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July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Mark 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
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul 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
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
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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
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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Weekend
Edition
July 6, 2002
American
Journal
The Crooks in the White House
by Alexander Cockburn
This is exciting. Will Dick Cheney keel over from
his fifth heart attack before he becomes the first veep since
Spiro Agnew to resign in the face of charges of financial crookery?
Or will Bush fire him to divert attention from his own seamy
business past?
Over last weekend President Dumbo poked
his head above the rubble of the WorldCom scandal and made a
stand: "No violation of the public's trust will be tolerated...
Executives who commit fraud will face financial penalties and,
when they are guilty of criminal wrongdoing, they will face jail
time."
Sunday morning brought more ringing pledges
to protect the public weal: "If anybody violates the law,
we go after them", SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told Sam Donaldson
on ABC's This Week.
In an earlier incarnation Pitt was one
of the guys who successfully lobbied the SEC to make it easier
for Arthur Andersen and the other big accounting firms to cook
the books on behalf of Enron, MCI/WorldCom and others.
Bush, flush with campaign contributions
from Enron, MCI/WorldCom ($100,000 last summer), duly signalled
his gratitude by putting Pitt in charge of the SEC, where he
put the agency in snooze mode amid a ripening cloud of scandal
involving the biggest names in corporate America.
But even Pitt couldn't choke off the
investigation into Halliburton, one of the largest oil service
companies in the world, headed until July, 2000, by Cheney who
was the company's CEO.
The SEC is probing whether Halliburton
reported over $100 million in disputed costs on big oil contracts
as revenues so that it could prop up its profits while negotiating
a merger with a rival, Dresser Industries. These accounting shennanigans
took place in 1998 on Cheney's watch, and yes, the accounting
firm was Arthur Andersen. (Small world. Dresser was the company
Bush Sr worked for in the early days in Texas.)
Noting Bush's promise that CEOs "who
have mismanaged their company in some fraudulent way will have
to pay", Donaldson asked Pitt, "Will that be the case
with Halliburton if you find wrongdoing under Mr. Cheney's reign?"
Quivering with integrity, Pitt bravely
declared, "I head an independent regulatory agency. We don't
give anyone a pass."
What else could he say? Up till now the
Halliburton scandal has been rumbling along, just under the radar.
But now it's nearing critical mass. Hence it may not be long
too before Dick Cheney announces that on doctor's orders, and
the better to deal with these outrageous accusations of chicanery,
he's stepping down, which is, if you believe friends of Tom Ridge
in Philadelphia, what Cheney waplanning to do before 9/11, making
way for the former Pennsylvania governor.
Of course anyone with a memory longer
than the day before yesterday would have doubled over with laughter
at the spectacle of Bush calling for jail time for corporate
crooks.
Remember Spectrum? Back in 1986 George W. Bush's oil company,
Spectrum, was about to go belly up, until kind friends folded
it in to Harken Energy. Various accounts, including the Daily
Enron site, narrate that from being on the threshold of the
debtor's prison, Bush suddenly had $500,000 worth of Harken stock,
an $80,000-a-year salary and a stock option arrangement that
allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40 per cent below market value.
Bush made more than a million off Harken, even though the company
itself lost a ton of money.
Sounds familiar? Here's more, culled
from the Daily Enron site. Bush also borrowed $180,375 from the
company - a loan that was later "forgiven", in accordance
with Christ's instructions on the subject of sinners. (In 1989
and 1990 alone - according to the company's Securities and Exchange
Commission filing - Harken's board "forgave" $341,000
in loans to its executives.)
Now it's spring 1990. Iraq is menacing
Kuwait and thereby casting a shadow over Harken Energy's only
pending contract, a drilling project in Bahrain. Harken's financial
advisors, Smith Barney, have just issued a bleak assessment of
the company's position and future. Harken sets up a "restructuring
board" and Bush is on it.
In June 1990 claiming ignorance of Harken's
desperate plight and the Smith Barney report, Bush sells his
212,140 shares of Harken Energy for $848,560.00.
The sale falls under the SEC's insider
stock sale rule requiring almost immediate formal notice, but
Bush does not report the sale until seven months later. At the
time the SEC is headed by George H. Bush's appointee, Richard
Breeden.
Bush sells his Harken stock less than
thirty days after his father's National Security Advisor, Brent
Scowcroft, sent the President a secret memo warning that hostilities
between Iraq and Kuwait were likely. As the Daily Enron asks
, " Did dad share this information with his son? If so,
W. Bush traded on "non-public" information of an extraordinary
nature indeed."
Sure enough, two months after Bush Jr
made his killing, the shit hits the fan in the Gulf, and Harken's
shares go south, losing 25 per cent of their value the day Saddam
sends his troops into Kuwait. If Bush hadn't baled out he'd have
lost $250,000.
Sure, this is old stuff, just like Whitewater.
And they talk about this man restoring "trust" in the
White House?
The Incredible
Shrinking President (continued)
Derisive comments about Bush, particularly on
his current role as Ariel Sharon's errand boy continue to flow
in from foreign shores. In Britain the Sunday Telegraph ran a
piece last week by John Simpson, BBC World Affairs editor, quoting
senior civil servants in Whitehall, normally a purse-lipped bunch,
particularly on the topic of a US president, as scathing on the
topic of President Dumbo, describing his policies, particularly
on trade and the Middle East as "puerile", "absurdly
ignorant" and "ludicrous".
Meanwhile the dollar continues to plunge
and the stock market market dithers around in the toilet.
I'll say this for the Pres. He's lucky,
just like Bill. Of course under Bill the country felt it was
sharing in the luck, whereas under W it's been one damn thing
after another. Thus far the history of the Bush Presidency has
been the history of falling masonry. President Rubble. But, just
like Bill, W. has been the huge beneficiary of Terror. With Bill
it was the Oklahoma Bombing. It turned his presidency around.
With W it was 9/11. Without it he'd be a laughing stock inside
the national jurisdiction as well as overseas.
And now he's has the gift of a California
court's ruling that the pledge of allegiance runs counter to
the Constitution, thereby allowing every politician in the country
up to and including W the pleasures of posturing in front of
the flag and declaring unflagging trust in God, who is doing
little or nothing these days to merit such childish confidence.
Welcome to Bush's America, where the
Supreme Court has now ruled that vouchers are okay. So a child
is free to go to Catholic School at public expense and be sodomized
by a priest, preferably while both recite the pledge of allegiance.
My own view is that the Pledge should
be compulsory for children at school, along with prayer. As I
always say, a childish mind not innoculated with compulsory religion
is open to any infection. Make smoking compulsory too, along
with training in weaponry from small arms up to heavy artillery.
It would swiftly revive the peace movement. Five prostrations
to the Flag a day, a twofer for the Muslims in our midst.
This
Weekend's Features
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
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