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Today's
Stories
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004
CounterPunch Diary
Understanding
the World with Paul Sweezy
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I'm an optimist by disposition but some weeks
it's hard to find evidence of progress in human affairs. Here
on the tv screen is Secretary of State Colin Powell smoothly
fulfilling his designated function as the Empire's prime dispenser
of official lies. This particular morning Powell is ladling unctuous
bilge about the US-sponsored coup in Haiti, even as the renaissant
Tonton Macoutes, under the tolerant gaze of USMC officers, swarm
across Port au Prince chopping up any supporters of Aristide
they can find.
And here's Senator John Kerry, the Democratic
nomination in his grasp. Having made his own extremely zestful
contribution to the body count in Vietnam during the Phoenix
sweeps Kerry knows where many of the Empire's bodies are rotting.
In his first senate term he even led useful hearings into the
BCCI scandal and the arms-for-cocaine shuttle in Central America.
Then the Elders of Empire told him to mind his manners shut up,
which he promptly did.
But truth can pop out of Kerry's mouth
from time to time, as happened amid the Haiti coup unrolling
at the end of February under the carefully uncomprehending eyes
of the US press. The Bush administration, Newsday reported Kerry
as saying, "has a theological and ideological hatred for
Aristide" which led to the administration "empowering"
the rebels.
Not so bad. Then Kerry flew to Los Angeles
(where the LAPD had just plugged 17 bullets into a robber backing
his car towards them) and called for 40,000 more troops in Iraq,
100,000 more cops on the streets at home, 100,000 more firemen.
There's Keynesianism in action for you: John Kerry's bold pledge
for job creation. He also pumped up California's AG, Bill Lockyer,
to prod the courts into nullifying San Francisco's marriages
for gays.
Democrats will spend the rest of the
year insisting they're not liberal softies. So, rest assured,
Kerry "will not hesitate to order direct military action
when needed to capture and destroy terrorist groups and their
leaders." The Washington Post's man noted that "Kerry
appeared to outline his own preemptive doctrine in the speech."
That's the presidential option this year:
a choice between preemptive doctrines. Bill Blum, who's written
a useful history of the outfit, picked
up on Kerry's attack in this same speech on Bush for providing
insufficient funding for the National Endowment for Democracy.
As Bill wrote, "He probably thought he was on safe ground;
the word 'democracy' always sells well. But this is his most
depressing comment of all. He's calling for more money for an
organization that was set up to be a front for the CIA, literally,
and that for 20 years has been destabilizing governments, progressive
movements, labor unions, and anyone else on Washington's hit
list", including Haiti, where the NED has been active.
"When all seems dark", my father,
Claud, used to say when I was a teenager, "try reading a
little Marx. It puts things in perspective." As I'd mope
over the defection of some girl friend he'd thrust a copy of
the Eighteenth Brumaire into my hand and tell me to cheer up.
I remembered Claud's advice last weekend, when news that one
of the world's great Marxist economists, Paul Sweezy, had died
at the age of 93.
Sweezy wasn't at all like Marx in personal
demeanor. Karl was hairy, bohemian, cantankerous whereas Paul,
godlike in his good looks, radiated an amiable and dignified
calm, as least in my limited personal experience. Reading Marx,
you feel you feel you're getting to the truth of the matter and
it was the same way with Sweezy. He wrote and taught with extraordinary
clarity.
After Sweezy's death, I asked Robert
Pollin, once a student of Sweezy's, now teaching economics at
U Mass, for his thoughts on Sweezy. Bob remembered the excitement
of Sweezy's lectures at the New School, and he swiftly
furnished many interesting paragraphs about Sweezy's great
contributions, in the big books and in Monthly Review, which
he founded with Leo Huberman in 1949.
At Harvard in the 1930s Sweezy was the
star grad student of Joseph Schumpeter. Pollin reckons that Schumpeter
was thinking of Sweezy, whom he greatly admired, when he wrote
in Capitalism, Socialism, Dem ocracy, that capitalism would not
survive because capitalism breeds intellectual freedom, hence
people with critical faculties and it's only inevitable that
this spirit breeds powerful minds who will turn their guns on
the deficiencies of capitalism itself. Then Schumpeter, conservative
himself, wrote that socialism would succeed, maybe unwieldily,
but more egalitarian nonetheless, in part because the brilliant
thinkers grown dissatisfied with the crassness and injustices
of capitalism would also rise to the top in a socialist society,
and make it function decently. "And again," Bob writes,
" who else could he have had in mind here but Paul, his
student and protégé?"
Different times, brighter hopes. These
days we're looking at a lot of socialist rubble, but simultaneously
at capitalist architecture whose stresses and failures Sweezy
in accessible terms, decade after decade, in his books and in
Monthly Review, which he founded with Leo Huberman in 1949, trenchantly
detected and explained: the reasons for the New Deal's failure,
until World War 11 bailed out the system; military Keynesianism
and the Korean war as the factors in US recovery after that war;
underdevelopment in the Third World, consequence of dependency
that was created by imperialism the focus, (an analysis evolved
with Harry Magdoff in Monthly Review); the increasing role of
finance in the operations of capitalism, an analysis, again evolved
with Magdoff in Monthly Review from the late Sixties on.
Way ahead of most, Sweezy was clear-eyed
about the trends: the capture of more and more of society's wealth
by the rich, the threat this tapering pyramid of purchasing power
poses to the stability of the whole system, the need for the
left to bolster what defenses working people can muster against
the predators. "Sweezy", Bob Pollin writes, "was
the most powerful Marxist exponent of underconsumptionism since
Rosa Luxemburg. Keynes himself later embraced this as his analysis
of the 1930s depression. Underconsumptionism is the tendency
in capitalist economies for the capitalists to produce more things
than the people can afford to buy. Capitalism could solve this
problem through more income equality, and
more social control over investment spending. But capitalists
don't like that solution. Therefore, as Sweezy and Baran argued
in Monopoly Capital, they come up with alternative means of getting
buyers for the things monopolist firms decide to produce: they
get the military to spend, they induce spending through advertising,
and they ride the wave of epoch-making innovations like the automobile
(which brought public highway construction and government subsidized
construction of the suburbs)."
Read Sweezy's books and you can understand
why we have US Marines presiding over the continuing enslavement
of Haiti, why we have John Kerry proclaiming his doctrine of
progressive interventionism, why we have Alan Greenspan calling
for renewed onslaught on Social Security. He taught generations
how to understand these things, how not to be surprised. Like
all great teachers he gave us the consolations as well as the
burden of such knowledge. If you know what's happening you're
in a position to figure out how to do something about it, and
that's always uplifting.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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