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June 27, 2002
Rahual Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
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
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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TO
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Published March 15, 2002
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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
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 27,
2002
Reclaiming Our Commons
in an Age of Corporate Crime
by Ralph Nader
Hundreds of billions of dollars of the nation's
wealth-the people's resources-are being openly confiscated by
corporate interests.
Government, the presumed protector of
the public's property, has become, instead, the enabler of the
plunder and theft. The media, the nation's self-professed watchdog,
is apathetic, at  best, in sounding the alarm about the
people's loss of control over resources they have paid for or
inherited from previous generations. These are the resources
that citizens legally hold in common-their common wealth.
As a result, corporations have found
it easy to lay claim to a wide range of public resources-from
publically-funded medical advances to national forests, public
spaces in cities, the Internet, software innovations, the airwaves,
the public domain of creative works, the DNA of animals, plants
and humans. The appetite of Big Business for the appropriation
of public resources is limitless. Even public education has not
escaped the ambition of corporate control and takeover.
Surprisingly, corporate appropriation-the
privatization--of public resources has proceeded quietly with
only sporadic public outcries against the most blatant thefts.
One public interest activist and author-David Bollier-is making
a valiant effort to change that. As Bollier argues, the abuses
go unnoticed because the thefts are generally seen "only
in glimpses, not in panorama, when it is visible at all."
Bollier's new book "Silent
Theft-The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth"
(Routledge, New York and London) is a loud wake-up call for citizens
interested in halting the steady exploitation and erosion of
the nation's resources and values for short-term gains by the
few. And the book does, indeed, provide the reader a wide, vivid
and scary panoramic view of what is happening to the public's
resources-"the commons" as Bollier calls them.
"We have become a nation of eager
consumers-and disengaged citizens-and so are ill-equipped to
perceive how our common resources are being abused," Bollier
says. Bollier moves quickly to specifics- breakthrough cancer
drugs that our tax dollars helped develop, and the rights to
which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song for which
they now charge exorbitant prices. The archaic 1872 law which
gives mining companies the lucrative right to mine valuable mineral
resources on our public lands for $5 an acre-a right that the
mining industry preserves through what Bollier describes as "well-deployed
campaign contributions."
Bollier is especially critical of the
federal government's role in giving away its most promising drug
research and development to the drug companies for a fraction
of its actual value with the companies then charging whatever
prices they can make the desperately ill bear.
"It is a sweet deal for drugmakers
but an outrage for millions of American taxpayers and consumers,"
Bollier says. "It is a scandalous fact that the fruits of
risky and expensive scientific work typically do not accrue to
the sponsors/investors-the American people-until drug companies
have extracted huge markups of their own. The American people
pay twice, first as taxpayers, reaping a lower (or nonexistent)
return on their investments, and second as consumers paying higher
drug prices charged by pharmaceutical companies."
Bollier reminds the reader that Americans
own collectively one third of the surface area of the country
and billions of acres of the outer continental shelf. The resources
are extensive and valuable: huge supplies of oil, coal, natural
gas, uranium, copper, gold, silver, timber grasslands, water
and geothermal energy. The nation's public land also consists
of vast tracts of wilderness forests, unspoiled coastline, sweeping
prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and dozens of beautiful rivers,
and lakes.
"As the steward of these public
resources, the government's job is to manage these lands responsibly
for the long-term," Bollier argues. "The sad truth
is that the government stewardship of this natural wealth represents
one of the great scandals of the 20th Century. While the details
vary from one resource to another, the general history is one
of antiquated laws, poor enforcement, slipshod administration,
environmental indifference and capitulation to industry's most
aggressive demands."
The increasing exploitation of the commons,
Bollier argues, needlessly siphons hundreds of billions of dollars
away from the public purse each year that could be used for countless
varieties of social investment, environmental protection and
other public initiatives. The public's assets and revenue streams
are privatized with only fractional benefits accruing to the
public in return, he says.
Bollier also contends that the enclosure
of the "commons" by market forces (usually the bigger
companies) tends to foster market concentration, reduce competition
and raise consumer prices. He says it also threatens the environment
by favoring short-term exploitation over long-term stewardship-"the
flagrant abuses of public lands by timber, mining and agribusiness
companies are prime examples."
Despite his vigorous criticism of the
exploitation and neglect of the public's resources-"the
commons"-Bollier remains optimistic that people can be galvanized
to reverse the current trend.
"Americans have a long tradition
of creating innovative vehicles for ensuring fair return to the
American people on resources they collectively own," he
writes. "It is time to revive this tradition of innovation
in the stewardship of public resources and give it imaginative
new incarnations in the twenty-first century."
For anyone interested in joining the
effort to reverse the corporate exploitation of our public resources-David
Bollier's "Silent Theft" is a first-class starting
point.
For More Information on "Silent
Theft" see: http://www.silenttheft.com/
Today's
Features
Rahual Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership;
Calls for Fair Elections
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