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Today's
Stories
October 16
/ 17, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Free Speech Movement and Howard Stern
October 15,
2004
Paul Craig
Roberts
Where
Did These "Conservatives" Come From?: The Brownshirting
of America
Laura Carlsen
Wal-Mart
vs. the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
Greg Bates
Empire of Insanity: Kerry's Iraq Troop Numbers
Michael Donnelly
News from a Swing State: Does Anyone Here Have a Spine?
Katherine Lahey
The Venezuelan "Threat": Why Do Kerry and Bush Fear
Hugo Chavez?
Robert Jensen
/ Pat Youngblood
Election Day Fears
Leah Caldwell
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib: the Masterminds of Torture and Abuse
Website of
the Day
An Anti-Billionaire Policy? Why That Would Be Economic Racism
October 14,
2004
Darcy Richardson
The
Other Progressive Candidate: the Lonely Crusade of Walt Brown
Willliam A.
Cook
Turning
Myths into Truth
Laura Santina
Water, Women and War
Evelyn Pringle
Free Speech Banned by Big Pharma: What You Can't Say About Drug
Importation
Alan Farago
Lessons
from Nature
Rep. Maxine Waters
A Letter to Colin Powell on Haiti
Nicole Colson
Maimed
for Oil and Empire
October 13,
2004
Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton and Bill Quigley
Aftermath
of a Coup: The Other Disaster in Haiti
Sharon Smith
Barak
O-Bomb-a?: Democrats Target Iran
Christopher Brauchli
God and the Bush Administration
Mike Whitney
The Real Meaning of the Hamdi Case
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: a False Beacon?
Website of
the Day
Operation
Truth
October 12,
2004
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Greg Bates
The Year of Voting Dangerously: a Survey Request of Nader Voters
in Swing States
Steven Conn
Progressives as Pawns: Kerry's War on Nader
Jason Leopold
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from
UN Oil-for-Food Program
Security Scholars
for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Time for a Change of Course
Timothy J. Freeman
Dying for a Mistake
Pierre Tristam
Deconstructing Bush
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 2nd Debate: the Blurring of Act and Audience
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Israel as Sideshow
Website of the Day
John Kerry's Personal Off-Shore Tax Shelters
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
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 Edition
October 16 / 17, 2004
Those Who Went
Before
The
Free Speech Movement and Howard Stern
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Forty years ago this month a young man
called Mario Savio, 21 years old, climbed on top of a car in
Berkeley, California, and let fly with a stream of incendiary
rhetoric and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born.
I'll skip the next chapters
and go straight to "forty years later", meaning October
7, 2004, when a fellow two years older than Savio would have
been if he hadn't keeled over a few years ago clambered onto
a chair at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, right outside
the entry to the University of California at Berkeley and let
fly with a stream of rhetoric that would have been a lot more
incendiary for the crowds in Sproul Plaza if Lenni Brenner had
remembered to bring a bullhorn.
These days the Free Speech
Movement is comfortably, maybe too comfortably, installed on
the Berkeley calendar as an annual event where FSM veterans look
back on the Sixties (initial phase), hold panels on such topics
as I'm quoting from the Fortieth Anniversary program which
stretched across four days on "the FSM: Its Genesis,
Meanings and Consequences" and seek to hector youth for
their lack of revolutionary zeal.
I agreed to join Lenni for
some curb-side ranting, not only because he's an old friend but
also because Berkeley survivors of that period whose judgment
I respect say Lenni Glazer, as he was known then, was the fiercest
and most mesmerizing speaker, holding crowds spellbound at that
same corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, day after day till the
University seized an opportunity to have Lenni put away in the
state prison at San Luis Obispo for three long years. These days
he's as fiery as ever, though mostly at the other end of the
country, in New York.
I was glad, I told the modest
throng, to be able to speak at an FSM event on the very day when
the newspapers were testifying to the potency and profitability
of free speech, as uttered by the radio shock jock Howard Stern,
who had just been signed up by Sirius, a satellite radio company
for $500 million. There's money in talking dirty about girls.
Russians have a toast to "those
who went before". You drink to the dead, though you don't
clink glasses. Stern, I said, was standing on the shoulders of
many who "went before", who had sacrificed much that
he might enjoy his $500 million for speaking freely about sex.
There was Lenny Bruce, harried mercilessly by prosecutors and
cops across the country. Times were tougher still in the Forties
and Fifties when men like Gershon Legman, Jake Brussel and Samuel
Roth (who published the first excerpts of Joyce's Ulysses in
the US) all served prison terms after prosecutions by the Post
Office.
Free speech counts most when
it's most risky. In you used the word "Palestinian"
in any public place when I first arrived in New York in the early
1970s you risked being punched in the face. "Palestinians"
didn't exist, because Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister at
the time, had said so. Things are better now, though substantively
for Palestinians in Palestine they are far worse.
In the second debate, both
George Bush even weirdly mentioned his hopes for a Palestinian
state twice. He must be looking for the Arab-American vote. Of
course Kerry did not, just like every other Democrat. Both Bush
and John Kerry proclaimed their undying allegiance to the Bill
of Rights and the US Constitution. Both swore they stood four-square
for liberty, which was hard to listen to with a straight face
(like 98 per cent of the rest of the "debate") since
both deemed the Patriot Act a splendid thing. Of course the Patriot
Act embodies the notion that there are indeed times when free
speech is too risky.
Lenni was holding my legs so
I wouldn't fall off the chair, and I sensed from the slight pressure
of his hands that he wished I might descend to the sidewalk so
he could wheel on his next speaker, Jack Heyman of the Longshoremen's
Union at the Port of Oakland, promoting the Million Worker March.
Not so long ago Jack and his comrades received very painful
expression, in the form of rubber bullets, of the current view
of free speech and the right to assemble peacefully, as entertained
by the Oakland Police Department and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown.
So I wound up my hoarse rhetoric
with some jabs at the left, as mustered in Berkeley for the FSM
anniversary. Probably some 90 per cent of them are dedicated
"Anybody But Bush" zealots who have, with varying degrees
of venom, been denouncing Ralph Nader for presuming to exercise
his rights of free speech, as an independent candidate in the
presidential election.
Flowers of the sixties, now
gone sadly to seed, have been coursing round the nation's courthouses,
challenging Nader's efforts to get on state ballots. The older
crowd hate Bush, that's for sure. But they hate Nader more. So
here was the great irony. Most of those mistily honoring the
FSM don't much care for free speech when it looks as though it
might be risky, might inconvenience their favored candidate,
even though the favored candidate, John Kerry, wants to fight
a better war than Bush in Iraq and then march on to Teheran.
In fact the original FSM movement
was a much bigger tent than people now recall. My old friend
Conn Hallinan, who was an FSM militant and arrested in Sproul
Hall in the largest mass university arrests (800) in the history
of the US, has just reminded me of this. Hallinan says, "We
had right wingers, libertarians, conservatives and of course
weirdos. There was an FSM activist, who went on to successfully
challenge the law forbidding women to hang off the side of cable
cars in San Francisco. She was a right-wing libertarian."
These days the left and PC
crowd would find that the woman was opposed to affirmative action,
or some such, and would have driven her out with oaths and curses.
They have no idea of tactical coalitions. So much for the heritage
of Sixties radicalism. Not everyone's gone to seed, to be sure.
There's Lenni, who finally got me off the chair and actually
there are many, many more who understand the importance of the
third word that comes after Free Speech, namely "Movement".
Without a movement you have nothing, and you've built nothing.
That's what the ABB "leftists" don't understand now.
November 3 will be a bit late in the day to start looking for
one.
It's the long-term movements
that count, the ones that don't sell out every four years, to
support someone like Kerry who wants to widen the war in Iraq
and then go and burn down Teheran. These days many communities
campuses have pro Palestinian groups on them. There were almost
none thirty years ago. That's a real Free Speech Movement, and
one that has made a difference and will make a difference long
after this campaign is over.
Weekend
Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
Conn Hallinan
Ashcroft and Indonesia
Lori Smith
Health Care in America: And Then I Got Sick...
Dave Zirin
Hold the Booyah!: SportsCenter Out of the Middle East
John L. Hess
Rather Will Take the Heat, As Bush's War Deteriorates
Brian J. Foley
W is for Wimp: So Why do Manly Men Love Him?
Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman and Osama bin Laden: Odd Juxtapositions
Poets' Basement
Vest, Landau & Albert
Website of the Weekend
Eye on the NYTs
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