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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
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
August 28 / 29, 2004
Down
for the Count
The
Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
By
PAUL D'AMATO
This year's presidential
election has witnessed the almost complete collapse of the U.S.
Left into supporting the second party of big business. Using
the logic that "Anybody But Bush" should be in the
White House, a pro-big business, prowar, conservative Democrat
is being touted as the only realistic choice in this election.
There are elements in this election story that are so predictable--and
familiar.
First, there
are the assurances that it is the most crucial election in history,
one that demands we abandon all principle and accept the "lesser
evil," invariably a moderate Democrat, to defeat the incipient
Republican madman. The Democrat, predictably, puts the progressive
vote in his bag and proceeds to move further to the right, toward
the "center," dragging the Left along with him.
As the election
draws closer, leftists, progressives, and labor activists, agree
to stifle their own demands, to refrain from any statement, protest,
or struggle, that might embarrass the Democrat and hurt his chances
for election.
Some Democratic
politicians are chosen to play a special role, echoing more popular
themes: peace, pro-labor, universal health care, and so on. Their
role is to corral millions of people who are disillusioned with
the Democratic Party, and bring them back into the party fold
so that the conservative Democratic candidate--who cannot and
will not deliver--can be elected. These specialists are named
Eugene McCarthy (1968), George McGovern (1972), Jesse Jackson
(1984), and Dennis Kucinich (2004).
If there is
a third party running, those planning to vote for it as an alternative
are frightened with the prospect that they are not only tossing
their vote away, they are actually helping the right wing to
victory. The result is a period of demoralization and demobilization
of the Left. Promising movements--for gay marriage, for example--are
shelved because "now isn't the appropriate time."
What is different
in this election is the degree to which the Democrat in this
race doesn't even make a pretense of any meaningful reform--not
even a sop to his left--and the scale, nevertheless, of the Left
collapse into his camp. War in Iraq and "war on terror?"
Kerry will do it better than Bush. Wealth and poverty? Kerry's
not a "redistribution" Democrat. Gay marriage? Kerry's
opposed to it. Social services? They will be sacrificed to perfecting
the military machine and balancing the budget. In 1964 Johnson
at least pretended he was the peace candidate. Kerry hasn't even
felt the need to lie. Indeed, he is putting himself forward as
the stronger defender of U.S. interests.
Michael Albert
of Znet wrote recently,
Kerry is a
vile warrior happy to defend corporate interests... Both Bush
and Kerry represent corporate and other elite interests and agree
on preserving inequity and corporate domination. Neither candidate
is a friend toworking people, women, minorities, or to anyone
poor or weak.
Albert stands
with a number of leftists who provide us with an accurate assessment
of Kerry and what he stands for, and then turns around and argues,
"Holding one's nose and voting for Kerry in contested states
is a good thing to do." Perhaps his campaign slogan should
be, "Vote for the vile warrior."
Others have
made the argument that Kerry's election will send a message to
the people of the world that we reject the Bush agenda. Tariq
Ali, for example, said recently, "A defeat for a warmonger
government in Washington would be seen as a step forward."
There is no
doubt that a Kerry victory will be seen as a step forward, both
domestically and internationally. Unfortunately, Kerry has made
it abundantly clear to us that his victory will not be a step
forward. A victory for Kerry would not constitute a defeat for
a warmonger government, but the installment of the other party
of war to run the warmonger government "better" than
Bush. The confusion over what Kerry represents, if elected, will
act to disarm the antiwar movement for a period, until Kerry's
actions reveal what he really stands for. Though this should
not be necessary. Kerry is telling us now that even had it been
revealed before the invasion of Iraq that there were no weapons
of mass destruction, he still would have voted for war. What
more do we need to withhold our votes from this "vile warrior?"
Even if we
assume what can't be assumed, that Kerry would be less of a militarist
than Bush, are we really saying: Vote for the guy who will conquer
two countries instead of three? Is that really what American
elections are reduced to? The tragedy, as in virtually every
presidential election, is that we accept, to quote Hal Draper,
"the limitations of the choice."
Every new generation
of radicals is forced to relearn the lessons of previous generations
about the character of the Democrats in particular, and the stifling
two-party system in general. In the 1960s the New Left learned
the lesson when Johnson promised peace and gave them war.
The politics
of successive administrations--whether Democratic or Republican--have
had as their main aim the rebuilding of U.S. power internationally,
economically, militarily, and politically. If Kerry is elected
he has made clear that this will be the policy of his administration.
No matter what
the outcome in November, the tasks of those who are opposed to
capitalist globalization and war will remain. By collapsing behind
the "Anybody But Bush" mantra, the Left has weakened
rather than strengthened its hand.
Paul D'Amato is the Associate Editor
of the International
Socialist Review.
He can be reached at: pdamato@isreview.org
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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