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Pinochet: The final count

The general turns out to be a coward. When Chilean police knocked on Augusto Pinochet's door and threatened to slap the cuffs on him, Pinochet fainted.

Pinochet was placed under house arrest on Jan. 28 for his role in ordering the massacre known as the Caravan of Death, one of his innumerable crimes in his 17 years as dictator of Chile. Pinochet had already deployed the "doddering don" routine, feigning the Alzheimer's disease that afflicts his pal Ronald Reagan. It got him out of England last fall. And it may yet save him from culpability for the killing of more than 3,000 people during his years of terror.

Pinochet's increasing desperation probably stemmed from the fact that right there in Chile, his minions, loyal these many years, are beginning to turn on him to save their own skins.

Reagan, Clinton and the spectrum of mainstream punditry

The power to depict history is entangled with the power to create it. George Orwell observed long ago: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." And so it is in 2001, as American media outlets draw conclusions about the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

For conservative pundits, the two are open-and-shut cases of virtue and depravity; honor and its absence. The Gipper's recent 90th birthday brought an outpouring of tributes from top Republican image-crafters and media commentators, often one and the same. Reagan is now "lauded and embraced not only by the country but by its opinion leaders, its media, its historians and elites," Peggy Noonan rejoiced.

Bill heads for Harlem

Gore delivers homilies to journalism students in Colombia University, scarcely more than a stone's throw away from where his erstwhile boss is now proposing to establish an office in Harlem, N.Y., on 125th Street. Each has found his appropriate setting: the defeated veep pouring earnest banalities about journalism and politics into the eager ears of ambitious high-fliers already sending their resumes and worthy clips to the New York Times; Clinton, the moral reprobate, fleeing a blizzard of criticism for auctioning a pardon to a billionaire crook by setting up shop among the poorer folk.

Reporting on the fight against AIDS in poor nations

In Africa, 17 million people have already died of AIDS. In developing countries around the world, twice that many are now HIV positive. Such statistics are largely unfathomable. And news accounts rarely explore basic options for halting the deadly momentum.

But during the past several weeks, some major U.S. media outlets have taken bold and valuable steps in coverage of the global fight against AIDS. Mainstream journalists are making headway in reporting on a crucial issue: How can life-saving drugs get to poor people who need them?

Time magazine published a 20-page cover story in its Feb. 12 edition, combining stark photos with text about AIDS and its victims in Africa. "We have no medicines for AIDS," says a South African doctor. "So many hospitals tell them, 'You've got AIDS. We can't help you. Go home and die.'"

McKangaroo court in PanAm 103 stunner

Libya's Muammar Qaddafi said before the verdict on the two Libyans that the three Scottish judges had three options: to acquit, resign or commit suicide. In the event, the canny trio took a fourth course, which was to find one Libyan, Abdelbaset al Megrahi, guilty of the murder of 259 passengers on PanAm Flight 103 and 11 residents of Lockerbie in December 1988, and the other, Al Amin Fhimah, innocent.

Qaddafi is now thundering his outrage from Tripoli, Libya, to the gratification of many in the West, but Libya's leader has a point: The evidence the judges used to find Megrahi guilty is entirely circumstantial and extraordinarily weak. It is with good reason that Robert Black, professor of law at the University of Edinburgh and the man who persuaded Qaddafi to release the two Libyans for trial in Holland, denounced the verdict as "astonishing."

<I>How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America</I> Updated Edition Now

Now available at independent bookstores!

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Updated Edition Volume 4, by Dr. Manning Marable, in the South End Press Classics Series

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, a leading text for courses in African-American politics and history, has been central to the education of thousands of political activists since the 1980s, selling more than 30,000 copies in its first edition. In this updated edition, Marable examines developments in the political economy of racism in the United States and assesses shifts in the American political terrain since the first edition was published. Marable has updated all of the tables and charts on African-American poverty, health, employment, education, and spending, as well as other demographics.

You can't trade the cross for the cookie jar

AUSTIN, Texas -- Welcome to George W. Bush's world of fuzzy policy thinking. If you find yourself confused, befuddled or confounded by his recent proposals, don't worry about a thing. You understand them perfectly. They just don't make much sense.

Let me see if I can help with some of your questions:

What, you wonder, does drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have to do with solving California's energy crisis? Absolutely nothing, so don't waste time trying to find the connection. Less than 1 percent of California's electricity comes from oil.

Will allowing power plants in California to pollute more help solve the energy crisis there? No, Bush is just misinformed on that point, according to environmentalists, California state officials and energy-industry spokesmen.

Is there anything that the president can do about the California crisis? Yes, he might impose a temporary cap on wholesale electricity prices, but he has already announced that he will not, thus foreclosing (if nothing else) a useful threat.

From the global south side of the media looking glass

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- The question, from a participant here at the World Social Forum, was polite and understated: "Sometimes, one wonders if the poor political consciousness and the lack of information about the world of the standard American is not one of the problems of the world today. Do you think we all could help in some way to get Americans more aware of the rest of the world?"

The question -- directed at me because I'd just given a speech -- hung in the air while my brain fumbled for a fitting response. Programming decisions by U.S. media executives loom large at home and abroad. A hundred years ago, when Queen Victoria died, the sun never set on the British empire. Today, around the world, the market shares are shimmering for AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Building new schools in Columbus: Debt financing is the wrong way to go

More and more Americans are seeing politicians use government-incurred debt as a vehicle for paying off contributors to political campaigns, raiding the public treasury, undercutting the personal income-tax base, stratifying the nation’s wealth, and, in general, wasting a lot of tax money. These treasury raids are occurring at all levels of government. Examples are:

National notes from San Juan Hill to Chengue

What else did Bill Clinton do in those final hours of his presidency? Let's see, he gave Teddy Roosevelt the Medal of Honor and boasted in the accompanying speech on Jan. 16 that in 1993 he'd broken with the usual policy of incoming Democratic presidents who would pull the portrait of T.R. off the wall above the mantelpiece in the White House's Roosevelt Room and put up Franklin D. Roosevelt's portrait instead. Then the incoming Republican Commander-in-Chief would reverse the process. Not our Bill. He kept T.R. up on the wall, triangulating right from the start.

On Jan. 16, Bill said it was high time to give T.R. the medal for which he had been recommended right after the charge up San Juan Hill. Exit Bill, enter the new team, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, who now has a chance to live up to those fine words of his to the Republicans massed in Philadelphia for their convention last August. Powell told the plump delegates they should not forget the poor and the afflicted.

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