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July 3, 2000Nine Arguments for NaderHere's a number
that offers telling reasons for voting for Ralph Nader in the
fall. Nine Democrats. Last week the US senate finally voted $934
million to wage war in Colombia. The House voted earlier this
year to provide $1.7 billion
in anti-narcotics aid for Colombia over a two year period. The
Senate bill only covers the first year. Notice how closely the numbers mimic the few cosponsors of Feingold's bill to slap a moratorium on the federal death penalty. And where were those supposed liberals like Kennedy, Kerry, Bayh, Feinstein, Schumer, Torricelli, Levin, Durbin, Reid, Reed, Sarbanes? We need the Democrats to recapture Congress? Here's another
number: nineteen, So here we have the alliance against folly in Colombia, cemented between Republican fiscal conservatives and the radical Democratic faction. If you toss in Feingold and Wellstone, who didn't vote for Gorton's amendment we reach a grand total of 21 senators unpersuaded by the administration's arguments that the way to win the war on drugs here is to throw money into the banks accounts of Colombian military officers and Pentagon contractors. New Yorkers will note the absence of their two Democratic senators Moynihan and Schumer - from the list. The administration is fighting a counterinsurgency war under the pretext of drug interdiction, as George W. Bush accurately points out. (Bush, please note, is all in favor of counter-insurgency in Colombia, thus buttressing allegations that he dealt cocaine in his Yale years. All dealers like prices supports for their product, which one of the prime consequences of US drug interdiction.) What of the dreaded
"narco-guerillas"? But all this commotion over the senate vote obscures the fact that the US is already waging a major bio-war in Colombia, evoking the bio-war waged with Agent Orange against Vietnam thirty five years ago. The Colombian national police force has already is already busy spraying from the air, with the financial backing of the U.S. Colombia is getting $330 million during this year and the next irrespective of the new Senate legislation). As in Vietnam, aerial spraying has indiscriminately doused people, fields and livestock with poison. International observers say that the toxic effects of this spraying have destroyed vegetable crops and fruit orchards and contaminated streams and lakes, killing fish and farm animals. Several children have reportedly died after being doused by the spraying. Thus far, the hardy coca plant has been resistant to these poisons, flourishing in contaminated soil. McCaffrey's triumph could be to wipe out all agriculture other than coca-growing. His next stroke, disclosed in the June 1-15 edition of CounterPunch, is to launch a fungus developed by US bio-warriors, designed to attack the coca plant and opium poppy. This fungus could, so to speak, jump the tracks and further devastate Colombian crops. Meanwhile, if conditions in Colombia prove too arduous, the drug lords will simply shift operations to Ecuador or Peru, just as they shifted from Bolivia to Colombia. Back to the halls
of Congress, Ron Paul of Texas duly did so, arguing that U.S. entry in the WTO is illegal and unconstitutional, Paul said. "It is the U.S. Congress that has the authority to regulate foreign commerce. Nobody else." As with the senate resolution on Colombia put forward by Gorton, Paul and such Republican legislators as Bob Barr of Georgia formed common cause with anti-WTO radical Democrats like Kucinich or McKinney. So there's the
math. |
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