|
CounterPunch
November
26, 2002
Spank the
Donkey
Why We Should All Give Up on
the Democrats: a polemical essay
by STEVE PERRY
Another Election Day, another set of blown hopes
for Democrats everywhere. This is mainly an essay about the national
Democratic party, which ought never be confused with real people,
but in this one instance what I mean by Democrats are
the real people who continue to place their faith in the party
and to hope it can be made into more than the champion of the
status quo it's become. I mean all those other people, too, who
can't bear to call themselves Democrats (or Republicans) anymore
and don't like the way things are but see no alternative to letting
Democrats and Republicans hash it out. This is a vast number
of people we're talking about--between one-fifth and one-half
of the voting public, and beyond them the half of the country
that sees no point in voting. These were the real losers on November
5.
Time to give up on the Democratic party
once and for all. How much longer can we listen to all the plaintive,
futile pleadings to "change the system from within,"
to make the party wake up and smell the electorate? This is a
wish, not a strategy; it hasn't come true and it won't. That
so many people do still cling to the Democrats is testament to
the power of a myth--several myths, actually, but the one I have
in mind is the fiction that the Democrats turned right because
the country turned right. Any good propagandist knows the most
important lie is the big lie that frames all the others, and
this is the Democrats' big lie. Doesn't anyone remember all the
pundit-prattle about Ronald Reagan's "popularity gap,"
the gaping disconnect between his personal popularity and that
of his policies? Since the mid-1980s there has been a steady
dribble of social issues polls that have shown the American public
standing considerably to the left of its elected officials. (There
are polls that prove the converse, too. Usually they are the
ones that freight their queries with one overriding presumption:
You don't want to pay higher taxes, do you?)
However you parse the polls, there was
never any popular mandate for the Democrats' right turn. If there
had been, we would not see so many defections from an increasingly
conservative Democratic party; we would not hear so much half-hearted
apologia from beleaguered Democratic voters waiting vainly for
the day when the party veers the other way again; and there would
not be such a gigantic mass of people reduced to thinking of
Democrats as the perennial "lesser evil"--that is to
say, not what we the people want or need, but a little better
than nothing. I am going to argue that the Democrats are not
really a lesser evil, that their turn to Republican Lite in the
past generation has been as cynical as it is deliberate. But
for the moment let's take the lesser evil argument at face value
and suppose that the courts and the human services bureaucracies
do fare a little better (that is, erode more slowly) under Democrats.
Is that "democracy" in any sense? Do you really think
so little of your country and your citizenship as to accept that?
What happened
to the Democratic party?
You could say that times changed and the party changed with them,
and you would be right so far as it goes. But it had nothing
to do with the sentiments of the people. The party's right turn
was a move conceived from within and designed to make the Democrats
a more appealing vehicle for major private and corporate donors.
This past election notwithstanding, the strategy has been an
enormous success. Cash receipts have grown mightily. The business
wing of the party has generated a president who became the first
Democrat since FDR to win reelection to the White House, and
it missed electing his successor by a handful of votes (one vote,
really, in the Supreme Court). The business Democrats' hold on
the national party apparatus is complete.
The Reagan/Bush/Clinton years worked many changes in the political
culture, and none was more profound than the market revolution.
Over the past generation the American public has been relentlessly
conditioned to believe that whatever is dictated by the market--in
more guileless days, it was simply called the money power--is
sensible, reasonable, necessary. Our values and aspirations as
a society are now routinely subjected to the flummery of cost-benefit
analyses in which it's understood that the only thing that really
matters is cost. Democrats, under cover of "realism,"
are every bit as complicit in this shift as Republicans.
And where does it leave us? More than
ever, the business of America is business (and its stepchild,
war) and the business of Democrats is betrayal.
Why give up
on the Democrats now?
Here's the first thing you need to understand:
Election Day may have been a shock and a disappointment to the
national Democratic party, but it was not a failure. For all
the hits they took, the Democrats held the line where it mattered.
They did not let in any genuine political dialogue about the
central issues of war abroad or of the economy and managerial
lawlessness at home. In this they served their masters very well,
and that's really all any political party tries to do in the
end.
And how does the rank and file react? Why don't the Democrats...
If only the Democrats... If the Democrats were smart... Hold
on right there. Let's dispense with the ridiculous, shopworn
notion that the Democrats don't get it, that they are too dim
or too timid to do the things that are evident to the rest of
us: tack left, talk populist, stand up to Bush, push hot-button
issues like corporate malfeasance, health care, and campaign
finance reform.
They see these things as clearly as the
rest of us, and they choose not to do any of them. Why? Money
is the simple, vulgar answer, and the correct one. The matter
of corporate crime, to take one example, is not seen by the Democrats
as an opportunity to capitalize on Republican weakness and seize
an upper hand; it is seen as a problem shared in common with
Republicans--the problem of helping one's cash clients in a tough
time.
But illusions die hard, so the refrain
persists: Don't the Democrats see that they could win
by going a different way? Of course they do. But this isn't sports,
it's politics, and no one who supposes that the object of big-time
politics is to win every time out will ever understand what a
national political party is or how it operates. The viability
of such an operation--the continued security and power of its
chief officers--depends on two things: a steady stream of money
from stable sources, and the organizational will and means to
exclude from the party any persons or ideas that threaten the
servicing of that cash clientele. Parties like to win but it's
not the main thing.
And yes, it's also important to maintain
a critical mass of public support and party patronage; this is
exactly the Democrats' current crisis. But the people are a secondary
matter in the minds of party managers, and one they have sought
to address almost entirely with placating rhetoric. This was
the Clinton White House's express strategy from the day chief
adviser Dick Morris first whispered the magic word in Bill's
ear. That word, "triangulation," evoked a world of
cynicism and duplicity; Morris's basic idea was to hew close
to Republicans on policy (to please the party's funders and to
avoid getting outflanked on the right with middle-of-the-road
voters) while standing nominally to their left. The meager differences
between the Clintonites and the Republicans were carefully amplified
in Clinton's public rhetoric. In practice this meant assiduous
attention to public relations (we feel your pain--really we do)
and precious little else. The Morris/Clinton stratagem was predicated
on the notion that Democratic voters had nowhere else to go and
required only the barest of scraps to keep them in the fold.
So it's deliciously absurd to see all
the Democratic pundits and bloggers indignantly demanding that
Terry McAuliffe fall on his sword for the good of the party.
Not bloody likely: As far as he is concerned, whatever preserves
his regime's power is the good of the party. And there
is always the matter of cash receipts. McAuliffe, a financier
by trade and the longtime principal fundraiser for Bill Clinton,
has improved the party's cash position considerably. If he does
wind up falling on his sword (not for losing the election to
Republicans, but for losing the fundraising battle), his position
will be filled with another DLC clone who will vow to learn from
McAuliffe's mistakes and then emulate him in every important
respect.
The DLC, if you don't make a habit of
following such things, is the Democratic Leadership Council,
a creature hatched in the mid-1980s and promoted mainly by conservative
Southern and Western Democrats--people like Bruce Babbitt, Charles
Robb, Al Gore, Sam Nunn, and the winsome young governor from
Arkansas. To anyone paying attention, it was immediately clear
what they were up to. In 1986 Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers
published a little-noted book called Right Turn: The Decline
of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics that
traced the rise of the business Democrats who would eventually
constitute the heart of party leadership.
The coterie of big Democratic fundraisers
eventually coalesced behind the banner of the DLC, whose control
of the party was ratified by the successes of Bill Clinton. DLC
chieftains defined the game of politics entirely in terms of
money and set out to raise as much as possible, amending the
party platform as necessary and taking care to distance themselves
from all their old constituencies--most conspicuously black people,
but more broadly the whole American working class. Their few
gestures toward the white working class lay mainly in the realm
of race-baiting (it was Al Gore, not George Bush the elder, who
first dug up Willie Horton to use against Michael Dukakis, in
the 1988 New York primary) and no-new-tax pledges.
The rise of the pro-business Democrats
was less a coup than a summation of moves the party had been
making since the unruly events of 1968 and 1972, a period marked
by a "crisis of democracy" in the infamous phrase of
Samuel P. Huntington, meaning there was too damn much of the
stuff and it was proving unwieldy. After those tumultuous years,
the party promoted a number of changes designed to ensure that
no upstart could sway the party from the will of its national
machine. Thus we got super-delegates at the national convention,
an army of party regulars who could be counted on to back the
right horse in the event of a close race, and electoral tricks
like Super Tuesday, a carefully juggled slate of early primaries
that skewed heavily toward conservative Southern states--both
of them steps designed to prevent any left-liberal insurgent
from building a prohibitive lead in the race for the Democratic
presidential nomination. This is why the people who protested
that Jesse Jackson had no legitimate shot in 1988 were ultimately
right.
With the country's spurious right turn
as their warrant, the business Democrats spent the second half
of the 1980s and all of the 1990s crafting themselves into the
party of tough love--young, freshly galvanized "centrists"
who would cut away the cumbersome old entanglements and put fiscal
responsibility at the top of the Democratic agenda. Think JFK
and his New Frontiersmen, except that where Kennedy's boys were
hot to fight the Cold War abroad, Clinton's people were out to
facilitate one at home.
What they practiced wasn't centrism by
any recognizable standard. It always leaned carefully but emphatically
to the right. Bill Clinton set the tone for his first administration
by provoking a public fight with a relatively obscure female
rapper in order to distance himself and the party from the great
mass of black America, a gesture he spent the next eight years
underscoring with all the right kinds of coded talk about poverty,
pathology, and responsibility. (This was a winning proposition
on more than one level: A lot of upwardly mobile blacks loved
him for it.)
The Clinton years saw unprecedented rollbacks in numerous areas,
all undertaken in the name of realism and staying one step ahead
of the dastardly Republicans. Environmental protections? Clinton/Gore
tipped the scales more decisively than ever toward the preferences
of business. In the words of Jeffrey St. Clair, the coeditor
of CounterPunch and a veteran environmental writer and
activist, "Reviewing the environment during Clinton time
is like watching a preview of the Bush administration. Indeed,
many of Bush's worst ideas for the planet germinated with Clinton.
It started early and didn't let up. At the behest of his friends
in the chemical industry, Clinton moved to excise the Delaney
Clause, a valuable law which had been around since the days of
Rachel Carson that set zero tolerance for the presence of known
carcinogens in processed foods. With Delaney gone, the chemical
industry had smooth sailing for the approval of a host of new
pesticides. This also set a bad precedent for other issues: Regulative
prohibitions were going to be shoved aside in favor of 'risk
assessments' and cost-benefit analysis. This approach was soon
applied to air pollution, water pollution and toxic waste. But
it saw its most malign and far-reaching application with the
Endangered Species Act, which was essentially eviscerated under
the guidance of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
"Midway through Clinton's first
term, he signed what has been called the 'worst environmental
law of the 20th century'--the Salvage Logging Rider, which allowed
timber to be clear-cut on national forests across the country
without compliance with any environmental laws and shielded from
any kind of citizen challenge or lawsuits. In a 1996 op-ed the
great environmental radical David Brower wrote that 'Clinton
and Gore have done more harm to the environment in four years
than Reagan and Bush did in 12.' And one very mainstream voice--Jay
Hair, the former head of the National Wildlife Federation, who
died recently--compared the experience of working with Clinton/Gore
to date rape."
Business regulation? In everything from
food inspections to workplace safety, Clinton broadened the system
of voluntary compliance, a polite way of saying federal inspectors
packed up and went home and businesses were free to do as they
pleased as long as they didn't draw themselves into public scandal.
Civil liberties? After the Oklahoma City bombing, he outflanked
Republicans to the right with a domestic anti-terrorism bill
that could have been crafted by the Ashcroft Justice Department.
Then there is Clinton's crowning achievement,
welfare reform. It was his most famous "compromise"
with the evil Republicans, and you miss his real genius if you
suppose it was any compromise at all. Go back and recall the
circumstances that attended Clinton's 1996 signing of the welfare
bill. He was running for reelection that fall against a stiff,
cranky septuagenarian whose next job would be hawking Viagra--a
race Clinton was already assured of winning handily. The Gingrich
class of Republicans and their Contract with America were on
the run, excoriated in poll after poll. Prospects for Democratic
gains in Congress were good. It's a bald lie to say that Clinton's
hand was forced by political exigency; he had plenty of room
to maneuver.
And what did he do? In short order
he signed the welfare bill, and he denied a request to release
a portion of his campaign war chest for use in close congressional
races. The latter suggests that when push came to shove, Clinton
was not really interested in chasing a Democratic majority; it
better suited his purposes to be able to claim he was getting
pushed and shoved by Republicans. Publicly the Democrats would
have you believe that Clinton's legacy was a matter of doing
his best under adverse circumstances. It would be closer to the
mark to say he built exactly the record he desired, give or take
his planned second-term overhaul of the Social Security trust
fund. (Thank you, Monica Lewinsky--you saved Social Security!)
Next to Clinton, the Nixon administration was one long orgy of
fuzzy-headed liberalism.
Okay, but what
about Congress?
Say what you will of presidential politics; aren't the people
we choose to represent us in House and Senate races the product
of more homespun, democratic deliberations? No. Here again the
national party has the final say. The mechanism is simple enough.
In races for national office these days, you are nothing without
soft money, and the flow of these dollars to would-be Democratic
contenders is controlled by the party's national campaign organizations,
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). The committees
are happy to welcome all candidates at first, since they are
all prospective fundraisers for the party, but that doesn't mean
the party will return the favor to just anybody.
Listen to Bill Hillsman, the man who
masterminded the spectacularly successful long-shot campaigns
of Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Jesse Ventura in 1998. If any consultant
in the whole country should be besieged by a Democratic party
interested in winning, it's Hillsman. But in fact the national
Democratic machine despises him and actively discourages candidates
from working with him. "The party wields a tremendous amount
of power," he told me not long ago. (The interview is featured
in the October issue of The Rake.) "I was on a phone
call once with a pollster and a DSCC official and [U.S. Senate
primary candidate] Mike Ciresi. First off they wanted him to
raise a lot of soft money for the party. I told him, don't be
fooled--they're not going to put any of that money back into
your race unless you toe the party line and it looks very winnable.
"I've seen them do this with lots
of congressional candidates," said Hillsman. "They
say in effect, go raise money, and later they tell you to get
in line with the party platform or get left out in the cold.
Ben Nighthorse-Campbell's situation in Colorado was interesting
to watch for that reason. He got himself elected despite the
Democratic party and then switched to the Republicans shortly
after the election because he was so disgusted by the Democrats'
behavior."
Hey, wait a
minute...
All right, you might say: If you're going to be cynical about
it, then haven't moneyed interests always controlled, or at least
constrained, every major party in American history? Yes. But
a couple of important things have changed in the past generation.
Put simply, big money has not held all the cards in quite this
way since the Gilded Age of robber barons like Morgan and Rockefeller.
And in their day there was nothing approaching the staggering
concentrations of media that exist now, which is to say there
was not the opportunity to exclude so many voices and interests
from public dialogue. Fully half the country (the half that does
not vote, and has watched helplessly as its fortunes declined
over the last generation) is practically invisible in media except
when it commits lurid crimes. Stop and ask yourself how this
can be so--in the age of information, in the wealthiest industrial
democracy the world has ever seen.
It didn't happen overnight. An interesting
footnote on the American economy and the political economy of
the Democrats: In retrospect it's clear that the long post-WWII
boom in the economy and in real working class wages ended around
1973. After an oil recession and several years of stagnation,
the economy began growing again, but the rising tide no longer
lifted all boats. Instead the gains came to be more and more
concentrated in the top income percentiles; after the top 20
to 25 percent there were scarcely any gains at all, and more
often losses. As the majority of the country's citizens began
sliding backward in economic standing, they started fading from
the radar of the Democrats too. The party's modern accommodation
to the culture and goals of big business began in earnest during
the Carter years. It was Carter who made a point of getting Business
Roundtable denizens more involved in his administration; Carter
who touched off the wave of business deregulation--in trucking,
the airlines, and elsewhere--that most people associate with
Ronald Reagan; Carter who oversaw the end of a long if erratic
era of growing working class enfranchisement won mainly by the
labor and civil rights movements.
Aren't you
paying attention? The Democrats aremoving left.
It's true the Democrats have been making progressive noises since
their losses on November 5--hardly a surprise, given the mounting
and perfectly legitimate criticism of their me-too policies.
But note the pedigrees of their two liberal luminaries of the
hour, Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore.
Pelosi, the new House minority leader--a
position vacated by Dick Gephardt not because the party needed
new blood but because Dick Gephardt needed personal distance
from the party's troubles in preparing his own 2004 presidential
bid--is best known on Capitol Hill for being pliable and none
too bright. Her liberal bona fides stem entirely from having
represented one of the most left-leaning congressional districts
in the country, but Pelosi herself is the quintessential team
player. If ever there were a time for a Democratic party serious
about winning to roll the dice on more inclusive, less conventional
measures, this is it. Quite to the contrary, Pelosi launched
her tenure as minority leader by promising not to push
the party in new directions and (stop me if you've heard this
one) to work with the Bush administration and congressional Republicans
in a spirit of "bipartisanship." Now here is a truly
hateful word, a conservative Democratic shibboleth that ought
to send liberals and lefties fleeing for cover, since it's really
nothing more than a pledge to offer up more of the same. But
talk to any of these poor abandoned Democratic liberals and they
will eventually start burbling about the necessity of bipartisan
cooperation--as if the bogeyman falsely held up as its only alternative
(complete gridlock) would not be preferable to the governance
we're getting now.
Al Gore's latest reinvention, this time
as the avatar of a single-payer national health care system,
is a similarly cynical affair. Surely you remember Gore the environmentalist,
author of a bold and even apocalyptic treatise on global warming;
Gore's green awakening didn't stop him and his merry band from
brokering the many environmental betrayals of the Clinton years.
Gore was not interested in pursuing environmental reforms, even
the petty ones he could have won in the near term. When Carol
Browner, Al's own former chief of staff, tried to push through
some modestly tightened EPA smog regulations in 1998, big Democratic
contributors balked and the administration hung her out to dry.
Tell you what. If Al Gore secures the
Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 campaigning for single-payer,
and writes into the party platform a radical overhaul of the
health care system, I will declare myself a Democrat and shut
up about all these things.
It won't happen.
What about
the Paul Wellstones of the world? Don't they prove there's room
in the party for liberals and wild cards?
In the past couple of weeks I have been
accused of all manner of attacks on Paul Wellstone's memory.
One letter writer called me a grave stomper. This for pointing
out that, in my view, Wellstone erred in keeping such a low profile
and aligning himself with the national Democratic leadership.
The criticisms of what I wrote all come down to this: How nice
that you're so ideologically pure, friend, but those of us living
in the real world don't have that luxury.
This is ironic. In the past generation
countless people have left the Democratic party, or gotten pushed
out of it, or simply stopped caring about it, over all sorts
of issues. It's the party itself that's burdened by an untenable
ideological purity: It means to remain programmatically compatible
with its financiers and large donors at any cost, even though
that cost is an increasing and now perilous level of defection
by traditional Democratic voters who have no stake in sticking
with the party. But again, the Democrats are not in this position
because they're out of touch. This is where they have chosen
to stand. They would be happy for your help--in fact, they are
positively desperate for it, because a party can lose only so
much ground before the patronage that keeps it functioning at
ground level begins drying up--but come what may, they mean to
stick with the people who pay their bills, thank you very much.
As for Wellstone, one last time: I believe
he was a good and honest and well-meaning man, and I mourn his
passing far more than you may imagine. His work was not all for
nothing; Wellstone partisans like to point out how hard he worked
at playing defense, toning down some of the more noxious provisions
of the legislation he encountered every day.
And I have no doubt that this is true,
or that it made the circumstances of some people a little better.
But the decision to work within the party and concentrate on
legislative minutiae also kept Wellstone from using his position
to elicit public pressure on select issues and expand the terms
of debate within the party. By his own account, he set out in
the beginning to fight for radical reform in key areas such as
health care and campaign finance, principally by using his grassroots
organizing experience to bring outside pressure to bear on Washington.
I know this because he said so to me and to any number of other
reporters.
But once he reached Washington, he soon
succumbed to the blandishments of the Democratic leadership.
He bought into then-majority leader George Mitchell's swap of
plum committee assignments for adherence to the party line. He
acquiesced to Hillary Clinton and pulled his single-payer health
care proposal off the table at a time when, as either of them
should have seen, it was most needed to provide cover on the
left for the Clintons' more conservative plan. Paul Wellstone
started as an insurgent and wound up a proud if sometimes balky
Democrat. If you are cognizant of the goals with which he entered
the Senate, and honest about what became of them, it pretty much
dispels the notion that "working inside the system"
will do a damn thing to change the Democrats.
So what, we
shouldn't vote at all?
That's not what I'm saying. Local and
state races frequently offer more distinct choices than national
ones, both in the major parties (which are more ideologically
porous at this level, since campaigns for smaller offices require
less money and are less determined by the wishes of large donors)
and in smaller parties like the Greens and the Independents.
Those races are worth watching and often worth participating
in. And there's nothing wrong with the occasional judicious vote
for a national Democratic candidate when the Republican opponent
is especially noxious. I voted for Fritz Mondale on that basis
myself; or rather, I voted against someone I personally despised
in Norm Coleman. Play the lesser evil game if you want--sparingly,
lest you keep legitimizing the whole corrupt Democratic edifice--but
bear in mind the larger truth of the matter: A system that always
puts you in the position of choosing a (barely) lesser evil is
a mockery of your right to representation.
So what to do?
Start talking to people and building
things. Recognize that the most
consequential work you can do has little immediate connection
to electoral politics. The civil rights movement, to cite the
greatest uprising of American citizens in the last 100 years,
was not built on voting for pro-civil rights politicians; no
such creature even existed when it began. It was based on relentless
public pressure over a period of years. Today there are any number
of major issues to organize around: health care, corporate crime,
international trade policy, the environment, labor rights and
economic justice, civil rights and civil liberties. The political
establishment and major media will steadfastly ignore you for
as long as they can, but there are still countervailing opportunities
for outreach and collective action. The mass WTO protests in
Seattle a few years ago, and elsewhere around the globe since
then, were mainly organized on the Internet, a medium ripe with
possibilities for connecting like-minded people.
Stop fearing what will happen if you
give up on the Democrats. Your
fear of what will ensue if they wither away is really all they
have left at this point. It's time to look for higher ground.
What will happen if the Democrats collapse, after all?
The plutocrats will take over? The right will launch an assault
on our most essential liberties? The forces of empire will pursue
a global jihad against anything that stands in the way of our
continuing shaky hegemony over most of the planet's vital resources?
Look around you: It's already happening, every bit of it, and
not because "the Republicans have too much power."
It happened under Carter, under Clinton, under Democratic control
of Congress. There is only one party now, the Republicrats, or
if you prefer, the Property Party. And at this late date they
are constrained in their ruthlessness not by opposition parties
or checks and balances but by the prospect of public revolt.
Stop defining "citizenship"
by the mere act of voting. That
only makes you a consumer and a spectator, which is all that
either major party wants you to be. Where electoral politics
is concerned, make a point of learning more about the small parties
active in your area, and help them in any way you can to get
on the ballot and to get a fair hearing. In some states, Minnesota
included, a relatively small percentage of votes is enough to
garner these parties a share of government campaign funds. If
they can begin winning races for local office and lesser state
posts (for example, secretary of state or state auditor), it's
one more crack in the Republicrat wall.
Stop pretending the system isn't broken. Unless you like sham democracy and one-party
politics, I mean.
Stop pretending the Democratic party
is interested in fixing it. Or
in other words, stop trying to fix the Democratic party--because,
by the lights of "real" Democrats, the ones who own
and operate it, it isn't broken. And quit all the moaning about
the stupid Democrats blowing chances. The Democrats are not stupid.
But if you are still bedding down with them and expecting something
to change, you have every reason to wonder about yourself.
Steve Perry,
long time CounterPunch contributer, is the new editor of the
Minneapolis/St. Paul alternative weekly City Pages. Email him
directly at sperry@citypages.com.
Send a letter to the editor for publication
at letters@citypages.com
Yesterday's
Features
Susan Davis
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That Big Stick
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Shot While Escorting Jenin's School Children
Kurt Nimmo
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Chris Floyd
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Francis Boyle
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Dave Marsh
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Mark Hand
Dr. Alterman,
I Presume
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Back Alley
Loan Sharks
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November 23,
2002
Susan Davis
Now About
That Big Stick
Caoimhe Butterly
I Was
Shot While Escorting Jenin's School Children
Kurt Nimmo
Bush &
the Canadians
Chris Floyd
Rough Beast
Slouching
Francis Boyle
On Behalf
of Iraq's 4.5 Million Children
Dave Marsh
Spirit
in the Light
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Rebirth
of Student Protest in Iran
Mark Hand
Dr. Alterman,
I Presume
Ralph Nader
Back Alley
Loan Sharks
Elaine Cassel
The Shameful
Treatment of John Malvo
Adam Engel
& Ian Harvey
Poets'
Basement
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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
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
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