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Today's Stories

November 4 / 5, 2006

Ralph Nader
Failure Across All Fronts

November 3, 2006

Laura Carlsen
Day of the Dead in Oaxaca

Stephan Said
Honoring Bradley Will

John Stauber
"Victory in Iraq:" The PR Machine Behind Bush's Favorite Slogan

Mike Whitney
Baghdad is Surrounded

Joshua Frank
DNC Deja Vu

Victoria Furio
More Than Timetables

Tammara~85,441
They Say He is Coming Home

Stuart Croswaithe
Beatings and Sugar Plums: New Labor's War on the Kurds

Missy Beattie
Bush Shock

Website of the Day
Howlin' Wolf


November 2, 2006

Winslow T. Wheeler
The US Body Count in Iraq: an Analysis of Who is Dying and How

Paul Craig Roberts
Evil is as Evil Does

Dave Lindorff
Kerry Out: the Joke's Still on Us

Uri Avnery
The Lovable Man? Lieberman and the Decline of Israeli Democracy

Jeff Birkenstein
Smearing Harold Ford in Black Face

John Ross
Slave Labor in Private Prisons

Zoltan Grossman
Recharging the Anti-War Movement

Eveyln Pringle
The SEC's Probe of Halliburton: Is Cheney Being Fitted for a Striped Jumpsuit?

Christopher Brauchli
Drug Profits and PACs: Why Big Pharma Pushes the GOP

 

November 1, 2006

Alan Dershowitz v. Bruce Jackson
On Torture

Brian Tokar
Running on Hype: the Real Scoop on Biofuels

Fred Leonhardt
Democrats, Sex Crimes and the Press: the Goldschmidt Affair

Richard W. Behan
Triumph of the Petropublicans: Bush's Other Civil War

Brenda Norrell
Indigenous Opposition to the Border Wall

Charles Sullivan
Spoils of Corruption: Who Will Stand Up When America Goes Wrong?

Ron Jacobs
Hell is Rising in Oaxaca: interview with a Oaxacan Rebel

Mike Knapp
Green Stench in Minnesota: the Commissioner and the Hog Lot

Moshe Adler
The Temptations of a Union Boss: the Case of Brian McLaughlin

Walden Bello
Chain Gang Economics

Lee Ballinger
The Collapse of Hip Capitalism: How Tower Records Committed Suicide

Joshua Frank
Party in a Cage: Snake Oil and the Midterm Elections

Carl Gelderloos
Cheerleading the Massacre in Oaxaca: an Open Letter to the Washington Post

Peter Rost, MD
Panic in Big Pharma

Saul Landau
Bush's Anti-Terrorism Record: Don't Look Too Close

Website of the Day
The Meatrix


October 31, 2006

William S. Lind
The Third and Final Act: Iran

Stephen S. Pearcy
Dem Candidate's Wife Urges Cindy Sheehan Not to Protest Iraq War

Uri Avnery
Who's Afraid of an Iranian Bomb?

Michael Colby
Corporations Win Again!: Bush Opens National Parks to Bio-Prospecting

Sunsara Taylor
A No-Win Election for Women

Ben Beachy
Targeting Nicaraguans' Stomachs: 11th Hour Election Meddling by the US

Edward Humes
Nine Words: America's Disservice to Veterans

Roger Burbach
The Meaning of Lula's Victory in Brazil

Subcomandante Marcos
A Communique from the EZLN on Oaxaca

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Funny Business in the Booth: Vote for James H. 'Jim'

Sharon Smith
Those Damned Democrats

Website of the Day
Parks Not for Sale

 

October 30, 2006

Robert Fisk
Dirty Bombs Over Lebanon: Did Israel Use Uranium Weapons?

Bruce Jackson
Normalizing Torture

Norman Solomon
I Was Wrong About Thomas Friedman, the World's Wealthiest Pundit

Lance Selfa
Liberal Doormats: Tread on Us

Ali Khan
The Veil and the British Male Elite

Lee Sustar
European Islamophobia: Fanning the Flames of Hate

Robert Jensen
The Death of Empathy

Akiva Eldar
Lieberman: Making Haider Look Good

Tim Montague
The Natural Step to Eco-Villages

Brian M. Downing
Evil in the Valley: Civilian Massacres, From Vietnam to Iraq

Website of the Day
Alien Impeachment


October 27 / 29, 2006
Weekend Edition

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hogwash: Fecal Factories in the Heartland

Maher Arar
The Horrors of Extraordinary Rendition: a Personal Account

David Rosen
Perversions of Power: Mark Foley and the Bush Administration

Gregory Elich
"A Bursting Boiler at Russia's Doorstep:" Why Bush is Seeking Confrontation with N. Korea

Tom Barry
Fear and Loathing in the North: an Apartheid Fence in America?

Jeff Taylor
Democrats By Default?

Dave Lindorff
Why Nancy Pelosi is Wrong

Ron Jacobs
The General Who Called Out the Devil: the Politics of Hugo Chavez

Maurus Chino
Hauba Hanu: Oppression Affects All People

Christopher Brauchli
Veiled Threats: the Global War on Fashion

Sherwood Ross
The Wages of Whistleblowing: Why Bunny Greenhouse Sits in a Corner

Rev. William Alberts
In Search of a Real Inter-Religious Dialogue on War and Justice

Aseem Shrivastava
Pushing India Toward a "Dollar Democracy"

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
Bush's Mea Culpa Speech, First Draft

Russ Fine / Dee Fine
Of Peters and Principles: Learning About Sex and Hypocrisy from the GOP

Seth Sandronsky
Social Security: the Distortions of Sebastian Mallaby

Michael Carmichael
Rogue President: Midterm Meltdown

Joe Allen
The Legacy of Gillo Pontecorvo: a Maker of Revolutionary Films

David Vest
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Landau, Engel and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Safely Home

 

October 26, 2006

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Islamic Fascism?: Inflammatory Ironies

Carlos Zorrilla
The Police Raid on My House: Trumped Up Charges and Collusion Between a Mining Company and the Government of Ecuador

Paul Craig Roberts
The Crimes of Greed vs. the Crimes of Government: If Enron's Skilling Gets 24 Years in Prison, How Many Should Bush and Cheney Get?

Mike Whitney
The Charnel House of Baghdad

Lily Hughes
A Cruel and Unusual Reality: Inside the Texas Death House

Jennifer Matsui
Madonna's African Safari: The Great White Baby Hunter

Tim Matson
How to Save Vermont

Stephen Fleischman
Like a Soldier: Benchmarks, Timelines and Lies

Missy Beattie
The Blood of October: Are We Sure Barney Still Supports This War?

Patrick Cockburn
From "Mission Accomplished" to "Mission Impossible" in Iraq

Website of the Day
Open Letter to The Nation

 

October 25, 2006

Michael Donnelly
Ethnicity and Baseball

John Stanton
The Vindication of Sibel Edmonds

John Ross
Upheaval from the Bottom

Conn Hallinan
Hunting Hugo: When It's About Oil Nothing is Off the Table--Not Even Assassination

Robert Jensen
Academic Freedom on the Rocks

Johnny Barber
Drinking Tea with Hizbullah

Bruce K. Gagnon
Space Cowboy: Bush's War on Heaven

Daniel McGowan
Elie Wiesel for Israeli President?

James J. Brittain
Uribe's Failure to Learn from Colombia's Past

Peter Harley
Afghanistan in 3-D

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Minister of Strategic Threats

Shepherd Bliss
The Bioneers and the New York Times

Website of the Day
The Price of Staying the Course

 

October 24, 2006

John Walsh
The Book of Rahm: Emanuel's War Plan for Democrats

M. Shahid Alam
Not All Terrorists Are Muslim: the Latest Falsehood from the Advocates of Civilizational War

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Silence at Home, as America Eats Her Young

Michael Phillips
The Story of My Kidnapping in Nablus: "I Never Feared for My Life"

Dave Lindorff
Truth and Consequences on Iraq: Bush's Latest Cut-and-Paste War Plan

David Phinney
A US Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Labor Trafficking Used to Build World's Largest Embassy

Laura Carlsen
Food Insecurity: the World Needs Its Small Farmers

Pierre Tristam
The American Way of Gore

Marguerite Rose Jimenez
"About That Trip to Cuba:" When the FBI Came Calling

Website of the Day
Tampon Terrorists

 

October 23, 2006

Saree Makdisi
Israel's Cluster Bomb War: "What We Did Was Insane and Monstrous"

Joshua Frank
The Antiwar Movement and Independent Politics: an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Fred Gardner
What Have California Doctors Learned About Cannabis?

Ralph Nader
The End of Habeas Corpus and the Belligerent Despot-in-Chief

Ron Jacobs
Bush's Clark Clifford: James Baker Wants a Kinder, Gentler War

Norman Solomon
Punditry Without Consequences: Channeling Thomas Friedman

Richard Manning
Outside the Market: We Need and Owe Rural People

Neil Kitson
Canadians in Afghanistan: Bloody, Unbowed, Stoned?

William MacDougall
The Socialist, the Columnist, His Wife and the Prostitute

Gilad Atzmon
Surviving the Board of Deputies

Werther
The Evening of Empire

Website of the Day
Different Drummer: Internet Coffeehouse Movement

 

October 20 / 22, 2006

Alexander Cockburn
The Myth of Microloans

Gary Leupp
How the US Declared War on North Korea

Brian Cloughley
What Are They Dying For?

Dave Zirin
Pat Tillman's Brother Breaks His Silence

William Blum
Don't Look Back: Who Said Clinton Didn't Kill Anybody?

Christopher Brauchli
The Cronies' War

Winslow Wheeler
The Mad Logic of Pentagon Spending: As Costs Rise, Readiness Declines

Michael Donnelly
GOP Death Slide: Is the Party Really Over?

Fred Gardner
Corporate Drugs Useless Against Alzheimer's

Susie Day
How to Stay Out of Gitmo

Lucinda Marshall
Behind Closed Doors: the Invisibility of Domestic Violence

Fred Wilcox
The Second Palestinian Intifada: History of a Struggle for Survival

Alan Maass
Standing Up Against Racism at Columbia: a Wake Up Call to the Passive Left

Lee Sustar
A Bipartisan Border Wall: New Phases in the Crackdown on Immigrants

Ariadna Theokopoulos
Shame on You, Dr. Warf: Hail the Epidemiologist in Chief

Missy Beattie
Surges: the Dow and the Death Count

CP News Wire
Bush's Paraguay Land Grab: Hideout or Water Raid?

CP News Services
Sexually Repressed Republicans: Robert Bork, Riveted

Poets' Basement
Davies, Engel, Buknatski and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Scenes from Oaxaca

 

October 19, 2006

Elaine Cassel
The Bush Administration's Assault on Defense Lawyers

Col. Dan Smith
Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine: Cracks in the Bush / Blair Axis

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
North Korea's Nuclear Test: a Q & A

Josh Gryniewicz
Wal-Mart Tightens the Squeeze on Workers

Amira Hass
What is 20 Tons of Explosives?

Eric Holt-Gimenez
Poison and Famine in the Fields: How the Agri-Food Industry's Deadly Cycle Feeds Immigration

Jesse Hagopian
Arrested Democracy: On Trying to Ignore Aaron Dixon

Sam Husseini
How Third Parties Can Solve the "Spoiler" Problem and Win Elections

John Weisheit
A Gathering of Water Buffaloes: Feds Celebrate Death of the Colorado River

CP News Service
A Plea to U2 From Africa's Children: Stop Bono Before He Kills Again

Website of the Day
George W. Bush: Hollywood Producer

Art Gallery of the Day
Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings in Manhattan

 

October 18, 2006

Joshua Frank
Cindy Sheehan's Lesser Evilism: Democrats or Bust?

Dr. Curran Warf, MD
Slandering Sound Science: Bush's Attack on the Lancet Iraq War Death Study

Saul Landau
Bush's Foley: Will the Dems Blow It?

Tom Barry
The Politics of Fear

Bruce Jackson
Thundersnow: a Report from Buffalo

Dave Lindorff
Loveless Among the Ruins: Even Repubs Flee Bush's Failed Middle East Policy

Frederico Fuentes
When Cochabamba Said "Enough": Bolivia's Blow to Neoliberalism

Michael Simmons
Greetings from Echo Park: an Open Letter to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner

Daryll E. Ray
The Root Problems in American Agriculture

Kate Doyle
The Dead of Tlatelolco

Website of the Day
The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee

 


October 17, 2006

Michael Neumann
Hit and Run: Guerrilla Reviewing

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Test, Political Flare: Interpreting the Physics and Politics of N. Korea's Nuclear Test

Stephen S. Pearcy
The Interrogation of Julia Wilson: Secret Service Grills 14 Year-Old Artist

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan Reconsidered: The Taliban Aren't Gone, Women Haven't Been Liberated

Al Krebs
The Corporate Assault on Zoning

David Underhill
Politicus Interruptus: Come Back, Jo Bonner

Daniel Wolff
NY's Iraq Veterans Against the War Needs Your Help ... Now

James Brooks
Desirable Duds: Israeli / US Cluster Bombs Litter Lebanon

Website of the Day
Stop Torture Now

 

October 16, 2006

Gary Leupp
North Korea as a Religious State

Patrick Cockburn
General Mutinies Against Blair

David Wilson
Where Have All the Doctors Gone?: the Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services

Robert Fisk
Confronting Turkey's Armenian Genocide

Robert Jensen
Racism and Cheap Thrills at U. of Texas Law School

Ingmar Lee / Krista Roessingh
An Appeal for S. India's Wild Elephants

Mike Whitney
America's Other War Party

Jake Whitney
The Courageous Dr. Rost

Sanho Tree
Sugar Daddy Politics: Was Foley Blackmailed to Secure His Vote on CAFTA?

Website of the Day
Best War Ever

 


October 14/15, 2006
Weekend Edition

Uri Avnery
Gaza as Laboratory: the Great Experiment

John Walsh
How Rahm Emmanuel Has Rigged a Pro-War Congress

Jean Bricmont
A Fable About Palestine

Jennifer Van Bergen
Bush's Military Commissions Act and the Future of America

Ralph Nader
Wilted Yankees: the Fruits of Checkbook Baseball

Floyd Rudmin
The Logic of Proliferation: How Bush's Belligerence Prompted N. Korea to Pursue Nuclear Weapons

Mark Weisbrot
Correcting the Facts on US/Venezuela Relations

Laura Carlsen
Building a Future in the Mixteca

Hani Shukrallah
A Stroll Through the Cairo Mall: Shopping as Cultural Pursuit

Dr. Susan Block
The Spent Milk of Human Foley

John Chuckman
North Korea's Bomb: Still 1,126 Nuke Tests Behind the US

Lucinda Marshall
Is Betty Ugly?: the Profits of Denigration

Don Monkerud
The Case Against Depleted Uranium

Missy Comley Beattie
What Bush Means By Tolerable Violence in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
Shouting "No One is Illegal" in a Crowded Theater

Website of the Weekend
Ratfink Raunchfest

 

October 13, 2006

Jorge Mariscal
PowerPoint Racism: How Military Recruiters Pitch to Latinos

Stephen Philion
The Myth of the Spat Upon Vets: an Interview with Jerry Lembcke

John Blair
Strip Mining Wildlife Preserves: Black Beauty's Filthy Lucre

Col. Dan Smith
Oil, Atoms and War

Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry
How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: Part Two, Winning the Ground War

Stephen Fleischman
Journalism Then and Now

Charles Perroud
The Death Penalty's Invisible Victims

Anne E. Brodsky
Return to Afghanistan: Where the Rhetoric Doesn't Match the Reality

Website of the Day
Underwater Nuke Test

 

October 12, 2006

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran

Norman Solomon
The Pundit Path to Death in Iraq

M. Shahid Alam
On Colonialism and Colleagues

Paul Craig Roberts
Can We Call It Genocide Now?

Meredith Schafer / Chris Kutalik
Is a General Transportation Strike Looming for 2008? Can Labor Seize the Moment?

Carl Gelderloos
Images of Occupation: Teaching in Nablus

Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry
How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: Part One, Winning the Intelligence War

Charles Sullivan
Assassins of Truth

William S. Lind
Why Do We Still Fight a Lost War?

CP News Service
The South Turns Against the War

Website of the Day
There's a Riot Goin' On

 

October 11, 2006

John Feffer
Pyongyang 1, Bush 0

Dave Lindorff
A Killing Occupation

Jackson Katz
Gunning Down Women: Coverage of "School Shootings" Misses Central Issue

April Howard / Ben Dangl
The Tin War in Bolivia

Michael Carmichael
World War W

Ken Couesbouc
The New Witchcraft: Marvin Harris on the War on Terror

Gregory Afghani
Sleepless on Skid Row: Guilty of Being Homeless in America

Alexander Cockburn
600,000 Dead in Iraq: Chortles in the New Yorker for Slaughter's Cheerleader, C. Hitchens

Website of the Day
Petition: Defend Columbia Students Who Confronted the Minutemen

 

October 10, 2006

Paul Craig Roberts
Lost Wars and a Lost Economy

Robert Robideau
The Myth Keepers of Columbus

Joshua Frank
The Democrats and the War on Civil Liberties

Dave Lindorff
Free the Press Free Linda Greenhouse

Dave Zirin
Brother of the Fist

Heather Gray
Where Votes Matter: My Experience in South Africa

James Knotwell
Big Ag in the Heartland: the Future of Nebraska's Family Farms

Missy Beattie
The Return of James Baker, III

Mike Whitney
Bush and North Korea: Bumbling Toward Disaster

David Rosen
Sex Panic on Capitol Hill: Mark Foley and the Politics of Sex in America

Website of the Day
Eno / Byrne: Music to Enjoy the Foley Scandal By

 


October 9. 2006

Robert Fisk
The Age of Terror

Norman Solomon
Welcome to the Nuclear Club

Ron Jacobs
The Boom Heard Around the World

Gideon Levy
The Mystery of America

Walter Brasch
Their Back Pages: Sex, Lies and Family Values

Mickey Z.
Who Killed Michael Moore?

John Holt
Grizzlies in Our Midst: Can Humans and Bears Coexist?

Lucinda Marshall
Not So Pretty in Pink: Profits and Breast Cancer

Saul Landau
Post-Castro Cuba

Website of the Day
War, Inc.

 

 

October 7 / 8, 2006
Weekend Edition

Alexander Cockburn
Wargasms and Orgasms

Peter Kwong
The Chinese Face of Neoliberalism

Ralph Nader
Revolt of the Generals

Mark Donham
What Cynthia McKinney Means to Me

Dave Lindorff
Philly's Police Snoops

Peter Bosshard
World Bank Shuts Out Dissident Voices: Big Dams, Huge Profits & Political Corruption

Ron Jacobs
Evil Hour in Colombia

Lawrence R. Velvel
Governmental Derelicts: Moral Meltdown in America

Fred Gardner
Arnold Vetoes Hemp Bill

David Green
The US, Israel and the Invasion of Lebanon

Jim B.
Activism, Incorporated: Outsourcing Grassroots Politics?

Missy Beattie
Prayers for Peace at the Edge of the Abyss

Michael Donnelly
Blame the Page: Grand Old Perverts Go on Offensive

Jackson Thoreau
Enter Newt

Jon Hung
Revisiting Korematsu: Denying Civil Rights Based on National Origin

CounterPunch News Service
Why We Confronted the Minutemen at Columbia

Tom D'Antoni
Playlist

Poets' Basement
Orloski, Davies, Tirado, Gaffney and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Reagan Gone Wild

 


October 6, 2006

Alison Weir
Just Another Mother Murdered

Tiffany Ten Eyck / Mark Brenner
Made in (DeUnionized) America

Corporate Crime Reporter
Look Who's Behind "37 Reasons" to Vote for Big Business: Former Clinton PR Flak Mike McCurry

Juan Antonio Montecino
Cleaving a False Divide in Latin America

Walden Bello
A Siamese Tragedy

Christopher Brauchli
Rank Invitations: Dining with Bush

Brynne Keith-Jennings
Dan Burton in Nicaragua: the Congressman, His Stick and the Elections

Jonathan Cook
The Struggle for Palestine's Soul

Website of the Day
Fighting Hog Farms and Clearcuts in the Heartland

 


October 5, 2006

John Walsh
Turn the Page

Carol Norris
The Radical Right, the Myth of the Gay Child Abuser and You: a Psychotherapist on the Hysteria Over Foley

Paul Craig Roberts
Will November Bring Hope or Another Stolen Election?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Truth About the Embargo of Cuba

James Abourezk
Waterboarding the Constitution: After Torture, What's Next?

Nicola Nasser
Removing Hamas: Brinksmanship or Coup d'Etat?

Kirkpatrick Sale
Breaking Away: the First North American Secessionist Conference

Uri Avnery
Peace with Syria: Lunch in Damascus

Website of the Day
More Naughty GOP Messages


October 4, 2006

Elizabeth Terzakis
The Walls That Racism Built: Blood Revenge, the Death Penalty and Kevin Cooper

Paul Wolf
The Mushy Rebellion: Pakistan Under Musharraf

Sean Penn
The Arrogant, the Misguided and the Cowards

Dave Lindorff
Outrage as Misdirection: The Real Scandal isn't Foley

Diane Farsetta
For Sale: Iraqi Kurdistan

Sharon Smith
Democrats: Yes to War, No to Pedophilia

Felice Pace
Revoking 1776

Sara Roy
The Economy of Gaza

Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn: the Video Interview (Part Two)


October 3, 2006

Jennifer Van Bergen
Compassionate Conservative Pedophiles

Greg Moses
The Infallible Empire: Junking Habeas Corpus

Stan Cox
Real Bad ID: a National Driver's License and the Fading Right of Anonymity

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
How Empires Die

Evelyn Pringle
Big Pharma Takes a Hit: Alaska's Supreme Court Outlaws Forced Drugging

Fred Wilhelms
SoundExchange and Unpaid Music Artists: Help Us Find These Musicians and Get Them Paid

Michael Abelman
Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food: the Risks of Convenience and Consolidation

Gary Leupp
The Foley Follies

Website of the Day
Bush and Blair: Endless Love

 

October 2, 2006

Eric Hazan
Roadmap to Nowhere: an Interview with Tanya Reinhart on Israel/Palestine Since 2003

Mike Whitney
Bloodbath on 60 Minutes: Court Stenographer Finally Comes Clean

Norman Solomon
American Narcissism and Iraq

Assaf Kfoury
Meeting Nasrallah

Missy Beattie
The Meaning of "ummmm": Speaker Hasert and the Over-Friendly Congressman

Arthur Neslen
Lie Less in Gaza

Paula J. Caplan
How the Supreme Court Mangled My Research

Website of the Day
Predator Drones Target Bechtel

 

Sept. 30 / 0ct. 1, 2006
Weekend Edition

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Face of Class War

Marjorie Cohn
Rounding Up US Citizens: a Consitutional Shredding

Ben Tripp
Deviant Conservative Males: an Analysis

Ron Jacobs
A Dismal and Chaotic Place: Iraq According to Patrick Cockburn

Ralph Nader
Torturer-in-Chief

Mike Whitney
Iraq: The Breaking Point

Christopher Reed
It Pays to Raise a Ruckus

Seth Sandronsky
The Housing Bust: Excess Investment and Its Discontents

Fred Gardner
The Chancellor's Wife

Mokhiber / Weissman
Hewlett Packard and the Erosion of Privacy

Michael Dickinson
My Escape Attempt from Prison Transfer: Extract from a Diary in Turkish Police Custody

Alan Gregory
Fake Green: Top 10 Ways Politicians Pretend to be Environmentalists

Poets' Basement
Gardner, Landau, Lindorff, Davies,& Buknatski

 

 

September 29, 2006

Bruce Jackson
Chavez's Reading, Bush's Reading

Michael J. Smith
The Lobby Debate Does Manhattan

Emira Woods
Oil Trip: Record Profits for Exxon, Deprivation for Africa

William S. Lind
The Sanctuary Illusion: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq as Theme Parks for 4GW

David Swanson
Mommy, What's Waterboarding?

Jonathan Cook
Bad Faith and the Destruction of Palestine

Website of the Day
Jesus: the Recruitment Tapes


September 28, 2006

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Flaws in the Military Commissions Act

Ron Jacobs
The Generals, the Democrats and Iraq: One Policy, Two Parties

Mokhiber / Weissman
Scenes from Laura's Book Festival: Elmo Will Not Save You

Lee Sustar
A Left Challenge to Lula

Robert Jensen
Finding My Way Back to Church--and Getting Kicked Out

John Chuckman
America Has Just Lost Two More Wars

Evelyn Pringle
Inside America's Nursing Homes: a Hidden Tragedy of Neglect and Abuse

Nicola Nasser
Bush and Islam: Words vs. Deeds

Uri Avnery
Political Corruption in Israel

Website of the Day
Art Against the Empire


September 27, 2006

Patrick Cockburn
A Final Explosion Looms in Mosul

Camilo Mejia
Blowback From Iraq: Giving Terrorism a Reason to Exist

Pat Williams
Tax Burdens and Cheaters in the Rockies: Send Those IRS Mercenaries in Search of Montana's Land Barons and Oil Drillers

Ben Terrall
Failing Haiti: Another Bungled UN Mission

Ridgeway / Ng
Paul Weyrich Explaines His Opposition to the Patriot Act: a Short Film

Joe Allen
Where are the Mass Protests?

Andrew Wimmer
Don't Disappear Into a Black Hole

Franklin C. Spinney
Rumsfeld's AutoCarterization: Skullduggery in the Pentagon's Budget

Website of the Day
Model Nukes: the Photo Contest


September 26, 2006

Hani Shukrallah
The American Mind: When Historical Analysis is Reduced to Whim

William Blum
If It's Election Season, It Must Be Time for a Terror Alert

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Torturing the Obvious

Barbara Becnel
Witness to an Execution: a Slow and Very Painful Death

Paul Rockwell
Judicial Complicity in US War Crimes: the Watada Case

Dave Lindorff
Bush and Iran: Going to War to Save His Own Ass?

Rich Gibson
Lessons from the Detroit Teachers' Strike

Anthony Papa
The Danger of Meth Registries: "Have a Cold? Prove It, Then Sign Here"

Nate Mezmer
New Orleans is Back ... Without Blacks: Monday Night Football at the Superdome

Uri Avnery
Mohammed's Sword

Website of the Day
Only YOU Can Stop the Sale of Public Lands to Mining, Timber and Real Estate Corporations


September 25, 2006

Patrick Cockburn
The Most Dangerous Place in the World: a Journey to Iraq's "Taliban Republic"

Jonathan Cook
Human Rights Watch: Still Missing the Point on Lebanon

Joshua Frank
Did Maria Cantwell's Campaign Try to Buy Off Aaron Dixon?

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bush Administration Itching to Nuke Iran?

Robert Jensen
Defending Chavez on FoxNews

Dave Lindorff
Horowitz on Campus: This Mouth for Hire

Norman Solomon
Media Tall Tales for Next War

Dr. Charles Jonkel
Save a Grizzly, Visit a Library: "People like the Croc Hunter are Worse Than the Most Bloodthirsty Slob Hunter

Michael Dickinson
"The King's New Clothes:" a Play Written in a Turkish Jail

Alexander Cockburn
Flying Saucers and the Decline of the Left

Website of the Day
Great Bear Foundation

 

September 23 / 24, 2006
Weekend Edition

Jonathan Cook
How Israel is Engineering the "Clash of Civilizations"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Star Wars Goes Online ... Crashes

Dr. Anon
A Doctor's Life in Baghdad

Tom Barry
Oil and Political Opportunism

Carl G. Estabrook
The Darfur Smokescreen

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Two Presidents

Todd Chretien
The Axis of Lesser Evilism

Dr. Charles Jonkel
From Grizzly Man to the Croc Hunter: the Global Media and the Death of Bears

Debbie Nathan
I Was Disappeared By Salon

Fred Gardner
Dustin Costa Struggles Against Invisibility

Fred Wilhelms
The Money Belongs to the Artists Who Created the Music

Seth Sandronsky
The Cruel Economics of Health Care in America

Ralph Nader
Mavericks at Work

Rev. William Alberts
"Specks" and "Logs" and 9/11

Jon Van Camp
Who is Hezbollah?

Heather Gray
Conservatives and Technology

David Vest
Jerry Lightfoot, RIP

Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listenting to This Week

Poets' Basement
Landau / Davies

Website of the Weekend
Meet Me In The Morning: C. Wonderland & J. Lightfoot

Video of the Weekend
Is It a Bird? A Missile? Or, Just Perhaps, a Friggin' Plane?

 

September 22, 2006

Patrick Cockburn
Republic of Fear: Torture in Bush's Iraq, Worse Than Under Saddam

Michael Donnelly
It's the Manipulated Economy, Stupid

Ramzy Baroud
The Next Palestinian Struggle

Evo Morales
"We Need Partners, Not Bosses": Address to the United Nations

Stanley Howard
Torture and Justice in Chicago

Sarah Leah Whitson
Hezbollah's Rockets and Civilian Casualties: a Reply to Jonathan Cook

JoAnn Wypijewski
Conservations at Ground Zero

Website of the Day
Cockburn in Atlanta: the Video Interview


September 21, 2006

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad
"No Nation Should Have Superiority Over Others:" UN Address

Justin E. H. Smith
Ending the Death Penalty: Outline of an Abolitionist Program

Rick Kuhn
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Post-Cold War Decline

How the US Lost Latin America

By JOSHUA SPERBER

The end of the Cold War can be seen as both the best and worst thing to ever befall the United States. On one hand, the USSR's precipitous collapse represented total victory for the US. In one dramatic moment, the US's primary military rival was defeated, while the putative threat of communism appeared to suffer an irrevocable setback, if not absolute historical refutation, with the demise of its oldest and largest nation-state sponsor; US anti-Soviet policies were perceived as vindicated, while the global conditions for US dominance pursued since the Wilson Administration, as described by Neil Smith--namely, an open world market--had finally arrived. US hubris was as sizable as it was predictable. On the other hand, the disappearance of the US's primary rival introduced enormous and potentially insurmountable difficulties.

Massive military spending subsidizing the US economy found itself without political justification for the first time since FDR's Lend Lease Act rescued capitalism from itself; an enormously effective propaganda device used to suppress domestic labor and maintain social control had been lost; the disappearance of an ostensibly alternative political-economic ideology that had previously inspired the US into undergoing domestic civil rights reforms threatens to create a newfound and possibly terminal complacency; and the nominal raison d'etre for an aggressive foreign policy "protecting" allies from the alleged Soviet threat, while toppling and upholding rebels and servants in interventions around the Third World, has been eliminated. The ramifications of the end of the Cold War can be seen domestically and internationally, and politically, economically, militarily and ideologically. This paper will examine the effects of those ramifications on the US relationship with Latin America.

When we say that the US "lost" Latin America we are of course adopting the language of US planners who seek to "have" it, that is, who seek to keep it from foreign competitors as stipulated in the Monroe Doctrine, while maintaining internal rulers amenable to US corporate investment and extraction. The US has lost on both counts, as imperial rivals, specifically China, Noam Chomsky notes, are cultivating financial, arms and energy agreements with Latin American states, while growing numbers of those states are increasingly and flagrantly ignoring US orders. The US's traditional response of forcible removal has apparently been presently neutralized, at least in Venezuela, where the 2002 attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez was a humiliating failure, resulting in the solidification of the targeted regime. Likewise, the US's traditional day-to-day method of dominance over Latin America, that of IMF/WTO economic policies expediting the massive and regular transfer of Latin American wealth to the US, is also being eschewed by emboldened nationalist leaders.

With the collapse of the socialist bloc, large areas hitherto quarantined from the West became exposed to capitalist penetration, dialectically creating the conditions for the US's ensuing overreach. The economic aspects of this overreach, however, to a fair degree transcend the Cold War. It was in 1973 that capitalism's postwar Golden Age finally came tumbling to an end. The crisis in overproduction/ under-consumption would prove intractable, triggering the US's shift from productive to finance capitalism and the advent of a debt-based economy. Though the US effectively employed economic means to thwart rivals from the 1973 oil crisis through the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, as David Harvey writes, the deindustrialization associated with its greater shift to a consumption-driven economy weakened the nation internally while its growing massive debt significantly weakened its leverage vis-à-vis foreign rivals. The international equilibrium that had been so totaled by WWII, which had left much of the world in ruins and the US vastly enriched, was irrepressibly reconfiguring. The Cold War's end, depriving the US of its role as the chief defender of the West against the USSR, introduced a greater political component to the intensifying economic rivalry between the US and its allies, specifically its Western European allies who were, in fits and starts, moving toward economic, political and nascent military unification driven by both longstanding US economic dominance and the hastening decline of the rate of profit.

Growing differences between the US and its Cold War allies--not to mention its adversaries--descended into total and acrimonious conflict over the US/UK 2003 war on Iraq. Immanuel Wallerstein asserts that the US war against Iraq constituted a war on France and Germany, noting that it was the first time in the history of the UN that the US was unable to win Security Council passage of a resolution it badly wanted. France and Germany, among others, were indeed defying US attempts to isolate and strangle Iraq, elevating its own energy, financial and political interests above the US's attempt at disciplining the recalcitrant oil producer. Hussein's threats to convert oil sales from dollars to euros, which would have benefited the EU at potentially great US expense, could further be seen as likely to have raised the hackles of US leaders. Indeed, the latter were particularly embittered as they recognized that the military destruction of Iraq's ossified nationalized economy would create massive investment opportunities benefiting the global economy as a whole. Their erstwhile allies, for their part, opposed the war as a means of, beyond protecting their own positions, opposing the narrower US interests that attacking Iraq did in fact also advance. Beyond the general domestic benefits of warfare--expanding executive power, weakening civil liberties, furthering nationalism and weakening labor, etc.--the US attacked Iraq with the aim of controlling access to the Middle Eastern oil "spigot" while encircling China with military bases, securing US dominance for future decades as outlined in the Project for a New American Century, as Harvey notes.

The war has, of course, not gone as planned. As a result, the US has suffered incalculable political damage--partially due to the incontrovertible exposure of its prewar claims as fabrications. It is badly overextended militarily, strengthening the hands of regional adversaries, namely Iran, and its treasury is hemorrhaging. In short, as Paul Kennedy presciently saw, it appears that the US's difficulties in Iraq are hastening what was being fended off: US decline.

It is more this material weakening of the US global position than the blow to its political credibility that pertains to Latin America. Latin America, as opposed to Western Europe, has long had good reason to view the US with hostility and suspicion. The US has repeatedly undermined democratic nationalist heads of state, overthrowing Arbenz in 1954 Guatemala and supporting the military coup against Goulart ten years later in Brazil. In 1973 Chile, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the socialist democrat Allende, replacing him with Augusto Pinochet who went on to establish a murderous police state. After the US-supported dictator Somoza was overthrown in 1979 Nicaragua, the US created death squads who employed non-state terrorism as a means to destroying the popular Sandinista Government. The US established similar death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Today the US supports a government in Colombia engaged in some of the worst human rights abuses in the hemisphere.

If US-supported repression, however, is a means to an end, the end largely involves economic domination. The US has more often than not been able to achieve this more directly, if not less violently in its effects, through the imposition of IMF/WTO economic mandates, often culminating in brutal so-called austerity programs. For creditor nations, these programs' success was their failure, as the dramatically depreciated standards of living resulting from foreign-imposed neo-liberalism in Argentina, for example, discredited that program there once and for all. The political fallout of the Argentine crisis--where the poor overtook highways and rebelled in food protests, while the wealthier fought cops upon being deprived of their capital--has contributed to the US's failure to impose the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Latin America, an attempt to expand NAFTA as a means of matching the EU's increasing economic cohesion and the ascent of China.

The backlash against IMF/WTO neo-liberalism and its US sponsor is increasingly articulated through indigenous people's movements, which have obtained state power in Bolivia. Indigenous movement's grievances, platforms and rhetoric, buttressed by the strength of innumerable anti-capitalist movements with their annual meetings at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, arguably represent the greatest and most cogent refutation of global US-led capitalism in the post-Cold War era. That the US is unable to condemn these movements as Soviet proxies, but must either attack them through the baldly oppressive and ideologically prostrate "War on Terror," itself a rhetorical substitute for the equally impotent "War on Drugs," badly weakens its hand. No matter how hollow and hypocritical the US's Cold War rhetoric had been it at least had the retrogressive Soviet police state to reference. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, US imperialism is growingly naked--revealing its indubitable oppressiveness among masses whose revolutionary sentiment "another world is possible" is a direct challenge to the US nationalism that is an internal precondition for its rule. At the same time, even removed gloves can do little when their fists are being swallowed in the Middle East.

While the growing brazenness of US extra-legal violence reveals and exacerbates its weakening position, the US is simultaneously suffering as a result of the internal contradictions of its official, and unavoidable, economic policies. NAFTA was designed to both alleviate capitalism's invariable overproduction crises by opening up the Mexican market to US-subsidized agribusiness, while also creating investment outlets freed from environmental, labor and other regulations impeding foreign trade and profit. While reactionaries such as Ross Perot were correct in predicting that NAFTA would accelerate US de-industrialization and lead to massive job losses, its defenders were equally correct to condemn nationalist capitalists like Perot as naïve isolationists ignoring that capitalism's quintessence is perpetual expansion. NAFTA's adoption less reflected a political decision than a bilateral response to increased economic competition within post-1973 capitalism, that is, falling rates of profit combined with decreasing areas of investment.

One irony of present-day capitalism is that the deleterious effects of its insatiable rapaciousness are, via one manner or another, increasingly boomeranging on the imperial powers. NAFTA assuredly devastated Mexico, condemning myriad peasant farmers to poverty. Unable to compete in a market flooded with US-subsidized cheap grains, rural farmers overwhelmed the cities. In the north, the brutal anti-union maquiladoras resulted in heavily polluted, crime-ridden towns left for dead by the ravages of capital departed for yet cheaper markets across the Pacific. This declining standard of living led increased numbers of Mexican workers, combined with refugees of the earlier Central American killing fields, to migrate to the US.

In Working the Boundaries, Nicholas De Genova describes the manner in which the inflow of Latino/a migrant workers benefits the US economy, as it is able to assault labor as a whole through making vulnerable an underpaid racialized subclass by, rather than deporting it, legally designating it perpetually "deportable." Though benefiting the economy, the stable political basis required for capitalism is being undermined by job loss amid the persistent decline in the standard of living. US fascist movements like the so-called Minutemen have astutely diverted growing hostility associated with worsening labor and living conditions through obfuscating economic realities while decrying the effects of a degraded "culture." Composed of and aided by neo-Nazi organizations, they, like liberals, accept borders, states and capitalism as natural givens, while seeking to "defend" white supremacy against the Latino/a "aliens." Notably, the Minutemen and other fascist organizations are increasingly disdainful of George W. Bush, himself the helpless captive of corporate and state exigencies. The negative effects of furthering capitalism within an ideological context that precludes mass dissemination of the radical critique of capitalism has resulted in tendencies so potentially powerful they threaten to subordinate material state economic interests to ideological ones.

That this fascist threat is occurring after the end of the Cold War indicates that if the US's pro-freedom language of the Cold War-years was rhetoric and bluff, sometimes called, the loss of an apparent ideological foe within the context of advancing capitalist crises relegates present-day declarations of "freedom" an anachronistic folly. Apart from the present and future domestic victims of an increasingly racist and aggressive US, the collapse of an "American" ideology premised on perpetually expanding borders and "freedom" harms the long-term health of a state needing though doggedly avoiding reform, as Eric Hobsbawm foresaw in his Age of Extremes. The US appears to have played its last hand, and brute force is a prescription for, if not total collapse a la the USSR, precipitous and inevitable decline.

Joshua Sperber lives in New York. He can be reached at: jsperber4@yahoo.com

 

 

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