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The New Campus McCarthyism
There’s a McCarthyite campaign in full spate across higher education in the U.S. today. For every headline case, like Norman Finkelstein or Joseph Massad, there are three or four less-publicized smear campaigns. In the sights of the witch-hunters are faculty targeted as “anti-Israel”, as terror-symps, as leftists. In our latest newsletter we feature the personal history of Victoria Fontan, a Frenchwoman who came to a US campus from field work in the back alleys of Fallujah and found out just how devastating academic warfare can be. ALSO -- Saving the Florida Everglades – Alan Farago reports from the battlefront. PLUS -- They aimed at Moscow, They Hit Kabul: Serge Halimi on Sarkozy and NATO’s Mission Creep. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Today's Stories April 1, 2009 Chris Floyd March 31, 2009 Uri Avnery Peter Lee Nicholas Dearden Dave Lindorff Joanne Mariner Ron Jacobs Wiliam S. Lind David Michael Green Benjamin Dangl Johnny Barber Dedrick Muhammad Website of the Day March 30, 2009 Michael Hudson Patrick Cockburn Henry A. Giroux Mike Whitney Ralph Nader Paul Craig Roberts Jeremy Scahill Robert Bryce Jonathan Cook Ray McGovern Website of the Day March 27-29, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Arno J. Mayer Michael Hudson José Pertierra Andy Worthington Mike Whitney Winslow T. Wheeler Souad N. Al-Azzawi Dave Lindorff Ian Masters Barbara Rose Johnston Jami Tarn Diane Farsetta David Ker Thomson Against Democracy Ramzy Baroud Rannie Amiri Wajahat Ali Nick Egnatz Gregory A. Burris Missy Beattie Stephen Martin Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
March 26, 2009 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Neve Gordon Patrick Madden Gareth Porter Dave Lindorff Hannah Safran Keith Newell Todd Chretien Nelson P. Valdés Website of the Day
March 25, 2009 Robin Blackburn Conn Hallinan David Rosen Jonathan Cook Dean Baker Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber David Macaray Dave Lindorff Sarah Knopp Website of the Day
March 24, 2009 Robert Sandels Harvey Wasserman Franklin Lamb Michael Donnelly Norman Solomon Elizabeth Schulte John Goekler Nicole Colson Global Balkans William S. Lind Website of the Day
March 23, 2009 M. Shahid Alam Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Ralph Nader Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Chris Irwin Binoy Kampmark Michael Dickinson Website of the Day March 20-22, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts P. Sainath Robert Weissman Saul Landau David Michael Green Greg Moses Ron Jacobs Michael D. Yates John V. Whitbeck Andy Worthington Linn Washington Jr. David Ker Thomson Laurent Jacque Rannie Amiri Reiko Redmonde / David Macaray Kenneth Couesbouc Martha Rosenberg Alan Farago Missy Beattie Richard Rhames Stephen Martin Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend March 19, 2009 Dave Marsh Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Sam Smith Harvey Wasserman Binoy Kampmark Kathy Sanborn Christopher Brauchli George Wuerthner Diann Rust-Tierney Website of the Day
March 18, 2009 Michael Hudson Paul Craig Roberts Nelson P. Valdés Jonathan Cook John Ross Yifat Susskind Dave Lindorff Frances Moore Lappé Richard Grossman Rev. William E. Alberts Website of the Day March 17, 2009 Michael Hudson James G. Abourezk Harry Browne Joanne Mariner Alan Farago Dean Baker Peter Morici Bill and Kathleen Christison Richard Gott Walter Brasch Website of the Day
March 16, 2009 Pam Martens Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff John Walsh Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Stephen Fleischman Christian Christensen Scott Handleman Website of the Day March 13 / 15, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Peter Lee Diana Johnstone David Harvey Petrino DiLeo David Ker Thomson Eric Ruder Fred Gardner David Yearsley Saul Landau Laura Carlsen Robert Weissman John Goekler / Tom Barry Kathy Sanborn Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty David Michael Green Alan Maass / Christopher Brauchli Richard Morse Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend March 12 , 2009 Sharon Smith Christopher Ketcham Mike Whitney Ray McGovern Eric Toussaint / John Ross M. Reza Pirbhai Chris Floyd Steve Early Quentin Gee Website of the Day March 11 , 2009 Mike Roselle Paul Craig Roberts Henry A. Giroux Nikolas Kozloff Norm Kent Mitu Sengupta Ludwig Watzal David Macaray William S. Lind Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day March 10 , 2009 Franklin Spinney Vijay Prashad Stan Cox Zoltan Grossman Reuven Kaminer Jonathan Cook Dave Lindorff Brian McKenna Harvey Wasserman Corey Pein Website of the Day
March 9 , 2009 Pam Martens Ralph Nader Peter Lee Mike Whitney Peter Morici Dean Baker Steve Ault Stephen Lendman Farooq Sulehria Belén Fernández Website of the Day March 6-8 , 2009 Alexander Cockburn Chris Floyd Uri Avnery Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot David Ker Thomson Phil Aliff Rebekah Ward Tracey Briggs Dean Baker Daniel P. Wirt, M.D. Carl Finamore Wajahat Ali David Michael Green David Macaray Michael Dickinson Susie Day Bob Sommer Ben Sonnenberg David Yearsley DC Larson Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend March 5 , 2009 James G. Abourezk Kathleen and Bill Christison Robert Weissman Patrick Cockburn William Blum Robert Fantina Saul Landau Benjamin Dangl Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day March 4, 2009 Marjorie Cohn Mike Whitney Ron Jacobs Ashley Smith Joanne Mariner Dan Bacher Mark Engler Franklin Lamb Cal Winslow David Mandelzys Website of the Day March 3, 2009 Conn Hallinan Fawzia Afzal-Khan Brian M. Downing Robert Larson Daniel P. Wirt, MD Russell Mokhiber William Loren Katz Kathy Sanborn Pauline Imbach Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day March 2, 2009 Andrea Peacock Paul Craig Roberts Peter Lee John Blair Peter Morici Uri Avnery Michael Donnelly Fred Gardner Sonia Nettnin Andrew Lehman Website of the Day
Tom Barry Harvey Wasserman Adam Turl David Macaray James McEnteer Website of the Day
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April 1, 2009 Beyond Here Lies NothingSurging Further Into the Afghan AbyssBy CHRIS FLOYD
The political class has failed us. At every level, they have failed us. Republican and Democrat, they have failed us. Liberal, conservative and centrist, they have failed us. They have lived on lies, and lived by lies, for so long that they no longer know how to comprehend the truth, much less communicate it or – God forbid – act on it. And so they plow on deeper into the darkness, in zombified pursuit of pointless goals, heedless of the signposts warning of danger, like some demented wagon train dragging a load of dead mules toward the edge of a cliff. Political failure is nothing new, of course. Deliberate deceit – and egregious self-delusion – are nothing new. Misrule and evil on the part of elites are nothing new. But the great churning engines of the American Empire – especially its war machine – are infinitely more vast and powerful than anything seen on earth before. Its inextricably entwined economic and military forces permeate the globe. Nowhere on earth can you completely escape the tourbillions of these forces; yet because of this same pervasive reach, there is now no place on earth that cannot send its shock waves back up the line, roiling the imperial heartland itself. The very magnitude of the American power structure makes the consequences of its crimes and failures more destructive and widespread: the difference between your house being hit by a cannonball or by a cruise missile. I am, I suppose, what most people would call a cynic. I don't see how anyone who has followed American politics for as long as I have – some 40 years now – could be anything else. To quote Uncle Bob once more, when it comes to politics, "I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes." I expect to be lied to. I expect to hear horseshit and fairytales wrapped up in threadbare pieties and Orwellian doublespeak. I expect power and money and militarism to carry the day. Even so, I must admit my guts lurched with queasy dread last week when Barack Obama announced, with a flourish of falsehoods and fearmongering, his grand plans to escalate the "Af-Pak" War. Not that I was surprised by any of it: both the truth-abusing rhetoric and the war-expanding intentions have been hallmarks of Team Obama's Afghanistan policies since the early days of his presidential campaign. And Obama, eager to establish his tough-guy cojones, was killing civilians in Pakistan and ordering up an Afghan surge just as soon as he climbed into the Imperial cockpit. His much-vaunted "strategic review" was simply a bureaucratic exercise to determine how best to tweak and refine the policies already adopted by the Bush Administration and its military managers -- all of whom were of course retained by Obama. Again, this was to be expected. After all, "continuity" has been his watchword -- or rather, it became his watchword right after he was swept into office as the self-proclaimed embodiment of the public's desperate longing for change. Even so, to see the expansion of the Af-Pak War finally, formally promulgated, and to realize what this really means, not in terms of the ludicrous political theater of Washington and the media, not in the war-game fantasies of think-tankers and armchair warriors, but in the actual costs -- the death and suffering of thousands of innocent people, the ruinous chaos and the violent hatred engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan debt added to our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further coarsening and brutalization and militarization of our society, and again, because it bears repeating, the physical and emotional destruction of countless human beings whose only crime was to be born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters of the world, the warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power -- this is a bitter and sickening thing. And no amount of foreknowledge or cynicism makes it any easier to bear. The day it gets easier, the day your cynicism makes you shrug off the horror -- "So what else is new?" -- is the day your soul dies. The wagon train with its rotting cargo keeps lurching on. A change of drivers has not meant a change in direction. As Tom Englehardt points out, in both foreign policy and on the economic front, the Obama Administration is trying frantically to preserve an imperial system that is cracking under the weight of its own immoral excesses, its own arrogance and willful ignorance. But owing to the latter, their only solution is to do more of the same things that have plunged the system into severe crisis. In fact, the domestic side of their efforts is even more radical, more shocking than Obama's dull-witted "continuity" in Terror War. The new administration is openly transferring trillions of dollars to a small core of financial elites, in effect placing the rest of the country into a state of economic peonage to these remote and unaccountable overlords -- who have, astonishingly, used the fear and suffering created by their own actions as an opportunity to take their domination of society to even greater heights. What Obama and his economic team are abetting is, as Simon Johnson and others have noted, nothing less than an oligarchic coup d'etat. I lived through one of those in Russia in the 1990s, and it was not a pretty sight. And again, because the scale of the American power structure is so much greater, so too will be the far-reaching, long-lasting consequences of this coup. I've never been a starry-eyed idealist. I've never preached the counsel of seeking the perfect at the expense of the good. And I've never believed that any single politician or administration could take office and magically transform the nature of the American empire overnight. I acknowledge the aptness of the metaphor used by many of Obama's defenders: the image of a sea captain, beset by virulent opponents on the bridge, struggling to turn a vast ocean liner in the opposite direction, in the midst of a raging storm. That would indeed take a long time, and tremendous effort, and require stoic patience from the passengers. But that is not what is happening. The long, hard, thankless effort that it would take to roll back the bloated global empire of bases and curtail the power of the oligarchy (for you can't do one without the other) has not even begun. Obama is not trying to wrest the ship of state toward a new direction; he is deliberately and willingly continuing on the same disastrous, destructive course as before. Every day carries us further and further away from the shore, and makes any effort to reverse course that much harder -- if indeed, it is still possible at all. Chris Floyd is an American writer. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com. |
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