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Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
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Recent
Stories
August
8, 2003
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
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Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
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August
2 / 3, 2003
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R. Piety
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Francis
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One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
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In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
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August
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Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
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Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
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Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
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Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
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July
31, 2003
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Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
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Hull
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Army of One?
July
30, 2003
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How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
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Thomas
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Sean
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Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
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Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
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Website
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Bring Them Home Now!
Congratulations
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July
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"Journalist Spotted! Journalist
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Thomas
J. Nagy
The Belligerent Dr. Pipes
Kurt Nimmo
Tom Delay Goes to Jerusalem
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Dead Reckoning: Bush Warriors Sign Off on War Crimes
Robert
Fisk
Another Botched Raid; Another Massacre
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Did Chalabi Help Write Bush's State of the Union Address?
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McGovern
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August
9, 2003
"The
White Colin Powell?"
Marc Racicot: Bush's
Main Man
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
When the Florida recount fiasco was in full-throttle,
the Bush team called in one of its top fixers to deal with the
media and help put the finishing touches on the brusque strategy
that helped seal the election. That man was Marc Racicot, the
former governor of Montana. Many thought would be rewarded for
his efforts with a top post in the Bush White House. Although
he was on the short list for both Secretary of the Interior and
Attorney General, Racicot ended up in the cushy post as head
of the Republican National Committee, where his deft fundraising
abilities fattened the RNC vaults with a record $250 million
in soft money contributions for the 2002 election cycle.
Racicot didn't just sit on that mountain
of cash; he used it like a MOAB bomb on Democrats. He is credited
along with Karl Rove of with devising the media strategy that
yielded such great triumphs for the Republicans in the 2002 elections.
In early June, Bush tapped Racicot as
the chairman of his reelection campaign and already the corporate
loot is pouring into the Bush campaign coffers. It was an astute
choice. Although his name is hard to pronounce (Ross-Co), Racicot
presents a kinder media presence than the other visigoths in
the
Bush camp. One Republican staffer called him "the white
Colin Powell, the only two Bush advisers with any kind of sex
appeal."
Racicot, whose hair is as delicately
managed as John Kerry's, may look benign next to the frightful
visages of Rove and Rumsfeld but he's a ruthless politician who
is as far to the right as anyone in the Bush inner circle. Just
ask those who know him best: the people of Montana.
Racicot served as governor of Montana
from 1994 through 2000, where he slashed taxes, carried water
for big timber, deregulated the state's electric utilities and
moaned ceaselessly about the oppressive hand of the federal government.
Prior to that Racicot served two terms as attorney general for
the Big Sky state.
These days Montana's once robust economy
is in ruins. The current governor, Racicot's bumbling protégé
Judy Martz, gets most the blame for the crisis and lumbers along
with an approval rating of 23 percent. But Racicot's savage economic
policies laid the foundations for the wreck that now plagues
the state: record deficits, bankrupt schools and a senescent
economy.
While Racicot slashed services and taxes,
he also funneled what little money remained in the Montana treasury
into costly projects that benefited political donors. For example,
Racicot spent tens of millions of dollars on a new software system
for the state government that was supposed to minutely track
agency budgets and expenditures. Nearly a decade and $50 million
later, the system still doesn't function and the workings of
state's budget (now deep in the red) remains as opaque as the
rituals of Eleusis.
Although the state of Montana was veering
toward bankruptcy, Racicot sank $100 million into the construction
of new prisons, which were built by political donors. The problem
was that Montana was one of the few states with an overcapacity
of prison beds. The prisons went up anyway and despite a slate
of harsh new laws passed under Racicot and Martz to lock up more
Montanans the new prisons remain underbooked. Now, Montana is
desperately looking to rent out its empty cells to other states.
His cavalier approach to the state's
health care services was even more disastrous. Racicot pushed
through a $400 million scheme to privatize Montana's mental health
care system. But less than two years after it was put into place,
the new program collapsed, pushing schizophrenics and other patients
out onto the streets and off of needed medications. The state
is now faced with recreating a system that Racicot destroyed.
When Montana's schools began to falter
from the budget squeeze, Racicot offered a quick fix: log off
the remaining old growth on state lands and cycle the receipts
to the schools. This scheme, dubbed clearcuts for classrooms
by local environmentalists, ravaged Montana's forests, but did
almost nothing to help the state's beleaguered school system.
Using the same rationale, Racicot also began selling off state
park and forestlands near urban areas to his corporate cronies
for shopping centers, office buildings and subdivisions.
Montana once enjoyed the toughest clean
water laws in the country. Racicot dismantled them in 1995 when
he signed a bill backed by mining and oil companies which raised
limits on the discharge of toxins and carcinogens into Montana's
streams, allowed corporations the right to police their own conduct
and at the behest of the coal methane producers expanded the
luxury to foul groundwater to the very boundaries of polluter's
property.
This was followed by Racicot's big gift
to the strip-mining lobby. Despite the fact that Montana, which
bears the historical scars of the strip-and-run coal companies,
is the only state in the nation whose constitution requires the
reclamation of all lands disturbed by mining, Racicot signed
into a law a measure that exempts open pit mines from any responsibility
to restore the mess they make, often contaminated with cyanide
and other toxic debris.
But perhaps the biggest fiasco of Racicot's
tenure as governor was his role in deregulating Montana's electric
utilities, which allowed Montana Power Company to sell off it's
generating stations, dams, powerlines and water rights to PPL
(Pennsylvania Power and Light). In exchange, Montana ratepayers
saw their utility bills soar by more than 50 percent, from one
of the lowest in the nation to the highest.
Racicot forged a close friendship with
Bush in 1995, when the two men began working together on anti-regulatory
initiatives for the Western Governor's Association and the National
Governor's Association. The relationship between the two governors
proved so cozy that there was speculation in Montana that Bush
might pick Racicot as his running mate in the 2000. Ultimately,
Cheney picked himself for that position and the golden boy from
Montana went to work in the DC office of Bracewell & Patterson,
a Houston law firm with close ties to Bush that specializing
in advancing the agendas of oil and gas companies.
One of Racicot's chief clients during
those tumultuous early days of the Bush administration was in
dire need of a well-placed hand: Enron. Even after Racicot was
selected to head the RNC, he refused to drop Enron as a client.
His efforts to protect Enron during its time of tribulation certainly
paid off for the company's executives. While Martha Stewart faces
federal charges over a $200,000 stock deal, Enron executives
Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who bilked investors out of billions,
enjoy afternoons on the most exclusive golf courses in Houston.
After Racicot became chairman of the
RNC he moved his office to the party's headquarters a couple
of blocks from the White House. Even though he rarely went into
the law office and had no official roster of clients, Racicot
continued to pull down a six-figure paycheck from Bracewell &
Paterson.
"I have certainly provided advice
and counsel to some private people with private business activities
that have not been governmentally related," Racicot said.
"So I have done some things, but it has been very limited.
So as a result of that I have honored the terms of the employment
agreement and they were in such a frame of mind that they thought
(leading the Republican Party) was something constructive for
me to be engaged in and they acquiesced to my involvement."
The new head of the Bush campaign sees
no reason to recuse himself from such easy money now.
Jeffrey St. Clair is author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
(Common Courage Press) and coeditor, with Alexander Cockburn,
of The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Both books will be
published in October.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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