Today's Stories

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hillary Reclaims Her Innner Child

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

Subscribe Online

Courting Jim Crow

Hillary Clinton Reclaims Her Inner Child

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hillary Clinton famously found her voice in New Hampshire, but it took the senator until West Virginia to relocate her inner child. Yes, she’s once again embraced the Goldwater Girl of her youth.

Once upon a time while she was still the front-runner, Hillary chastised Barack Obama for his naïve pledge to take unilateral action to assassinate by cruise missile Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda leadership if their hideaway in the mountains of Pakistan could ever be located. She said such a strike would be destabilizing and in contravention of international law. Now Mrs. Clinton, following in the footsteps of her hero Goldwater, is vowing to take unilateral nuclear action to obliterate an entire nation: Iran.

In Clinton’s mind, this political regression has been validated by her wins in the Wal-Mart Belt of Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, states where her terms on the union-busting board of Wal-Mart are viewed as a political asset.

Hillary’s neo-populism seems to have been grafted from the virulent stock of Orval Faubus and George Wallace, which fused anti-bank and anti-corporate oratory with rancid segregationist rants. (For more on the origins of the southern populist Dixiecrats read Robert Sherrill’s The Gothic Politics of the Deep South, one of the most instructive books ever written on American politics.) But whereas Faubus and Wallace actually delivered some economic crumbs to poor southern whites, Hillary offers mainly hollow and strained rhetoric. Clinton is constitutionally wedded to a stern neoliberalism, a disposition she can’t fully camouflage.

Long ago, the states of Kentucky and West Virginia entered into an economic suicide pact with Big Coal. The bill for this grim Faustian bargain has finally come due with chronic unemployment, busted unions, poisoned water, pulverized mountains, rampant environmental illnesses and chronic privation. Yet, all Clinton had to offer this desolate region was a vow to fund clean coal technologies. Clean coal is the biggest con job since energy deregulation, another fraudulent scheme unleashed in Clinton time. Low-sulfur coal isn’t clean and the latest method for extracting those black seams constitutes the most devastating form of mining yet invented: mountaintop removal. Using this barbaric method, Big Coal is steadily decapitating Appalachia and burying its valleys and hollows under mounds of toxic detritus. Communities and watersheds be damned.

Another example. Hillary came to Oregon last week. She didn’t draw 75,000 people for a speech on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland, as Obama did. Instead she headed to Beaverton, the posh suburb of Portland that is home to Nike, where she held a press conference in an empty subdivision of new upscale homes that had sat unsold for the past year. Most of the people who voted for her in West Virginia don’t earn enough in ten years of hard labor to pay for one of these houses. She communed with the developer, commiserating over the hard times of the real estate industry.

In recent weeks, the growing ranks of the homeless had camped out in front of the Portland mayor Tom Potter’s office, demanding more humane treatment. It apparently didn’t occur to Hillary to ask her developer pals to open up those vacant houses to shelter the economic refugees of the Bush era.

With his solid win in Oregon, Obama has now earned a majority of pledged delegates. He has also surpassed Clinton in super delegates. But the finality of this mathematical threshold hasn’t deterred Hillary, who vows to fight on until "we have a nominee--whoever she may be." Indeed, Clinton is now claiming incredulously that she is the popular vote leader, a number that can only be achieved if ballots cast by blacks only count as half a vote. (Obama currently leads Clinton by nearly 500,000 votes.)

Increasingly, Clinton is operating in a virtual reality programmed by her pollster Mark Penn during his downtime from working for the butchers of Colombia.  Adhering to Penn’s fatal calculus, Clinton has endeavored to re-segregate the Democratic Party electorate into demographic segments and then pitted them against each other. The Clinton campaign has intentionally inflamed these simmering antagonisms: black versus Hispanic, black versus white, black versus older women, white collar versus blue collar, young versus old, under-educated versus college grad.

Back in the 1980s, Lee Atwater constructed an illusory Big Tent for Republicans, welcoming inside the Reagan Democrats—if only to soon betray their core interests.  This was called the politics of expansion. In contrast, Clinton and Penn are cynically attempting to contract the Democratic base by provoking an internal Hobbesian free-for-all—total warfare of the factions.

What was once coded is now explicit. Clinton openly talks about her appeal among “working, hard working, white voters.” The implication here is that blacks are lazy, shiftless and on the welfare dole and that perhaps only half of their votes should count. But shouldn’t someone remind her that her husband dismantled welfare? Perhaps her former mentor Marian Wright Edelman should make the call.

Coming from a Wellesley grad who just loaned her own campaign nearly $12 million, Hillary’s attempts to peg Obama as an elitist requires a degree of chutzpah that might make Alan Dershowitz tingle with envy. But when the Clintons tag Obama as an elitist, they don’t mean primarily that he is rich (which he is) but that he’s an “uppity nigger.”

The Clinton camp has become so entrenched in their racial rhetoric that I’ve begun to wonder if they begin their morning strategy sessions with a screening of the Rodney King beating tape as a motivational tool.

For the dull-witted, Clinton’s surrogates are sent out spell it out in capital letters. Obama used cocaine (Bob Johnson). Obama’s middle name is “Hussein” (Bob Kerrey).  Obama is a master of “shuck and jive” (Andrew Cuomo). Obama is another Jesse Jackson (Bill Clinton). Obama’s story is a fairy tale (ditto). And, most recently, Geraldine Ferraro told the Los Angeles Times that Obama is a “sexist” (most black men are, right?) and she won’t vote for him if he is the nominee.

To sum up: Obama is a drug abuser, a huckster, a secret Muslim, a con artist and a misogynist. And that’s without dragging Jeremiah Wright into the scenario.

Numerically, Obama sewed up the nomination back in March. Since then the Clinton campaign has been running largely on the fumes of her own ego, at a cost of a million dollars a day.  How then can she justify persisting, especially with a campiagn freighted with such malignant themes?

Her campaign now resembles a political neutron bomb that wipes out all living contenders and leaves only the super-structure of her own aspiration standing.  Apparently, the idea is to crush the interloper Obama, either in Denver, through some deus ex machina of spineless super-delegates stampeding her way, or to have McCain do her work for her so that she can challenge the septuagenarian in 2012. If so, her motto will be the familiar taunt of the schoolhouse tattletale: “I told you so.”

If Obama survives the primaries and falls to McCain in November, Hillary will attempt to remake the Democratic Party in her own image. It will replay of the origin of the conservative DLC, designed by her husband and Lieberman to keep the party from falling into the hands of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. This time the C will stand for Clinton.

The Clintons have always been graceless and petulant in defeat. They seek to destroy any defectors from their camp (c.f., Bill “Judas” Richardson). Now that NARAL has jilted Clinton for Obama, Hillary is probably contemplating coming out in favor parental notification for teenage abortions and joining the next senate filibuster against stem cell research.

Meanwhile, Obama is daily being drained of any vestigial progressive instinct. In order to prove he’s not an appeaser of Hezbollah, Obama is pledging to beef up funding of the Lebanese army and paramilitaries, a disastrous scheme that will only exacerbate a fractious situation. If this keeps up, there will soon be demands that Obama annul his marriage to the seditious Michelle, the last affirmative reason to vote for him in my view.

With the walls closing in around her, Hillary unveiled a final argument: Karl Rove, the man John Conyers wants to put in leg-irons in the crypt of the Capitol, says she’s the better candidate against McCain. Rove also swore there were weapons of mass destruction. Clinton fell for that one, too.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

 

 

 

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