Today's Stories

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

Gary Leupp
Base Alienation: Obama's Team of Rivals

Mike Whitney
Bail Out the Economy? More Pay is the Only Way

Karl Grossman
Lost in Space: NASA at 50

Niall Meehan
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Historian, Politician, Censor

Steve Conn
Where Would Larry Summers Dump the Guantanamo Mess?

Uri Avnery
Israeli Elections: Spot the Difference

Corey D. B. Walker
The Politics of Freedom

David Swanson
The Purloined Constitution

Worthy Group of the Day
Socialist Worker

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
January 2 - 4, 2009

Diary of 2008

You Remember It, Don't You? An Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Hope is the fuel. Hope the feds will bail you out of your foreclosure, hope you’ll get a job, hope you don’t get sick and go bankrupt, hope your money manager didn’t give your trust fund to Mr Madoff. Bury 2008 and write its epitaph, "I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story."

This was the forlorn wail of the literary agent who bought the latest fake memoir to have embarrassed the publishing industry – the story of Herman Rosenblat who claims in Angel at the Fence that he met Roma Radzicky, his wife of 50 years when he was a kid in a Nazi German concentration camp. He says a little Polish girl fed him apples through the barbed wire and that they met on a blind date in New York in the Fifties and fell in love.

Funny thing is, Herman WAS in a concentration camp  and he did meet Roma on a blind date in New York. She had been a child in Germany, and had come to the States via Israel. They have been married for 50 years. So theirs is a truly a hope-filled story. But not hope-filled enough in today’s market. Not hope-filled enough for Berkley Books and Oprah. Some time in the 1990s  Herman, a retired tv repairman living in Miami, began to improve on reality, to the the fury of his and also Roma’s family who knew perfectly well what he was up to. He decided he met Roma through the wire of Schlieben, a subcamp of Buchenwald.  Berkley bought his book and Oprah had him on her show, twice. Investigators finally demolished Herman’s fantasy, saying the layout of the camp would have made it impossible for Roma to throw the apple that far. Herman, 79, has fallen back on the hope defense: "I wanted to bring happiness to people. I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, who investigated and exposed Herman and Roma’s fables, told Wyatt Mason of Harpers on the last day of 2008:

“Herman erased his own compelling story. His three older brothers took an oath never to part from him. They fed him in the camp and they lied about his age to protect him. Herman wrote his brothers out and substituted a fantasy tale about meeting a young girl at the fence. Roma, the compliant wife, erased her own compelling story. She was part of a family group from Krosniewice that survived–and few survived from that town–by dint of special cunning, forged documents, and luck. She also reconstructed her family as a family of four when there were five. The third sister, too young, too dark, to pass in hiding as a Polish Catholic, was, sadly, left behind.”

So Herman and Roma decided, in evening of their lives, to repackage their survival as  a love story of the death camps, “the single greatest love story... we've ever told on the air" Oprah Winfrey.)

As the late Raul Hilberg, great historian of the Nazi extermination of the European Jews wrote in his often acrid memoir, The Politics of Memory, published in 1996. “If counterfactual stories are frequent enough, kitsch is truly rampant… The philistines in my field are truly everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichés….The first German publisher of a small volume, containing my introduction and documents about the railroads [viz. their role in the destruction of the Jews] inserted a poem for which, he said, he had paid good money, describing human beings in freight cars including children whose eyes glowed like coal… . The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage and kitsch is debasement.”

Israel, Gaza and the U.S.

President-elect Obama is getting whacked by the left for declining comment on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, but his prudent silence is just as discomfiting to the Israeli government and its allies here, in the United States. They wanted a ringing endorsement of their onslaught. There were also hints in their demeanor on television that Obama’s senior aides like David Axelrod were not overly delighted with Israel’s state propagandists for headlining Obama’s remarks on a visit to Israel in the summer that "If somebody shot rockets at my house where my two daughters were sleeping at night, I'd do everything in my power to stop them.”

On the campaign trail and, indeed, since he reached the U.S. Senate in 2005,  no politician was more sedulous that Barack Obama in ensuring that the Israel lobby here had no cause for disquiet. On arrival in Washington, he instantly selected Joe Lieberman, known informally as the senator from Israel, as his mentor. At the annual conference this last summer of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Obama drew criticism from across a broad political spectrum for his groveling.

“Israel should get whatever it wants and an undivided Jerusalem should be its capital,” Obama assured the American Jewish delegates, many of them influential Democrats from across the U.S. The next day, one of his foreign policy advisors hastily issued a clarification to the effect that Obama believes "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as part of "an agreement that they both can live with." The aide refused to rule out such possibilities as Jerusalem also serving as the capital of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods.

So, is there any evidence that when he sits down in the Oval Office, Obama will try to set a new course? 

It’s certainly true that the minute the new Obama administration made any move, however tentative, deemed “anti-Israel” by the massed legions of the Israel lobby – stretching from vice president Biden’s office, through Obama’s own Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to about 98 per cent of the U.S. Congress, the major newspapers and TV networks, the think tanks in Washington, the big Democratic Party funders – political mayhem would break loose. The White House would see its prime political enterprise, the  economic recovery program, immediately held hostage.

It’s also true that both Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have in the past evinced sympathy for Palestinian aspirations: the former was photographed with his wife Michelle in what was obviously an amiable meeting with the late Edward Said, America’s best known Palestinian, and Hillary Clinton publicly embraced Yasir Arafat. It seems safe to say that, unlike Bush Jr., neither Obama nor Mrs. Clinton have any rootedly ideological or religious commitment to the Zionist cause. Political self-preservation and advancement form  the  leaven in their loyalty to Israel and will remain predominant.

But if the power of the Isrel lobby , here in the U.S.A., is as obstructive   as ever to the formation of any equitable U.S. policy to address Palestinian aspirations the international situation does offer opportunity. Although ruthless and horrifying Israel’s onslaughts on Gaza are evidently an expression of weakness, in a quest for military credibility forced by the imminence of elections in Israel, just as Shimon Peres, in similarly dire straits, launched Operation “Grapes of Wrath” against Lebanon before an election (which his party lost) in 1996. Bombardment, as always, unites the population on the receiving end and rallies it around its political leaders, assuming they don’t run away.

In the end, Israel will stop the bombing and what will it achieve  beyond another exhibition of futile strategy, like the attack on Lebanon in 2006? The last time Israel had an effective military campaign that could be called a victory was 27 years ago, in the 1982 attack on Lebanon. Hamas has been greatly strengthened by the current attack and the status of President Abbas reaffirmed as a spineless collaborator with Israel,;Mubarak likewise; Syria and Turkey alienated from Western designs; Hezbollah and Iran vindicated by the world condemnation of Israel’s barbarous conduct. For months Israel besieged Gaza, starving its civilian inhabitants of essential supplies with no effective international reproach. It’s hard to take dramatic photographs of an empty medicine bottle, but  easy to film a bombed out girl’s dorm or a Palestinian mother weeping over the bodies of her five dead daughters, featured on the front page of the Washington Post this week.

Israel’s current  crop of leaders are second-raters, and conditions ripe for a forceful push from the U.S., assuming that the new administration has the requisite modicum of courage and ingenuity – a very, very long bet, as bitter experience for nearly forty years instructs us.

In the dying moments of his administration, Bill Clinton nearly brokered a deal between Barak government and Arafat. Hilary Clinton certainly knows that the story of Arafat walking away from “the best possible deal” is a myth fostered by Israel and that it was Barak, facing elections who collapsed the deal at the Taba summit. Everybody knows what the contours of a settlement should be. Olmert, on his way out, put it flatly in his famous October interview in Yediot Aharonot:  "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the essence of which is that we shall actually withdraw from almost all the territories, if not from all the territories … Anyone who wants to keep all the territory of [Jerusalem] will have to put 270,000 Arabs behind fences within sovereign Israel. That won't work."

In that same interview Olmert said of his previous 30 years as a politician, apropos the Palestinian question, “I was not ready to look into all the depths of reality." Will  Obama and Clinton confront reality? America’s changing and weakening circumstances prompt them to do so. If Obama wants to be judged as anything more than a partisan of the Israel  lobby, he will have to make the attempt. That said, no one who has followed US policy in the Middle East with any attention since the Six Day War in 1967  should discard profound pessimism as the anchor for all assessments.

For those who want to get a taste of Hamas’ outlook, where better to turn than to the interview in our latest newsletter with Hamas’s leader, the Damascus-based Khaled Meshal. Last May CounterPuncher Alya Rea and   yours truly were among a party of Americans sitting down with Meshal and some aides in a house in the suburbs of Damascus. Meshal himself is an alert and humorous man who looks to be in his early 50s, born in a village not far from Ramallah. He was trained as a physicist, has visited the U.S. a number of times and speaks good English.

In  this same bumper edition subscribers get  the definitive rundown from the grerat Indian journalist P.Sainath on a prolonged spasm of terrorism which has probably claimed in total well over 200,000 lives. I refer to the neoliberal onslaught on Indian farmers which drove  some 17,000 farmers to suicide last year alone, many of them not too far from Mumbai. In this instance the sponsors of terror are not to be found in Pakistan but in economics departments in Chicago, Harvard and Yale and the headquarters of the World Bank. 

Talking of academe you’ll also find in the newsletter gratifying testimony to the vile conduct of Harvard Law School during the McCarthy witch-hunts as the School tried to force famed attorney Jonathan Lubell and his twin brother David to Name Names. Finally, in the newsletter There’s an excellent probe by Steve Higgs into the possible environmental causes of autism and a homage by yours truly to the late great English environmental writer Roger Deakin. Subscribe Now!

So let’s turn now to politics as kitsch, and the campaign year just concluded, with hope’s (and Oprah’s) candidate triumphant.

January 1

It’s time to take stock of the landscape.  The American political system, as conditioned by corporate cash, legal obstructions to independent candidacies, the corporate press,  is designed to eliminate any substantive threat to business as usual. In the case of the Democrats, the winnowing process is working well.  Mike Gravel, by far the most vivacious and radical of the party’s candidates on substantive matter of the war and empire, was swiftly  marginalized. I’ve seen very few Gravel buttons.

Dennis Kucinich seemss to have a lock on those Democrats prepared to say true to a hopeless outsider. I don’t understand this loyalty to the Ohio congressman. The point of hopeless outsiders is to give us hope. It’s a dialectical thing. They convince us that their cause is not hopeless, is worth fighting Kucinich gives me no hope. He has barely shouldered his way into single digits.  His signs and buttons and tickers already look as though they’re collectibles on e-bay.

The three major Democratic contenders for the nomination are all unalluring. John Edwards is offering us a populist package, with homilies on fair trade, gaps between rich and poor, corporate greed and so forth. Decent people including many labor organizers are working for him. I don’t believe a word he says. His substantive record on war and empire is bad. He has poor judgement. Why spend $400 to have a hairdo that makes you look like a slick lawyer with a fancy haircut?

Barack Obama?  I can’t remember a single substantive statement he’s made. In terms of political philosophy and pragmatic intention his platform is like the Anglican clergyman’s answer, when asked for his conception of God: an oblong blur. When pressed, Obama’s positions on war and empire are usually very bad.

January 3

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is now fighting for its life after a shattering defeat last night in Iowa at the hands of the black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Also on life support is the candidacy of the Mormon Mitt Romney, trounced in Iowa's Republican caucuses by Mike Huckabee, the folksy and decidedly Christian former governor of Arkansas.

Confounding all expert predictions, the turnout on the Democratic side doubled from 2004 and Obama can fairly claim he was the reason. His vague calls for change held huge allure for Democrats and independents in every age group, except among women over 65 who stayed true to Mrs Clinton.

Obama won in the cities and in rural counties. Among young people Hillary won 11 per cent of college voters. Obama won 60 per cent. Young people simply didn't care for Hillary. In their cohort, Hillary's 'likeability' scored a desolate 17 per cent.

The parlor wisdom in the press has been that the war in Iraq is no longer an issue. It turned out that the three main issues on voters' minds were, in descending order, the war, the economy and health care. Obama led in all three.

For the party establishments - Democratic and Republican - it was a bad night, as their favoured candidates went down to severe defeat.

The Clintons' calculation had been that Obama would never be able to match their fund-raising. Wrong. Obama raised huge sums from small-sum contributors, who can continue their support. A lot of Hillary's big financial backers have already reached their legal limits.

Mrs Clinton had the big feminist organizations in her corner and a good chunk of organized labor. They didn't deliver, any more than the Democratic machine supervised by campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and super-pollster Mark Penn. They thought they could sink Obama withDecember's slurs about drug use, Islamic heritage and color. The slurs backfired.

On the Republican side Mike Huckabee sank the hopes of Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment in part because of his version of economic populism, far more persuasive than that of the Democrat John Edwards, whose run now seems doomed.

Ron Paul scored 10 per cent, a respectable performance for an anti-war candidate running in a pro-war party. The Iowa results have brightened the landscape by overturning the official apple cart.

January 8

The women of New Hampshire saved her. Hillary Clinton, confounding premature expectations of her political demise, won the Democratic primary by a narrow two per cent, 39-37. The prime reasons for her victory over Barack Obama were a) women and b) the lower profile in New Hampshire of the war in Iraq.

In New Hampshire, Hillary got 47 per cent of the women's vote, 34 per cent going for Obama. The Clintons learned, how to calibrate an assault on Obama. That was Bill Clinton's role. His carefully prepared outburst the day before the primary, assailing Obama for lies and malicious slanders on his own character, was an eerie reprise of his furious outbursts during the Lewinsky affair.

As in Jacobean tragedies, the time is coming for the stage hands to haul the dead and dying off the stage. Gone: Fred Thompson (one per cent of the vote in New Hampshire, after an incredible amount of press); Mike Gravel, 396 votes; Dennis Kucinich, 3,800 votes, the same number of UFOs Shirley MacLaine sees on a clear night; Bill Richardson, 12,845 votes, or five per cent.

Giuliani? It doesn't look good for him. This is the north-east, his quarter of the Homeland.

January 11

On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bond-rating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the US government “reform” Social Security and Medicare. “In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government’s Aaa rating.”

Today, the world’s credit system is strained to bursting point by such financial scams as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) which are bundles of debt instruments, ranging from junk bonds through subprime mortgages. Moody’s and the other rating agencies have played a crucial role in putting the CDOs together in the first place.

If Moody’s is going to present itself as a major political player presuming to dictate national policy down the barrel of a financial gun, its executives and analysts should be hauled into the star chamber. Let’s have a rendition of these Moody’s executives before a special investigative committee of Congress with full subpoena power. Ask them to explain their own role in causing the financial upheavals afflicting the planet right now, due to the collapse of the housing bubble and its impact on the home mortgage market.

January 21

He's a smart fellow and so Barack Obama surely knew what was in store for him if he ever looked like taking the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton.

Obama's charmed life came to an end with his Iowa caucus victory. In New Hampshire, Hillary's campaign manager Billy Shaheen warmed up voters by reminding them Obama was unelectable because of his past "drug use" as a pot-smoker and a cokehead. Hillary snarled that whereas the black Martin Luther King was a merchant of dreams it took a white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get the Civil Rights bill through Congress. Andrew Cuomo, a prominent New York Democrat, said he was tired of Obama's "shuck and jive".

Bob Johnson, America's first black billionaire and a big Hillary supporter, stood next to Hillary on a campaign platform in South Carolina and said the Clintons had been fighting for black justice while young Obama was still "doing something in the neighbourhood" ie doing drugs behind the schoolyard fence.

Racial decorum is paper-thin in America, and already the gloves are halfway off. Obama's home preacher and spiritual counselor, Jeremiah Wright, told a huge and applauding congregation in his church in Chicago that "some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton because her husband was good to us. That's not true! He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

Now Clinton and Obama are locked in a desperate struggle for the South Carolina vote on January 26.  It won't be long before the Clinton campaign circulates some of Rev Wright's sermons linking Zionism with racism. Already they're trying to link Wright's church to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Jackson can predict accurately to Obama what will happen next and those speeches praising Senator Lieberman won't help.

January 31

McCain’s victory in Florida on Tuesday is a measure of the terrible shape the Republican Party now finds itself in. They have a front-runner that no faction in the party really likes. He’s old, short, bald, with a history of serious skin cancer and a record of psychological instability. He is favor of a war deeply disliked by about 70 per cent of all Americans and has publicly proclaimed that the U.S. may well be in Iraq for a hundred years. With the country is poised on the lip of recession he calls for budget cuts. In Michigan he told distraught auto workers, – many of them “Reagan Democrats”, that their jobs were never coming back. In Florida he said he didn’t know much about economics but that Social Security would have to be fixed – i.e. privatized. Over half the people voting in Florida’s Republican primary were over 60 and the Arizona senator’s blithe endorsement of privatization would have scarcely been encouraging as they read the slumping bottom lines on their private 401K retirement accounts.

February 1

Politics offer many sagas of lowness acting in the service of decent achievement. Richard Nixon was a low character but presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage in 1973 of the Endangered Species Act, the single most significant piece of legislation in American environmental history. Bill and Hillary professed noble intentions endlessly. Page upon page in Sally Bedell Smith’s book, For the Love of Politics,  even amidst scandal and impeachment, has them raptly discussing constructive “public policy.” If mere information was the key to political success, the Clintons would have rivaled FDR and Eleanor.

Bill Clinton had “typically had a half-dozen books going at any one time.” His briefing primers “ran more than one hundred pages.” He “liked to devour the Department of Agriculture’s acreage-planted reports.” But the gabfests went round and round in circles because very early in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bill and Hillary had also learned conclusively that a hundred worthy position papers, each a thousand pages long, weigh less in the balance of forces than a single phone call from the CEO of Georgia Pacific or Tyson Chicken or Wal-Mart.

The book echoes with the stunned gasps of astounded friends, long-term political supporters and lovers, as the Clintons’ knives sank between their shoulder blades. The most vivid of Bedell Smith’s pages portray a man operating well beyond the norms of rational or civilized behavior. His Georgetown professor had told him great men could do without sleep, and so he tried to get by on four hours a night. His eyes would glaze in important meetings. Jolted awake, he would abuse his subordinates in endless, profanity-laden tirades.

“Some aides,” Bedell Smith writes, “thought his eruptions were pathological … Years later, Bill explained that he was able to live ‘parallel lives,’ which he described as ‘an external life that takes its natural course and an internal life where the secrets are hidden.’ He traced his identity as a ‘secret keeper’ to his troubled upbringing, when he hid the chaos of his household behind a sunny persona. He had difficulty, he said, ‘letting anyone into the deepest recesses of my internal life. It was dark down there. He admitted that over the years his own anger ‘had grown deeper and stronger.’”

As president, he kept everyone waiting, including a group of elderly concentration camp survivors huddled for two and a half hours in a tent during a rainstorm until they finally left. Terrified of open conflict and desperate for approval, he drove his staff mad by vacillation in reaching any decision, followed by abrupt switches in direction.

February 10

At the end of last week, Ann Coulter, the Saxon Klaxon, announced that if McCain gets the nomination she would not only "vote for" Hillary, she would "campaign for her if it's McCain” because  Clinton "is more conservative than he is".

On Super Tuesday the dirigible of drivel himself, Rush  Limbaugh, told his vast radio audience: “If I believe the country will suffer with either Hillary, Obama or McCain, I would just as soon the Democrats take the hit rather than a Republican causing the debacle. And I would prefer not to have conservative Republicans in the Congress paralyzed by having to support, out of party loyalty, a Republican president who is not conservative.”

February 14

Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake was not divorcing Bill in 2001 and then pressing forward into the presidential campaign as Senator Hillary Rodham, He’s a millstone and the campaign thus far has exploded the claim that Bill Clinton is still magic as a vote winner. Many Democratic party regulars have very hard feelings about him. Clinton was not good for the Democratic Party when he was in the White House. As Barack Obama pointed out in a speech in Virginia Beach, “Keep in mind, we had Bill Clinton as president when, in ’94, we lost the House, we lost the Senate, we lost governorships, we lost state houses.”

On top of that Bill Clinton infuriated blacks in South Carolina by mildly race-baiting Obama. Clinton’s little slaps, designed to ghettoize Obama, produced huge black majorities for the purveyor of Change and angered many white liberals too.

Hillary as divorcee would have had real panache, a woman high-stepping into freedom on the ashes of her past, like Eva Peron. As things stand she can’t even offer Obama a deal whereby she’ll accept the vice presidency. Who would want Bill scampering in and out of the Old Executive Office Building, ogling the interns.

But if Hillary’s in bad trouble, the Hillary-haters are in even worse shape. The conservative movement is finished. Rush Limbaugh, is flaming out, like the zeppelin Hindenberg. For years now the liberals have loved to tremble at Limbaugh’s malignant powers. But it turns out Rush couldn’t get a dog-catcher elected. For months he’s urged the dittoheads to rally to a true conservative. He’s worn himself hoarse denouncing McCain as a traitor to the cause. With each daily dose of raillery from Limbaugh McCain’s cause flourished.

The prophets are discredited because their cause has failed. The conservative movement has splintered, victim of lethal saber slashes from the neocons, who plunged the country into an unpopular and hopeless war; from George Bush, who rewarded the conservatives with the No Child Left Behind Act and the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, both of which could have been put forward by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

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