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July 11, 2002
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
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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
COUNTERPUNCH
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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
11, 2002
A Tale of Two Twits
Wall Street
Burns, Bush Fiddles...
and Where's Waldo Wellstone?
by Steve Perry
The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street
recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering
public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic
pearls the likes of which many older Americans recall fondly
from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. "I
know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for
myself, but for predecessors as well." "Teaching children
to read will make America what we want it to be-a literate country
and a hopefuller country." "For a century and a half
now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring
alliances of modern times."
But he was at his deadpan best in the
financial district speech: "In the long run, there is no
capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character."
Ah, but seriously, folks-seriously! Telling one of these CEOs
not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress
better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.
Enron begins to seem like the good old
days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery,
and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance
rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then
came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched
between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving
Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing,
and Halliburton-the last concerning alleged improprieties that
took place in the late '90s when Dick Cheney headed the company.
The business press is taking all this much more seriously than
mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, "Phony
earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts,
directors asleep at the switch-this isn't just a few bad apples
we're talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown.
We have reached the tipping point." Nocera and his colleagues
correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis
since 1929.
The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered
species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure
that such scandals don't flare again anytime soon to disrupt
their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless
but silly to the president, who has never known any other way
of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success
in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed
to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy,
which he cashed in just before his father's war on Iraq sent
Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to
be registered at the SEC within two months' time; W waited over
half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a
$600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter
at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when
the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism,
and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much
as they can are no more than Bush's birthright. Privately he
must be mystified by all the fuss.
Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall
Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there
will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the
SEC-which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the
very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the
crimes at hand-and a shiny new executive commission to study
the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser
forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that
allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions-the
rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and
to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems,
for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate
in deals they are "analyzing" "dispassionately"
for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
The Democrats are licking their chops
over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November,
but it doesn't mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier
to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national
level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the
Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise
over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party
a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that
flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It's foolish to suppose
the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that
of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man
many consider prime presidential timber for '04, Tailgunner Joe
Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats
not to lose their heads and turn "too populist" on
big business's perfidy.)
If ever the time was ripe for mavericks
from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a
little good-and, not incidentally, making names and power bases
for themselves-that time is now. And once again we must ask,
where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé
in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) I have pawed in vain through
Wellstone's website, the Congressional Record, and various news
archives to find any discouraging word on the corporate crime
wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican
dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial,
nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about
the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles
in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees
in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs
under investigation has snapped and struck his wife-Paul and
Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.
One thing's for damn sure: In this most
pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The
Nation once called "the senator from the Left"
is nowhere in sight. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone
is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions
and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and
a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record
with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out
pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial
scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved
considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone.
Is there a political candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter
of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing,
reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman?
Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with
him. Quite a feat when you think about it.
Yes, yes: Wellstone has done some admirable
things in the Senate, Wellstone is palpably better than the inveterate
lizard he's running against, blah blah blah. But if he continues
to abstain from action and comment on the most pressing domestic
matter of the day-he could, at minimum, lead the charge in demanding
hearings regarding Bush/Harken and Cheney/Halliburton-he may
still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And if that happens
he had better not whine about the White House or the Republican
National Committee or the invisible Green candidacy of Ed McGaa,
because he will have only himself to blame.
Steve Perry
is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch and a columnist for
The Rake.
He can be reached at: sperry@mn.rr.com
Today's
Features
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
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