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Today's
Stories
April
16 / 18, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Bush, Kerry and Empire
April
15, 2004
Greg
Moses
Follow the Families, Not the Script
Virginia
Tilley
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt:
Just Change the Channel
Ron
Jacobs
They Coulda Been Champions of the World:
Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic
Michael
Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes Reporting
in the Toronto Globe and Mail
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion Story: We Rule; You
Die
April
13, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Ill, Old and Young of Fallujah Ask:
"Do We Look Like Fighters?"
Stan
Goff
The Bridge: a Rant
Dave
Lindorff
The Real Lessons of Vietnam
April 10
/ 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age
Patrick
Cockburn
Ambush, Kidnap, Murder: Another Day in "Post War" Iraq
Ellen Cantarow
Health Under Siege on the West Bank
Tariq Ali
Iraqi
Resistance: a New Phase
Werther
Pseudoconservatism Revisited: When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Robert
Fisk
Bush's War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Gary Leupp
Indian Wars, Vietnam and Orientalist Fantasy
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Cont.
Jorge Mariscal
Perils of the Bootstrap
Phil Gasper
Defying Stereotypes About Death Row
Dave Zirin
Bringing the Black Freedom Struggle Into Sports: an Interview with Lee
Evans
Brandy
Baker
The Revolution is Playing at a Theater Near You
Mickey Z.
Underground Music is Free Media: an Interview with Twiin
Ali Tonak
Get Ready for the Million Worker March
Harry Browne
Asking the Wrong Question About Richard Clarke & 9/11
Gideon
Samet
The Sharonizing of America
Conn Hallinan
Remote Control Warriors
Website
of the Weekend
Taboo
Tunes
April 9,
2004
Robert
Fisk
This
War's Simple Truth: Iraqis Do Not Want Us
John L.
Hess
The
Non--Confessions of a Warrior Princess: Condi on the Stand
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Condoleezza's Condescensions
Christopher Brauchli
Holes in the Sky: Bush's Crazed Missile Defense Plan
Don Santina
Forget the Alamo!: Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
William S. Lind
The 4G Warfare Seminar, Cont.
Bill Christison
9/11
Commission is Bush's New Lapdog
Website of the Day
What We've Done to Fallujah
April 8, 2004
Wayne Madsen
Rice
(and the Record) Proves It: Bush Knew, But Failed to Act
Kurt Nimmo
Will
Bush Flatten Fallajuh?
Patrick
Cockburn
Guided
Missile; Misguided War
Laura Flanders
Steamed
Rice
Larry Everest
What Condi Rice is Hiding
Adam Federman
Sacred Capitalism Hits Russia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Iraqi Intifada Begins
Norman Solomon
The Quest for a Monopoly on Violence
Douglas
Valentine
Echoes
of Vietnam: Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq
Website of the Day
Xispas: Chicano Art, Culture and Politics
April 7,
2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Those
Pulitzers!
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Deeper
into the Mouth of Hell: We Must Find the Exit from Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Tet
in Iraq: Closer to the Cosmic Disaster?
Patrick
Cockburn
Battles
Across Iraq: US Death Toll Mounts
Kathy Kelly
Pacification: Worth the Price?
Sonali
Kolhatkar
What Are You Doing About Afghanistan?
Rahul Mahajan
Report from Baghdad: Opening the Gates of Hell
Robert
Fisk
US Airlifts Saddam to Qatar
Mike Whitney
America Out of Iraq, Now!
Sam Hamod
Bush, Pandora's Box and the Tiger
April 6, 2004
C.G. Estabrook
Mercenaries
and Occupiers
William
Blum
The
Anti--Empire Report: the Israel Lobby
Col. Dan
Smith
The
Language of Disbelief: 1.3 Billion Still Live in War Zones
Dr. Bulent Gokay
The Coming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Lynn Landes
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote; Machines Do
Sheila Samples
What Would Royko Write?
Jason Leopold
Condi's Blind Spot: Rice Never Mentioned al--Qaeda
Mickey Z.
A Reality Show with No End in Sight
Robert
Fisk
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
|
Weekend
Edition
April 16 / 18, 2004
The Capitulation of the Left is Almost
Unprecedented
Bush,
Kerry and Empire
By ALEXANDER
COCKBURN
As
one who regards Gerry Ford as our greatest president (least time served,
least damage done, husband of Betty, plus Stevens as his contribution
to the Supreme Court) I’d always imagined the man from Grand Rapids
would never be surpassed in sheer slowness of thought. When a reporter
asked Ford a question it was like watching that great sequence in Rossellini’s
film about Louis XIV, when a shouted command is relayed at a stately
pace through a dozen intermediaries from the kitchen to the royal ear.
In Ford’s case, to watch a message negotiate the neural path from
ear to cortex was to see a hippo wade through glue.
But
I think Bush has Ford beat. Had he ever made a mistake, the reporter
asked at that White House press conference last Tuesday. The president’s
face remained composed, masking the turmoil and terror raging within,
as his cerebellum went into gridlock. It should have been easy for him.
Broad avenues of homely humility beckoned him on. “John, no man
can stand before his Creator as I do each day and say he is without
error…” Reagan would have hit the ball out of the park.
But the President froze. He said he’d have to think it over.
Indeed,
accounts of Bush’s comportment by former associates such as Paul
O’Neill suggest a Ford-like core to the man, of tranquil inertness,
penetrated in Ford’s case by the evil counsels of Kissinger, and
in Bush’s by the advisories of all his malign viziers. Why bother
impeaching Bush, as Nader is now wasting our time urging? Leave Bush
alone. Impeach Scalia and indict Cheney, two realistic and useful political
objectives.
Behind
the liberal hysteria over Bush, as a demon of monstrous, Hitlerian proportions,
I get the sense of a certain embarrassment, that the man is bringing
the imperial office into embarrassment and disrepute. Hence all the
plaintive invocations of the distress of “America’s allies”,
hopefully to be cured by a competent rationalizer of the empire’s
affairs, like John Kerry. But should not all opponents of the American
Empire’s global reach rejoice that but would not the world be
a safer and conceivably a better place if the allies saw separate paths
as the sounder option? Gabriel Kolko, that great historian of American
empire, has been arguing powerfully (most recently in our CounterPunch
newsletter) to this effect and I agree with him.
With
leadership of barely conceivable arrogance and incompetence (Bremer
alone is a case study in the decline in quality of such American leaders
in the past 50 years) the US has managed the amazing feat of uniting
Iraqis in detestation of their presence, and of leaving itself with
zero palatable options. Amid this bloody disaster, with popular distaste
for the occupation of Iraq swelling up in the polls Kerry, with McCain
at his elbow, has been goading Bush into sending more troops. As a prospective
supervisor of empire, Kerry sends forth the word that the Democrats
are the Second Party of War.
Given
Nader’s aversion to a strident stance on a straight anti-war platform,
it looks as though the only decent option is Harry Browne of the Libertarians.
Kucinich? As he himself recently put it, he’s a “tugboat”
hauling castaways back into Democratic port in time for the fall regatta.
I heard him on NPR the other day, first saying that he was staying in
the race to show There Is Another Democratic Path, then refusing the
interviewer’s invitation to criticize Kerry.
With
hardly a backward glance --or forward look --the bulk of
the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party
center, without the will to inflict debate, the influence to inform
policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left
--a necessarily catch-all word --is almost without precedent.
By accepting the premises and practices of party unity the left has
negated the reasons for its own existence.
Let
me produce a rabbit from its hat. I wrote that preceding paragraph,
the one beginning “with barely a backward glance”, 20 years
ago with Andrew Kopkind in a piece we did for The Nation in the summer
1984 about Mondale’s candicacy, where we noted the Democratic
Party’s commitment to “the essential elements of Reaganism:
continued military expansion… further degradation of the welfare
system, denials of black demands for equity; and unqualified submission
to the imperatives of the corporate system.”
Any
words you think should be changed?
And
talking of the imperatives of the corporate system, Kerry announced
on April 7 that his primary economic policy initiative would be deficit
reduction. Welcome back, Robert Rubin, the man who ran Clinton’s
economic policy on behalf of Wall Street. Kerry’s economic advisers,
Altman and Sperling, acknowledge they consult with Rubin all the time.
If you still foolishly believe that the economy in Clinton-time was
properly guided for the long-term benefit of the many, as opposed to
short-term bonanzas for the wealthy few, I strongly urge you to read
Robert Pollin’s Contours
of Descent, which I hailed here last November. In line with that
analysis, and after some useful exchanges with Pollin, let me note major
problems with the Kerry program.
Deficit
reduction will do nothing to directly promote the growth of jobs, the
lack of which is now the fundamental problem in the economy. As Pollin
remarks, “It is also a political disaster for the Democrats to
again latch onto deficit reduction rather than jobs as their major economic
theme. The false premise of Rubinomics is that deficit reduction itself
promotes economic growth, and thereby jobs, by lowering long-term interest
rates. This is what Rubin and company think happened in the 1990s. But
they are wrong. What actually happened in the 1990s is that we had an
unprecedented stock market bubble. Because of the bubble, rich people
and corporations engaged in a huge wave of borrowing and spending that
drove the economy upward, only to crash back down when the bubble collapsed.”
Even
if Rubin were right about deficit reduction stimulating growth of GDP,
what is clear in the current "recovery" is that GDP growth
alone does not promote job growth. That is exactly what we mean by the
"jobless recovery". The Democrats should instead be talking
about a major jobs program, through refinancing state and local government
spending in education, health, and social welfare. Aside from the social
benefits from these programs, they also provide the biggest expansion
of jobs for a given dollar amount of spending. A million dollars spent
on education, Pollin calculates, would produce roughly twice the number
of jobs as the same amount spent on the military.
But
Kerry’s other shoe, war on the deficit as well as war in Iraq,
has a more sinister import. Deficits aren’t intrinsically bad,
and the current one is scarcely unparalleled in recent US economic history.
But Bush’s deficits, amassed in the cause of tax breaks for the
very rich and war abroad, provide the premise of a fiscal crisis to
starve social spending. It’s the Greenspan Two Step: endorse the
tax cuts, then say, as the Fed chairman did in February, that the consequent
deficits require an onslaught on social security. Remember, Bill Clinton
was all set to start privatizing social security, until the allurements
of the diviner Monica postponed the onslaught.
There
are progressive ways to close the deficit. For example, Pollin reckons
that if we imposed a very small tax on all financial transactions-i.e.
all stock, bond, and derivative trades, starting with a 0.5 percent
tax on stocks and scaling the other appropriately - we could raise roughly
$100 billion right there, or roughly 20 percent of next year's projected
deficit, even if we also assume financial market trading fell by an
implausibly large 50 percent as a result of the tax.
A
tax on financial transactions? Now you’re talking, but not about
anything you might expect from the Democratic Party or John Kerry.
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