connect with the groundswell of home-grown opposition to permanent
militarism."
Chris Kromm is
Director of the Institute for Southern Studies and Publisher
of Southern Exposure.
Copies of the recent SE issue "The South at War," and
the Institute report, "Arming the Occupation: The U.S. Arms
Industry and Israel," are available for $5 each by writing
to SE/ISS, P.O. Box 531, Durham, NC 27702. He can be reached
at: chris@southernstudies.org
Today's
Features
Jeffrey St. Clair and
Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
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