Today's Stories

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's 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
December 26-28, 2008

CounterPunch Diary

The Medusa's Head

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Conspiracism is raising its Medusa’s head again, her lethal visage wreathed with hissing absurdities, immobilizing judgement, melting intellect to pumice.

Journalist Russ Baker suggests in a new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means for America, “the strong possibility” (I quote from a respectful resume of his conclusions) that the 41st president, G.H.W.Bush, father of the present resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “was involved in assassinating President Kennedy, and that Bush was involved in staging the Watergate break-in (and the break-in at Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's) with the purpose of having these break-ins exposed and the blame placed on President Nixon.”

We’re back with the old notion of a secret, all-powerful permanent government, engendered in the WASP-nest of Skull and Bones, headquartered in Langley and locked in alternate collusion and combat with another permanent secret all-powerful government, headquartered in Zion and, if we are to believe the conspiracists, exultant at this hour at the tremendous coup of Bernie Madoff’s supposed victims.

Coup? I refer you to a scenario circulating the internet, titled “The Madoff Double Bluff” and credited to Muhammad Rafeeq, who makes the fatal presupposition – very common among conspiracists – that things work in the fashion advertised by the manufacturer on the outside of the box. As many children and parents learn at this time of year, this is not always the case.

In Rafeeq’s case, he assumes that fund managers and bankers invariably exercise due diligence on behalf of their clients, subjecting each proposed investment vehicle to merciless scrutiny. In the mighty backwash of the Fall of the House of Madoff, we are learning once again that many fund managers and bankers did no such thing. Whether in Switzerland, London or New York, they established themselves as feeders for Madoff and rushed him the money entrusted to them by their eager customers without a qualm, winning handsome commissions from Madoff for so doing.

But since Rafeeq thinks that Madoff’s operations were under conscientious scrutiny, he concludes that “there is no way Madoff could have been pulling a scam.” Having established his initial erroneous assumption as the foundation of his conspiracy, Rafeeq then raises a Gothick folly on this sand, claiming that the dirty work afoot here was not a Ponzi scheme (impossible because of zealous scrutineers) but an insurance fraud, led by Madoff to cover genuine losses from Madoff’s trades by claiming a Ponzi scheme and taking full responsibility:

Rather than saying this hedge fund has gone bust, due to its choice of investment assets and investment methologies, a scenario which is highly probable in the current financial paradigm, since all the professionals are predicting that at least 30% of all hedge funds are about to fail, more than 700 of them, the CEO [Madoff]  chooses to fess up to fraud. If the CEO admits the fund has gone bust, then all those wealthy members of the Jewish community get nothing, but if the CEO admits to fraud they get their money back as compensation from the US taxpayer, just as they are also drawing money back from the taxpayers with the other hand.

In other words, it’s a vast Jewish conspiracy, rather flattering to the Jews, as such conspiracy theories often are. (For such reasons Benjamin Disraeli, for one, liked to foster the notion that indeed the Jews are all-powerful.) Just as he assumes that all fund managers are conscientious, Rafeeq obviously thinks Jews are too smart to lose money.

I sent Rafeeq’s reflections along to CounterPuncher Pam Martens, a former Wall Street stockbroker who really did exercise due diligence on behalf of her clients and who was on to Madoff’s game back in the early 1990s. I strongly recommend her recent piece on the Madoff affar on this site, which we ran last Monday.

Martens wrote me back as follows:

The author [i.e. Rafeeq] is missing a few important points. First of all, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) will only cover a maximum of $500,000 per account owner; some accounts had tens of millions in them. Secondly, the account owner would have to show beyond a shadow of doubt that they actually gave money to Madoff in order to seek a SIPC refund and would be subject to jail time themselves if they lied. Since Madoff never owned a bank, all records of incoming funds and outgoing funds, along with the name of the beneficial owner, would be easily accessible at his clearing banks, two of which are listed in court documents as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon. And, finally, the author neglects the most important point: why would Madoff be willing to spend the rest of his life in jail to make others rich from SIPC refunds. I'm not buying this story. My guess (and it's just a guess at this point) is the following happened: the people who had been with Madoff since the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s had multiplied their original investment (on paper) many times over at the fictional annual rate of 10 to 13 per cent. Many wanted out once the market was down over 40 per cent. Once he paid them out, he had little left to meet regular income payouts and meet his high family salaries, overhead, multiple homes, yachts, private plane interests, office and payroll in London, country club memberships on Long Island and Palm Beach, etc. Then, apparently, some large redemptions were requested, totaling $7 billion. If he didn't pay, those people would have turned him in anyway. He had no choice but to fess up. 

There’s now much bellowing about the need for new regulations to head off the Madoffs of tomorrow. Such calls have the effect of suggesting that there were no locks on the stable door and that hence no one was really to blame for not checking that the stable door was securely shut. The deregulatory binge of the last few years notwithstanding, there are still plenty of locks – that is, regulations – on the books which, if actually used, would have stopped Madoff in his tracks. But the regulators and overseers were corrupted. In her piece for CounterPunch, Martens quoted the detailed 21-page denunciation of Madoff to the SEC in 2005 by Harry Markopoulos, outlining with great accuracy the huge fraud underway. The letter was dismissed out of hand by the SEC, one of whose regulators married Madoff’s daughter, a union given a rapturous retrospective green light in the New York Times after the scandal broke.

Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was a crime scene for 20 years at least, and it looks as though half Wall Street was privy to the fact, not to mention the regulators and the politicians in Congress in receipt of their portion of the $590,000 which, from 1998 through 2008, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities spent lobbying Congress and the SEC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It was a huge conspiracy, though not in the least like the one sketched in by Rafeeq. Conspiracies, like accidents, very often turn out to be normalcy suddenly raised to the level of drama.

Against Saviors

My brother Patrick called on Christmas Day, from his home in Canterbury. Opposite his house is St. Dunstan’s church, containing the head of Sir Thomas Moore, retrieved by his daughter Margaret after her father was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to sign the Act that declared Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church in England. Patrick’s house is as old as St. Dunstans and contains a right of way, through which custom decreed that pastoralists could lead their sheep. One of these days I’ll rent a flock and ratify the right, just in case the brother has any notion of privatizing the whole of his premises.

Patrick reported that he and his family had gone along that morning to listen to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, give his Christmas sermon. He said it was pretty good. I looked it up online, and the brother was right. It was a bracing critique of “great man” theories of change, specifically citing excessive hopes, now vested in Barack Obama.

“In recent weeks,” the Archbishop  declared, “we've seen some of Barack Obama's advisers and colleagues warning about the level of messianic expectation loaded on to the president-elect. 

“The gospel tells us something hard to hear – that there is not going to be a single charismatic leader or a dedicated political campaign or a war to end all wars that will bring the golden age…

“There is a savior, born so that all may have life in abundance, a savior … hidden in the form of poverty and insecurity, a displaced person … whose authority does not come from popularity, problem-solving or anything else in the human world. He is the presence of the power of creation itself.

“It is not the restoring of a golden age, not even a return to the Garden of Eden; it is more – a new creation, a new horizon for us all…

“And our own following of the Word made flesh is what gives us the resources to be perennially suspicious of claims about the end of history or the coming of some other savior exercising some other sort of power. To follow him is to take the risks of working at these small and stubborn outposts of newness, taking our responsibility and authority.

“We can't pass the buck to Caesar Augustus, Barack Obama or even Canterbury City Council – though we may pray for them all and hope that they will play their part in witnessing to new possibilities.”

Not bad at all. The last year the liberals and a lot of the left here have passed the buck entirely to Obama.

It’s Not Over Till it’s Over

I drove north to Olympia from Petrolia, California, a couple of days before Christmas. Advised by co-editor St. Clair, himself ice-bound in Oregon City, that I-5 was closed, I aimed the ’62 Belvedere station wagon from Crescent City up the Oregon coast, and was duly rewarded by ravishing landscapes all the way to Astoria. Here’s where the blizzards are brought in by the cold air currents rushing down the Columbia River Gorge from the Inland Empire. There was plenty of snow in Astoria, also on either side of State route 30. The Belvedere shimmied a couple of time but took me gallantly east to the Lewis and Clark bridge over the Columbia into Washington and the final 70 miles of the 745 mile drive.

I had plenty of time to ponder the ups and down of ’08, which I’ll evoke in my Diary next week. For now, let me rally CounterPunchers to one last thought in ’08 for our future.  We’ve had a strong year. Month after month, our site has attracted millions of unique visitors. Our newsletters have been well received and have won new subscribers. CounterPunch Books enjoy a steady sale. It’s an encouraging picture and all of us here, at CounterPunch, thank you for your donations and subscriptions, but the edgy fact remains that in financial terms we’re never more than an inch or two from the edge of the cliff. We need every penny we can get, and so as we head to year’s end, and if you haven’t been wiped out by Bernie Madoff and feel that you have something to send our way, remember that all donations are tax deductible.

Donate now if you can!

Our latest newsletter has three very strong pieces – starting with Bill and Kathy Christison’s powerful description of the fearful sufferings inflicted on Gaza by Israel and the United States. Barbara Rose Johnston takes us to the Guatemalan gravesites of one more human catastrophe instigated by the terror network known as the World Bank. I review the grim Bush record on freedom and constitutional protections

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Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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