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Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber? Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night In his special report Alexander Cockburn interviews former Wiesel colleague and Holocaust survivor Eli Pfefferkorn. What Raul Hilberg, the Holocaust's greatest historian, really thinks about Wiesel's "Night". Also in this special issue: Is Hugo Chavez Hitler or Father Christmas? Larry Lack tells the full story of Venezuela's hand-outs to Uncle Sam's Shivering Poor. Plus, Jeffrey St Clair profiles the Endangered Visigoth and traces the rise and possible fall of Rick Pombo, destroyer of nature. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories March 16, 2006 Clancy
Sigal March 15, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Winslow
Wheeler Diane
Christian Ron
Jacobs Missy
Comley Beattie Jared
Bernstein Noam
Chomsky Website
of the Day
March 14, 2006 Earl
Ofari Hutchinson Dave
Lindorff Kevin
Zeese Todd
Chretien Jason
Kunin Thomas
Palley Cockburn
/ St. Clair Website
of the Day
March 13, 2006 Uri
Avnery Dave
Lindorff Mike
Whitney David
Green Jeremy
Scahill Mike
Ferner Corey
Harris Paul
Craig Roberts Website
of the Day
Alexander
Cockburn Ralph
Nader Paul
Craig Roberts Ben
Tripp John
Strausbaugh Landau
/ Hassen Robert
Bryce Gary
Leupp Fred
Gardner Ron
Jacobs Jonathan
Scott Ramzy
Baroud Jordan
Flaherty John
Chuckman Joe
Allen Julia
Kendlbacher St.
Clair / Walker / Pollack / Vest Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
March 10, 2006 Ben
Rosenfeld Lila
Rajiva Saree
Makdisi Elena
Shore Joshua
Frank Dave
Zirin Aura
Bogado
March 9, 2006 John
Walsh Annie
Zirin Brian
McKenna Chris
Floyd Rachard
Itani Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Wylie
Harris Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day
March 8, 2006 Patrick
Bond Brian
Concannon, Jr. Pat
Williams Lance
Selfa Mokhiber
/ Weissman Walter
Brasch Vijay
Prashad Website
of the Day
March 7, 2006 Werther John
Blair Dave
Lindorff Mike
Whitney Warren
Guykema Sen.
Russell Feingold Robert
Jensen Norman
Solomon Bernie
Dwyer Website
of the Day
Ralph
Nader Dave
Zirin Vanessa
Redgrave Walter
A. Davis Joshua
Frank Nate
Mezmer Paul
Craig Roberts Website
of the Day
Alexander
Cockburn Jennifer
Van Bergen Steven
Higgs Winslow
T. Wheeler Ron
Jacobs Rev.
William E. Alberts Colin
Asher Fred
Gardner "Pariah" John
Scagliotti Seth
Sandronsky Joan
Roelofs Arjun
Makhijani Ardeshr
Ommani Diana
Barahona Ben
Tripp St.
Clair / Socialist Worker Staff Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend March 3, 2006 Laura
Carlsen John
V. Whitbeck Chris
Floyd Mohamed
Hakki Pratyush
Chandra John
Scagliotti Website
of the Day
March 2, 2006 Paul
Craig Roberts Dave
Lindorff Ramzy
Baroud Saul
Landau Joe
Allen Steve
Shore Denise
Boggs Norman
Finkelstein Website
of the Day
March 1, 2006 Mairead
Corrigan Maguire Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Faheem
Hussain Antony
Loewenstein Elizabeth
Schulte Mike
Whitney John
Ryan Michael
Donnelly Tom
Reeves Website
of the Day
February 28, 2006 Sen.
Russ Feingold Ralph
Nader Joshua
Frank Aziz
Haniffa Benjamin Dangl Norman Solomon Mike
Ferner Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
February 27, 2006 Buncombe
/ Cockburn Paul
Craig Roberts Ingmar
Lee Ron
Jacobs Dave
Lindorff Pat
Wolff Lila
Rajiva Website
of the Day
February 25 / 26, 2006 Alexander
Cockburn Lila
Rajiva Lee
Sustar Jennifer
Van Bergen / Madis Senner Justin
E.H. Smith Paul
Craig Roberts Jason
Leopold Gilad
Atzmon Zahid
Shariff Fred
Gardner Dick
J. Reavis David
Stocker John
Bomar Mike
Marqusee Pratyush
Chandra Ben
Tripp Dr.
Susan Block Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
February 24, 2006 Alan
Maass William
S. Lind Dave
Lindorff Pierre
Tristam Meg
Bannerji Robert
Jensen Mark
Engler Jennifer
Loewenstein Website
of the Day
February 23, 2006 Chet
Richards Jonathan
Feldman Joshua
Frank Ron
Jacobs Amira
Hass Samah
Sabawi Norman
Solomon Christopher
Reed Website
of the Day
February 22, 2006 Robert
Pollin Phil
Doe Pirouz
Azadi Saul
Landau Brian
McKinlay Sam
Smith Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Diane
Farsetta Website
of the Day
February 21, 2006 Paul
Craig Roberts Franklin
Spinney Dave
Lindorff Alevtina
Rea Bruce
K. Gagnon Dave
Zirin Bill
Quigley Website
of the Day
February 20, 2006 Jennifer
Van Bergen Rachard
Itani Gideon
Levy Joshua
Frank Newton
Garver Pratyush
Chandra Seth
Sandronsky Cockburn
/ St. Clair Website
of the Day
February 18 / 19, 2006 Werther Uzma
Aslam Khan Joe
DeRaymond Edward
F. Mooney Paul
Craig Roberts Elaine
Cassel P.
Sainath Thomas
P. Healy Brian
Concannon, Jr. Fred
Gardner Rep.
Cynthia McKinney Brian
Tokar Chan
Chee Khoon Andrew
Freedman St.
Clair / Walker Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
February 17, 2006 Floyd
Rudmin Gervasio
Rodríguez Gary
Leupp Ramzy
Baroud Amira
Hass Matthew
Koehler Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Debbie
Nathan Website
of the Day
Febrauary 16, 2006 Lila
Rajiva Norman
Solomon Ron
Jacobs Paul
Craig Roberts Website
of the Day
February 15, 2006 Brian
Conacnnon, Jr. Dave
Lindorff Saree
Makdisi Joshua
Frank Amira
Hass CounterPunch
Wire Robert
Bryce Website
of the Day February 14, 2006 John
Sugg Don
Santina William
A. Cook Ray
McGovern John
Ross Website
of the Day
Lila
Rajiva Christopher
Brauchli Dave
Lindorff Ron
Jacobs Mike
Whitney Michael
Neumann Website
of the Day
February 11 / 12, 2006 Alexander
Cockburn Ralph
Nader Paul Craig
Roberts Pat Williams Fred Gardner Saul Landau John Chuckman Roger Burbach Seth Sandronsky Website of
the Weekend
February 10, 2006 Carl
G. Estabrook Sen.
Russell Feingold Roxanne
Dunbar----Ortiz Saree Makdisi Website of
the Day
February 9, 2006 Dave Lindorff Mike Marqusee Paul Craig Roberts Peter Phillips William S. Lind Christine Tomlinson Innocent Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's Eavesdropping Program Will Youmans Robert Robideau Richard Neville Peter Rost Website of the Day
February 8, 2006 Ron Jacobs Stan Cox Sen. Russ Feingold Robert Jensen Rep. Cynthia McKinney Niranjan Ramakrishnan Don Monkerud David Swanson C.L. Cook Christopher
Fons Jeffrey Ballinger Website of
the Day
February 7, 2006 Edward Lucie-Smith Robert Fisk Paul Craig Roberts Neve Gordon Joshua Frank Peter Montague Jackie Corr Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
February 6, 2006 Christopher
Brauchli Robert Fisk John Chuckman Jenna Orkin Paul Craig
Roberts
February 4 / 5, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Mike Ferner James Petras Alan Maass Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Bill Glahn Saul Landau Laura Carlsen James Brooks Mike Roselle John Holt Sarah Ferguson William S.
Lind Niranjan Ramakrishnan Seth Sandronsky Derrick O'Keefe Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Elisa Salasin St. Clair / Vest Stew Albert Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
February 3, 2006 Toufic Haddad Heather Gray Tim Wise Conn Hallinan Eva Golinger Daniel Ellsberg Dave Zirin Robert Bryce Website of
the Day
February 2, 2006 Winslow T.
Wheeler Stan Cox Rachard Itani Mike Whitney Amira Hass Norman Solomon Michael Simmons Christopher
Reed Website of the Day
February 1, 2006 Sharon Smith Jason Leopold Cindy Sheehan Joseph Grosso Earl Ofari Hutchinson Steven Higgs Robert Robideau R. Siddharth Jim Retherford Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
the Day
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March 16, 2006 Community Farming in LA Neoliberalism at the Garden Gate By TOM PHILPOTT The fate of LA's South Central Community Farm, the nation's largest community garden, hinges on a dubious back-room deal between a developer and an ambitious city attorney. According to the Los Angeles Times, though, it's all pretty straight-forward. "It would be nice to keep the South Central Community Garden, an island of lush kitchen crops covering 14 acres amid the industrial warehouses, packing plants and junkyards that stretch for miles in a seemingly endless sweep along Alameda Street," the paper declared in a March 11 editorial. But the garden sits on private property, the Times continued, and its owner "has every right to kick out the people who have been squatting there for more than a decade." And the putative owner, Brentwood developer Ralph Horowitz, is exercising his right to the hilt. He has evicted the gardeners, who are now clinging to the land on the strength of a court-ordered stay that expires March 20. In its place Horowitz plans to erect a warehouse-possibly for Wal-Mart. The garden lies conveniently near the Alameda Corridor, a $2.4 billion city project designed to facilitate the flow of goods shipped into the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports through the metropolitan area. Since its completion in 2002, big-box retailers have scrambled to build warehouses in South Central. If Horowitz and his apologists at the Times have their way, the 350 families who tend plots at the garden, all of who whom live under the poverty line according USDA's guidelines, will have to find a new source of fresh food. Although they've created a "special, almost magical, place," the Times opined, "no magic is so strong that it erases a landowner's right to either his property or its fair value." Irony abounds here like vegetables in a well-tended garden plot. Most of the plot holders are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. A generation of neoliberal policies in Latin America has turned smallholder farming there into an economic disaster, sending legions of displaced farmers north in search of gainful employment. These immigrants-whose hard work for low pay has helped underwrite the U.S. inflation miracle, keeping interest rates low so consumers can, well, consume-find few opportunities to grow their own food here in El Norte. In this case, when they did gain access to kitchen plots, the invisible fist of neoliberalism swooped down again, powered as always by property's inalienable right. Yet the ironies go deeper than double-displacement-deeper even than plunking a big-box warehouse, groaning with goods manufactured by low-wage workers in China, on top of a food source for low-wage Latino workers in the United States. To understand fully the brazenness of Horowitz's power play-and the feebleness of the Times' response to it-you have to sift through the details of how the developer gained title to the land. Like most urban community gardens, this one sprang up on land that no one much wanted originally. In the late 1980s, the city seized the land under eminent domain from an investment group led by Horowitz. Horowitz's investment company ended up receiving $4.7 million in compensation. The city's plan: to build an incinerator to generate electricity by burning trash. Most people don't like to live amid the stench of garbage, so the neighborhood successfully organized to stop that project. By the time of the Rodney King rebellion in 1992, the lot had become trash-strewn and abandoned. The city agreed to allow the Los Angeles Food Bank to invite neighborhood residents to transform it into a community garden. By all accounts, neighborhood residents rallied around the asset, turning it into a vital source of fresh food in an area with few grocery stores. Here is how Dean Kuipers, whose piece in the LA CityBeat for Jan. 26, 2005 remains the best account of the farm's plight so far, describes it: "The contrast with community gardens elsewhere in the city is shocking. These aren't tiny weekend projects with a few tomatoes and California poppies. The 330 spaces here are large, 20 X 30 feet, many of them doubled- and tripled-up into larger plots, crammed with a tropical density of native Mesoamerican plants -- full-grown guava trees, avocados, tamarinds, and palms draped in vines bearing huge pumpkins and chayotes, leaf vegetables, corn, seeds like chipilin grown for spice, and rank upon rank of cactus cut for nopales. The families who work these plots are all chosen to receive one because they are impoverished by USDA standards, and use them to augment their household food supply. These are survival gardens." But the birth of a thriving, productive community garden wasn't the only thing that changed in the area after the King riots. In the 1990s, the city of Los Angeles dropped a cool $2.4 billion to build out the Alameda Corridor, "a modern rail and big-truck super-pipeline from the Port of Los Angeles straight through the warehouses of South L.A. and Vernon," Kuipers writes. And that made the once-depressed warehouse district an important hub for big-box retailers to organize the booming influx of goods from points west, including China. In turn, South Central land suddenly became very valuable. In his dealings with the city in the 1980s, Horowitz had retained right of first refusal if the city ever decided to sell the land. In 2003, after repeated lawsuits had failed to force the city to resell it to him, he cut an out-of-court deal with city attorney Rockard "Rocky" Delgadillo. The city sold Horowitz back the parcel of land for $5 million. His campaign to bulldoze the garden began soon thereafter. Here is where the story really gets interesting. In its March 11 2006 editorial, the LA Times averred that "the bottom line is that the courts ruled for Horowitz." But that's not true. Horowitz regained the land in a back-room deal with Delgadillo, not in court. South Central Farmers spokesperson Tezozomoc has been a tireless researcher and chronicler of this story. In his work inside and outside of the garden gates-Tezozomoc is studying for a masters' in linguistics at California State University, Northridge-the man has given new meaning to the old Gramscian phrase "organic intellectual." Tezozomoc told me that back in 1994, the city valued the land at $13 million when it shifted the title from one city bureaucracy to another. "How can it have been worth $5 million in 2003, when the city itself said it was worth $13 million in 1994-before the Alameda corridor was even close to being finished?" Tezozomoc says. The farmers are now suing the city to reverse the deal, on the grounds that it sold the property from under their feet without consulting them, at a price far below market value. Horowitz is in turn countersuing the farmers, claiming that they're abusing the legal system. "How are you going to sue 350 poor families for almost a million dollars?" Tezozomoc asks. Tezozomoc suggested that I look closer at the dealings between Horowitz and Delgadillo, the city attorney who gave him such a sweet deal on the farm tract. Rocky Delgadillo is an interesting figure. A Harvard law alum, he's a darling of the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Institute, which named him one of its "100 to Watch" in 2003. In a gushing profile on the DLC's Web site, Delgadillo describes his path from big-time entertainment lawyer to selfless public servant. His move, like the birth of south Central Farm, hinged on the Rodney King rebellion. On the day the infamous acquittals, Delgadillo says in the DLC piece, "I felt a great sense of shock but also a great sense of purpose. Coming from the neighborhood I did, I felt fortunate for the opportunities I had been given. . And my parents always taught me I had an obligation to give something back. I knew it was my time to go back and help my community." By 2003, he was handing his community's biggest chunk of green space over to a Brentwood-based developer at a cut rate. Perusing LA's Ethics Commission web site at Tezozomoc's urging, I found Ralph Horowitz bolstering Delgadillo's war chest for the city attorney race with the maximum donation of $1000 in 2000. The only other local politicians Horowitz is on record giving money to are Eric Garcetti and Victor Griego-both of whom, Tezozomoc reports, have supported Horowitz's bid to pave the garden. Horowitz co-owns the South Central Community Farm property with something called Shaghan Securities, which gave Delgadillo $1000 in 2001; and with Jack Libaw, who handed Delgadillo $500 in 2001. (Jack's brother Evan also gave councilman Griego $500 in 1999.) As with Horowitz, these men are on record donating cash only to politicians who have directly benefited their bid to regain control of the Farm property. When you do a search on the Ethics Commission Web site of Delgadillo's contributors and the term "developer," a list of seemingly interminable length emerges. Like the LA Times itself, this fellow resides squarely in the pocket of the class that makes dirt fly in Los Angeles-"give back to my community" prattle aside. Delgadillo is now running for California Attorney General. But this story is about more than back-room deals between politicians and developers and the craven daily newspapers that coddle them. It's about the contours of civic policy in an era of broad neoliberal consensus. To build the Alameda Corridor-the project that made South Central Community Farm so attractive to Horowitz-the city of Los Angeles cobbled together $2.4 billion. According to a press release from the US DOT's Federal Highway Administration states, the money came from: "$1 billion raised by revenue bonds issued by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $400 million directly from the ports, $460 million provided by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and a $400 million loan from the U.S. Department of Transportation." That's an impressive array of bureaucracies united behind a single project. The ideology behind Alameda couldn't have been more coherent. On the corridor's 2002 debut, U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta declared that: "The Alameda Corridor will help the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accommodate the increasing trade growth in the future while helping our national economy capitalize on southern California's standing as a major trade hub of the Pacific Rim." The facilitation of global trade, then, receives the unquestioned backing of state and federal authorities. Urban farming, with its myriad environmental and social benefits, gets different treatment. Tezozomoc tells me that LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who gained office last year amid an outpouring of liberal self-congratulation, attended South Central Community Farm meetings during the campaign and "told us what we wanted to hear." Since then, though, "Villaraigosa has disappeared." In one of his few recent public pronouncements on the situation, the mayor suggested that the farmers raise $16 million in private donations and buy the tract outright from Horowitz. (Note the tacit admission: the city severely undervalued the land by selling it for $5 million in 2003). Thus are the costs of global trade socialized, while low-wage urban workers are left to fend for themselves in the free market. Note: An earlier version
of this story stated that Victor Griego, to whose political campaign
Ralph Horowitz once donated money, served on the LA City Council.
Actually, he was defeated in his Council bid. The author regrets
the error. Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, N.C. In his spare time, he writes about the political economy of food. He can be reached at: tom@maverickfarms.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org. |