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Today's
Stories
February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
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
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for More Stories.
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February
26, 2004
AEI to Colombia
"Can't
Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
By JACQUES KINAU
Mark Falcoff's February 23, 2004 American Enterprise
Institute post, "Facing up to the Conflict in Colombia"
broaches an important topic. But Falcoff does not face up
to reality as promised. Falcoff correctly notes that what started
as a civil conflict in Colombia has degraded into a very dirty
war replete with kidnappings, terrorism, and paramilitary executions.
However, in crediting the leading rebel
group with trafficking financed success, with little popular
support, he misses two underlying factors that must be confronted.
The first is that the FARC guerrilla
simply couldn't function without the tacit complicity of the
US.
FARC participates in the trafficking
a portion of the estimated 580 tons of cocaine sold annually
in the United States. This is laundered from US dollars back
into Colombian pesos to finance guerilla payrolls, arms and
explosives purchases and operations. The FARC, and other Colombian
groups, have come to rely almost completely on the extremely
lax enforcement climate against money laundering in the US.
The FARC has depended upon companies
like General Electric to facilitate financing the bad things
in life, such as spectacular attacks against soft civilian targets,
by GE's blind eye toward US manufactures based exporting and
refusing to put an end to cash purchases.
For years a key money laundering strategy
has been the cash purchase and exportation of manufactured goods
from the United States, particularly south Florida, to sell
at below market prices in Colombia's vast black market, known
as "San Andresitos". This old and tired trick still
brings in an estimated $5 billion a year to Colombia. Few American
executives or American law enforcement officials dare confront
it.
Second, although Colombia's population
isn't generally supportive of the guerrilla, government and
business leaders enjoy equal, or at times even less, public
confidence. Although many officials and businesspeople are honest,
the spectacular incidences of graft, nepotism, and white collar
robbery, particularly of pension funds, and the general misallocation
of tax revenue has sullied reputations and trust. Confidence
inspiring infrastructure for effective tax collection and revenue
distribution has all but broken down.
Falcoff decries the role of NGOs, the
Pastrana "land for peace" effort, and urges more military
assistance to put down the guerilla:
"The present situation is also different
in its international dimensions. Both figuratively and geographically,
Colombia is a crossing point for drugs, terrorism, gun-running,
and international criminality."
The most obvious choke point to strangle
all of these activities is their key financial juncture: the
US. Yet profits from the 13 fold wholesale to retail distribution
markup of narcotics in the US market as well as revenue from
higher manufactures exports, and increasingly financial services
sales (insurance contracts) to launder the proceeds of trafficking
are fat, and US resistance is high.
What Colombia needs least is a simplistic
AEI inspired solution that demonizes only one guilty party,
provides lucrative military aid, and hopes for some sort of
defining "win". It hasn't worked for Israel, isn't
working for Iraq, and won't work in Colombia. The US has already
provided $3 billion in Korean War era ammo that US forces couldn't
legally "lock and load", as well as Vietnam vintage
trucks and other useless military aid in the Plan Colombia boondoggle.
This helped relatively few Colombian soldiers but padded many
US defense contractor pockets by liquidating their worthless
stock.
The most effective approach to help Colombia
is the most painful for the US: clamp down on money laundering
facilitated through the US financial system and underground
economy.
Only then will the US be able to claim
a productive role in curing what ails Colombia. Other US and
even NGO aid should be lent helping Colombian president Uribe
in his new, massive project to collect unpaid taxes, an endeavor
sure to bring needed revenue to both urban and rural coffers.
Unfortunately, this is yet another area
largely outside AEI's "expertise".
Jacques Kinau
writes for Academics for Justice, and San Francisco IndyMedia.
He can be reached at: JKinau@stinktank.org
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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