LETTERS
LETTERS^ to the Editor Shameless Ripoff Iwas pleased to see Eyal Press's articles on U.S. corporate and military support for Indonesia ("Meet the Suharto Lobby," May issue), with the accompanying...
...Since the issue went to press, twelve members of the Peoples Democratic Party, all in their twenties, have received sentences of up to thirteen years for subversion, undermining state ideology, and inciting students and workers to demonstrate against the government...
...Pint-Sized Clinton As much as you hound Clinton for being a sold-out "Republicrat" (and rightfully so), I would have thought that you'd be able to recognize the pint-sized version of the same old thing...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...I hope this means The Progressive is going to break its relative silence about the ignominy of Peru and allow your readers to begin to understand the details of the military regime that is so ardently supported by Bill Clinton and the U.S...
...But if you read The Progressive, you get the impression that it was Press who broke this story...
...What has happened to her could have happened to any of us who traveled south to work in solidarity with the poor in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc...
...Medea Benjamin Global Exchange San Francisco, California Free Lori Berenson Thank you for the editorial "Peru's Bloody Hero" (June issue) and your criticism of the reactionary press's sycophancy with regard to Alberto Fujimori...
...Bill Clinton, the State Department, more than 100 members of Congress, and most human-rights organizations have all admitted that Lori's rights were denied...
...robber barons...
...by John Nichols, June issue) gives me a sense of deja vu...
...It's little wonder we've had our asses kicked again and again...
...Yet, with winks and nods, they have given Fujimori the message that he may do what he wishes with her...
...After having worked for the FMLN in El Salvador, she traveled south to attempt to increase awareness of the brutality of Fujimori's regime, and to allow North Americans to hear from those who are struggling against the military dictatorship...
...That incident, which I heard about from the Timor Network, was prominently mentioned in Press's article, without attribution...
...While the East Timor Action Network has done a remarkable job building a movement around the beleaguered island of 800,000, it's high time we created a movement to support the 200 million Indonesians living under General Suharto's boot...
...Congress...
...Frankly, I'm a lot less impressed with it than John Nichols seems to be...
...He has also refused to address the issue of medical marijuana for AIDS patients...
...As a long-time contributor to The Progressive who has managed to worm his way into the business press, I'm always happy to work with and share information with other journalists...
...Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, in his Progressive interview with Amy Goodman, expressed hope that there would be a "full-fledged movement" in the United States to support the democratic struggles in Indonesia and East Timor...
...corporate and military support for Indonesia ("Meet the Suharto Lobby," May issue), with the accompanying piece on the right's sudden discovery of East Timor...
...Tim Shorrock Washington, D.C...
...It was conveyed to me by people in ETAN, with whom I am regularly in contact...
...The Progressive, if it is to live up to its name, must challenge activists to rescue Lori ftpm her present horror and begin the process that will send Fujimori and his collaborators to the justice they deserve...
...and that after the Democratic Convention, if (when) he loses to Gore, he continues running on the third-party ticket...
...That said, Shorrock's claim that I perpetrated a "shameless ripoff" of his work is just plain wrong...
...solidarity activists that this treatment will visit them if they attempt to come to Peru to challenge his dictatorship...
...This infantile generalization divorced from the cruel realities of Peru buys into every self-defeating premise that monopoly capital has set out for us...
...Scott Thomas MacLarty Washington, D.C...
...In this cold-storage locker, her life will end unless her compaheros in the United States fight for her...
...Firms Influence Policy on Indonesia," was the first expose of the U.S.-Indonesia Society to appear in the mainstream press and the first to report the relationship between the U.S.-Indonesia Society and James Riady, the Lippo Group, and Freeport-McMoRan...
...They took hostages, and that's never justifiable...
...As for welfare reform, Wellstone voted to deny all federal benefits—from food stamps and housing to educational aid—to anyone (like me) who has been convicted of a drug felony (possession of marijuana, in my case...
...Russell B. Bentley III Yankton, South Dakota The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...For her crime of calling for a $3-a-day wage and the right to organize independent unions, she was sentenced to six years...
...The lead article, "U.S...
...Gary Handschumacher Antonito, Colorado Delicate Bubble Iwas bowled over by the assertion in your editorial "Peru's Bloody Hero" that "the guerrillas in Peru should not be romanticized...
...My two-part series on Indonesia ran in The Journal of Commerce on November 26 and 27,1996...
...There's little doubt that when he loses the nomination to Vice President Gore, he'll reconcile his primary supporters with a candidate who stands for so many things he opposes: NAFTA, GATT, welfare "reform," corporate health-care profiteering, kowtowing to Asian and U.S...
...It's about time the press took a hard look at the real powers behind U.S...
...Another labor leader, Muchtar Pakpahan, is languishing in jail while his trial drags on...
...That didn't happen, and Press should apologize...
...Stan Goff Raleigh, North Carolina Harvest of Suckers The possibility of Paul Well-stone as a Democratic Presidential contender ("A Candidate for 2000...
...Having been the only independent candidate to run against Paul Wellstone in 1990,1 had high hopes for his alleged progressive agenda when he won...
...Policy, Not Party Funds," began with an anecdote about the Dole campaign inviting the East Timor Action Network to a Clinton rally...
...For her efforts, Lori was given a life sentence without benefit of a fair trial...
...It is the responsibility of the U.S...
...Included in this group is a twenty-five-year-old woman, Dita Sari, a labor leader who led strikes of thousands of garment workers toiling for U.S...
...While Indonesia's best and brightest are being muzzled and thrown in jail, United States businesses from the Freeport-McMoRan mining company to Nike shoes are making super-profits off the repression...
...The author replies: Ido regret not citing the fine articles Tim Shorrock wrote for The Journal of Commerce in my piece on how the rightwing media covers Indonesia, though my article was about some of the hypocrites who suddenly discovered East Timor when the Clinton scandal broke, a somewhat different subject...
...What would the editors advise...
...In her seven-foot-by-nine-foot cell, she is caged twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day without sufficient food or water and with little protection from the cold...
...Shame on you for this self-indulgent condemnation of those who were driven into a corner and chose to fight the only way they had left...
...However, I am offended by Press's shameless ripoff of my work on the U.S.-Indonesia connection, published months before in The Journal of Commerce, and his failure to acknowledge facts and anecdotes that I first reported...
...I hate bursting anyone's delicate little bubble, but with self-imposed rules like this, fascism would prevail in Europe, South Africa would still be under the boot of apartheid, Batista's children would still be entertaining gangsters in Havana, and a slave economy would still hold sway in the South...
...Lori has dedicated herself to challenging the repression of the poor in Central America and Peru...
...For example: While talking about campaign-finance reform, he still somehow managed to raise more than $7 million for his 1996 campaign, almost twice as much as his Republican rival...
...Wellstone has talked the progressive talk, but he has never walked the walk...
...Worse, his piece included long quotes from Scott Reed, Dole's campaign manager, and Senator Feingold, that appear to be lifted directly from my article...
...policy and President Clinton's support for one of the world's most notorious dictators...
...What he wishes is to slowly torture her to death to send a message to other U.S...
...left, and particularly solidarity activists, to take up her struggle...
...Eyal Press Brooklyn, New York Profits of Repression Thanks for the great articles on Indonesia and East Timor in the May issue...
...companies like Arrow and Jockey...
...His crimes range from calling for higher wages to advocating the right of self-determination for the people of East Timor...
...And I first learned about the Riady links to the U.S.-Indonesian Society not from Shorrock but from journalist Allan Nairn...
...Let me suggest that we support a Wellstone candidacy only under the following conditions: that in early 2000 the Senator allow his name to be entered as an independent candidate, say, with the Greens or the New Party or the fledgling Labor Party (or all three in coalition), while he himself attempts to win the Democratic nomination...
...The abandonment of Lori Berenson by "progressives" in this country is disgraceful...
...The quotes from Scott Reed and Senator Feingold were also given to me by John Miller of ETAN...
...The Dole campaign's invitation to the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) was something I knew about well before reading his articles...
...I lifted zero facts and zero anecdotes from his articles...
...That the rebels take their case to the hallowed ballot box...
...Of particular concern is the ongoing silence by The Progressive, and many others, to the plight of Lori Berenson...
...Marching with the strawberry growers, giving speeches at Democratic Party dinners, and comparing himself to Robert Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt aside, when it comes to the nitty-gritty on the Senate floor at voting time, Wellstone lines up for the status quo right along with the rest of them...
...Those were our sisters and brothers, and they deserve our support and respect...
...She has repeatedly sworn her innocence, but is now facing her second year in the bleak dungeon known as the Yanamayo Prison, nearly 13,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes...
...So when Press asked me to fax him my articles on Indonesia, I gladly complied, with the understanding that I would be credited when credit was due...
...The second article in my series, "East Timor Group Slams U.S...
...Many of us supported the White House aspirations of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and Jerry Brown in 1992, both as decent and progressive as Senator Wellstone, only to find ourselves handed over to the frontrunners at the Democratic National Convention like a harvest of suckers...
...His treacherous vote in support of the Defense of Marriage Act was not his only betrayal of the gay and lesbian coalition that did so much to get him elected twice...
...Peru declared war on its own working and poor people, and every one of those "hostages" was a collaborator in that war...
...Senator Wellstone says all the right things (well, most of the right things—his support for the Defense of Marriage Act hints at a Clintonesque voice inside him whispering, "Take 'em for granted"), but he's a career Democrat whose primary loyalty is to his party...
Vol. 61 • July 1997 • No. 7
