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April 18, 2002
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
Alexander Cockburn
Austin Cultural Limits:
Willie Nelson, Film and BBQ
April 17, 2002
Norman
Finkelstein
Behind
the Carnage in Palestine
Kristen Schurr
With the Wounded
and the Homeless in Nablus
Norman
Madarasz
Undoing
Chavez:
The View from South America
Brian Wood
Combing The Ruins of Jenin
George
Monbiot
Chemical
Coup: The CIA's Attempt to Undermine the UN's Weapon Inspector
for Iraq
Robert Fisk
Fear and Learning in America
April 16, 2002
Todd May
US
Should End Aid to Israel
Gabriel Ash
The Oilman, the General
and the Coup that Failed
Ron Jacobs
Wake
Up Some Mornin',
Find Your Own Self Dead:
The Chavez Coup
Brian Wood
Inside Jenin: Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
Jack McCarthy
Citizen
Coup: The Times,
The Post and the Coup Plotters
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
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
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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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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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April 17, 2002
From
Senator "Lunkhead" to Energy Czar:
A Year in the Life
of Spencer Abraham
By Jeffrey St. Clair
When Spencer Abraham toiled as the junior senator
from Michigan, he wanted desperately to do away with the Department
of Energy, a federal outpost that the Republicans have railed
against since its creation under Jimmy Carter. In his six years
in the senate, he never missed a chance to vote to abolish the
department and to accuse its administrators and employees of
an hysterical range of misdeeds, from treason (Wen Ho Lee) to
using the banner of environmentalism as a cover for bringing
about a new age of solar socialism.
Abraham was trounced in his 2000 senate
reelection bid and, rightfully thinking that his prospects for
employment in the private sector might be bleak, he faxed his
frail resumé (highlighting his stint as part of Dan Quayle's
brain trust) to the Bush transition team--meaning, as in all
other matters of import, Dick Cheney. When word came that Bush
and Cheney were set to offer Abraham the post as the nation's
energy czar, Abraham reportedly threw something of a tantrum.
Apparently, he had his heart set on the slot at the Department
of Transportation, where, no doubt, he believed he could do some
major league damage for the captains of industry in Detroit and
Dallas.
But time heals all wounds. Now that he
finds himself in charge of the DoE, Abraham seems to have become
entranced by its political utility. The Energy Department, Abraham
soon discovered, was not some green bunker plotting the solar
conquest of the energy market. No. It was a clearinghouse for
the oil and nuke industry, a kind of federally-endowed lobby,
which occasionally dispensed token handouts to the energy conservation
crowd. In recent years those tokens have gotten smaller and smaller.
Let's review Abraham's first year directing
the energy policy of Big Oil's newest favorite administration
(recall that the last one wasn't all that bad for the likes of
Arco and Chevron). At the top of the list is the ceaseless maneuvering
to break open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to exploration
and drilling. The Refuge (only the pro-drilling claque insists
on calling it ANWR, which sounds frightfully like an oil company
moniker) sits on the arctic tundra in the northeastern corner
of Alaska. Long a prize of the oil lobby, the Refuge is the last
unsullied swath of coastline in the American arctic, home to
polar bear, wolves, caribou, salmon, raptor nesting colonies
and the Gwich'in tribe.
Even though by bureaucratic right the
Arctic Refuge is part of Interior Secretary Gale Norton's empire,
Spence Abraham made the transfer of the wildlife refuge to the
oil industry the top priority on his energy agenda. Upon reflection,
it wasn't a particularly smart move, even if higher-ups like
Cheney were telling Abraham to go for it.
But Spence isn't the brightest bulb in
the Bush cabinet. Indeed, during his tenure in the senate Abraham
was known by senate staffers--the biggest gossips on the Hill--as
being jovial but clueless. One Republican senate staffer told
CounterPunch they referred to Abraham as "Senate Lunkhead"--that's
a certain kind of distinction in a chamber populated with the
likes of Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback.
Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is a battle
that Abraham simply can't win. And mightier men than he have
tried, from James Schlesinger (the first energy secretary under
Carter, now a pimp for Big Oil) to the arch-villain himself,
James Watt. It's the third rail of environmental politics, the
Death Star for Big Oil's deepest desires. The Big Green groups
are likely to capitulate on everything from the Everglades (witness
the recent sell-out by National Aubudon Society on Jeb Bush's
developer-friendly plan) and Superfund to ancient forests and
the Endangered Species Act. But they will not relent on the Arctic
Refuge. Why? Easy: it's the biggest fundraiser they've ever come
across and they'll fight to the death to keep it. (That also
means, of course, that many of these green groups want the Refuge
to remain perpetually at risk of development.)
Last week in a desperate attempt to secure
enough votes to override a senate filibuster of the bill to open
the refuge, Abraham played the Iraq card, alleging that Saddam
Hussein's threat to cut off oil sales to Israel's allies necessitated
opening the refuge to Exxon and Chevron. Of course, Abraham didn't
explain Saddam's threats would have the slightest impact on US
oil supplies, which have maintained an embargo against Iraqi
crude since the Gulf War.
Even former CIA head and Iraq hawk James
Woolsey didn't buy that one. "The bottom line is that we'll
be dependent on the Middle East as long as we are dependent on
oil," said Woolsey, who served as Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995. "Drilling in ANWR
is not a recipe for America's national security. The only answer
is to use substantially less petroleum."
But Abraham wasn't through. He had a
bad hand, but he was determined to play all his cards anyway.
The secretary hatched a scheme with Senator Frank Murkowski to
lure the votes of Democratic senators by proposing to add a bailout
for steelworkers to the energy bill. While the measure may have
attracted the attention of some Dems from the steelbelt, it foundered
when conservative Republicans condemned it as a boondoggle for
big labor. After six years in the senate, you'd have thought
that Abraham would have at least learned to check these kinds
of vote swaps over with Trent Lott first and not simply take
the word of Murkowski, who is deranged on the subject of oil
drilling in the Arctic.
Earlier this week Abraham's department
came up with another stupid idea: blame it on the Indians. The
DoE launched a despicable attack on the Gwich'in, the Arctic
tribe that has opposed drilling in ANWR out of concern for the
impacts on fish and wildlife, particularly caribou, that they
depend on for sustenance. Abraham dredged up a 20-year old exploration
arrangement on the Venetie Reservation outside the small town
of Arctic Village, signed off on by some tribal members. The
exploration site was not in caribou habitat and proved to be
lacking in oil reserves, but Abraham went out of his way to portray
the impoverished tribe as a band of duplicitous hypocrites in
the press, as if hypocrisy were a moral defect unknown to Big
Oil.
For their part, the Gwich'in remain undeterred.
The Refuge is a centerpiece of their spiritual cosmology, revered
as "the sacred place where life begins." "
"We depend on the caribou, as Gwich'in
people, for food, clothing, medicine, tools and spirituality,"
says Sandra Newman, a council member for the Vuntut Gwich'in
First Nation. "And in return, the caribou depend on us to
take care of the land for them so they can continue to be free."
[It was all for nothing. On Thursday
April 18, the pro-drilling forces fell 14 votes short of invoking
cloture. But true to his nature, Abraham vows to fight on.]
At the same time Abraham was bashing
the Gwich'in, he was going to bat for the big boys in Detroit,
helping to defeat once again new fuel efficiency standards for
American automobiles. Under the rosiest scenario, the oil reserves
under the Arctic Refuge will yield roughly 3.2 billion barrels.
And it would take 10 years for that oil to reach the pump, and
even when production peaks -- in 2027 -- the refuge would produce
less than 2 percent of the oil Americans are projected to use.
By contrast, Detroit automakers have the technology right now
to boost fuel economy standards to at least 40 miles per gallon.
By phasing-in that standard by 2012 the nation could save 15
times more oil than the Arctic Refuge is likely to produce over
50 years.
When tougher fuel efficiency standards
came up for a vote before the senate in mid-March, Abraham was
there to denounce the measure and lobbying senators to defeat
the package. He was so persuasive that fourteen Democrats jumped
over to his side, including Baucus-MT, Bayh-IN, Breaux-LA, Byrd-WV,
Carper-DE, Cleland-GA, Conrad-ND, Dorgan---ND, Feingold-WI, Kohl-WI,
Levin-MN, Lincoln-AR, Milkulski-MD, Miller-GA, Nelson-NE, and
Stabenow-MI. [Nearly all of these Democrats were certified as
good greens by the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra
Club's political action committee.)
Then there's Abraham's cozy relationship
with Enron, a bond forged during his senate term that continues
to this very day despite the company's leprous reputation. Even
after the Enron scandal blew up, the DoE and the State Department
have continued to go to bat for the energy conglomerate, particularly
on the issue of the Dabhol natural gas plant in Maharashtra State,
India. This monstrosity was neither needed nor wanted by the
Indian people, but came about through a combination of bribes
and arm-twisting, led by Frank Wisner, Jr (son of the famous
CIA official and suicide) who served as Ambassador to India under
Clinton and then made a bee-line for Enron's board. When the
plant predictably went under, Enron begin desperately badgering
the Indian government to cover its estimated $200 million in
loses. Cheney and Abraham were recruited to do the shattered
company's bidding. And they did, even as India was being recruited
as a fellow traveler in Bush's war on terror. To its credit,
the Indian government told the Bushies to take a hike.
But the defense of Big Oil is never done,
a loss for one is a loss for all. Thus, a couple of weeks ago,
the Bush team was still going to bat for Enron, as the State
Department and the DOE warned the Indian government once again
that its failure to "live up to its contractual agreements"
on the Dabhol plant might limit future investments in the nation
by US energy firms. A prospect that the Indian people (if not
the government) must be greeting with a sigh of relief.
[By the way, just how phoney was Enron?
This nugget gives a pretty good idea. It seems that the company
ran a mock trading floor in its Houston headquarters, complete
with desks, flat-panel computer displays and teleconference rooms.
The idea was to fool visitors and prospective investors into
believing that Enron traded commodities full-time, in a kind
of 24/7 frenzy. In fact, the equipment was only hooked up internally,
and the employee-"traders," who appeared to be frantically
placing orders, were merely talking to each other--no doubt about
how they could unload the soon-to-be-worthless Enron shares clogging
up their 401K plans.]
On the nuclear front there's Yucca Mountain,
the austere stretch of Mojave desert 100 miles north of Las Vegas
where the DoE and its masters in the nuclear industry want to
dump the radioactive waste that is piling up relentlessly at
the nation's commercial nuclear reactors. During the 2000 campaign,
Bush pledged to Nevada voters that he would hold firm against
any attempt to make Yucca Mountain the nation's nuke waste dump.
That promise certainly helped Bush win
a tight race in Nevada and (along with the Supreme Court) the
White House. But it turns out that Bush was just kidding. Within
weeks of taking office, the leaders of the nuclear industry were
given free access to the White House and the DOE and quickly
went about writing a game plan for seizing Yucca Mountain. Anyone
who'd taken the time to look at where the nuke industry's political
money was flowing couldn't have been surprised at Bush's political
pirouette.
A new report by Public Citizen spells
it out pretty clearly. The nuclear industry contributed $82,728
to Abraham during the 2000 election cycle, when he was a U.S.
senator, and spent even more money lobbying on issues dear to
the industry's bottom line, including the ill-conceived nuclear
waste dump proposal. In 2000 alone, leading nuclear energy interests
that helped bankroll Abraham's unsuccessful Senate campaign spent
more than $25 million to hire some of the highest-powered lobbyists
in Washington, D.C., including top officials from the Reagan
and Clinton administrations, records show. Eight of the lobbying
firms hired made Fortune magazine's recent list of the 20 most
influential firms in Washington.
But the nuke industry didn't stop there.
They also spent more than $25 million lobbying congress and federal
agencies on the matter-that's about a half-million a week, every
week of the year. The nuclear industry flooded Washington with
a strike force of lobbyists, totalling more 53 different lobbying
firms, for a combined total of 199 individual lobbyists. This
doesn't include the in-house lobbyists working for utilities
and other nuclear industries.
And these were no run-of-the-mill K-Street
lobbyists. Nearly half of the lobbyists hired by Abraham's top
nuclear contributors previously worked for the federal government.
The roster includes seven former members of Congress; former
acting Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler, who also was former
chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; Gregory Simon,
the chief domestic advisor to former Vice President Al Gore;
Haley Barbour, political affairs director in the Reagan White
House and former chair of the Republican National Committee;
and James Curtiss, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
These people can work political magic.
For example, only last week, Abraham and Homeland Security head
Tom Ridge came to the remarkable conclusion that shipping high-level
nuclear waste across the nation by rail and truck presents no
special terrorism risk. No wonder Ridge doesn't want to answer
any questions during his appearances before congressional committees.
Of course, Ridge does have a point. Terrorism
probably isn't the biggest concern when it comes to hauling all
that radioactive waste across country. It's much more likely
that an American city will be nuked by accident when one of the
atomic trains derails and spills its lethal cargo into rivers
and neighborhoods and onto streets. In fact, it's damn near a
statistical certainty.
Remember, as my friend David Vest points
out, this scheme to ship nuclear waste by rail from every corner
of the country to the Nevada outback is being hawked by many
of the same people who threw a fit over busing kids a few blocks
to improve educational opportunities for urban students. And,
by and large, they are the same cadre of politicians who want
to pull the plug on Amtrak as a burdensome federal subsidy.
Then there's the Bush/Abraham/Cheney
energy plan, the creation of which has been the subject of brutal
litigation between the White House, the General Accounting Office
and environmental groups. Two recently released documents give
an idea of how closely the Bush energy plan followed the industry's
script:
A March 20, 2001 email from the American
Petroleum Institute to an Energy Department official provided
a draft Executive Order on energy. Two months later, President
Bush issued Executive Order 13211, which is nearly identical
in structure and impact to the API draft, and nearly verbatim
in a key section.
In March 2001, a Southern Company lobbyist
emailed a DOE official suggesting "another issue" for
inclusion in the energy plan: so-called reform of the Clean Air
Act and related enforcement actions. The suggestion was incorporated
into the energy plan, launching the Administration's controversial
effort to weaken the Clean Air Act and retreat from high-profile
enforcement actions against the nation's largest polluters, including
the Southern Company.
While Abraham, Cheney and the other Bush
bigwigs huddled repeatedly over a period of months with the energy
elite, environmentalists were largely locked out. Abraham himself
met with more than 100 representatives from the energy industry
and trade associations from late January to May 17, 2001, when
the task force released its report. But when enviros, lead by
the corporate-friendly Environmental Defense Fund, asked for
a meeting with Abraham, his scheduler, Kathy Holloway, stiff-armed
them, saying that Abraham was too busy for a face-to-face.
One of the DOE documents released by
order of a federal court on April 10, 2002, shows that the Energy
task force gave one of its staff members 48 hours to contact
11 environmental groups to obtain their policy recommendations.
The environmental groups were given 24 hours to provide written
comments. Another DOE memo notes that staffers should endeavor
to closely scrutinize the green's comments and "recommend
some we might like to support that are consistent with the Administration
energy statements to date."
There was a final blow. In order to print
up the oil/nuke energy plan, Abraham chose not to waste a cent
from his multi-billion dollar drilling budget. Instead, he plundered
$135,615 from the DOE's mothballed solar, renewables and energy
conservation budget to produce 10,000 copies of the White House
energy plan released last May. The solar funds were even raided
to pay for the Administration's energy lobbyist Andrew Lundquist's
air ticket to Alaska to strategize on drilling in the Arctic
Refuge.
But Abraham's going to have to find a
new printing account next year, because those funds probably
won't be around much longer. The energy plan that the solar funds
financed the printing of calls for slashing the renewable energy
program by more than 50 percent.
Maybe old Spence has a sense of irony
after all.
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