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July 18, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith-based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al-Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
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!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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
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July
18, 2002
Corporate
Socialism
The
CEO Crimewave
by Ralph Nader
The relentless expansion of corporate control
over our political economy has proven nearly immune to daily
reporting by the mainstream media. Corporate crime, fraud and
abuse have become like the weather; everyone is talking about
the storm but no one seems able to do anything about it. This
is largely because expected accountability mechanisms -- including
boards of directors, outside accounting and law firms, bankers
and brokers, state and federal regulatory agencies and legislatures
-- are inert or complicit.
When, year after year, the established
corporate watchdogs receive their profits or compensation directly
or indirectly from the companies they are supposed to be watching,
independent judgment fails, corruption increases and conflicts
of interest grow among major CEOs and their cliques. Over time,
these  institutions, unwilling to reform themselves,
strive to transfer the costs of their misdeeds and recklessness
onto the larger citizenry. In so doing, big business is in the
process of destroying the very capitalism that has provided it
with a formidable ideological cover.
Consider the following assumptions of
a capitalistic system:
1) Owners are supposed to control what
they own. For a century, big business has split ownership (shareholders)
from control, which is in the hands of the officers of the corporation
and its rubber-stamp board of directors. Investors have been
disenfranchised and told to sell their shares if they don't like
the way management is running their business. Nowadays, with
crooked accounting, inflated profits and self-dealing, it has
proven difficult for even large investors to know the truth about
their officious managers.
2) Under capitalism, businesses are supposed
to sink or swim, which is still very true for small business.
But larger industries and companies often have become "too
big to fail" and demand that Uncle Sam serve as their all-purpose
protector, providing a variety of public guarantees and emergency
bailouts. Yes, some wildly looted companies that are expendable,
such as Enron, cannot avail themselves of governmental salvation
and do go bankrupt or are bought. By and large, however, in industry
after industry where two or three companies dominate or presage
a domino effect, Washington becomes their backstop.
3) Capitalism is supposed to exhibit
a consensual freedom of contract -- a distinct advance over a
feudal society. Yet the great majority of contracts for credit,
insurance, software, housing, health, employment, products, repairs
and other services are standard-form, printed contracts, presented
on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Going across the proverbial street
to a competitor gets you the same contract. Every decade, these
"contracts of adhesion," as the lawyers call them,
become more intrusive and more insistent on taking away the buyers'
constitutional rights to access to courts in favor of binding
arbitration or stipulate outright surrender of basic rights and
remedies. The courts are of little help in invalidating these
impositions by what are essentially private corporate legislatures
regulating millions of Americans.
4) Capitalism requires a framework of
law and order: The rules of the economic game are to be conceived
and enforced on the merits against mayhem, fraud, deception and
predatory practices. Easily the most powerful influence over
most government departments and agencies are the industries that
receive the privileges and immunities, regulatory passes, exemptions,
deductions and varied escapes from responsibility that regularly
fill the business pages. Only those caught in positions of extreme
dereliction ever have reason to expect more than a slap on the
wrist for violating legal mandates.
5) Capitalist enterprises are expected
to compete on an even playing field. Corporate lobbyists, starting
with their abundant cash for political campaigns, have developed
a "corporate state" where government lavishes subsidies,
inflated contracts, guarantees and research and development and
natural resources giveaways on big business -- while denying
comparable benefits to individuals and family businesses. We
have a government of big business, by big business and for big
business, even if more of these businesses are nominally moving
their state charters to Bermuda-like tax escapes.
"Corporate socialism" -- the
privatization of profit and the socialization of risks and misconduct
-- is displacing capitalist canons. This condition prevents an
adaptable capitalism, served by equal justice under law, from
delivering higher standards of living and enlarging its absorptive
capacity for broader community and environmental values. Civic
and political movements must call for a decent separation of
corporation and state.
In 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression,
Congress created the Temporary National Economic Committee to
hold hearings around the country, recommend ways to deal with
the concentration of economic power and promote a more just economy.
World War II stopped this corporate reform momentum. We should
not have to wait for a further deterioration from today's gross
inequalities of wealth and income to launch a similar commission
on the rampant corporatization of our country. At stake is whether
civic values of our democratic society will prevail over invasive
commercial values.
Ralph Nader
is the founder of Public Citizen.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
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