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The Latest News
on Power and Evil
in Washington
(and Elsewhere)
PUBLISHED
ON SEPTEMBER 6
PANAM 103 TRIAL:
The Case Falls Apart;
Inside Story of How the
US and the UK Tried
for Years to Insure the
PanAm 103 Case Would
Never Come to Trial in
a Fair Courtroom Because
They Knew They Couldn't
Make the Case Stick
How Qaddafi, Helped
by Mandela and a Canny
Scots Lawyer, Called
the West's Bluff
How the Western
Press Covered Up
NADER'S CAMPAIGN:
Is It Building a Movement?
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 28
COUNTERPUNCH
GOES TO LA
A FIELD DAY
FOR THE HEAT:
Cops Riot As Planned,
Bravely Trample Trapped
Crowd With Horses,
Fire Point Blank
At Unarmed Kids,
Amid Huzzas of Press
GORE/LIEBERMAN TICKET:
Sprayed With Cash
In Tinseltown;
Judeo-Christian
God Hailed At
Every Turn
EDWARD SAID
ON RALPH NADER:
What Nader's Campaign
Means for America
and the World
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
The Getty Museum vs.
The Watts Towers
BASIC INSTINCT:
Tipper's Secret
Love Diaries
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT
DICK CHENEY:
He's Dumb
SPECIAL PRE-LA
REPORT ON AL GORE:
° Soul Brother to Newt
° Betrayer the Environment
° Friend of Nuclear Power
° Hated by Senate Colleagues
° New Deal Sabotuer
° Reinventing Government
on the Backs of the Poor
Search CounterPunch
Read All About Al Gore:
a User's Manual, the explosive new book by CounterPunch editors
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Whiteout:
the CIA, drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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September 11, 2000
Celebrity Politics
Really, Ms Sarandon!
At the Deauville
Film Festival, where she was handed a Lifetime's Achievement
Award, Susan Sarandon told the British newspaper the Sunday Express
that "We stand a chance of getting a president who has probably
killed more people before he gets into office than any president
in the history of the United States." Sarandon also claimed
that making a stand against the death penalty was almost deemed
politically incorrect in America.
What is all this? Andy Jackson
killed a hundred times as many people before becoming prez as
Bush. Of course, they were Indians, so maybe they don't count.
"In the US it is not a good time for anybody to feel strongly
about things that are not popular", Sarandon went on, "and
if you are against the death penalty it's like being against
a war. Your loyalties to the government are questioned if you
are against it."
What
can Sarandon be talking about? Approval for a moratorium of the
death penalty is now running at over 70 per cent in California.
Ever since the governor of Illinois announced suspension of the
death penalty in his state early this year, the numbers have
been shifting nationally. The idea that death penalty abolitionists
are somehow politically and socially as isolated as Christians
in the Roman catacombs is silly.
Sarandon's husband Tim Robbins
has endorsed Nader, who's emphatically against the death penalty.
The two should raise a stink about both the Democratic and Republican
presidential candidates about the death penalty. Certainly, Bush
has signed plenty of death warrants. But Al Gore enthusiastically
supported expansion of the federal death penalty to cover over
60 new crimes including some not involving murder. He has also
been part of the administration that put through the Counter-Terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act, virtually shutting the door
on the right of prisoners on Death Row to appeal to the federal
courts. In terms of ensuring more people will get executed, Gore's
record is worse than Bush's.
There Is No "Lesser Evil"
or Bye-bye Mr. Altman
Sarandon's remarks were topped
in foolishness by Robert Altman who said last week that he felt
it would be a "catastrophe for the world if George Bush
is elected". Altman vowed: "You won't see me for dust.
I for one will be leaving the country and living in France."
What's Altman expecting to happen? Altman should book his ticket
to the Cote d'Azur now, whatever the outcome. To paraphrase the
old song, Nothing Bush could do, Gore won't do worser.
The Bill of Rights. Liberals-for-Gore like to suggest Bush would usher
a fascist state. There's absolutely no evidence that Bush could
improve on the fascist tendencies of the Clinton-Gore years.
Gore is, after all, the man who wants to cover America with,
in his own words earlier this year, "a blanket of blue"
meaning 50,000 more semi-trained, trigger-happy cops out on the
street like the ones who blew away Amadou Diallo and who were
recruited to the Ramparts division in Los Angeles to wage war
on youth gangs.
Gore's particularly hot for crack
downs on minority youth. "I will fight", he said in
his crime message this spring, "for a federal law that will
help communities establish gang-free zones with curfews on specific
gang members, a ban on gang-related clothing and the specific
legal authority to break violent teen gangs once and for all."
The crime rate drops and the prison population climbs, largely
because of the war on non-violent drug users. Want to listen
to Gore on this? "We have to insist on more prison time
for those who don't break the habit."
You can quote such things to liberals-for-Gore
and see their eyes glaze over as they intone "Gore would
appoint good people to the federal bench". Really? Through
his entire political career Gore has striven to take power out
of the hands of judges, good or bad. Back in his first congressional
race in 1976 he vowed to push for tough minimum mandatory sentences,
well before this abuse of the separation of powers became a staple
of posturing "crime-fighters" in the 1980s. As vice
president Gore has pushed for block grants for prison expansion
in the states, with the proviso that such federal grants will
only be issued if each state ensures that prisoners serve at
least 85 per cent of their sentences.
The Supreme Court. Just to remind you, it's impossible to predict how
Supreme Court Justices will perform. The two most liberal justices
on the Court today , Stevens and Souter, were appointed by Republican
presidents Ford and Bush. When Ford nominated Stevens, Dick Cheney
was his chief of staff. A Nixon appointee, Harry Blackmun, wrote
the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and Roe v Wade's
prime opponent on the Court was Kennedy's man, Byron White. Do
the Republicans really want to end choice, at least for middle
class women? Of course not. They want to close the gender gap.
As for poor women, Gore spent his congressional career voting
to deny them funding for abortions?
Trade, labor, military spending,
the environment. On trade pacts
the only difference is that Bush offers rhetoric and Gore has
a rap sheet of 200 trade deals that he has helped negotiate through
Clinton-time, led by NAFTA and GATT. Gore's most substantive
achievement in the field of labor relations was to gut the NLRB
in his Reinventing Government rampages in 1994.
Defense. It's an arms race between the Democrats and the Republicans.
Gore and Bush are outbidding each other day by day in the bid
to be the bigger hawk. Gore pledges more interventions ("forward
engagement") round the world if he's elected president,
and denounces Bush's plan for unilateral cuts in the nuclear
arsenal as irresponsible.
The environment. In his prime field of influence as vice president
Gore's record has been terrible. Right now he's pledging a "salmon
summit" in the Pacific Northwest, rejecting the advice of
his own Fish and Wildlife Service biologists that the only hope
of saving the salmon is to breach the dams on the Snake River.
In July, the administration, in the form of Gore's close friend
and former personal attorney George Frampton, announced it wouldn't
beach the dams a position echoed by George W. Bush. As
for Nader, he pledges that he would breach the dams.
Nader reached 5 per cent in the
polls and Gore felt it necessary to dust off some of his father's
populist rhetoric at the Democratic Convention. Imagine if Nader
was in the debates and polled 3o per cent. "The only way
the left can work within the Democratic Party is act without
it. That is, the future of the party will be determined by forces
operating on its margins or beyond its boundaries." Andrew
Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn wrote that in The Nation in 1984,
about the Mondale presidential campaign in 1984. The Democratic
Party has taken at least four wrong turns since then. Are liberals
so impoverished in their thinking and expectations they can't
see that out of the groups despised and betrayed by Clinton and
Gore there is a vital movement in the making? CP
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