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<td width="343" valign="bottom"><p class="date"><!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="date" --><a href="default.html">02/09/04• Vol.
128, No. 8</a><!-- InstanceEndEditable --></p></td>
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<p><a href="punching.jsp">Punching the president</a></p>
<p><a href="as.jsp">AS Senator Simenson resigns; replacement needed</a></p>
<p><a href="sin.jsp">'Sin City' residents give police thumbs up</a></p>
<p><a href="truck.jsp">Truck backs into dining hall;injures female
pedestrian</a></p>
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<h1>Punching the president</h1>
<p><strong><font size="3">Muckrakers throw blows at Bush, oil, in forum series</font></strong></p>
<p><strong><font size="2">By Adrian Rodriguez</font></strong></p>
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<p>The Bush administration has led a destructive campaign against the world
and its poorest citizens for virtually all of its four years in office,
and Americans need to open their eyes to its global consequences, two
online investigative editors said Friday at Fresno State.</p>
<p> Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, authors and co-editors of
CounterPunch.org, visited the campus last week as part of Fresno State’s Middle East
Forum, a series of talks that began in 2001. </p>
<p> “
This administration is about oil, from top to bottom, right from the
beginning,” Cockburn said. “Of 48 members of Bush’s
transition team, 31 of them were from the oil industry.”</p>
<p> More than 150 people crowded into the University Business Center in
the afternoon, some standing in the aisles and others jammed into its
doorways
for the forum, which was sponsored by various organizations, including
the Campus Peace and Civil Liberties Coalition, the Beth Ann Harnish
Lecture Series and the Associated Students, Inc.</p>
<p> Vida Samiian, campus adviser for Campus Peace, said the audience was
larger than usual.</p>
<p> “
[Vice President Dick] Cheney set up the game plan early,” Cockburn
said. “The National Energy Development Group met behind closed
doors… and we now know they were parceling out Iraq. This was before
Sept. 11.”</p>
<p> The Bush strategy, according to Cockburn, is to take as much as possible,
as fast as possible, but not to tell anyone until it’s too late.</p>
<p> St. Clair, an environmental reporter from Oregon, described Bush as
waging a war in Iraq, and other wars as well.</p>
<p> “
There was a pre-emptive strike out of the White House on the environment,” St.
Clair said, referring to the first months of the Bush administration. “He
rolled back 200 environmental laws with the stroke of a pen.”</p>
<p> St. Clair wasn’t accusing just republican presidents. Democratic
and republican-led presidencies of the past 20 years both set the stage
for the current Bush administration’s relentless assault on the
world environment, he said. In terms of the environment, democrats and
republicans are indistinguishable, he said.</p>
<p> But, by far, Bush is the most destructive president in history, he
said, reporting that top Bush officials ordered the Environmental Protection
Agency to conceal the health effects of the World Trade Centers’ collapses
Sept. 11. </p>
<p> “
They’re experts at concealing,” St. Clair said. “Bush’s
administration will set the record for the fewest listings of endangered
species, at a time when those species are under the greatest threat.”</p>
<p> Cockburn said people can denounce Bush’s administration on and
on, but people need to eventually ask why this is occurring. To many
of the world’s poorest, it doesn’t matter whether Bush or
Clinton is in office, because their lives are still affected by America
in the same way, St. Clair said.</p>
<p> “
America is a business,” Cockburn said, “and its business
is to make money off the rest of the world.”</p>
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