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CounterPunch
October
19, 2002
Bowling for Baghdad
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and ROBERT WEISSMAN
Last week, your nation's capital was a bit more
surreal than usual.
First and foremost, there is the sniper.
And just when the sniper arrives in the
neighborhood, here comes Michael Moore with his much awaited
critique of violence in America -- Bowling for Columbine.
We have three words of advice: go see
it.
In one scene, Moore, a lifetime member
of the National Rifle Association, goes to door to door in Toronto,
Canada, doesn't knock, and just walks in.
Apparently, in Canada, many people don't
lock their doors.
This in a country, Canada, where there
are 7 million guns for a population of 33 million.
 But in Canada there are fewer than 400 gun deaths
a year.
In the United States, we hit 400 in two
weeks -- that's 11,000 gun deaths a year.
In the U.S., eight children under the
age of 18 are killed by guns in America every day.
Moore raises a disturbing question: if
it's just the guns, stupid, then how come Canadians are not slaughtering
themselves the way we are slaughtering ourselves?
This question takes Moore to Littleton,
Colorado, the site of the Columbine massacre, home to the war
machine Lockheed Martin, the war machine that sponsors the news
on National Public Radio.
There he interviews a spokesperson for
Lockheed Martin, who tells Moore that the weapons the company
builds there are used by the United States for defensive purposes.
Moore then cues up the war footage and
runs through the history of U.S. aggression throughout the world
-- from Central American, to the Middle East, to Southeast Asia.
This juxtaposition of government and
corporate violence with grainy film from the Columbine school's
security camera capturing young children massacring young children
drives home Moore's larger point -- that the violence and duplicity
in our society starts at the top.
Which brings us back to our nation's
capital, where both parties' leadership, in part at the urging
of the military-industrial-complex, gave the green light last
week for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.
We attended a press conference held by
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri), the day
after Gephardt went to the White House, stood by Bush, and gave
the green light for war.
We had with us an editorial from that
morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch titled "Gephardt Caves."
Our sentiment exactly.
In it, Gephardt's hometown paper said
that the reason he sided with Bush was because he wanted to be
Speaker of the House, and then President. (This pattern, by the
way, followed for other Democratic presidential hopefuls -- Tom
Daschle (D-South Dakota), Hillary Clinton (D-New York), John
Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut), Diane
Feinstein (D-California), John Edwards (D-North Carolina) --
all of whom voted with Bush on the war.)
All said it was not about politics --
not when young (American) lives are at stake.
But the Post-Dispatch called Gephardt
on it.
Gephardt "protests too much when
he says he is rising about politics."
"He wants to be speaker of the House
-- or president," the Post Dispatch wrote. "He can't
achieve either goal taking an unpopular stand against a war against
Saddam."
We asked Gephardt whether he wanted be
speaker or President.
"That's irrelevant," he shot
back.
Not.
We then went over to the White House,
where Ari Fleischer was conducting one of his press briefings.
We wanted to know about a two-sentence
letter from Theodore Sorensen, the former legal advisor to President
John F. Kennedy, that was published in the New York Times.
Sorensen wrote this:
"President Bush has not yet openly
reprimanded his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, for suggesting
that 'a bullet' is the cheapest way of accomplishing his goal
of regime change in Iraq. Is it possible that the United States
now endorses for other countries a policy of presidential assassination,
the very epitome of terrorism, after our own tragic experience
with that despicable act?"
So, Ari, did the President reprimand
you?
Ari says: "As far as that is concerned,
on the policy, as you know -- I think you were here when I said
on the record that that is not -- and people heard it the day
I said it -- that is not a statement of administration policy."
But did the President reprimand you for
saying that?
Ari says: "I think I have made the
views clear of where the White House is on this."
Not.
We then head back over to the Congress,
where the war-mongerer Senator Lieberman was releasing a Senate
Governmental Affairs report on why Enron happened.
The conclusion: "All the public
and private agencies that were supposed to exercise oversight
and protect investors failed miserably."
The report was especially critical of
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to review
any of Enron's annual reports after its 1997 filing. Before going
over to the Lieberman briefing, we rang up former SEC chair Arthur
Levitt.
We asked Levitt what we should ask Lieberman.
"Ask him -- where was Lieberman?"
Levitt told us. "He was busy tying up the SEC in knots over
auditors' independence, over the budget, and over options accounting."
We put this to Lieberman.
Lieberman gets testy and shoots back:
"Well, I hope he didn't say that,
and if he did, it is grossly unfair and inaccurate."
Actually, quite fair and accurate.
Michael Moore is a political agitator.
Go to see his movie -- and take as many
friends and family members with you as possible.
Gephardt, Lieberman and Bush are political
leaders.
Listen to them, and you can only get
angry -- and then organize to kick these guys out of office.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.)
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