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Calling All CounterPunchers!
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Today's Stories November 10, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Kim Nicolini Cpt. Paul Watson November 7 / 9, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Vijay Prashad Tariq Ali Jean Bricmont John V. Whitbeck Saul Landau Peter Morici Lawrence Velvel Karyn Strickler Nativo V. Lopez Christopher Fons Alan Farago David Yearsley Christopher Brauchli Samah Sabawi Dave Lindorff Deepak Tripathi Beth Sherouse Patrick Irelan Stephen Martin Richard Rhames J. Murray Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Day
November 6, 2008 Frank J. Menetrez John Chuckman P. Sainath Joshua Frank Edna Canetti John Ross Norman Solomon Fawzia Afzal-Khan Robert Weissman Harvey Wasserman Website of the Day
November 5, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Chuck Spinney Ishmael Reed Chris Floyd Binoy Kampmark Michael Donnelly David Macaray Peter Morici Manuel Garcia, Jr. William Willers Website of the Day November 4, 2008 Kathleen Christison James Ridgeway Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Conn Hallinan Holly M. Barker Ashley Smith Andy Worthington Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Doug Lummis Carlos Fierro Website of the Day November 3, 2008 Patrick Cockburn John Kennedy O'Hara Peter Montague Steve Conn Andrew Gebhardt Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Niranjan Ramakrishnan Uri Avnery Dave Lindorff Fred Gardner DC Larson David Michael Green Val Strange Tuli Kupferberg / Website of the Day
October 31 , 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Douglas Valentine Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski Alan Maass William P. O’Connor Patrick Irelan Brian Cloughley Mats Svensson Binoy Kampmark Steve Conn Alan Farago Morton Skorodin Robert Bryce Wajahat Ali David Yearsley Dennis Loo Pam Martens Stephen Martin Richard Rhames Ramzy Baroud Missy Beattie Howard Lisnoff Richard Neville Saul Landau / Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Stanley Heller William Loren Katz Joshua Frank James McEnteer Felice Pace Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day
October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day
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November 10, 2008 How Will Progressives Deal with Liberalism in Power?Look on the Bright Side, Dammit!By BILL HATCH Here in Merced, the Obama campaign was as invisible to the general public as the on-going immigration raids. Obama-Biden lawn signs were greatly outnumbered by For Sale and For Rent signs in this national foreclosure-rate capital. Our local Democratic Party is dominated by a Blue Dog congressman and his plutocrat paymasters and has no community credibility. We did however notice frequent email invitations to local phone-bank events, where people here would call to help get the vote out in the battleground states. In any event, Obama wasn’t paying much attention to Merced. California is a very blue state, it performed as expected, and Obama was taking care of business where he needed to be to win his campaign. Yet his campaign achieved something unimaginable: it elected an African-American to the presidency of the United States of America. Its coalition of youth, people of color, progressives, the anti-war movement, low-income Americans and others, won the election. It was able to take advantage of the economic disaster. It found another political center, in fact it had to find and empower that new center to win. Economic disaster struck in September. McCain was ahead on points but the Obama campaign was the beneficiary. Obama didn’t win just because of the worst economic news in decades. The campaign was able to take advantage of the news because it had already been organized, was running smoothly and gathering momentum when the bad news broke. There is no way that campaign started two months before the election nor is there any way even the enormous sums of money it raised could have been used effectively in so short a period of time if not for a campaign that was organized and growing sufficiently to turn those millions into votes. If not a movement – and that will have to be seen – it was organized along movement lines, which reflected at least some of the community-organizer values of its candidate. The Republicans jeered at those values. By that time, Republicans had believed their own propaganda for so long, they were blind to what would happen to them, and their “center” was left behind. Some have noted that 52 percent of the popular vote is not a landslide. While experts debate the point, we note that the 52-percent majority provided a comfortable victory of 364 electoral votes (without Missouri reporting yet). I don’t know what the campaign said about “rejuvenation of American Democracy, etc.,” but it was a masterpiece of a political campaign in the excellent cause of electing the first African-American president of the United States of America. Perhaps a white candidate whose name did not end in a vowel would have won by a greater number of votes, but there was only one successful candidate, one election and one poll that counted. Dr. Vincent Harding stated an important theme to Amy Goodman during Democracy Now!’s Election Night coverage: that Obama will govern “a little left of center” and that it will be essential for progressives to continue to work for their goals and to make sure that he hears them from inside the White House. Harding’s voice came swimming out of the broadcast as a brief moment of pure, sober wisdom in the midst of polyphonic, left excitement as states fell to Obama in orderly succession a couple of hours before the polls closed in blue California. Goodman brought to our attention that Dr. Harding wrote most of Martin Luther King Jr.’s magnificent speech, "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break the Silence", delivered 4 April 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. But, the Obama campaign shifted the effective political center of the country by a registration and get-out-the-vote campaign that matched the candidate’s rhetorical gifts. Those gifts are extraordinary. Obama did not allow a one-word slogan, “Change” and a three-word slogan borrowed, from Cesar Chavez (at least that's how we first heard it) and translated into English, to go stale. Obama may have come up with more compelling definitions of the word, “change,” than anyone in history. The campaign was incredibly long, even by US standards. A newcomer, Sarah Palin, ceased to interest in a matter of weeks. Obama remained fascinating to hear and watch. The political “center” is a dubious concept. The proper distinction, in a nation that does not compel its citizens to vote, is between a center invented by public opinion polls and the politically effective center. This year, we saw a massive voter turnout, which will always move the center in a certain direction. This direction often but not always benefits Democratic Party candidates. Whether it is more “to the left” or “liberal,” is more difficult to say. In the last 40 years, we have seen a steady decline in voter turnout and, correspondingly, a politically effective center moving toward Republicans “to the right.” Obama’s political campaign changed the effective political center of the US somewhat away from the right by dint of the hard work on the ground and through the Internet that was there, in place, and ready to attract an economically anxious population to its cause and translate the attraction into votes, in all the right places. What this movement away from the Republicans may mean is unclear. A little more pragmatism in the White House is to be welcomed, but if it just founders in squalid business deals, un-enlivened by a deeper sense of justice, it will be extremely disappointing to millions of people. What is called the progressive movement has come into being as innumerable groups in the nation have found it necessary for many reasons to oppose neo-conservatism. How progressives will deal with liberalism in power remains to be seen. However, economic and military crises may overwhelm such concerns. Exercising one’s right to vote itself was a vital cause in this campaign, a major theme. We should not, in the year 2008 in the oldest democracy in the world, have to be dealing with this issue, but the right wing has shown us very clearly and straightforwardly that if we do not take aggressive steps to protect our franchise we will lose it, touch-by-touch to corrupted technology as well as by more overt means of voter suppression. Millions of Americans were aware this year that their right to vote was in danger. Voting itself was part of the Obama campaign’s cause, which linked it in another way to the Civil Rights movement. “Use it or lose it!” as we used to say in voter-registration drives. “Si, se puede” or “Yes, we can” is a complex slogan because it does two things that embody Change. To say the words at once recognizes the powerlessness from which we have come as it asserts the will to transform ourselves into a politically effective cause. The circumstances that combine to produce genuine acts of political creativity are always unique. The history of the phrase, at least in our provincial California memory, comes from the Farm Labor movement here. In a time when the state’s Democratic Party bias toward agribusiness was very strong, it was definitely an anti-Democratic Party slogan. However, this year it certainly became a rallying cry Hispanic Obama voters throughout the nation. Here in the San Joaquin Valley, Obama won, with a lot of help from Bush’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the last several years. At least in California, the phrase closely resembles, “Sal, se puede,” which means “Get out if you can,” with just about the opposite meaning. As the Farm Labor movement developed, it appeared to us to have been converted by Chavez and other community and labor organizers, to “Si, se puede,” almost a translation of “We shall overcome.” Recalling La Causa, so much a part of the political scene in the West and Southwest in the 1960s and 1970s, and even Eastern cities during campaigns like the table grape boycott, reminded us of a number of Democrats in political power in that era who did not say they were social liberals and fiscal conservatives. They said they were liberals and got elected for being liberals. Although liberalism is a vision-impaired ideology, it still provided a more humane and hopeful political tradition than anything our current neo-Carthaginian rulers have ever had to offer. Even Ronald Reagan, if we recall, began as a Democrat and his oratory revealed evidence of what he had rejected. Barry Goldwater condemned liberalism from the experience of daily confrontation with it. Politically blind and deaf, and leading dubious majorities for eight years, Bush spoke as if this political tradition were as dead as “civilian collateral damage.” Job-seeking Clintonians swarm about Obama today. Now, we have a president-elect who possesses a complex, rich, rhythmic oratory, who often makes sense, and has added a progressive tone to a pragmatic outlook. Whatever his message, we may have to listen to Obama in a way we have not listened to a president in decades, not because some of his immediate predecessors have not been extremely gifted orators (both Clinton are), but because we may need to depend on this president more than we ever needed perhaps any president since FDR. Spare us a bunch of Slick Willies feeling our pain. Combining some elements of this campaign and time -- Obama’s rhetorical skill, the campaign themes and the sense of cause his campaign had to have to win, an economic situation looking chillingly like a depression, following a period of politics and government defined by the millennial trauma of 9/11, neglect of the people and reckless economic and imperial adventures -- it seems that Americans are trying to take back our government from plutocrats. The departing revolutionaries of the Right ended by displaying a deficient concept of justice and a strong preference for cash. One hopes that after the Democrats have finished their feeding frenzy of the spoils of office they will recognize the existence of a public with a few ideas of its own about justice and cash. Perhaps we can, if we can only stay awake long enough. Having said that, we do not mean tuning in exclusively to President Obama. That could replicate neuroses of the past. We ought to grateful to barbarians in office for providing us the necessity to speak up. Liberals are masters at controlling such “intemperate” speech “for the good of (their uncommon selves).” Keep your ear tuned to your reasons, under the great umbrella of “Change” and “Yes, we can” that gave you the hope to vote for Obama. We should concentrate on telling him what kind of specific changes we need and desire. He will be in the White House surrounded by people forcefully pushing agendas of the same-old variety and vanity – more wars, more bailouts of the wealthy, special dispensation for Chicago derivatives merchants, more special deals for special interests at the expense of the Common Good. Setting aside the problem that the Common Good may be impossible to define in a nation this large and with such an empire, it remains the task to articulate our own visions of the Common Good from our own ground. These visions will vary and conflict with others. However, the hope we place in President-elect Obama is that it will be more likely now than it has been for a long time that these visions, grounded in local common needs and aspirations, will have a chance of fighting their way through the door to a table where effective political bargaining may occur. In backrooms, elected politicians have sold out The Public Trust, the Public Interest, the Interest of the Citizen, Liberty, or the Common Good – whatever you want to call the political goal of human happiness – to plutocrats for too long. The national income disparity reveals this clearly and unemployment is rising rapidly. A large part of the problem of this recession is that 70 percent of the US economy is based on consumer spending and consumers can no longer spend like they once did because the homes they borrowed against may no longer be their own. In preparation for this great, challenging morning of renewed political hope, we might take some time to recall just how oppressive the out-going regime has been and how deeply it had afflicted us with its steady barrage of anti-human, anti-nature, and above all its fear propaganda. Among other things, we might take hope in the thought that the progressives, and the progressive element in Obama’s thinking, might improve the eyesight of American liberalism before imperial fantasy and bailouts of the rich fatally blind it and do irreparable harm to the US experiment in self-government. Former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-NJ (Princeton, Oxford, NY Knicks), warned us repeatedly that race relations was the greatest danger to American society. We are stunned by the hope Obama's victory brings. He should not have abused it with the appointment of Rahm Emanuel, a former Israeli citizen and volunteer for the IDF and enemy of anti-war Democrats. If we can elect an African-American president, we can admit that Israel directs of our Middle East policy and "change" that, too, perhaps being guided by Bobby Kennedy's repeated line in 1968: “This is unacceptable!” We might also reflect that, to some extent, the world has been the victim of millennial religiosity of late, a force quite impervious to the practical reasoning -- neither religious dogma nor fascist sophistry -- upon which the US Constitution is based and which on occasion hoves into view as an imperfect but better guide to policy than Bible-thumping. The issue of politics is the Common Good, not the imperial crusader’s individual religious salvation through murdering innocent Muslims. We are permitted to disagree greatly on what the Common Good may be, but it is time to admit it isn't murderous, suicidal religious crusades that kill hundreds of thousands but doesn't lay a hand on the terrorist. The phrase, “under God,” was only inserted in our Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, due to pressure from the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. We went through two world wars and the Great Depression without evidently feeling the need to assert that our “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” was holy. People went right on praying for rain and survival in foxholes without the need for it. I went through the world polio epidemic of 1953 in hospital and recovering, praying to live and praying for the dying and dead. I don't remember hearing anything about the USA in the county hospital quarantined boys' polio ward. The Pledge itself was only written in 1892, by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist and brother of socialist Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward. Although a Baptist minister, Francis felt no need to create the illusion in the Pledge that the US was a biblical divine protectorate and confuse children with any similarity to any religious creed they may have been required to recite in church. The history of the Pledge is bound closely to the development of public schools, not parochial schools. That phrase caused enormous mischief in children’s minds, because it turned the Pledge of Allegiance almost all American children are compelled daily to take, regardless of inherited family religious belief, from a statement of limited, explicitly civil, political values into a religious confession of a nationalist creed. The Bush regime has taught Americans a priceless lesson, for which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the Middle East have been sacrificed: there is nothing special about the US but its size and power; it has no divine protection from moral, military, political or economic disaster; it is like any other empire that has ever existed and gone broke from the consequences of unholy greed, military aggression and infernal belief that it has a special, divine dispensation for murderous conquest. Empire never produces the Common Good, is never the Christian thing to do, provokes terrorist retaliation and, as the Iraq and Afghan wars very quickly did, ends in being a good thing only for a small number of big shots. Now let us hope that we may learn the lesson and find the political power to compel better policies. Bill Hatch lives in Merced and can be reached at wmmhatch@sbcglobal.net
New in the Print Edition of CounterPunch For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederic Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy 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 gear make great presents. Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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New in the CP Print Edition! For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederic Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; and Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Waiting for Lightning
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