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Today's Stories December 29 / 30, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby December 28, 2007 Farzana Versey The Complex Electra Wajahat Ali A Pakistani Requiem Binoy Kampmark Death in Rawalpindi: Bhutto and Her Legacy Ayesha Ijaz Khan Not Dead Yet: The Pakistan People's Party Still Survives Anthony DiMaggio Turkey's Bombing of Iraq Ray McGovern Creeping Fascism Jim Goodman Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going Ron Jacobs Transcending the Colonizer's History: Iran, a People Interrupted Russell Hoffman Mini-Nukes by Toshiba John Murphy Greens Gone Wild Website of the Day Guiliani Campaign Official: "Only Rudy Can Defeat the Muslims"   December 27, 2007 Dilip Hiro A Tragedy Foretold: Will Bhutto's Death be a Boost for Her Party? Murtaza Shibli Who Killed Bhutto? Stephen Soldz Fallujah, the Information War and U.S. Propaganda Bill Quigley Locked Outside the Gates Paul Craig Roberts The Great American Lock-Up Omer Subhani Killing Bhutto: What Happens Next in Pakistan? Marjorie Cohn The Torture Tape Cover-Up: How High Does It Go? Allan Nairn Cataclysm By Money Whim Jacob G. Hornberger Smearing Ron Paul: Shame on the NYT Norman Solomon Channeling Suze Orman Patrick Irelan Rumsfeld Spills the Ink Ben Tripp Pass the Razor Blades Website of the Day Quagmire, For What It's Worth   December 26, 2007 Charles Tripp From One Saddam to Fifty Paul Armentano No-Knock, You're Dead Rannie Amiri Lebanon in Search of a Government Stanley Heller Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson's War John Walsh Two Unreasonable Men Martha Rosenberg The Strange Career of Scott Gottlieb Norman Madarasz Bolivia Amends New Constitution and Faces Mutiny from Within Website of the Day Cockburn at the Battle of Ideas   December 25, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Conscience and Empire December 24, 2007 Andrea Peacock A Dark Ride on the Border Tariq Ali Thinking of Edward Said Uri Avnery Help! A Ceasefire! Jill Jameson Burma is Not Back to Normal: A Trip from Rangoon to Mae Sot Steve Melendez Russell Means Goes to Washington Mike Whitney The Big Fix Chuck Munson Not Getting It About New Orleans John Walsh Clueless Crusaders Farzana Versey Tony Blair and the Hawking of Religion Richard Neville Dreaming of a White House Christmas Website of the Day Back in the USSR December 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Mike Huckabee's Ascending Chariot Ralph Nader Politics and Profits: How the Oil Cartel Gets Its Way Andy Worthington Intelligence Failures, Battlefield Myths and Unaccountable Prisons in Afghanistan Ahmad Faruqui The Comedian of Pakistan Bill Moyers Society on Steroids Rev. William E. Alberts Blessed are the Peacemakers Timothy J. Freeman From Kant to Lennon: Can War Really be Over? Anthony DiMaggio Democrats Continue to Capitulate on Iraq Fred Gardner Molecule of the Year, Cannabiodiol Paul Krassner Enhanced Hazing Techniques Seth Sandronsky 17 Years of Meanness: Repealing California's Three Strikes Law William Loren Katz Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters: Recalling the Battle of Lake Okeechobee Michael Dickinson In the Dungeon of the Zabita Ron Jacobs Why Leon Russell Still Matters David Vest Doyle Bramhall's "Is It News?" Poets' Basement Orloski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend George W. Hates Santa   December 21, 2007 John Ross New Massacres Loom in Mexico Jacob Hornberger Nothing Can Morally Justify the Invasion of Iraq Dick J. Reavis A Way Out of the Newspaper Abyss Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon The 2007 P.U.-litzer Prizes Peter Morici Business as Usual as Recession Looms Jack McCarthy Let Us Now Praise Judith Regan (Even If She Did Sleep with Bernie Kerik) Raúl Zibechi Sex and Revolution Steve Early How the Presidential Candidates Made Me an Atheist David Macaray Union Aftermath Patrick Bond Zuma, the Center-Left and the Left-Left in S. Africa Lakota Freedom Delegation A Declaration of Independence from the USA Website of the Day Solomon v. Beck: Tale of the Tape   December 20, 2007 David Rosen Mitt Romney's Secret Life as a Pornographer Alan Farago The Huckster and the Wreckage: Jeb Bush and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Laura Carlsen Standing Up to NAFTA Ashley Dawson The Return of the Bread Riot Wayne Smith and Jennifer Schuett Cuba Changes, US Policy Stagnates Website of the Day How to Talk to a FoxNews Reporter   December 19, 2007 Saul Landau Is the NIE Bush's Watergate? Paul W. Lovinger Hillary the Hawk Norman Solomon The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck Dave Zirin George Mitchell's Drugs of Choice Marjorie Cohn Bush Still Spinning Iranian Nukes Sen. Russell Feingold The Iraq War is Exhausting Our Nation Sonja Karkar A Christmas Reflection on Palestine Anthony Papa Open the Drug Gulags Christopher Ketcham Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions Davey D Britney's Little Sister is Pregnant: Should We Blame Hip Hop? Website of the Day When Republicans Use the F-Word on TV   December 18, 2007 R. F. Blader The Politics of Teen Pregnancy George Wuerthner Gunning for Wolves in Idaho Steven Higgs Can the NAFTA Superhighway be Stopped? Vijay Prashad Encounters with Ghadar David Macaray The Free Rider Problem Ralph Nader Nine Books That Make a Difference: a Reading List for the Holidays Eva Liddell Privatizing War Abroad, Invading Privacy at Home Martha Rosenberg While the Bodies are Still Warm: Drugs, Shrinks and Shooters Dave Lindorff When Impeachment is Out of Print Peter Morici The Consequences the Trade Deficit Website of the Day Ron Paul: How Fascism Will Come to America   December 17, 2007 Mike Whitney Staring Into the Abyss Tom Barry Planning the War on Immigrants Uri Avnery A Gaza Masada? Greg Moses Crossing the Line in Texas Allan Nairn Terrorism; Counter- Terrorism: Excuses for Murder Patrick Bond South Africa's Fight Between Hostile Brothers Stephen Lendman Police State America Charles Jonkel Grizzly Right of Way Laray Polk An Inside-Out Crisis in Gaza Stephen Fleischman Pawns in Their Game December 15 / 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh A People's Penny for the Magna Carta Howard Zinn Bomb After Bomb Standard Schaefer The Greening of Big Tobacco Raymond J. Lawrence Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas Alan Farago Down on Desolation Row: the Vultures and the Growth Machine Saul Landau Lord Byron and the Bad Tourists Jenna Orkin Lying to "Reassure" the Public: Bush's EPA and the Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Ahmad Samih Khalidi Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct Robert Fantina Politics By Photo-Op Missy Comley Beattie Resistance Amid the Ruins Ramzy Baroud Of Mormons and Muslims James L. Secor A Vision for China's Future Elijah Wald Ike Turner's Music Won't be Forgotten Website of the Weekend The Alliance for the Wild Rockies Needs (and Deserves) Your Support   December 14, 2007 JoAnn Wypijewski The Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him John Ross Iraqi Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax Jacob Hornberger Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? Allan Nairn "Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes Dave Zirin The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners Dave Lindorff The First Cut is the Deepest Misty MacDuffee Toxic Grizzlies Ben Terrall What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine? Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi Prerequisites for Peace Website of the Day Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"   December 13, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Shrinking the Dollar from the Inside-Out Mike Whitney Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding Ron Jacobs Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy Norman Solomon The USA's Human Rights Daze Peter Morici The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch Sandy Mayes Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia Franklin Lamb The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling? Jacob Hornberger Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It Nadim Rouhana An Interloper in My Own Land Dave Zirin On Pigskin and Petrol Website of the Day Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support! December 12, 2007 Allan Nairn US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian Phones Alan Farago How Sprawl Eats Its Young Ray McGovern Torture, Lies and Videotape Winslow T. Wheeler The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts Evan Jones The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell Doom for the US Farm Belt James Petras An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers Joel Hirschorn The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine Joshua Frank Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention Sherry Wolf Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul Dan Bacher Survey of a Fish Graveyard Website of the Day Men Eating Bugs   December 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn What's Really Happened During the Surge? Diana Johnstone The Next Kosovo War Paul Craig Roberts It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution David Macaray Impasse in Hollywood Ralph Nader Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs Andy Worthington Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result Martha Rosenberg No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers Steve Champion / Anthony Ross Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams Kim Nicolini Tangled Up in Dylan Michael Dickinson Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent Website of the Day A Charming (and Worthy) Pitch December 10, 2007 Uri Avnery How They Stole the Bomb From Us Debbie Nathan The Perils of Journalism and Child Porn JoAnn Wypijewski Is There a Left Here Left? If So, What Can It Do? Steve Kelly Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness Donna J. Volatile Welcome to the Revolution   December 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Coup Against Bush and Cheney Brenda Norrell Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists Saul Landau The Ruins of Empire R. F. Blader A Rape in Every Drink? Ray McGovern Spinning Iran's Centrifuges Allan Nairn Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in Indonesia Linn Washington, Jr Spotlight on Death Row Paul Craig Roberts When Will Bush Come Clean?   December 7, 2007 Sean Penn Piano Wire Puppeteers Arthur Versluis Mining Water in the Desert M. G. Piety Racism and the American Psyche: Some Thoughts on Race and Intelligence Pam Martens Banksters Gone Wild Alan Farago Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia? Sprawl and the Credit Crisis Allan Nairn It Takes (Out) a Village Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday Alice Slater The Iran Opening Robert Weissman The Story of Stuff Website of the Day Something About Mitt   December 5, 2007 Mike Whitney Why the CFR Hates Putin Sharon Smith The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden and the Dead End Democrats James Petras Venezuela in the Aftermath Ron Jacobs The Iran Charade Dave Zirin Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor John V. Whitbeck Two States or One? Time to Choose Peter Zinn Covered in New Orleans Niranjan Ramakrishnan Impeach Pelosi Instead Alan Farago The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida Heather Gray US Meddling in Australian Politics Website of the Day A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas   December 4, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in Ann Arbor Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court Paul Craig Roberts The Lies at the End of the American Dream Ray McGovern No-Nuke Iran Winslow T. Wheeler Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are Too Small Allan Nairn The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just Want Food" Russell Mokhiber The USA v. Al Arian Nikolas Kozloff As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American Left John V. Walsh Peace Movement Paralyzed Ghada Ageel Will Peace Cost Me My Home? Stephen Soldz The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations Website of the Day Hands Off the People of Iran     December 3, 2007 Tariq Ali Venezuela After the Referendum Bill Quigley New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor, Tax Credits for Developers Eric Walberg The Bible and Middle East History Uri Avnery After Annapolis Marjorie Cohn Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed Dave Lindorff Vengeance Isn't Sweet Stephen Fleischman Homeless in Paradise Martha Rosenberg Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile Website of the Day So Just Lead!   December 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift in a Sea of Booze Jeffrey St. Clair The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West Mike Whitney "Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir Rosen Shemon Salam A Visit From the FBI Roger Burbach The Battle in Bolivia Benjamin Dangl New Politics in Old Bolivia Brian M. Downing The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to the Surge? Greg Moses Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story Sonja Karkar The "Never-Never" Peace Conference Saul Landau Ethics and Evil in South Boston Margaret Kimberley Black America Left Behind John Ross What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution? Reza Fiyouzat Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran Judith Scherr Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays Lance Olsen Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy Christopher Brauchli Mr. Bush and the Despots Robert Fantina Iraq as U.S. Colony Dan Bacher Fish Triage on Prospect Island Michael Donnelly Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency Website of the Weekend Appalachian Voices   November 30, 2007 Peter Stone Brown The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan Wajahat Ali The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's Former Minister of Information Allan Nairn Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers Alan Farago The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash John Ross The Death of Latin America's First Revolution Corporate Crime Reporter America's Corporate Crime Capitals Lucia Alvarez Diego Gonzalez Argentina's Political Future James Rothenberg The Iraqi Miracle Website of the Day Bio-Bling?   November 29, 2007 R. F. Blader The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran Stephen Soldz War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire Sheldon Richman Iraq 3.0 George Wuerthner Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws Felice Pace Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis? Col. Dan Smith The Meaning of Annapolis Harvey Wasserman Terror Target Nukes Nikolas Kozloff Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08 Paul Krassner Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike! Dave Lindorff News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela? CP News Service The One State Declaration Website of the Day A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter November 28, 2007 James Petras CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela Jeff Halper Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One Way Street Pam Martens Crashing Citigroup Peter Morici Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession Mohammed Khatib Separate and Unequal in Palestine Helen Redmond The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America William S. Lind In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm? Ben Tripp We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges Jeff Berg Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran Website of the Day The Lies of Joe Klein   November 27, 2007 Joe DeRaymond On the Road to the Torture School Paul Craig Roberts Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary and Rudy Marjorie Cohn Remembering Victor Rabinowitz Mike Whitney A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp Ron Jacobs The Myths of Military Progress Col. Dan Smith The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work Ralph Nader Family Learning Karim Makdisi Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut Christopher Ketcham Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop Ronan Bennett Martin Amis Does a Coulter Website of the Day Celebrating the Uncensored Media   November 26, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Heading for Annapolis Paul Craig Roberts The End of All That David Macaray Enter Mediator Sameer Dossani Pakistan's Wounded Dictator Roger Burbach The Final Battle in Bolivia Mark Scaramella Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire Brian McKinlay Howard's End Rick Kuhn The Fall of a Racist Union Buster Binoy Kampmark Ruddslide and Dull Alec Monica Benderman What Do You Know of War? Brenda Norrell Return to Alcatraz Website of the Day Ghostworld by DJ Spooky   November 24 / 25, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson, MD Robert Fisk Darkness Falls on the Middle East Saul Landau Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P. Jeffrey St. Clair Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism Rannie Amiri Beirut's Black Friday Christopher Brauchli Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace Daniel Gross The Gap and Black Friday Mike Whitney "A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions" Marjorie Cohn Iran and the 2008 Elections David Rosen Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans David Michael Green If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom .... Kenneth Rexroth When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan Muhammad Iqbal Trans. Shahid Alam Ghazal Website of the Day Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill November 23, 2007 Gary Leupp Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat Valley Laura Carlsen Coming to Terms with Diversity in Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP David Macaray Keeping Labor Unions Out Andy Worthington Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden Clifton Ross Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant Seth Sandronsky Battling Sodexho Dan Bacher Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation William A. Cook The Myth of Middle East Peace Website of the Day Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short Film   November 22, 2007 Alan Farago Who Lost America's Everglades? Greg Moses A Thanksgiving Basting Dave Lindorff Impeachment is Back on the Table Mike Ely Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving Omar Azfar Gore for President of Pakistan?   November 21, 2007 Vijay Prashad Our Dictator, Their Democracy Martha Rosenberg Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant Manuel Garcia, Jr. Epiphany on the Glacier John Ross The Last Days of Mexican Corn Brian McKenna Cancer Terrorists Unmasked Stephen Soldz Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo Monica Benderman Needing Peace Ben Terrall Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar Website of the Day Mercy for Animals               Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition December 29 / 30, 2007 CounterPunch Diary Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Time made Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Chalk it up as nostalgia for the cold war, when America was great, and a working man in a state like Michigan had two cars, a nice house, a country cabin, a health plan, a pension and a wife who stayed at home, canning fruit and batting her eyes at the postman. These days he has two lousy jobs, she has three and they have negative equity in their home, no health plan and no pension. A couple of indices of how down many Americans are feeling about the future: The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has reached its highest point in at least 25 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported. The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S. residents ages 45 through 54 ­ far more than among younger adults, whose own suicide stats are also on the rise. In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in the 45-54 cohort, the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982, a year when there was a terrible farm crisis in the Mid-West. These days it's the health care crisis. People can't even afford to get finished off respectably by a doctor or a hospital, so they have to do it themselves. The second index of desperation is a sudden spike in teen pregnancies, particularly among young black women. As R.F. Blader wrote a few days ago here on this site, "When we believe in our opportunities, we safeguard our futures. Conversely, we behave self-destructively when we have no hope. For many teenagers in America, the options aren't heartening. In a society where opportunities are scarce and life is getting harder, getting pregnant puts a positive spin on a vote of no-confidence." Indeed some argue that having babies early is a very rational choice for a young black teen, since her support network of kin are still alive, and her own body not wasted by the toxins associated with low income neighborhoods. In less than a week America will start trudging through the endless months of Campaign 2008. Worthy Iowans, their quadrennial season in the limelight at its apex, will cram into the caucuses and kick off the horse races. In all the torrents of rhetorical hot air thus far expended, it's hard to find a single sentence from any politician that could give any comfort to that suicidal 50-year old or the teen with a toddler as her only solace. There are gestures to populism by the Democrat John Edwards, but I've not met anyone who believes that there is the slightest chance of substantive reform of health care or a reversal of soaring trends in inequality. The bad guys have a lock on the system. The default option these days is fantasy ­ a trend in American politics kicked off in this epoch by Ronald Reagan. Reagan knew how to keep things simple. When Reagan died a Pentagon official told me that when Ron became president in 1981, and thus "commander in chief" the Joint Chiefs of Staffs mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". Reagan really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats. Reagan set the bar for the level of national political debate. They called him the Great Communicator and no one has moved the bar since. So who cares if his great contribution to the national fantasy "missile defense", aka, "the strategic defense initiative" aka "Star Wars, is now scheduled to consume 19 per cent of the defense budget even though it's well nigh universally admitted the system is useless. The system is impregnable to reform and everyone knows it. London-Paris The Dialectics of Revolution, uh, Recycling Three years ago some smart leftists in England put together an event called the Battle of Ideas and the mix of provocative themes, well-run panels and competent speakers worked out well. I was invited to speak at a couple of sessions in the third Battle at the end of this last October and was happy to find its organizers threading a sane course past the rocks on which left-organized confabs usually founder: viz., endless mastication of the obvious; marked disinclination to address any new ideas; overblown preachments to the converted. In fact, on the surface at least, this didn't seem like a particularly "left" affair, which probably explains why that weekend a thousand people were milling around the Royal College of Art, next to the Albert Hall. Waiting for my first panel -- "Digital Commons: Does Technology Add Up To A New Sphere?" My answer, No -- , I thought back forty years to what these days would be called a signature sixties event, namely the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, held over two weeks in July 1967 in a magnificent railway repair shed known as the Round House, built in the 1840s in north London. There was nothing circular about those proceedings. It was full tilt forward to revolution, personal and political. The Congress was convened by radical psychiatrists led by R.D. Laing and David Cooper. They believed that the violence done to what they saw as those socially victimized persons termed "schizophrenic" or "mad" had common features with America's imperial violence, at that time being unleashed on revolutionary Vietnam. The affair featured big names and big themes: Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, Gregory Bateson. The night before his address I cooked dinner for Mr. and Mrs. Marcuse on behalf of the New Left Review editorial committee. Marcuse was sharing lodgings with Goodman and denounced the latter's habit of leaving the bathroom door open as he stood in his underwear, brushing his teeth, "flirting his buttocks." Marcuse twitched his behind in parody of the licentious author of Growing Up Absurd as, slightly shocked, our group waited to continue with probing questions about the Frankfurt School. "Too much civilization, not enough Eros," Mrs. Marcuse muttered wryly. Next day Marcuse admonished the large crowd, many of whom had taken up permanent residence in the Roundhouse, "We have been too ashamed, understandably ashamed, to insist on the integral, radical features of a socialist societyif this qualitative difference today appears as Utopian, as idealistic, as metaphysical, this is precisely the form in which these radical features must appear if...socialism is indeed...the leap into the realm of freedom-a total rupture." What seemed to seize the crowds at the Battle of Ideas thirty years later were not grand visionary sweeps, like those of Marcuse-history has sidelined these for the nonce-but deflations of what one may term rhetorical, politically correct "mini-progressivism." One panel I eagerly attended, "Recycling Is A Waste of Time," featured a German, Thomas Deichmann, describing the insane recycling regulations now beleaguering the citizenry of Frankfurt. The case for efficient incineration, he asserted, was overwhelming. Most recycling is an utter waste of time, economically unsound and without benefit for the environment. "We should," he counseled urbanely, "be thinking of more interesting things." Julia Hailes, "sustainability consultant" to companies such as Marks and Spencer and Shell, author of The New Green Guide, listened tautly, as did Julie Hill, author of A Zero Waste UK. Ms Hill gazed at Deichmann as though he were a lead battery in a baby's bath. Hailes mimed, with as much enthusiasm, albeit less satirically than Marcuse forty years earlier, the pleasures of tossing foil into one kitchen bin, metal bottle top into another, plastic into a third. Recycling, she chirped, made her feel good. The two didn't carry the crowd. A man described sorting green, clear and brown glass into three bins, only to see them all dumped into the same truck. A woman seized the microphone: "I go to the dump with my kid each week, to take the rubbish there. Then he goes to school and they do their first day trip, and where do they go?" She paused for effect. "To the dump!" The crowd roared. Mind you, this wasn't a mob of hee-haw Limbaugh-type reactionaries, deriding all collective social efforts to improve the planet. In this and other sessions, their indignation stemmed from a sense that along the road from the grand visions of '67 to the pious sustainability mantras and globe-survivalist waffle of our own phase, the vision of human liberation expressed by Marcuse had collapsed into variants of resource management and nannyism, with irksome rules and protocols, none of which had anything to do with onslaughts on capitalist ownership and control. Back in 1989 I did some interviews on environmentalism and socialism for Z magazine with the left economist James O'Connor. Jim described what he'd told a fellow in the newspaper recycling business: "If you set up a recycling project where your outfit helps to create the conditions to organize social relations of production that make sense, that have to do with fraternity, equality, liberty, and justice, etc., etc., then I'll recycle my newspapers. Come and tell me when you have done that. AC: What do you do with your old newspapers? JO: Throw them in the trash. What do you do with yours? AC: Throw them in the trash. Back in Ireland with my mother we leave them out for the man from St Vincent de Paul who takes them away for some charitable purpose, thereby maintaining social relations in the sorry state they are today, imploring the poor to pray for relief from heaven. And, needless to say, the poor people of my home town are very glad to have St Vincent de Paul bail them out in their hour of need. Democrat Found in Republican's Corpse WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A partially mummified hadrosaur discovered by a teenager in North Dakota may be the most complete dinosaur ever found, with intact skin that shows evidence of stripes and perhaps soft tissue, researchers said on Monday. They also found a second fossil. The clawed foot belongs to a species of crocodile that may have been dining on the hadrosaur soon after it died in a riverbed. "It could have crawled up the back passage of the animal, went to get the guts and ended up stuck," said paleontologist Phil Manning. So Much for Second-Hand Smoke They Died in 2007: Vincent Sardi Jr., 91. Consummate host of Broadway watering hole Sardi's. Jan. 4. Footnote: The item on the Battle of Ideas first ran in the print edition of The Nation. Your Ad Here

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