Punching the president

Muckrakers throw blows at Bush, oil, in forum series

By Adrian Rodriguez

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.

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.

“ 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.”

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.

Vida Samiian, campus adviser for Campus Peace, said the audience was larger than usual.

“ [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.”

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.

St. Clair, an environmental reporter from Oregon, described Bush as waging a war in Iraq, and other wars as well.

“ 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.”

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.

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.

“ 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.”

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.

“ America is a business,” Cockburn said, “and its business is to make money off the rest of the world.”