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Today's
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July
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise
of the Green Party
Saul
Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela
July
1, 2004
Katherine
van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in
His Method
Joe
Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
William
James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment
Robert
Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
Website
of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
June
29, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Cloak-and-Dagger Handover
Robert
Fisk
Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland
Troy
Selvaratnam
New York Times Boosts Pet Developer
Harry
Browne
Bush in Ireland
Ray
McGovern
The CIA According to Anonymous
Elaine
Cassel
Hamdi, Padilla & Rasul: Who Really
Won?
June
28, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn / Leyla Linton
Grisly Rituals in Iraq
Amira
Hass
Confronting Myths and Deadly Power
June
26 / 27, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
Patrick
Cockburn
Iyad Allawi, the CIA's New Stooge
in Iraq
Dennis
Hans
Once They Were Sweethearts: Cheney,
the NYTs and the Myth of an Iraq Link to 9/11
Ben
Tripp
Adventures in Fuel Efficiency
Dave
Lindorff
That State Department Terrorism
Report: What They Knew, But Didn't Tell You
Chris
Floyd
Cold Irons Bound: the Russian Gambit
Ali
Tonak
Contamination at Berkeley: Profit Motives,
Academic Freedom and the Case of Ignacio Chapela
Keith
Rosenthal
The Withering of the Anti-War Movement
Bryan
Sacks
The Failure of the 9/11 Commission
Wayne
Madsen
Another Case of Blowback
Thomas
St. John
L. Frank Baum, Racist: Indian-Hating
in the Wizard of Oz
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
American Swadeshi
June
25, 2004
Stephen
Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"
Saul
Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege:
Bush Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction
Amir
Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace
Jack
McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal?
Did Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?
Greg
Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader
June 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
John
Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing
Death Threats
Harry Browne
On
the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe
Bill Kaufman
Another
Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush,
Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did
They Tell?
Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?
John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy
Diana Johnstone
Kerry
and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"
June 23, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Bush
and Castro Face Off
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"
Kurt Nimmo
From
Saddam, With Love
Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars
Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"
Patrick Cockburn
The
Pretense of an Independent Iraq
Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib
June 22, 2004
Dave Lindorff
The
Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption
Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?
Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings
Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq
John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales
Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity
Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés
Bruce Jackson
Saying
No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify
Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill
June
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos
Upon Chaos
Cockburn
/ Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty
Uri
Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage
June
19 / 20, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid
and Isolated
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation
on Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh
Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother
Nature
Col.
Dan Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis
in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a
Year Later
Prudence
Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!
Poets'
Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert
Kathy
Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids
June
18, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave
Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player
& Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American
Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
18, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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July
2, 2004
Suicide
Right on the Stage
The
Demise of the Green Party
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
"Ignorance of remote causes
disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate
and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive."
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
(1651)
So this is what alternative politics
in America has degenerated to: Pat LaMarche, the newly minted
vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party, has announced
that she might not even vote for herself in the fall elections.
The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized by the
specter of Bush and Cheney that they've offered up their own
party-born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from
Carter to Clinton-as a kind of private contractor for the benefit
of those very same Democratic Party power brokers.
Take a close look at what LaMarche,
a not-ready-for-primetime radio "personality", had
to say to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after
winning the nomination in Milwaukee.
"If the race is tight,
I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my country.
But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his
country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."
This is the sound a political
party makes as it commits suicide.
LaMarche's running mate, David
Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer from Texas is a dull and
spiritless candidate, handled by some truly unsavory advisors
(more on them in future columns). In action, he functions as
a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, lumbering
across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and
back again, to the tune of his liberal political masters. The
tune? The familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."
Bland, yes, but it worked,
thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the pompous Ted Glick.
At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green Party, heavily
infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the ticket
of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign
of Cobb and LaMarche.
This won't harm Nader much.
Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic
platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to
the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption and the environment)
and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can,
if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the
battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's
issues or lose the election. It's as simple as that.
The fatal damage in Milwaukee
was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort
sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored
for more than a decade to build their party into a national political
force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even
more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans
(cf: Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing
were destroyed in an instant.
But behold: the rebuffed Nader
continues to poll nearly 6 percent without the Green Party behind
him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with an electron microscope.
Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely the way Cobb
and his backers want it.
So, the Greens have succeeded
in doing what seemed impossible only months ago: they've made
the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which still chugs along
claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after the close
of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after
the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political
endeavor. Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective
function: to lure progressives away from Nader and back into
the plantation house of the Democratic Party.
But at least Kucinich remained
a Democrat. Cobb and LaMarche were supposedly leaders of a political
party that formed not in opposition to Republicans, but from
outrage at the rightward and irredeemable drift of the Democratic
Party. Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its mind,
it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the spine--especially
its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of fear. And once
the white flag is raised there's little chance of recovering
the ground you've given up.
Always nearly immobilized by
an asphyxiating devotion to political correctness, the Green
Party has now taken this obsession to its logical extreme by
nominating a pair of political cretins at the top of its ticket.
Under the false banner of the Cobb/Lamarche campaign, the Green
Party is instructing its members to vote for its candidates only
in states where their vote doesn't matter. This is the so-called
safe state strategy.
Safe? Safe for whom? Not for
Afghan or Iraqi citizens. Not for US troops. Not for the detainees
at Gitmo, Bagram or Abu Ghraib. Not for migrant farm laborers
or steelworkers. Not for the welfare mother or the 2 million
souls rotting in American prisons. Not for the spotted owl, the
streams of Appalachia or the rainforests of Alaska. Not for the
residents of Cancer Alley or the peasants of Colombia or teen
age girls slaving away in Nike's toxic Indonesia sneaker mills.
Not for the Palestinians, the Lakota of Pine Ridge or elementary
school students from the hard streets of Oakland. Not for the
hopeless denizens of death row or three strikers in for life
for a gram of crack or gays hoping to unite in marriage or even
cancer patients seeking simple herbal relief from excruciating
pain.
A crucial player in this unsavory
affair was Medea Benjamin, the diva of Global Exchange. In rationalizing
her decisive vote backing the Cobb/Lamarche ticket, Benjamin
emitted this profundity: "John Kerry is not George Bush."
Apparently, that tiny sliver of genetic variation is all it comes
down to these days.
Yes, Medea, you're right. Kerry
is simply Kerry, a bona fide war criminal, with a record of political
infamy that is just as malodorous as that of George Bush-only
it's longer. Over the past four years, Kerry has been complicit
in the enactment of some of Bush's most disgusting policies.
Indeed, these days Kerry offers himself up mainly as a more competent
manager of the Bush agenda, a steadier hand on the helm of the
Empire.
Kerry stands unapologetically
for nearly every issue that caused the Greens to bolt the Democratic
Party. He was present at the founding of the Democratic Leadership
Council, the claque of neo-liberals that seeks to purge the Democratic
Party of every last vestige of progressivism and reshape it as
a hawkish and pro-business party with a soft spot for abortion-essentially
a stingier version of the Rockefeller Republicans.
Kerry enthusiastically backed
both of Bush's wars and now, at the very moment Bush is signaling
a desire to retreat, the senator is calling for 25,000 new troops
to be sent to Iraq, where under his plan the US military will
remain entrenched for at least the next four years.
Kerry supported the Patriot
Act without reservation or even much contemplation. Lest you
conclude that this was a momentary aberration sparked by the
post-9/11 hysteria, consider the fact that Kerry also voted for
the two Clinton-era predecessors to the Patriot Act, the 1994
Crime Bill and the 1996 CounterTerrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act, which were just as bad if not worse.
Although he regularly hams
it up in photo-ops with the barons of big labor, Kerry voted
for NAFTA, the WTO and virtually every other job-slashing trade
pact that has come before the senate. Kerry, who has courted
and won the endorsement of nearly every police association in
the nation, regularly calls for putting another 100,000 cops
on the streets and even tougher criminal sanctions against victimless
crimes. He refused to reconsider his fervid support for the insane
war on drug users, which has destroyed families and clogged our
prisons with more than 2 million people, many of them young black
men, whom the draconian drug laws specifically target without
mercy. Kerry backs the racist death penalty and minimum mandatory
sentences.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional
Black Caucus jeered Ralph Nader when he spoke to them about his
campaign, a bizarre reception for a man who has been a tireless
advocate for civil rights and poor people. If this group of legislators
actually cared about the welfare of their constituents, instead
of merely their sinecure within the party, they would hire the
twin Dominatrixes of Abu Ghraib, Lynddie England and Sabrina
Harman, to clip a dogleash on Kerry (who disgustingly said he'd
like to become the second black president) to interrogate him
about his dreadful record on civil rights when he comes calling
seeking their support. Of course, they won't. The Congressional
Black Caucus is perhaps the only political conclave with clout
as vaporous as the Greens.
Kerry, and his top advisor
Rand Beers (a veteran of the Clinton and Bush National Security
Council), crafted Plan Colombia, the brutal and toxic war on
Andean peasants, waged for the benefit of oil companies under
the phoney rubric of drug eradication. His scrawny energy plan,
devoid of any real emphasis on conservation or solar power, calls
for more off-shore oil leasing, widespread natural gas drilling,
transcontinental pipelines and strip-mining for coal. His deficit-fixated
economic policy, scripted by Wall Street bond tycoon Robert Rubin,
is even more austere than Clinton's.
Like Joe Lieberman, Kerry markets
himself as a cultural prude, regularly chiding teens about the
kind of clothes they wear, the music they listen to and the movies
they watch. But even Lieberman didn't go so far as to support
the censorious Communications Decency Act. Kerry did. Fortunately,
even this Supreme Court had the sense to strike the law down,
ruling that it trampled across the First Amendment.
All of this is standard fare
for contemporary Democrats. But Kerry always goes the extra mile.
The senator cast a crucial vote for Clinton's wretched bill to
dismantle welfare for poor mothers and their children and, despite
mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to hail the mean-spirited
measure as a tremendous success.
This is merely a precis of
the grim resumé of the man the Green Party now supports
through the proxy candidacy of David Cobb. The message of the
Cobb campaign is: a vote for Cobb is a vote for Kerry. Translation:
a vote for Cobb is a vote for war, and everything that goes along
with it.
It's also a vote for political
self-annihilation. David Cobb is the Jim Jones of the Green Party.
Form a line and pass the Kool-Aid.
Risk free voting? I wouldn't
bet your life on it.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
and, with Alexander Cockburn, Imperial
Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
Weekend
Edition Features for June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
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The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
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Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
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