Today's Stories

October 23-25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
All the Populism Money Can Buy

Christopher Ketcham
Unlearning the CIA: the Education of Bob Baer

Jeff Gore
Palestine in Pieces: an Interview with Bill and Kathleen Christison

Gareth Porter
What Really Prompted Iran to Build the Qom Enrichment Facility?

Jayne Lyn Stahl
The Power Behind the Drone

Saul Landau
Fidel on Obama and Consumerism

Mike Whitney
The Great Dollar Collapse Debate

Nikolas Kozloff
Challenging the Dollar Dictatorship: an Interview with Economist Ethan Kaplan

Ron Jacobs
The Vatican's Takeover Bid

Russell Mokhiber
The Weiner Charade

Missy Beattie
Gainful Employment

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Posada and the Cuban 5: Without Any Exception Whatsoever?

Stephen Lendman
Cashing In, Selling Out: AARP's Tradition of Betrayal

David Ker Thomson
Natural History: Make Some Today

Rannie Amiri
Saada Under Siege

Ronnie Cummins
The Organic Revolution

Norm Kent
Bring It On: Fox News vs. Team Obama

Charles R. Larson
Zimbabwe's Unravelling

David Yearsley
Damn Near Dead at Yale

Lorenzo Wolff
A Fistful of Your Own Teeth

Ben Sonnenberg
Costa-Gavras's "Z": an Excellent Thriller

Kim Nicolini
Where the Wild Things Are: Max's Hollow Utopia

Website of the Weekend
Truth Squading Timberland: Join the Fray!

October 22, 2009

Dan Pearson /
Kathy Kelly
The Rotten Fruits of War

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Police Don Arab Disguises

Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State

Mark Engler
Pranksters Fixing the World: and Interview with the Yes Men

Johann Hari
Three Myths Driving the Afghan War

Brian M. Downing
Losing the War

Eric Toussaint
Small Oversights and Big Lies About Latin America

Tom Mountain
Busting the Darfur Myth

Israel Shamir
Russia's Daring Vote

Charles Thomson
What is Damien Hirst Playing At?

Website of the Day
Hitler Upset At Balloon Boy Hoax

October 21, 2009

Pam Martens
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street: Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Kafkaesque Deportation

Liaquat Ali Khan
Now Pakistan: Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

D. K. Wilson
Rush Limbaugh and the NFL

Franklin Lamb
Syria's Golan Heights

Norman Solomon
Uncle Sam in Afghanistan

Stephen Fleischman
Hypocrisy Unbridled

Patrice Higonnet
On Harvard's Financial Crisis

Binoy Kampmark
Herta Müller's Nobel

Kevin Coval /
Josh Healey
Searching for a Minyan

Website of the Day
How Wall Street is Making Its Bilions

October 20, 2009

Sharon Smith
Et Tu, Codepink?

Tariq Ali
Farce in Kabul, Tragedy in Pakistan

Mark Brenner
Pensions: the Next Casualty of Wall Street

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Adoption of the Goldstone Report: What Does It Mean?

Michael D. Yates
Down in the Valley With Cesar: Power, Paranoia and Purges in the UFW

Dean Baker
Does Citibank Need China?

Dave Lindorff
Depleted Uranium Weapons: Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are No Joke

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: a Very Important Liar

Kevin Zeese
Can the Democrats Avoid a Populist Health Care Rebellion?

Gilad Atzmon
Autumn in Shanghai

Website of the Day
A Message From the Gyre

October 19, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Dollar Will Not Crash

Greg Moses
The Cash Cops of Tenaha

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica

Michael Donnelly
Outside Agitator

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Dick's Fringe Army: Tea Baggers and Birchers?

Eric Walberg
The Battle in Canada

Russell Mokhiber
Pennsylvania, First in the Nation for Single Payer?

Barbara Rose Johnston
War, Peace and the Obamajority

John V. Whitbeck
Zionism: an Anti-Semite's Dream?

Christopher Ketcham
Swine Fools

Website of the Day
Greenspan: Break Up the Big Banks?

October 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
White House v. Fox News: a War Obama Can Win

Saul Landau
Autumn of the Patriarch

Paul Craig Roberts
The Rich Have Stolen the Economy

Carl Ginsburg
Where $18 an Hour is Too Much

Ralph Nader
Barney Frank the Bankers' Consort

Nikolas Kozloff
Rainforest Beef, Factory Farms and Anthony Bourdain's War on Vegetarians

Carlo Galli
Berlusconi: Still Doing Nothing, Still There

Dave Lindorff
Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

Catherine Rottenberg / Neve Gordon
Educating Children in War Zones

Marshall Auerback
Dollar Spasms

Nicola Nasser
The Realistic Way Out of Iraq

Windy Cooler
The Ghost of John Brown

James L. Secor
Why I Miss China

Ron Jacobs
Escalation Unopposed

Wes Jackson
A Way of Knowing

Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
Global Food Fight

David Ker Thomson Against Leaders

Missy Beattie
Dinner With the President

Emily Ratner
Taping Our Mouths Shut to Scream Out Our Dissent

Stephen Martin
The Scorched Earth Mindset of the International Banker

Michael Snedeker
"A Place of Greater Safety"

Charles R. Larson
Cheeta: the Last of the Hollywood High-Rollers

David Yearsley
Judith Leyster's Sensuous Passions

Peter Stone Brown
It's a Bob Christmas for Halloween

Poets' Basement
Keeler, Beatty and Anderson

Website of the Weekend
Elements of Nature

October 15, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
Our Cheap Politicians

Brian M. Downing
Rethinking the Afghan Insurgency

Ramzy Baroud
Abbas and the Goldstone Report: Our Shame is Complete

Danny Weil
A Neo-Liberal Arts Education: Diploma Mills and Debt Peonage

M. Idrees Ahmad
Return to Peshawar: a Journey Home

Margaret Kimberley
Michelle's Family Tree

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: Which Side Are You On?

Harvey Wasserman
Nuking the Climate Bill

Nirmal Ghosh
A Tale of Two Protocols: How Montreal Could Save Us From the Mire of Kyoto

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin Bears It All

Website of the Day
Tortured Law

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

M. Reza Pirbhai
Fighting the Taliban: What, Exactly, is Being Fought in Afghanistan?

Gareth Porter
Hawks Play Up the Taliban's Ties to Al Qaeda

Paul Craig Roberts
War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law

John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon

Ralph Nader
The CBO's Flawed Report on Medical Malpractice

Dean Baker
Won't You Please Come to Chicago to Greet the Bankers?

Charles Modiano
White Silence: Where Does Brett Favre Stand on Rush Limbaugh?

Nadia Hijab
Abandoning "Women and Children"

Walter Brasch
An Extension of Her Motherhood: Sherry Carpenter, Journalist and Animal Care Provider

Website of the Day
Nader: Obama Has a "Concessionary Personality"

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

Weekend Edition
October 23-25, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

All the Populism Money Can Buy

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Across the country, last weekend there were anti-war demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.

I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, California. My neighbor Ellen Taylor decided to spice up the proceedings by having a guillotine on the platform, right beside the Eureka Courthouse steps. It’s in the genes. Her father was Telford Taylor, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.

When she told me about the plan for the guillotine, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Ellen said she wanted to reach out to new constituencies beyond the committed left, and what better siren call than the swoosh of the Avenging Blade? A hundred years ago, people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French revolutions. Mark Twain composed the most passionate defense of the Terror  ever written in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court . But then, after 1917, the French Revolution was seen as the harbinger of Bolshevik excess and it grew less popular.

Up on the platform, I took the guillotine issue head on. In the  Terror, only 666 aristocrats had been topped in Paris in what is now the Place de la Concorde; 1,543 throughout France. The reward: a decisive smack on the snout of the land-holding aristocracy; durable popular power for peasants, workers and the petit bourgeois: M. le patron and M. le proprietaire stepped into history.

Here, in America, the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor, juror or ballot box. If corporate lawbreakers felt that somewhere along the line the retribution of the guillotine might await them, it would concentrate their minds marvelously, and cow them into lawfulness.

I got some cheers, and a charming young hippy, Brooklyn, mother of three, told me she wanted to move to France forthwith. Ellen asked the executioner, Michael Evenson, to put the contraption through its paces. She invited the crowd to call out designated victims – CEOs of the major banks, billionaires of note. Michael hitched the blade up six feet, and down it came with quite a satisfactory thwock.

Three days earlier, Goldman Sachs announced $3.1 billion in third-quarter profits, and set aside $5.3 billion for bonuses. Since G-Sachs is only still in business because of public bailout money, the bonus payments really make people mad. On the whole, Americans aren’t keen on axe blades, preferring the lynch mob’s rope, but if the target had been the board members of Goldman Sachs, I’m sure they’d make a generous exception, particularly after Lord Griffith’s remarks were widely quoted on this side of the Atlantic. Griffiths, vice chairman of Sachs International, told an audience at St. Paul's Cathedral last Tuesday that the  public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all. I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good ...”

Left and liberal commentators have talked yearningly about a new populist fever raging in the American body politic, prompted by the spectacle of bailouts for bankers but foreclosures and the dole for everyone else. I can’t say there’s much sign of populism in any energetic form. Look at movies from the Thirties, like Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and there’s a real edge to the anger of that time Capra felt it artistically important to convey. These days, the anger is formulaic. Over the weekend, the liberal opinion makers at the New York Times – Bob Herbert and Frank Rich – chewed out Goldman Sachs. Growled Herbert:

“Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families’ heads, the wise guys on Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses – this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.”

The Obama administration promptly rushed to cover its left flank by announcing it’s planning to impose cuts in executive pay at seven companies with substantial bailout funds. The U.S. senate’s parlor populist, Bernie Sanders, dutifully proclaimed that the Obama administration deserve praise for “taking an important step forward in trying to control the obscene compensation packages of the top executives on Wall Street.”

Note the meek qualifier, “trying.” The truth of the matter is that the Obama team has managed the tricky shot of giving more bailout money to the banks than the cumulative dispensations of all previous U.S. governments, while at the same time NOT giving any significant debt relief to ruined homeowners, a huge slice of whom is poor, black and Hispanic. Obama is not seeking to reform the financial system, and it would be beyond miraculous if he did, since the contrivers of the present mess – Lawrence Summers, et al – were given a welcoming clap on the back by the new president, as he stepped into the White House and told them to get on with the job. This amazing bailout for the existing corrupt system – as if Lenin had used the October revolution to restore the Romanovs – has been engineered without significant opposition from organized labor or the left-ßliberal end of Obama’s own party.

Of course, people curse the bankers and their political flunkeys as they watch their 10Ks atomize, their homes go, and their jobs disappear to China. They smolder as they watch the parade of Murdoch’s demagogues on Fox, flirting and toying with the theme of Obama’s assassination. The Obama administration dares to go to war with Glen Beck, apparently the only enemy it feels capable of confronting, at least at the time of writing. The gossip site Gawker calls on its readers to turn in all discreditable information about Goldman Sachs executives. The liberal talk host Olberman calls on his audience to rat out Beck. Neither invitation has thus far yielded any significant harvest.

Alas, American populism needs the octane of cash. During the Clinton scandal, Hustler supremo Larry Flynt wanted his audience to rat out high-ranking Republican sinners. He offered $100,000 cash rewards, and the dirt rolled in. Populism has to be cash-based these days. Maybe that was Ralph Nader’s point. His first work of fiction, 700 pages long, is titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.

Kevin Gray, Mark Rudd, Bruce Franklin…The Gang’s All Here!

Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from South Carolina Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be?

New to CounterPunch, Mark Rudd contributes an important piece on movement-building – task number one for the left today. He counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement.  H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan.

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Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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