Today's Stories

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be "Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U.S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N.D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on "Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

June 30, 2008

Peter Lee
Did a Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges?

Jeff Sommers
Burying the Bloody Shirt; A New Age for Latvia Dawns? "Astatu Loskutovu!"

David Macaray
The AFL-CIO Votes to Endorse Obama

Martha Rosenberg
Sex Work is Different from Sex Slavery, aver Carnal Toilers

David Price
Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality

Alexandra Early
Report from El Salvador: Why They All Keep Coming

June 28 / 29, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Guess What "Surprise" Republicans Yearn For

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nike's Bad Air

Joan P. Mencher
The Human Right to Eat

Nikolas Kozloff
Nader, Obama and White Talk

Jason Hribal
Tillie, Elephants and the Zoo

Alan Maass
Obama Swerves Right

Robert Fantina
Iraq and the New York Times

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
It Was Oil, All Along

Mike Whitney
A Glimmer of Light in Television Wasteland

Justin E. H. Smith
Collective Guilt and the Fate of Kosovo

Pham Binh
The Mendacity of Hope

David Yearsley
The Rest is Noise

Christopher Ketcham
19 Aphorisms

Jeremy R. Hammond
Bush and the Press vs. the Constitution

Kathleen M. Barry
An Open Letter to Barney Frank on Israel

Walter Brasch
Politics and Animal Cruelty in Pennsylvania

Brett Drugge
A Field Trip to the Reagan Library

Susie Day
Sex Sans the City

Website of the Day
How to Expose a Hypocritcal Politician

June 27, 2008

Franklin C. Spinney
The Defense Reform Trap

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Encaging of Gaza

Brian Cloughley
Chaos in Afghanistan

Saree Makdisi
Occupation by Bureaucracy

Liliana Segura
Reactionary Change: Obama and the Death Penalty

Paul Krassner
Remembering George Carlin

William S. Lind
The War and the Yellow Press

Candace Cohn
Embracing Big Brother

Ron Jacobs
What's a Voter to Do?

Binoy Kampmark
Beached in Chile

Website of the Day
Zoom Uganda

June 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Who's Actually Winning in Iraq?

Nikolas Kozloff
Kinder and Gentler Assassination Techniques? Obama Waffles on School of the Americas

William P. O'Connor
The Drone of Experts

Saul Landau
McClellan's Mini Mea Culpa

Ashley Smith
Which Way Forward for the Antiwar Movement?

Dave Lindorff
Our Kids and Their Kids: Terrorists or Victims?

David Macaray
A Brief History of Union Negotiations

Binoy Kampmark
Warming Seats at the Hague: John Howard and War Crimes

Matt Reichel
There's No Hope at the Ballot Box

Remi Kenazi
You Don't Mess With the Racism!

Website of the Day
A Movement Afoot in the Heartlands

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"Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all."

-- Maximilien Robespierre

Bastille Day Edition
July 14, 2008

How the Crumbling Economy will Change Cuba Policy

Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

By ALAN FARAGO

Every presidential cycle, the mainstream media turns to the question of Cuba and the vote of Miami Cuban Americans, respected for the constituency's influence on the State of Florida and national politics.and national politics. And every presidential cycle the mainstream media dutifully reports US foreign policies toward Castro as the determinant factor.

It is easy to be confused: local Spanish language radio can't get enough of Castro. Talk show hosts run political candidates through the mill like guayabera through the roller bars of an old washer, wringing every last drop of fealty to anti-Castro passions.

But the better clue to the election preference of Cuban Americans, often voting as a bloc in municipalities like Hialeah, is not the purity of ideology so much as the source of profit that drives the bloc.

The profits that Miami's Cuban American business elite are defending originate no where near the Malecon, but mainly at city or county hall in downtown Miami where zoning and permitting changes for platted subdivisions rule the order of day and night.

In The New York Times, David Rieff leads the wondering crowd, whether the Republican hold on Miami in the presidential and Congressional elections will change because the Bay of Pigs generation has faded away. Legitimate challengers have emerged to contest three Republican Congressional districts. ("Will Little Havana Go Blue?", July 13, 2008, New York Times Sunday Magazine)

"Call it the Miami Spring, or Cuban-American glasnost," Reiff writes. Catchy, yes, but not predictive of the upcoming election as the fact that the "ownership society", conceived by Bush loyalists from Florida's real estate developers, is now wrecked on the shoals of toxic debt, fiscal recklessness, and moral hazard.

In Miami, Castro was a useful foil both to unify the Cuban American vote and, also, to organize local government contracts according to a pecking order and hierarchy that served to control Miami's levers of power. County contracts to supply needed infrastructure for developers goes hand-in-hand with political power: the use of public funding whether for Section 8 housing or for roads all served the same purpose.

What accounts like Rieff's usually miss about Cuban American politics is the sophisticated manner in which exercise of power has been administered by demonization of opposition in Miami and manipulation of US foreign policy to Cuba, in Washington. Miami's political insiders are loathe to call it, for what it is. Leaders like US Senator Bob Graham, whose political career neatly meshed with the ascendency of Miami's Latin builders, have family fortunes tied to the model. Local journalism, like The Miami Herald, might be closer to reporting the facts except for the outsized influence of its core advertising revenue, related to production home builders in suburbs.

From mining and moving limestone, to laying tarmac and painting lines on roads, to setting telephone cables and electricity lines, to water pipes and infrastructure, all link up to platted subdivisions in Miami's remnant farmland and Everglades.

It was called the Cuban American National Foundation, but road paving contracts linking Miami to suburbs had as much to do with US foreign policy toward Cuba as the competition to see who could outlast the other: Jorge Mas Canosa or the bearded dictator himself.

The rise of Cuban American economic power, primarily tied to the conversion of farmland to platted subdivisions, dovetailed with the economic model-- suburban sprawl-- that is now in shambles.

Look to NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, not David Rieff, for instruction:

"The reality is that the U.S. has invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful housing capital (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth. This financial crisis is a crisis of accumulation of too much debt – by the household sector, the government and the country – to finance the accumulation of the most useless and unproductive form of capital, housing, that provides only housing services to consumers and has zippo effect on the productivity of labor. So enough of subsidizing the accumulation of even bigger MacMansions through the tax system and the GSEs.

And these MacMansions and the broader sprawl of suburbian/exurban housing are now worth much less – in NPV terms – not only because of the housing bust and the fall in home prices but also because: a) the high oil and energy prices makes it outrageously expensive to heat those excessively big homes; b) households living in suburbian and exurban homes that are far from centers of work, business and production that are not served by public transportation are burdened with transportation costs that are becoming unsustainable given the high price of gasoline. So on top of the housing bust that will reduce home values by an average of 30% relative to peak high oil/energy prices make the same large homes in the far boonies of suburbia/exurbia worth even less – probably another 10% down – because of the cost of heating palatial MacMansions and because of the cost of traveling dozens of miles to get to work in gas guzzling SUVs. Thus, it is time to stop this destruction of national income and wealth that a cockamamie decades long policy of subsidizing the accumulation of wasteful and unproductive housing capital has caused."

In simple terms, the crash of the economic model built on suburban sprawl-- a model that organized Cuban American politics for decades-- will change US foreign policy to Cuba.

Even before the crash-- the most significant in Florida since The Great Depression-- Cuban American leaders in Miami were hungrily eyeing profits in Cuba available to corporations from Canada, Germany, and Spain.

With municipal budgets following the housing economy down in Florida, combined with surging fuel prices and the dawning realization that Miami has become the Rust Belt of Florida, there is a perfunctory feel to business and politics as usual and a dawning awareness in Miami's business and political elite that there will soon be more money to be made in Cuba than Miami.

District 21 Congressional candidate Raul Martinez comes closest to saying so, buried deep in the NY Times report: “There is a fear in this community,” he said as we sat together in the living room of his home in Hialeah, “that if you speak out, then bad things will happen. I think that, in particular, businesspeople have been afraid of being denounced on talk radio or not getting contracts because they are too ‘controversial.’ ” This has now changed, he said, and the change is real, though he added, laughing, “It’s just that no one wanted to be the first person to call for it.”

"No one wanted to be the first person to call for it" is disinformation: reasonable Americans and even some Cuban Americans have blasted the failures of US foreign policy toward Cuba and called for change.

But Martinez is correct on the main part: the pecking order of the economic elite in Miami is determined by ways government contracts are ordered, parceled out and assigned. No one knows this better than Martinez, who served one of the region's largest and politically influential municipalities--Hialeah--as a charismatic mayor and blood brother to Miami's Latin builders.

More than any other political figure, Martinez understands the use of Spanish language radio as a codex for elections. It is the businesspeople who fund Spanish language radio-- and the interminable flow of talk piling code on code, mostly related to Castro.

The "contracts" that people are afraid of "not getting" are really to the point: contracts from everything from Miami International Airport, to low income housing, to contracts for roadway and construction in Miami.

The wasteful and unproductive housing capital that Roubini describes as the root of massive jeopardy to the national economy is what made Cuban American developers and lobbyists like Sergio Pino into centimillionaires. Behind Pino is a whole train of decamillionaires, and behind the decamillionaires, the solomillionaires clawing their way onto the ladder of zoning changes in farmland and open space.

Some of Miami's Latin builders fiercely love Cuba, nursing terrible personal, family tragedies, many wish longingly for the day they can return: but they do not imagine their return exclusively as children whose birthright was stolen, or even as revenge for distant crimes: the Miami Cuban political elite see their return to Cuba as triumphants who managed US foreign policy to Cuba for decades, not based on influence with a national audience in place like North Dakota so much as with the supply chain of builders, developers and speculators in Florida wetlands.

That is where the power was, right up to the present moment.

But there is a change in Cuba, as well, that must be registering on Miami's Cuban American power elite: ordinary Cubans want economic opportunity, that's clear enough. But for the most part, their reverence of Cuba and of their own leadership is a rejection of the Miami model of governance.

Cubans love Miamians but they do not for the main part love Miami. They want economic growth and opportunity but conflicted about the cost of absorbing a Miami power structure in foreclosure.

There is very little difference between the red and the blue model of Cuban American politics, except that Republican incumbents have boxed themselves in tighter than their Democratic challengers.

Now that the building boom is fully discredited, a boom that Cuban American developers substantially helped to foment in Tallahassee, Florida and Washington DC, change in US foreign policy to Cuba is beginning to carry the stamp of economic imperative.

It is time to move on, the old fashioned way in a new direction. As history would have it--because George W. Bush has made such a hash of the economy-- in Miami the Democrats and Barack Obama will get there, first.

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