Congress is Best Reason to Vote for Nader

by Alexander Cockburn

So where does the "nine Democrats" number figure in this picture? The sum total of puissant legislators who voted for Sen. Paul Wellstone's amendment, which would have taken $225 million from the $934 million and spent it instead on domestic drug treatment programs, consisted of nine Democrats and two Republicans. Here they are: Boxer, D-Calif. (co-sponsor); Grams, R-Minn.; Murray, D-Wash.; Byrd, D-W.Va.; Harkin, D-Iowa; Specter, R-Pa.; Dorgan, D-N.D.; Leahy, D-Vt.; Wellstone, D-Minn.; Feingold, D-Wis.; Mikulski, D-Md.

Notice how closely the numbers mimic the few co-sponsors of Feingold's bill to slap a moratorium on the federal death penalty. And where were those supposed liberals like Kennedy, Kerry, Bayh, Feinstein, Schumer, Torricelli, Levin or Sarbanes? If this is how they behave in opposition, why do we need the Democrats to recapture Congress?

Here's another number: 19 -- being the senators who voted in favor of Slade Gorton's, R-Wash., amendment slashing the Colombia package from nearly one billion down to $200 million in order to pay down the national debt: Allard, R-Colo.; Gorton, R-Wash.; Kohl, D-Wis.; Boxer, D-Calif.; Gramm, R-Texas; Leahy, D-Vt.; Collins, R-Maine; Grams, R-Minn.; Mikulski, D-Md.; Craig, R-Idaho; Gregg, R-N.H.; Murray, D-Wash.; Crapo, R-Idaho; Harkin, D-Iowa; Specter, R-Pa.; Enzi, R-Wyo.; Hutchinson, R-Ark.; Thomas, R-Wyo.; Fitzgerald, R-Ill.

So, here we have the alliance against folly in Colombia, cemented between Republican fiscal conservatives and the radical Democratic faction. If you toss in Feingold and Wellstone, who didn't vote for Gorton's amendment, we reach a grand total of 21 senators unpersuaded by the administration's arguments that the way to win the war on drugs here is to throw money into the bank accounts of Colombian military officers and Pentagon contractors.

The administration is fighting a counterinsurgency war under the pretext of drug interdiction, as George W. Bush accurately notes. What of the dreaded "narco-guerrillas?" As the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington sensibly pointed out last week, "The FARC, founded by Marxist guerrillas decades before the emergence of cocaine production in Colombia, imposes 'taxes' on drug lords and coca farmers to fund their multimillion-dollar military operations, its militants are rarely involved in the actual cultivation and trafficking of drugs. In fact, the right-wing paramilitary, which both the Colombian and U.S. governments acknowledge is responsible for 78 percent of the nation's human rights violations, is known to be far more deeply involved in narco-trafficking than their leftist counterparts. While the U.S. aid package will undoubtedly reduce drug production, the paramilitary groups' deep ties to the Colombian armed forces and large-scale dependence on the drug trade will invariably lead to selective eradication efforts."

But all this commotion over the Senate vote obscures the fact that the United States is already waging a major bio-war in Colombia, evoking the bio-war waged with Agent Orange against Vietnam 35 years ago. The Colombian national police force is already busy spraying from the air, with the financial backing of the United States, Colombia is getting $330 million during this year and the next, irrespective of the new Senate legislation.

As in Vietnam, aerial spraying has indiscriminately doused people, fields and livestock with poison. International observers say that the toxic effects of this spraying have destroyed vegetable crops and fruit orchards and contaminated streams and lakes, killing fish and farm animals. Several children have reportedly died after being doused by the spraying. Thus far, the hardy coca plant has been resistant to these poisons, flourishing in contaminated soil.

McCaffrey's triumph could be to wipe out all agriculture other than coca-growing. His next stroke (disclosed in the latest edition of CounterPunch, the newsletter I co-edit) is to launch a fungus developed by U.S. bio-warriors, designed to attack the coca plant and opium poppy. This fungus will, so to speak, jump the tracks and further devastate Colombian crops. Meanwhile, if conditions in Colombia prove too arduous, the drug lords will simply shift operations to Ecuador or Peru, just as they shifted from Bolivia to Colombia.

Back to the halls of Congress, and yet another number for you. In a 363-56 vote, reps. of we-the-people defeated a motion that would have withdrawn the approval of Congress from the agreement establishing the WTO. Under the 1994 laws authorizing U.S. entry in the WTO, the administration has to submit a report on the costs and benefits of membership. After the report is filed, any member of Congress can sponsor a resolution to withdraw from WTO.

Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian Republican, duly did so, arguing that U.S. entry in the WTO is illegal and unconstitutional, Paul said. "It is the U.S. Congress that has the authority to regulate foreign commerce. Nobody else." As with the Senate resolution on Colombia put forward by Gorton, Paul and such Republican legislators as Bob Barr of Georgia formed common cause with anti-WTO radical Democrats like Kucinich or McKinney.

So there's the math for you. A bipartisan coalition of about 30 senators and 56 representatives can be relied upon to do the right thing on big-ticket items like wars abroad and the WTO. Against them are ranged the massed legislators of the Permanent Government, which is presently exerting itself mightily to keep Ralph Nader out of any debating venue for presidential candidates where he might have an opportunity to lay out these realities.