Today's Stories

December 4-6, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Twin Frauds of Obama

December 3, 2009

Jeff Ballinger
Helping Dicatators Look Good

Paul Fitzgerald / Elizabeth Gould
What are We Fighting for in Afghanistan?

Christopher Brauchli
Innocent Dead Men Walking

Laura Flanders
All-Too-Familiar Line on Afghanistan

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah's New Manifesto

Mark Weisbrot
Unavoidable Differences: Brazil vs. Washington

Gary Leupp
Obama's Tortured Rationale

Stephen Fleischman
Envisioning an Exit Strategy?

Bill Christison
Obama's Unjust Iran Policy

December 2, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Obama Puppet

Gareth Porter
The Power Struggle Behind Obama's Speech

Zoltan Grossman
Afghanistan: the Roach Motel of Empires

Mike Whitney
The Path to Full Employment: an Interview with Marshall Auerback

Ron Jacobs
The Escalation Begins: an Exchange with Anand Gopal

M. Shahid Alam
The Groveling of Pakistani Elites

D.K. Wilson
Is Tiger Woods Black Enemy Number One?

Fran Shor
Obama and the Dying Empire

Susan Galleymore
African Realities in the Wake of World AIDS Day

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Caught in the Cross Fire

Website of the Day
Rebel Without a Conscience

December 1, 2009

David Price
Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan

Afshin Rattansi
The Dubai Disaster: a Familiar Fall

Carlos Benemann
Dubai FUBAR

Dean Baker
Is "Helping Homeowners" Washingtonspeak for Bailing Out the Banks?

Bouthaina Shaaban Rejecting Westocentrism

David Rosen
America's Failing Sexual Health

Susan Galleymore
Global Connections and the Arc of War

David Macaray
Labor's Beating Heart

Miriam Pemberton
Bush-Style Military Spending Not Over Yet

Farzana Versey
Condoms, Hunks and the AIDS Celebrity Circus

Website of the Day
The Story of Cap and Trade

November 30, 2009

Gary Leupp
A "Necessary War" -- for a Gas Pipeline

Mara Ahmed /
Judith Bello
Pakistan and the Global War on Terror

Mike Whitney
Crisis in Dubai

Steven Higgs
Growing Up Toxic

P. Sainath
Pay-to-Print: "News" Stories for Cash Scandal Rocks India

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Arab Women Workers Need Not Apply

Norm Kent
On the Suicide of Mike Penner: Why the Transgendered Need Civil Rights Protections

Dave Lindorff
Obama as the Manchurian Candidate

Normon Solomon
The Hollow Politics of Escalation

David Michael Green How Dare You Clean Up Our Mess?

Website of the Day
The America's Program Needs Your Help

November 27 - 29, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Auld Triangle Goes Jingle Jangle

Carl Ginsburg
Planning for Poverty?

Mike Whitney
Blame Larry Summers

Franklin Spinney
Obama as LBJ

Joshua Frank
Coal Kills

Saul Landau
The True Price of Oil

Heather Gray
Overtly Racist Regimes in the 20th Century

John Ross
The Timeline for a New Mexican Revolution Comes Due

David Macaray
Adventures in Polarization

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: 52 Words That Shook Washington

Shamus Cooke
The Devastating Consequences of the Corporate Health Insurance Bill

David Ker Thomson
The Transformers

Martha Rosenberg
Cash for Cheesedogs? The Recession Takes a Bite Out of Meat Consumption

Ramzy Baroud
A Paradigm Shift in Singapore?

Ron Ridenour
Post-War Internment Hell for Tamils

Amanda Mueller
Saving Grace: Negotiating Abortion and the Catholic Faith

James Rothenberg
China Kowtow

Travis Kelly
Mayday, 1960: the U2 Files

Don Monkerud
Big Beer Takes Over

Ron Jacobs
Science Fiction and Politics

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of Chinua Achebe

David Yearsley
What Father Made Us Sing Before the Turkey

Poets' Basement
Catherine Zickgraf and Mickey Z.

Website of the Weekend
Good to Be Alive

November 26, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Mumbai in the Shadow of Kashmir

Greg Moses
We Remember the Popol Vuh

Jayne Lyn Stahl
How About a War on Poverty Instead?

Jeff Cohen
Get Ready for the Obama / GOP Alliance

John Blair
The Gasification of Indiana

Ann Robertson /
Bill Leumer
A Surge in Demands on Goverment for Jobs

Farzana Versey
The American East India Company

Sam Husseini
Moral Relativism at Fort Hood: Guilt, Therapy and the System

Tom Mountain
The Truth Behind the Turkey

Website of the Day
A Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs

November 25, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The Bush-Blair Conspiracy on Iraq

Marjorie Cohn
The Case of Lynn Stewart

Belén Fernández
An Interview with Honduran Coup General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez

Ralph Nader
Weak-Kneed in China

Rannie Amiri
The Impending Release of Gilad Shalit: What Palestinians Deserve in Return

Missy Beattie
Finish the Job?

Rob Stone, MD Health Care Delusions: Better Than Nothing?

Norm Kent
In Praise of Adam Lambert

Binoy Kampmark Handing It to France: the Sporting Trial of Thierry Henry

Ron Ridenour
International Support for Sri Lanka

Website of the Day
The Credit Card Game

November 24, 2009

Mary Lynn Cramer
Health Care Reform and the Skinning of Seniors

Dean Baker
Too Big to Kill? The Vampire Banks Rise Again

George Ciccariello-Maher
Occupy Everything! Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police

Eric Walberg
Canada's Guantanamo

Andy Thayer
Lessons From a Lynching: the Murder of Jorge Steven Lopez-Mercado

David Macaray
The Delphi Incident: How the White-Collar Tribe Got Shafted

Laura Carlsen
The Perils of Plan Mexico

Gary Leupp
Obama as Hamlet

Adam Federman
Poisoning Dimock

William S. Lind Mission Creep: Counter-Insurgency in Salinas?

Website of the Day
Geography of the Recession

November 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
A Trial That Will Convict Us All

Jonathan Cook
Have Israeli Spies Infiltrated International Aiports?

Edward S. Herman / David Peterson
Vulliamy's Smears

Bouthaina Shaaban
What's New? It's Always Been Like This

Helen Redmond
Health Care's Historic Flop

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Arabia's Attack on Yemen

Dave Lindorff
Abortion and Health Care

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Self-Delusionary American Tragedy

Mike Whitney
Is American Casino the Best Picture of the Year?

Mark Weisbrot
Honduran Dictatorship is a Threat to Democracy in the Hemisphere

David Michael Green
The Placeholder Presidency of Obama

November 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch Diary
It's Show Trial Time!

Gareth Porter
New Light on the Qom Facility

Mike Whitney
The Great Stimulus Debate of '09: Crybabies need not apply

Fred Gardner
Mammography
Pushes Back

James J. Brittain
It's Really a War on the Poor
A War on Coca Nobody Believes

Jonathan Cook
Rabbi Followers 'Terror Cell in Parliament'

Alan Farago
Bulletin from the Dark Side: Florida's Republican Ultras

David Macaray
A Hindu Version of the UAW
Labor Strife in India

Binoy Kampmark
The Israeli Exception: Gilo and East Jerusalem

Ben Sonnenberg
Ashes and Diamonds
Retirement Norwegian Style

Ron Jacobs
Judge Roy Bean Takes Manhattan

David Yearsley
200,000 Testicles Offered Up to the Gods of Song

Brenda Norrell
A Border Runs Through Them:
The Struggles of the Tohono O'odham

Ron Ridenour
The Tamils and Equal Rights of Self Determination

November 19, 2009

Christopher Ketcham
The Dumbest Newspapers at the Center of the World

Shamus Cooke
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit

John V. Walsh
Impotent in China

Saul Landau
Dissidents Make Noise--Oops, News

Ralph Nader
Exiting Afghanistan

Nikolas Kozloff
Blackout in Brazil

Fred Gardner
Reputable MDs Buy NorCal Health Care

Charles R. Larson
Voices of the Silenced

John A. Murphy
Nader v. Dodd

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Obama's Gray World

November 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Religious Scoundrel

John Ross
Hot Oil!

Conn Hallinan
Strategic Towns: Why Gen. McChrystal's Plan Will Fail

Mike Whitney
Obama's China Junket

Ray McGovern
The Bogus Success of the Surge

Nelson P. Valdés
Cyber Cuba: Internet, Broadband and Foreign Policy

Ramzy Baroud
Globalization Unchecked

Ron Ridenour
Tamil Eelam: the Historic Right to Nationhood

November 17, 2009

Mike Whitney
Let's Get Fiscal

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Double Crossed: War Vets Deported

Brian M. Downing
Do They Subscribe to GQ at the Pentagon?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Two-Tiered Justice System

Joanne Mariner
A First Look at the Military Commisions Act

Dean Baker
Obama's Nuclear Option on the Yuan

Martha Rosenberg
Pig Hell at Wal-Mart Supplier

Danny Weil
Fear in Nicaragua

David Macaray
Retail Sales as Combat

Laura Flanders
Buried Bonanza for Over-Builders

Walter Brasch
Rush to Judgment on Terror Trials

November 16, 2009

Alan Nasser
Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer

Jonathan Cook
Campus Watch Copy Cats

Mark Weisbrot
Obama, China and the Dollar

Carol Miller
We Need Health Care, Not Insurance

Gary Leupp
The Andolan in Kathmandu and the Revolution to Follow

Harry Clark
Justice Goldstone at Brandeis

Ray McGovern
Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism

Norman Solomon
California Democrats Urge Obama to Leave Afghanistan

Ron Ridenour
Genocide in Sri Lanka

Norm Kent
Doctors Light Up

Brenda Norrell
Torture Resisters Arrested at Fort Huachuca

November 13-15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
A Man in a Hundred

Patrick Cockburn
Meet Our Afghan Ally: Stealing Money, Selling Heroin and Raping Boys

Tariq Ali
Short Cuts in Afghanistan

Douglas Lummis
Obama, Hatoyama and Okinawa

Vijay Prashad
Can the Major Speak?

Carl Ginsburg
Cornering the Market on Ambition

Manuel García, Jr.
The Purpose is Pork

Rannie Amiri
The Disastrous Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas

Mary Lynn Cramer
Death By Denial: the Militarization of Mental Health

Fred Gardner
Pot Doc Down

Dave Lindorff
Health Care Reform: DOA

Robert Jensen
How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Death Stampede Revisited

Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing Timberland: Nike Foe Jeff Ballinger Zeros in on a New Target

Ron Jacobs
No More Star Spangled Eyes

David Model
NATO's Chimerical Enemy in Afghanistan

John V. Walsh
Godless China: What Obama Will Find

Jon Mitchell
Beggars' Belief

Stuart Easterling
Blaming the Narcos in Mexico

Dan Bacher
Big Oil Takes Over Marine "Protection" in California

Franklin Lamb
Lebanese Students Advise Obama on How to Get It Right

Farzana Versey
Moderns, Models and Martyrs

Charles R. Larson
War, Peace and Paramilitaries in Colombia

Saul Landau
The Coen Bros. Brutalize Job

David Yearsley
When the Cirque Meets the Beatles

Lorenzo Wolff
At the Side of the Frontman

Poets' Basement
Blaine, Rivas and Cox

November 12, 2009

Robert Weissman
Maniacal Deregulation

Franklin Spinney
The Afghan War Question

Nadia Hijab
After Fort Hood

Afshin Rattansi
Night Vision: Why US Sanctions on Syria Will Kill American Soldiers

Paul Craig Roberts
America's Dismal Future

Ralph Nader
Failing the People on Health Care

Belén Fernández
Tourists of the Honduran Counter-Revolution

Allan J. Lichtman
A National Peacemaker's Day

Dave Lindorff
President Peacenik's War

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Headline of the Year

November 11, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Crafting of a Loophole

Mike Whitney
A Small "d" Depression

Rev. Jesse Jackson
Where's the Jobs Stimulus?

Jeff Nygaard
Iranian Irrationality? Maybe Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Regime Reneges on Political Deal

James Ridgeway
The End of the Little Red Cars: Memories of East Berlin

Eamonn McCann
Blood on Their Hands

Michael Ortiz Hill
Unbecoming War and Terrorism

Shepherd Bliss
From Oklahoma City to Fort Hood

Walter Brasch
"This is Jenna Bush Reporting ... "

November 10, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

Dean Baker
How to Raise $140 Billion a Year From Wall Street Banks

Rose Ann DeMoro
The Truth About the House Health Care Bill

Ramzy Baroud
Inch by Inch, House by House: How Israel Won the Settlement Battle...Again

Peter Lee
The Dalai Lama Sticks His Thumb in the Dragon's Eye

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Workers

Roberto Rodriguez
Running Past PTSD (Or My Susto Profundo)

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Self-Dismembering F-35

Alan Farago
The Rising Tide

Joseph Grosso
The Legacy of Albert Parsons

November 9, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

Linn Washington
Fox Finds a New Black Boogeyman

Carl Ginsburg
To be Young and Unemployed Forever

Jeff Leys
War Funding, 2010

John A. Murphy
Can Lieberman Save Single Payer? Why Progressives Should Back a Filibuster

John Halle
Bard and the Lobby: Final Thoughts on the Kovel Affair

Bouthaina Shaaban
Clinton Dances With Netanyahu

James Ridgeway
Heath Care: Winning a Battle, Losing the War

Dave Lindorff
The Kafka Economy

David Macaray
The Philadelphia Transit Strike

Stephen Fleischman
The Tea Party System

Website of the Day
Cap-and-Trade: The Huge Mistake

November 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Too Fat to Fight

Mark Grueter
Inside the American University of Iraq

Paul Craig Roberts
The Evil Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Friendly Fire

Gareth Porter
Karzai's Cabinet of Warlords

Mike Whitney
The Battle of Seattle, 10 Years Later

James Bovard
How the Media Enables Government Lies

Dean Baker
Don't Touch the Banks!

Robert Lawless
Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

Saul Landau
Afghanistan: a War Without Logic

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Black Ops and Fort Hood

Stephanie Westbrook
My Memories of Fort Hood

M. Shahid Alam
How Eurocentric Are You?

Marc Levy
Walking With Mr. Muhammad

Franklin Lamb
Obama's Mid-East Mess

Ron Jacobs
A New Map of Hell

David Ker Thomson
Afternoon With Tulip

John V. Whitbeck
Moment of Truth

Julien Mercille
Drugs and Afghanistan: the UN's Misleading Report

Rannie Amiri
Egypt's Next Unelected President?

John Ross
Legalize It!

David Michael Green
Can You Hear Us Now?

Carl Finamore
Strike One for Hotels in San Francisco

Farzana Versey
The Farce of Fatwas and Political Expediency

Missy Comley Beattie
No to Single Payer, Yes to Prayer?

Charles R. Larson
Business as Usual in India

David Yearsley
Anna Magdalena, Music and the Art of Dying

Kim Nicolini
"Paranormal Activity:" a DIY Horror Film

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Devreaux Baker

November 5, 2009

Pam Martens
The Fire Sale of America

Vijay Prashad
The Great Heretic

Brian Gallagher
The Soldiers From Standard Oil: Harvard, ROTC and American Foreign Policy

Norman Solomon
The Next Phase in Health Care Apartheid

Nadia Hijab
The Battle for Palestinian Representation

Joseph Shansky
And the Winner in Honduras is ... the United States?

Andy Thayer
Questions and Answers From Maine

Tracy Rosenberg
Pacifica and the Barbarians Who Pay the Bills

Website of the Day
All Folked Up

November 4, 2009

Stan Cox
The Inflated Promise of Natural Gas

Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs?

Robert Weissman
The Medicare-for-All Moment

Susan Galleymore
Of Veterans and Volunteers

Ralph Nader
Hoh's Afghanistan Warning

Michael Leonardi
Italy's Secret Ships of Poison

Bitta Mistofi
Death to No One: Isolating and Taunting Iran Will Only Empower the Regime

Robert Bryce
From Lahore to Copenhagen

Martha Rosenberg
Is Your Doctor's Continuing Ed Funded by Drug Makers?

Dave Lindorff
Democrats Crash and Burn

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Backtrackers

November 3, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
The Delegitimization of Karzai

Mike Whitney
Why the Crisis Isn't Going Away

Franklin C. Spinney
Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear

Laura Carlsen
The Little Coup That Couldn't

Serge Halimi
Don't Blame the Internet

John Stanton
Social Decay in America

Sophia Weeks
A Guatemalan Lament

Dave Lindorff
Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

November 2, 2009

Steven Higgs
Autism Spikes, Toxins Suspected

Ishmael Reed
White in America: Behind the Scenes at CNN

David Macaray
UAW Members Vote Down Ford; and the Media Attacked the Union

Bouthaina Shaaban
Settler Colonialism: Return to the Middle Ages

David Michael Green
Coming to Get You

David Swanson
The Two Percent Robustness

Ellen Brown
Cutting Wall Street Out

Adam Federman
Trading the Watershed to Trash the Catskills

James McEnteer
Doppleganger Politics: Star Wars, Clone Wars

Stephen Fleischman
Foot in the Door: Capitalism and Health Care

Website of the Day
Secret California Park Giveaway

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Long Gaze of the State

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Facing Down the Machine: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

Carl Ginsburg
Living in the Shadow of Yankee Stadium

Mike Whitney
Obama Goes Wobbly Over More Stimulus

Joe Bageant
The Iron Cheer of Empire

Gareth Porter
Security By Warlords: the CIA's Afghan Payroll

Saul Landau
The Cuban Embargo

Anthony DiMaggio
Conspiracy, Inc.: Wild Tales From the Reactionary Right

Dave Lindorff
Happy Talk Amid the Wreckage: Stocks Up, Jobs Down

Rannie Amiri
The Spooks of Beirut

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
An Afghan Travelogue

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Who Will Reform the Health Care Reform?

Rev. William E. Alberts
God's Favorite Team (and Nation and Religion)

Alvaro Huerta
The Abominable Mr. Dobbs

Martha Rosenberg
Marketing Drugs to Psychoneurotics

Binoy Kampmark
Don't Give Us Your Wretched: Refugee Policy in OZ

Norm Kent
Not Just Zig-Zag Any More: Medical Marijuana Goes Mainstream

Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro

Ron Jacobs
One Man's Truth, Another Man's Lies

David Yearsley
Not Loud Enough by Half

Lorenzo Wolff
The Vulnerability of Lauryn Hill

Kim Nicolini
"Big Fan:" Football, Class and Sexuality in America

Poets' Basement
Davies, Heyen and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Coal Country Music

October 29, 2009

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel: a Wonderful Hiding Place

Mike Whitney
Housing Rebound? Not So Fast

Gary Leupp
Matthew Hoh Speaks Truth to Power

Conn Hallinan
Roman Roads and Modern Emperors

Marshall Auerback
Obama's Bogus Populism: Pay Curbs and Bank Loans

Laura Flanders
Palin's Pet Doug Hoffman Has Taliban Ties

Eamonn McCann
The War Criminal Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?

David Macaray
Strange Invaders: Can Ignorance and Arrogance Win Hearts and Minds?

Mark Weisbrot
When Small Countries Lead the Way

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Complicity in Torture Challenged

Christopher Brauchli
Will the Pope Bring the Taliban Into His Flock?

Website of the Day
The USS Liberty Affair and the Problem of Truth in History

October 28, 2009

Moshe Adler
How to Reduce Unemployment, Rebuild the Middle Class and Free Ourselves From Wall Street

Dave Lindorff
America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Frank Joseph Smecker
Agaisnt Prometheus: an Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology

Alexandra Early
What a "Jobless" Recovery Means for Young Workers

M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism

Vijay Prashad
Sahelian Blowback: What's Happening in Mali?

John Ross
Three Years Later, Brad Will is Still Dead

Franklin Lamb
A Rare Victory for Lebanon's Palestinians

Gregory Travis
The Dismal Science: Elinor Ostrom's Nobel

Susan Galleymore
Peace Cycle to Palestine

Website of the Day
Newspaper Decline, a Graphic Display

October 27, 2009

Mike Whitney
Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Patrick Cockburn
Bombs Will Go Off in Baghdad, Whether the US is There or Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

Alan Farago
Power Plays in Florida: Rate Increases, Nukes and Deception

Ralph Nader
Obama: Form Letters and Business as Usual

Dave Lindorff
Pentagon Dirty Bombers: DU in America

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Danger of Towing the Line Behind Israel

Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around

Iain Boal
How You Can Save Pacifica

Carl Finamore
Hotel Workers and the Law of Momentum

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Here Comes That Third Party: Palin and the Constitutionalists

Website of the Day
How Bank of America Charges for Perfect Credit

October 26, 2009

Bill Quigley /
Deborah Popowski
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

Uri Avnery
A Tsunami Called Goldstone

Mike Whitney
Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years?

Michael Snedeker
The Execution of Cameron Willingham

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Dirty War on Immigrants

David Michael Green
Paranoia for Breakfast

Martha Rosenberg
Gagging Michael Pollan

Patrick Bond
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen

Binoy Kampmark
Heading for the Tiber

Website of the Day
Goldman Sachs Abandons Kittens

Weekend Edition
December 4-6, 2009

Milwaukeeans vs. the Privatization Pandemic

Barbarians at the Schoolhouse

By GEOFF BERNE

In 410 A.D. Visigoth barbarians from northern Europe under their military leader Alaric brutally sacked imperial Rome, trashing its museums and public buildings, vandalizing its art treasures, and driving its population out of the city and into the countryside.

Just so, in June 2009, news arrived in my inbox from Todd Price in Wisconsin that Democratic U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, like Bush-era Republican Secretaries Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings before him an advocate of using charter schools and business management to bring about “education reform,” was gearing up, in his maiden outing as Secretary, for a sack of the city of Milwaukee, or at least its most visible community incarnation, its democratically administered public school system

Even to an attuned but distant observer from out of state like myself it seemed significant that here was a U.S. Secretary of Education making his debut in his post by involving himself in the micromanagement of how a single city, Milwaukee, runs its schools. A newspaper headline put a spotlight on this unusual federal intervention in a city’s affairs: “U.S. education secretary pushes to improve Milwaukee Public Schools.” The format was for Duncan to meet with an invited assemblage of a dozen school, community, and elected leaders from one American city, the city of Milwaukee, along with a high-placed state official, the Governor of Wisconsin, to lay down the law on the education makeover that would have to take place in the city of Milwaukee for the state of Wisconsin to qualify for a share of the $4 billion in federal “Race To The Top” funds for education reform.

Wasn’t it just a little unprecedented that here were a United States cabinet Secretary and a state Governor going to a city to put it on notice to shape up or ship out? Couldn’t the Secretary simply have put this message in a letter? No, he felt it important to be there in person to make the following points so that those in attendance who seemed to have been invited to create an impression of representativeness of Milwaukee education and the Milwaukee community — the president of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, the president of the Milwaukee Urban League, the Milwaukee schools head of Career Youth Development and the newly named staff person for the public schools’ Innovation and Improvement Advisory Council — would get his points into their heads, to wit, as this summary taken from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel puts it:

• Duncan wants a united approach, with people from throughout the community getting behind school improvement

• Duncan is not interested in small change, he wants dramatic, bold change

• Duncan is offering billions of dollars to a select number of states and it could be a big opportunity for Wisconsin to be one of them, but if they don’t get in line with the Secretary’s demands for reform, they could “blow it.”

• Duncan demands that leadership of the school makeover in Milwaukee, as the Journal-Sentinel reporter put it, “needs to start at the top, and that means the mayor.”

In an interview with the Journal-Sentinel published the day prior to the meeting, Duncan somewhat unconvincingly declined to express an opinion on the, you’d think, local issue of whether the Milwaukee mayor should be empowered to take over the city schools, while in the same breath exalting the benefits of mayoral school takeovers in uniting whole cities behind a common cause:

“Where the challenges are so large, you need all hands on deck,” he said. “You need the business community, you need the philanthropic community, you need the social service agencies, you need the not-for-profits, you need the city agencies, the police, the fire, the parks and rec . . . The best way I can think to get everyone rowing in the same direction is from leadership at the top, and that comes from the mayor.”

The Secretary in his whirlwind trip to Milwaukee did everything but slam the door on his way out. Milwaukeeans and people familiar with his previous record of replacing public with charter schools as CEO of schools in Chicago, recognized immediately that the outcome would bode ill for public education.

Sure enough, the Duncan visit was followed in September, three months later, by an announcement by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, of a state- and city-endorsed plan for “reform” of education in Milwaukee through dissolution of the city’s elected Board of Education and transfer of its authority to Tom Barrett, Milwaukee’s Democratic mayor. Barrett, who acknowledges aspiring to succeed the retiring Doyle as Governor in 2010, surely must anticipate a boon for himself — by carrying out the Duncan takeover game plan in Milwaukee — with voters across the state. The pretext for the transfer would be the need to bring Wisconsin in line, as speedily as possible, for the so-called “Race To The Top” funding that Duncan is holding out as a plum to the lucky 25 states that toe the Secretary’s line on reform, his line being: elimination of bureaucratic impediments to the remaking of schools such as boards of education who sign contracts granting job security to union teachers.

While Duncan, in replying to a September letter sent to him by a Wisconsin Congresswoman, Gwendolyn Moore, protested that no such demand had been made by him in the Milwaukee meeting, his letter and subsequent developments suggest otherwise. In reply to Moore's question as to whether at that session mayoral takeover of the city schools had been stated as a condition for the state to receive "Race to the Top" funding, the Secretary denied that there had been such a quid pro quo. However at the same time he firmly emphasized that if the state did not void "all legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking data about student achievement or student growth to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation" it would not be allowed to receive the coveted funding.   In other words, a threat had been made back in June, and in his September letter, peeling away the oblique wording, he repeats the threat by making the removal of “barriers” an absolute condition for receiving funds – the implication being: get rid of your board of education or do without the funding! 

But why has Mr. Duncan had this “thing” about Wisconsin and invested so much of his time,  and reputation, in bringing the state into the fold of the public school flagellators (excuse me, I meant to say “reformers”)? One answer is that until legislation to change the system of teacher remuneration was passed in that state during the week of November 9th, Wisconsin had been one of just three holdout states (the others being New York and Nevada) that were stubbornly refusing to peg teacher salaries to student test scores.  

The other reason the Secretary may have put such a premium on Wisconsin is the opportunity to make Milwaukee, America’s 11th poorest city, a poster child for the Duncan method of improving inner city schools: by empowering mayors to close and replace them.

If getting Wisconsin to adopt the Milwaukee takeover legislation is so important to the Secretary of Education that he even made a second trip to Wisconsin (that is, a charter school in Madison) with President Obama on November 4th, then we had better be alert for the importance it may have for the rest of us as well — as a sign of the future for urban communities like Milwaukee that many of us happen to live in, for the boards and officials that we elect to run them, and for school districts outside the inner city who may someday wake up to discover that they themselves are on the receiving end of this juggernaut of “school reform.”   Todd Price, whose account of this, let's face it, Washington-engineered attempted takeover of Milwaukee schools follows in Part II, was the 2009 Green Party candidate for Wisconsin Superintendent of Instruction. With credentials as a teacher of education as well as eyewitness and rally speaker in the Milwaukee confrontation, he opens a rare peephole into privatization-in-action: first, the would-be sack of a major American city’s schools by federal and corporate “barbarians” and then, the bristling backlash against it by Milwaukeeans rallying to defend the independence of their city.

Reacting to his reports and YouTube videos of ferment in Milwaukee that have been coming to me in Ohio, where I have been monitoring and writing about school privatization since the lead-up years to the birth of vouchers in this state with the Cleveland pilot program of 1995, I’ve been brought to attention (and I wouldn't be surprised if Sec. Duncan has been as well) by these Milwaukeeans - teachers, principals, administrators, elected officials, religious leaders, parents, and young students - who’ve been turning out in such numbers to defend their elected school board, and by their resistance to federal and state intrusion.

Could this be a crack in the picture window of acceptance of the privatization pandemic that has been raging unimpeded in this country since even before breaking into the open in the Reagan and Bush years in the 1980s? Considering that, nationally, even unions representing teachers from districts outside of urban areas like Milwaukee have climbed aboard the Duncan “school reform” bandwagon hoping for a seat at the table in the seemingly unstoppable post-public era that awaits, appreciation of what a striking rebuff to this consensus Milwaukeeans have lodged requires a sense of just how ingrained in our system the privatization process has become.

My purpose in what follows is to put Todd Price's narrative of the Wisconsin events in the context of that larger process.

Let me start this preface by highlighting dates in the modern history of privatization that, I believe, offer needed perspective on the Milwaukee story.

Federally grandfathered mayoral takeovers of city school systems like Milwaukee's did not happen out of the blue. The seemingly overnight transformation by mayoral appointment of local businessmen and retired military into "educators" deemed somehow more qualified to run a city's schools than its elected school board is part of a wave of "let business do it" privatization of government that started as far back as Lyndon Johnson's professedly liberal presidency in the 1960s and has merely come to its crest in the 21st century administrations of the younger George Bush and Barack Obama. For a fuller visualization of how, all but hidden in the shadows of the 23rd largest city in the United States, it comes to pass that a Democratic president’s Secretary of Education is found plotting to disable public school administrations and orchestrating the demise of the tradition of administrative home rule that goes back more than a hundred years to the founding of the modern American school board in 1901, we need a wide angle gaze.

We need to see this attempted educational annexation of Milwaukee as part of a panorama of selloff and outsourcing of publicly owned lands, services, and capital that has become a uniter of both political parties in a common cause: turning the keys to the American superstructure over to corporate domain.

Escorted by an honor guard of the two parties back to the seat of power it once held in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and has sought to have restored ever since), a corporate camarilla bent on stripping the nation of its public capital and its public treasury has dragged us back to 1921 and the days of President Warren Harding when cabinet members colluded with oil industry moguls in the privatization of federally owned lands in California and Wyoming’s Teapot Dome, and the watchword of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it all: “more business in government, less government in business.”

Meanwhile the gospel of full-scale public ownership, services, and regulation has languished for want of a party voice.

Already in 1966 under our "big government" President Lyndon Johnson, noted in the history books as the last of the New Dealers, seeds of the selloff of government functions and services were being planted when the Office of Management and Budget issued Circular A-76, a directive for government to maximize the process of outsourcing:

"The competitive enterprise system, characterized by individual freedom and initiative, is the primary source of national economic strength . . . the Government should not compete with its citizens."

Privatization picked up steam under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, whose presidential "Privatization Initiative" in his last year in office made the transfer of government services and capital to private ownership the official and declared policy of the United States:

George H.W. Bush: Title 3

Executive order 12803 of April 30, 1992 57 FR 19063 / May 4, 1992 Privatization initiative: To the extent permitted by law, the head of each executive department and agency shall undertake the following actions: (a) Review those procedures affecting the management and disposition of federally financed infrastructure assets owned by State and local governments and modify those procedures to encourage appropriate privatization of such assets consistent: with this order (b) Assist State and Local governments in their efforts to advance the objectives of this order; and (c) Approve State and local governments' requests to privatize infrastructure assets.

While the Bush directive laid out the game plan for massive asset sales, it was left to the Clinton Administration for implementation. According to Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated the biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under Bill Clinton.

Wolin reminds us that during his first term, Clinton outsourced more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs, thousands of then in intelligence, to private companies. By the end of his second term, he had cut 360,000 federal jobs, and the government was spending 44 percent more on private contractors than it had when Clinton took office in 1993.

The Heritage Foundation typified the enthusiasm of the right for the Democratic Clinton’s seeming partnership in privatization with then-House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich, calling his 1996 budget the “boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date.”

Nowhere is the hold of private corporations over our national wealth more obvious than in the for-profit manufacture of arms, warplanes, ships and military hardware.

The Congressional Research Service in the U.S. reported that American weapons sales abroad reached $37.8 billion, or 68.4 percent of all global arms transactions. The next largest weapons supplier was Italy at $3.7 billion, less than one-tenth the U.S. amount.

According to the Project on Governmental Oversight (POGO) database on Federal Contractor Misconduct, misbehavior by unaccountable and uncontrollable suppliers of arms and hired contract personnel, the top 100 defense contractors have cost the U.S. taxpayer billions in improper, illegal, and unaccounted expenditures.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) released a "Special Report on Contractor Business Systems" exposing failures of Defense Department oversight of contractor business systems to prevent egregious "waste, fraud, and abuse" on a scale tantamount to "hemorrhaging."

Right now, taxpayers are vulnerable: the government can't effectively audit those systems and detect contractor errors, omissions, misstatements, and unsupported, unallowable, or unreasonable costs. As stated in the report, the CWC found in an August hearing that "unreliable data from business systems produced billions of dollars in contingency-contract costs that government auditors often could not verify."

Here are some of the more outrageous financial losses to the public treasury attributed to unmonitored corporations receiving government military contracts (since 1995). From a list of the top 100 contractors (instances of misconduct and dollars misappropriated or unaccounted for):

Lockheed Martin: (50 instances of misconduct), $577.2 million. Boeing (31 instances of misconduct), $1561.4 million. Northrop Grumman (27 instances of misconduct), $790.4 million McKesson (8 instances of misconduct), $1356.7 million Merck & Co. (10 instances of misconduct), $5834.7 million. GlaxoSmithKline (16 instances of misconduct), $4280.7 million.  In all there were 678 instances of misconduct run up by the 100 top contractors for a total wasted dollars in the amount of more than $26 billion (26126.8 million).

And then there is the military itself in its newer privatized guise. In Afghanistan and Iraq an estimated 180,000 private contractors employed by private for-profit corporations such as Blackwater/Xe are increasingly taking the place of members of our nation's own armed forces.

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of March of this year, contractors made up 57 percent of the Pentagon's force in Afghanistan and total 65 percent if the past two years are averaged in. Congress appropriated $106 billion for contractors, earning salaries that are often triple or quadruple those of an American soldier or Marine, in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to through the first half of 2008.

While as of March 31 there were still more uniformed military personnel - 282,000 - than contractors - 242,657 - it is not hard to imagine if the trend continues a future in which an American force will be sent into battle without swearing an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and subordinate to the authority, not of an elected U.S. commander-in-chief, but to the dictates of their respective private corporations' CEOs.

One of the jewels in the crown of the new "let business do it" system of outsourcing public functions to private corporations is prison management. Private for-profit companies are increasingly running America’s prisons.

The Corrections Corporation of America, far and away the leading private corporation in the fast-growing incarceration industry known as "The Prison-Industrial Complex," operates a total of 65 facilities including 41 that it owns, and a total of 78,000 beds in 19 states and Washington D.C.

For 2007, CCA reported total revenues of $1 billion-478 million and profits of $266.3 million, an 18.4% increase over 2006. The net profit for that time period was $133.4 million, a 26.7% increase over 2006.

When the dynamic of profit is allowed to enter into the field of incarceration, incentive is created to maximize the number of arrests and length of sentencing, a Pandora's Box opening the way to corruption of the justice system, what George Monbiot calls "the revolting trade in human lives." He was commenting on reports in the Wall Street Journal of guaranteed payments of public funds to private jails for a set number of inmates regardless of the number of cells that are full or empty, and of inducements to judges to counter declining crime rates by handing down disproportionate sentences just to keep jail cells full (and prison management companies’ books in the black).

So it is that vital functions of government such as arms manufacture, prisons, and the waging of war are increasingly being handed over to private corporations to be run for-profit.

So what is wrong with that? What is wrong with outsourcing government functions if private corporations can do a job more efficiently and cost-effectively than government itself?

What's wrong is that when corporations that operate for the purpose of maximizing profits perform functions on behalf of or as "partners" of elected government, policy is put at the service of profit and contracts between political entities and partnering corporations are necessarily filled regardless of changed circumstances such as diminished need or budgets.

When the dynamic that drives the system is privatization, gratuitous wars are waged at wantonly padded expense, prisoner remediation vanishes and jails are stuffed to the gills by judges handing down inordinately extended sentences, medical insurers nickel and dime over coverage, and children are marched off to low-budget and non-union charter schools in desolate and abandoned shopping plazas and vacant industrial facilities for the sole purpose of making profit on investment and of maximizing profit yield for corporate investors.

Public School Districts Under Siege

The next frontier for privatization is education.

As with military manufacture, military contracting, and prison management, the federal government's education agenda under the leadership of Sec. of Education Arne Duncan is dead set on a policy of transferring the administration of public schools to private businesses. The Secretary has given evidence that his chosen means for accomplishing this handover is through putting mayors at the helm of entire (mainly urban) school systems, allowing them to replace elected school boards with appointed councils of businessmen and retired military that then go on to bring in for-profit corporations to manage the schools, drawing on budgeted money previously intended for public systems.

Duncan’s Race To The Top, a strategy of having states compete in a horse race for funds for education reform, makes clear that only states making concrete efforts toward privatization will get the coveted funds. These efforts would have to include “fostering the growth of charter schools” plus taking steps to replace teacher tenure with procedures to make employment conditional on student test results, i.e. making both teacher retainment and the continued existence of the schools they teach in as public rather than private entities conditional on performance measurement as in the world of business.

In these initiatives Duncan has set for himself the roles of midwife, epigone, and chief factotum for the privatization doctrines first laid out by the “father of modern school reform,” fellow-Chicago luminary Milton Friedman in a 1955 essay that he later incorporated into his landmark book Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. Friedman called for a wholesale “denationalization” of public education: instead of public funds going to school systems parents would receive vouchers on these funds to pay for “educational services” for their children at for-profit and not-for-profit schools that would be operated by entrepreneurs and managers who’d be free to set teacher compensations as low as a dog-eat-dog market for teaching jobs would bear. Government’s role would be reduced to “insuring that . . . schools met certain minimum standards, such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to insure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards.” 

In true survival-of-the-fittest purism, Friedman believed that parents should, if they decide to have children, be prepared to pay for their education.

In a prescient prophesy of the state of education today, Friedman depicted that the downfall of public schooling would be smoothly accomplished by being brought in in a piecemeal fashion, with the mushrooming privatized sector coexisting with the shrinking and declining public sector for a transitionary period of time. “Since governmental units . . . would continue to administer schools, the transition would be gradual and easy.” An educational regime change would be accomplished before people realized it had happened.

Though at present only 20 states have established vouchers-type subsidies for private schools, Friedman smelled victory for his idea of free-market education reform in an interview conducted for Reason Magazine in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of his 1955 vouchers essay, and two years prior to his death, stressing as proof that the tide has turned in privatization’s favor the capitulation of the teachers unions. Their “dam is buckling,” he waxed proudly, “and will shortly break . . . The basis of the National Education Association's and the American Federation of Teachers' power is crumbling.

At present, the privatization process, with its union-disabling subtext, is being promoted to the public as a rescue effort to “turn around” schools in impoverished and struggling urban neighborhoods, ASAP. States are being pressed, as in Wisconsin, to give mayors of major urban centers powers to effect the same transformation Duncan presided over in Chicago, where mayoral control under Richard Daley Jr. has existed since 1995 and where Duncan made a name for himself by closing 75 schools and replacing them with smaller, business-run schools shorn of union contracts and community governance.

Regardless of whether the Chicago experience actually produced the improved academic performance that was claimed, regardless of the toll on communities and the enormous number of families who found themselves without local schools for their children to attend, Chicago and mayoral takeover are being sold to the legislators of states like Wisconsin whose suburban and rural constituents can be counted on to back quick and drastic solutions to the schools of those “Warsaw Ghettoes” that their larger cities have become in their eyes and that many of them will never see or so much as drive through.

In this way, state adoption of mayoral control for just the main urban school districts is used as a wedge and foot in the door for what American business and the foundations that speak for them hope will be the privatization of all of American education. For when mayors need management for the schools that have been put under their direction, they make appointments from the business community and/or turn to ready-made education management corporations that are there waiting for their call. Why should what works for the urban schools not work for suburban, small-city, and rural schools? The precedent has been established for America to be left, in education as in healthcare without a “public option.”

In other words, education privatization is not just about mayors “turning around” underperforming urban districts. It’s about opening, ultimately, the whole education sector to for-profit management. However, first the public has to be sold on the need for “turn around.” First the public has to be whipped into a frenzy over a crisis in the schools, that is, the urban schools, a crisis requiring urgent “reform.” And then in the name of reform, the way is paved for business to be brought in on a white horse as reformers.

In the guise of reformers, celebrity tycoons from the world of business, opportunistic social advocacy personalities, and ambitious officials seeking to make a name for themselves as advocates for corporate interests have been the leading players in the new world of investment and career opportunity in privatized education.

Regardless of having no professional training as pedagogues or published works or other credentials as education theorists, researchers, or analysts, barons of finance for no discernible reason other than their Brobignagian wealth have been elevated to the status of venerated education mavens and saviors of our children's futures.

Prominent in this category are entrepreneurs like Microsoft's Bill Gates who, notwithstanding his record of epic business success, happens to have dropped out of college (Harvard) in his sophomore year rather than go to the top of the educational stepladder that is held out as model and paradigm for America’s schoolchildren. Secretary Duncan, an administrator whose advancement came from endearing himself to Chicago’s corporate community by his policy of shutting down public schools and opening charter schools, has no hands-on experience as an educator other than a period of time spent working in his mother’s tutoring school. Charter school minority advocate Al Sharpton, whose "action organization" has been the beneficiary of generous residuals he has received for his public appearances at the White House and around the country in support of opening charter schools that would supposedly put minority children on a college prep track, himself dropped out of Brooklyn College in his sophomore year.

Two illustrious business names who have been ceded a national megaphone on the subject of education in spite of having zero credentials in education are former financier Michael Milken and real estate-nursing home entrepreneur Eli Broad.

As is now all but forgiven and forgotten, Milken parlayed a career of reaping high returns from low-yield junk bonds, and from buyouts that created almost a one-man recession by throwing whole workforces of “bought” companies out on the streets, into a fortune that has made him, today, the 458th richest man in the world. Still his only experience as an educator came in three years of community service teaching math to minorities in Los Angeles in fulfillment of a ten year sentence for securities and financial reporting felonies of which he served 22 months in federal prison.

By 1999, only three years following his release from prison, Milken had amassed an empire of companies catering to every possible facet of the education industry that looked as though it might someday rival his former scale of operations as a financier. Today he heads a foundation purporting to set the standard for the training of quality K-12 teachers, all armed with math skills and fluent in the use of computer technology, and dispensing money incentives for recruitment of teacher talent. Yet other than the conferences his foundation sponsors for the purpose of affirming the superiority of private to public education, there is no evidence either in public utterance or on the printed page that this towering Colossus of the age of education profit seeking that is upon us has a holistic educational philosophy of how one actually inspires a young person to want to read, study, and achieve.

Eli Broad, who rose from the status of 19 year old prodigy in the field of accounting (“the youngest in Michigan history”) to founder one of the nation’s biggest networks of assisted care facilities, has devoted a significant portion of the $5.8 billion net worth that has made him number 42 on the list of 400 richest Americans to the cause of totally privatizing American education.

To this end Broad has contributed $10.5 million in startup funds to the Green Dot charter schools network in Los Angeles and in 1999 he and his wife Edythe joined the ranks of family foundation scions Bill & Melinda Gates and Michael and Lowell Milken with their founding of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. A flagship program of the foundation is the Broad Superintendents Academy that identifies and trains, executives with experience of leading large organizations for service as administrators, and even places them, in urban school districts. But is there any evidence either in public utterance or on the printed page that beyond his credo that American education needs to be run more “like a business” this indisputably wealthy and successful individual has a conceptual clue about how to cultivate and motivate the mind of a child?

These may be what used to be called Captains of Industry (and Finance), they may be builders of unparalleled monopolies in the fields of software, finance, real estate, insurance, etc. — world straddling economic players in the mold of the (for a time) successful businessman that Theodore Dreiser portrayed in The Financier and The Titan — but they do not fit the profile of “educators.” As far as education is concerned, they are “barbarians at the gates,” untrained and uncouth in the arts of shaping the lives and intellects of children. Yet here they are, the nation's prime movers in the raging battle to replace public education with a system in which the schools are outsourced to for-profit businesses, businesses that are not accountable to government financial oversight and free from union contracting that protects the job security of teachers.

Do American parents want schools to be run like businesses and their children to be treated as employees? Will they accept the idea of delivering their children into the hands of specialists in financial deal-making and cutthroat competition, who may or may not have completed college themselves and who view students strictly as “human capital” to be schooled in skills narrowly tailored to niches in today’s ever-so-transient corporate job market?

Do they want education to be made over in the model of privatized industries like military manufacture, military contracting, and prison management, industries that have taken advantage of the less-government, anti-oversight policies of federal administrations of the past three decades to pile up a record of fraud and financial abuse unmatched by any era in American history?

Or are parents, in step with the growing opposition to privatization and outsourcing that is being seen all over the internet, getting a little tired and put off by the endless blizzard of promotion for “education reform” as the panacea for all that ails our economy, job market, and society, and, as Todd Price will show is happening in Milwaukee, starting to line up behind their public schools once again?

Click here to read Todd Alan Price's essay "Milwaukee League Comes To The Defense of Public Schools."

Geoff Berne writes from Hamilton, Ohio, where the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in 2002. He was co-producer with Todd Price and Karen Chin of the 2004 video "Public Education in the Crosshairs" and in the 1990s was a member of the Ohio coalition Citizens Against Vouchers.

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