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CounterPunch Print Edition Exclusive!
The Coming War Against the Supreme Court
and Corporate PowerThe U.S. Supreme Court’s Jan. 21 decision unleashed unlimited corporate funds for open purchase of political control. In a special report Mason Gaffney traces the ebbs and swells of popular control of corporations since America’s founding. Did Jan. 21 mark a new high in corporate takeover? Gaffney outlines the agenda for popular counterattack in the coming decades. From the battle lines of struggles against corporate power across the world JoAnn Wypijewski reports on capital’s choke points along the “cargo chain” and how workers in ports, rail yards, trucks and warehouses can challenge a system where 225 people are worth more than the combined wealth of 2.5 billion. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.
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Today's Stories March 12-14, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Franklin C. Spinney Joshua Frank / Ismael Hossein-zadeh David Rosen / T. P. Wilkinson Ashley Smith John Ross Jorge Mariscal Conn Hallinan Joe Bageant Saul Landau Ramzy Baroud Bill Moyers / Ray McGovern Rannie Amiri Nadia Hijab Missy Beattie P. Sainath Cyrus Bina Dave Lindorff Manuel Garcia, Jr. Alan Farago Norman Solomon Sam Bahour Jed Brandt Mike Prysner Greg King Stephen Soldz Anthony Papa Charles R. Larson Civil Service at a Price: Mahfouz's "Cairo Modern" Michael Dickinson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend March 11, 2010 Jonathan Cook Yossi Sarid Patrick Cockburn Jayne Lyn Stahl Winslow T. Wheeler Sasha Kramer Billy Wharton Dru Oja Jay Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber David Macaray Website of the Day March 10, 2010 Marie Bénilde Carl Conetta Sasan Fayazmanesh Julia Stein Joshua Frank Don Monkerud Heather Gray / Laura Flanders Dave Lindorff Russell Mokhiber Website of the Day March 9, 2010 Keane Bhatt Steven Higgs William Blum Dean Baker Roger Burbach Marshall Auerback / Ralph Nader Conn Hallinan Nadia Hijab Dan Bacher Website of the Day March 8, 2010 Gareth Porter Chris Floyd Carl Ginsburg Jonathan Cook Dean Baker Bill Quigley Greg Moses Shamus Cooke Tolu Olorunda Kieko Matteson Mike Bader Website of the Day March 5 - 7, 2010 Alexander Cockburn James Ridgeway / Saul Landau / Nelson P. Valdes The Untouchable Budget: Defense Department, Inc. Ishmael Reed Dave Lindorff Mike Whitney Russell Mokhiber John Ross Mark Schuller Mark Weisbrot Rannie Amiri Ramzy Baroud David Rosen David Ker Thomson Wajahat Ali Missy Beattie George Wuerthner Benjamin Dangl Martha Rosenberg Vladimir Radyuhin Eric Walberg Robert Bryce Alison Weir David Macaray Laura Flanders Bouthaina Shaaban Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend March 4, 2010 Paul Craig Roberts Dave Lindorff Conn Hallinan Steven Higgs Frank Green Ron Jacobs Christopher Brauchli Don Monkerud Roberto Rodriguez The Politics of the Census: Masking Identities or Counting the Indigenous? Raymond J. Lawrence Website of the Day
March 3, 2010 Norman Finkelstein Bill Quigley Franklin C. Spinney Dean Baker Mike Whitney Raed Jarrar / Adam Federman Joshua Frank Will Parrish / Darwin Bond-Graham Matt Siegfried Website of the Day March 2, 2010 Patrick Cockburn Tricia Shapiro Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts Ellen Brown David Macaray Stewart J. Lawrence Shamus Cooke Udi Aloni / Binoy Kampmark Stephen Soldz Website of the Day March 1, 2010 Ralph Nader Will Parrish / Mike Whitney Diana Johnstone Jayne Lyn Stahl Vijay Prashad Paul Buhle Organizing Against Empire: Where Left and Right Meet ... Amicably Robert Jensen Marga Tojo Gonzales Website of the Day February 26 - 28, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Alison Weir Will Parrish / Jason Hribal Saul Landau / Mark Weisbrot Alan Farago Suzan Mazur Martha Rosenberg Ray McGovern Rannie Amiri Dave Lindorff Ramzy Baroud David Macaray Jared Ritvo Missy Beattie Brian McKenna Don Santina Binoy Kampmark M.G. Piety Michael Dickinson Art as Defensive Weapon Charles R. Larson Ben Sonnenberg David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend February 25, 2010 Jason Hribal Clancy Sigal Tariq Ali Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Peter Lee Russell Mokhiber Prosecuting Bush for War Crimes Deepak Tripathi Charlie Wilson's Legacy Norman Solomon Phillip Doe Website of the Day February 24, 2010 Ashley Smith Mike Whitney Garerth Porter Joe Bageant Shamus Cooke Al Benchich Harvey Wasserman Jim Goodman Ron Jacobs Stewart J. Lawrence Tom Clifford Website of the Day
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Weekend Edition Counterpunch DiaryRelax, the Empire's in Safe HandsBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN Are they really bumblers? The establishment’s opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election might presage a shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case. It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the traditional welcome – a pledge by Israel to build more settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. Hillary Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of spit, like vice president Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Armorim, rejecting Mrs. Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and call for tougher action toward Iran. Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Latin Americans and even some Democratic members of the U.S. Congress listened incredulously to Mrs. Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly violence-free election of Honduras’ new, U.S.-sanctioned President Lobo in a process to which both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers. Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure at the U.S. with stentorian protests about Obama’s friendliness toward the Dalai Lama. The PRC continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in U.S. Treasury bonds. The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a vote in a U.S. congressional committee to recognize the massacre of the Armenians in 1916 as “genocide.” Russia signals its grave displeasure at Mrs. Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. “We object to any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another's future,” she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the U.S. would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Is this partial list a reflection of incompetence, or a registration that, with a minor hiccup or two, U.S. foreign policy under Obama is moving purposefully forward in its basic enterprise: to restore U.S. credibility in the world theater as the planet’s premier power after eight years of poor management? Not much more than a year later, Obama has smoothed off the rough edges of Bush-era foreign policy, while preserving and, indeed, widening its goals, those in place through the entire postwar era since 1945. Latin America? Enough of talk about a new era, led by Chavez of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia, and other progressive leaders. So far as Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard. On the campaign trail in 2008, it was Republican John McCain who was reviled as the lobbyist for Colombia’s death squad patron, President Uribe. Today, it’s Obama who presides over an adamantly pro-Uribe policy, supervising a widening of U.S. military basing facilities in Colombia. As an early signal of continuity, Honduras’ impertinent president Zelaya, guilty of populist thoughts, was briskly evicted with U.S approval and behind-the-scenes stage-management. If ever there was a nation for whose enduring misery the U.S.A. bears irrefutable responsibility (along with France), it is Haiti. As noted by Noam Chomsky on this site last week, the hovels which fell down in the earthquake were those of people rendered destitute by U.S. policies since Jefferson, and most notably by the man to whom Obama is most often compared, another Nobel peace-prize-winning U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson. The houses that did not fall down in such numbers were those of the affluent elites, most recently protected by Bill Clinton who was second only to Wilson in the horrors he sponsored in Haiti. Yet under Obama, the U.S.A. is hailed as a merciful and generous provider for the stricken nation, even though it has been Cuba and Venezuela who have been the stalwarts, with doctors (in the case of Cuba) and total debt forgiveness (in the case of Venezuela). The U.S.A. refused such debt relief. Israel? Not one substantive twitch has discommoded the benign support of Israel by its patron, even though Obama stepped into power amid Israel’s methodical war crimes – later enumerated by Judge Goldstone for the U.N. – in Gaza. Consistent U.S. policy has been to advocate a couple of mini-Bantustans for the Palestinians and, under Obama, the U.S. has endured no substantive opposition to this plan from its major allies. With Iran, there is absolute continuity with the Bush years, sans the noisy braggadocio of Cheney: assiduous and generally successful diplomatic efforts to secure international agreement for deepening sanctions; disinformation campaigns about Iran’s adherence to international treaties, very much in the Bush style of 2002. In the interests of overall U.S. strategy in the region, Israel is held on a leash. No need to labor the obvious about Afghanistan: an enlarged U.S. expeditionary force engineered with one laughable pledge – earnestly brandished by the progressives – that the troops will be home in time for the elections of 2012. The U.S. and, indeed, world anti-war movements live only in memory. Earlier this week, Congressional Democrats in the House could barely muster 60 votes against the Afghan war. Russia? Vice President Biden excited the foreign policy commentariat with talk of a “reset” in posture toward Russia. Outside rhetoric, here’s no such reset – merely continuation of U.S. policy since the post-Soviet collapse. Last October, Biden emphasized that the U.S. “will not tolerate” any “spheres of influence,” nor Russia’s “veto power” on the eastward expansion of NATO. The U.S.A. is involved in retraining the Georgian army. China may thunder about the Dalai Lama and Taiwan – but, on the larger stage, the Middle Kingdom’s world heft is much exaggerated. The astute China-watcher Peter Lee hits the mark when he wrote recently in Asia Times that “the U.S. is cannily framing and choosing fights that unite the U.S., the EU, and significant resource producers, and isolate China and force it to defend unpopular positions alone. By my reading, China is pretty much a one-trick pony in international affairs. It offers economic partnership and cash. What it doesn’t have is what the U.S. has: military reach … heft in the global financial markets (Beijing’s immense overexposure to U.S. government securities is, I think, becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability), or a large slate of loyal and effective allies in international organization.” The United States, as Lee points out, is also making “good progress in pursuing the most destabilizing initiative of the next 20 years: encouragement of India’s rise from Afghanistan through to Myanmar as a rival and distraction to China.” All of this is scarcely a catalogue of bumbledom. Obama is just what the Empire needed. Plagued though it may be by deep structural problems, he has improved its malign potential for harm – the first duty of all U.S. presidents of whatever imagined political stripe. Oscars in the Age of Obama If you want a signifier of the changed image of empire, and imperial adventures in foreign lands, think about last Sunday’s six Oscars for The Hurt Locker, including ones for Best Movie and Best Director. The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, said at the end of her acceptance speech, “I'd like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world and may they come home safe.” Suppose Bigelow’s former husband, James Cameron, had won Best Director for Avatar. There is surely no way Cameron would ever have dedicated his Oscar to any soldiers, American or Canadian, serving as members of the imperial coalition – volunteers all – in Iraq or Afghanistan, unless they had defected to the other side or mutinied and been put in the brig or were facing a firing squad for treason. There is also surely no way that any movie about a serving unit in Iraq would have been in the running for an Oscar back in Bush time. I hoped Avatar would get a big Oscar rather than the consolations ones for cinematography and special effects. It would have honored a truly uncompromising anti-war, anti-American-Empire movie. I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker and don’t plan to, having endured more than one bomb-disposal films in my movie-going career. Also, the circumstances of the movie’s filming seemed distasteful, with scenes shot in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. “We had these Blackwater guys that were working with us in the Middle East and they taught us like tactical maneuvers and stuff – how to just basically position yourself and move with a gun,” Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told the New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. “We were shooting in Palestinian refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn't like we were without enemies. There were people there looking at us, 'cuz we were three guys in American military suits runnin' around with guns. It was nothing easy about it. It was always a compromising situation.” Jeremy Scahill writes an item in The Nation about Blackwater’s role, as disclosed by Ryzik and the author of The Hurt Locker’s screenplay, Mark Boal, made haste to contact him to deny that Blackwater had ever been hired in any capacity. Boal, apparently, supervised all such hiring of military and security consultants. Scahill asked him about comments made by the film's director, Kathryn Bigelow, in other interviews, mentioning the presence of Blackwater personnel on set, including as technical advisers. “It's possible,” Boal conceded, “that at some point somebody on set worked for Blackwater, but we never hired Blackwater.” The New York Times writer Melena Ryzik describes how Mackie showed her how the Blackwater men trained him to hold his weapon. “If you're a trained killer,” Mackie told Ryzik, “you're very precise.” This is Blackwater-precision, as displayed by the panic-stricken contractors, when they mowed down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007. But then, as Obama quoted in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from his favorite intellectual and unappetizing apologist for Empire, Reinhold Niebuhr, “To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” The Fight Against Corporate Power In his important special report in our latest newsletter, Mason Gaffney addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious January 21, 2010, ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, that a corporation may contribute unlimited funds advertising its views for and against political candidates of its choice – in practice, the choice of its CEO or directors. “The United States was born in rebellion against corporations,” Gaffney writes. “The U.S. Supreme Court soon began restoring their power. When it overreached, strong executives and popular movements set it back: under Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR. Today it has overreached again; it remains to see if a new movement or leader will arise to set it back again.” Gaffney assays the best political strategies for popular counter-attack. As he concludes, “Will ‘ordinary’ taxpayers rebel, as they did in the American Revolution, Emancipation, the Progressive Age of Reform, and the New Deal, or will corporate power wax unchecked until it replaces democracy altogether? Cyclical theory says we will have another anti-corporate reaction, but history also records tipping points in the decline of nations, from which they do not recover for generations, if ever. This one may be a squeaker.” Back to FDR, I say. Pack the Supreme Court! In the same bumper newsletter JoAnn Wypijewski has a truly terrific piece about the “cargo chain” as described by at a recent conference of radical dockworkers from around the world, meeting in Charleston, S.C.: “The people who move the world can also stop it,’ radical dockworkers like to say, and that captures the essential fragility of a global production and distribution system that depends on the precise coordination of hundreds of thousands of moving parts. If some of those moving parts—workers at a major trucking hub, a major rail switching network or, especially, a strategic string of ports—refuse to do their part, the whole system gets jammed up. Refuse long enough and broadly enough, and the system would be in crisis. “ Read her powerful reporting from the front lines of the world class struggle. How the Economy Was Lost We’re now proud to publish How the Economy Was Lost, Roberts’ searing, succinct history of how the US economy has been captured by a gangster elite. Roberts gives us the shortest, sharpest outline of economics for the new century ever put between covers. Go to our bookstore. Buy it now! Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
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