Today's Stories

February 6-8, 2009

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency & Anthropology: Roberto Gonzalez on Human Terrain Systems

Bill Moyers
Obama's Wars: an Interview with Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

George Ciccariello-Maher
From Oakland to Santa Rita: "Fired Up, Can't Take It No More"

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

Allan Nairn
What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

Gareth Porter
Generals Move to Obstruct Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Orders

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
"Too Big to Fail:" a Bailout Hoax

Dave Lindorff
The Ugly Truth: the American Economy is Not Coming Back

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

Andy Worthington
Blame the Chef: How Cooking for the Taliban Can Get You Life in Gitmo

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

Lorenzo Wolff
Playing Down a Bad Reputation: the Lovin' Spooful's Near Perfect Record

David Yearsley
When Orfeo and Euridice Lived Happily Ever After in Upstate New York

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

Paul Craig Roberts
Is It Time to Bail Out of America?

Riz Khan
The Future of Gaza: an Interview with Jimmy Carter

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

Gregory Vickrey
What About the Environment? Cap and Trade and Selling Out

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

Alison Weir
Killing Palestinians Doesn't Count: Fact-Checking Ceasefire Breaches

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

Weekend Edition
February 6-8, 2009

A Task to Make Democracy Matter

Educating Obama

By HENRY A. GIROUX

Barack Obama takes office at a time of great uncertainty, a time when the conventional wisdom and old assumptions of free market fundamentalism are thoroughly discredited.  At the same time, a new hope is taking shape, fueled by the need to reaffirm the democratic legacy of social, political, and personal rights through a reaffirmation of the discourse of governance and responsible politics and its connection to the language of democracy and the imperatives of the public good.  And yet the optimism that accompanied Barack Obama’s election is gradually giving way among many progressives to either a deep sense of despair in light of  his increasing political shift to the center or a doom-and-gloom cynicism in the face of economic crisis.1

The financial crisis increasingly appears overwhelming and impossible to contain, given how deeply embedded it is in the underlying political and economic power structures that emerged in the conservative counter-revolution that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Moreover, Obama’s reforms, particularly his economic and education policies, offer no alternative vision about how to change the underlying values and institutions that shape these important sectors of society. Hence, the financial bailout is led by many people who produced it and the reforms for education largely echo the same old corporate endorsement of vouchers, privatization, pay for performance, high-stakes testing, union busting, and the deployment of military schools for poor white kids and youth of color.2

What is even more disturbing is that the sustained neoliberal attack on the social state and its disinvestment in those political, social, and economic spheres vital to the development of healthy and critically informed citizenry have worked quite successfully in tandem with a new and vicious rationality—produced in countless sites, such as the media and higher education—that constructs adults and young people according to the dictates, values, and needs of a market fundamentalism.  All aspects of life are now measured according to the calculations of a philosophy that construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship.4 

Government in this case operates not only within the parameters of a corporate state  but also within the principles of a ruthless market, whose spectacle of cruelty can no longer hide behind its appeal to self-interest, freedom, and least of all democracy.  But simply criticizing the market, the privatization of public goods, the politics of deregulation,  and the commercialization of everyday life, while helpful, is not enough.  Stirring denunciations of what a neoliberal society does to public institutions, identities, and social relations do not go far enough. What is equally necessary is developing a language that moves beyond both the politics of Obama’s so-called “post-partisan” notion of hope and a growing cynicism that registers not merely the depth of the current economic and political crisis but also the defeatist assumption that power operates exclusively in the service of domination, tyranny, and violence.

Jacques Rancière rightly criticizes this cynical stance with his insistence that “The critique of the market today has become a morose reassessment that, contrary to its stated aims, serves to forestall the emancipation of minds and practices. And it ends up sounding not dissimilar to reactionary discourse. These critics of the market call for subversion only to declare it impossible and to abandon all hope for emancipation.”5 Rancière cannot imagine a mode of criticism or a politics that shuts down resistance, play, and hope—nor should we as teachers, parents, and young people.

At stake here is the need for a new politics of resistance and hope, one that mounts a collective challenge to a ruthless market fundamentalism that for the last thirty years has spearheaded the accumulation of capital and wealth at all costs, the commodification of young people, and the usurpation of democratic modes of sovereignty.  At the center of this struggle is a market sovereignty that has not only replaced the state as the principal regulatory force in developing economies of inequality and power but has also gained legitimacy and strength through  modes of education, persuasion, and consent that rely on the force of new media technologies, corporate values, commodified social relations, and a calculating rationality, all of which have to be challenged and transformed.  Any politics capable of disabling the sovereignty of the market must clarify in political and pedagogical terms a vision, project, discourse, and set of strategic practices necessary to confront a neoliberal order that views democracy as the enemy and flawed consumers as expendable. 

Free-market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism as it is called in some quarters,  has played a major role in creating not only massive human suffering, a financial Katrina, and millions of displaced lives but also a weakened social state and a failing democracy made all the more ominous by the dumbing down of public discourse and the emptying out of critical public spheres. Democracy is about neither the sovereignty of the market nor a form of state governance based largely on fear, manipulation, and deceit.  Any attempt at challenging neoliberal sovereignty and the national (in)security state must recognize the need for a politics in which matters of education, power, and governance are mutually determined. Such a challenge, in part, rests on a politics that takes seriously the need to understand not only how the institutions of economic Darwinism emerged and recently came unglued but also how and why modes of governing that embody the grand ideologies of a deflated Gilded Age appealed to so many Americans.  Frank Rich is right in alerting us to the importance of analyzing how a bankrupt neoliberalism has given us a “debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility [partly through] mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment.”6 

Implicit in Rich’s argument is the need to rethink the discourse of crisis, complicating its underlying causes by raising questions about the role of media and other educational institutions in celebrating and legitimating the pernicious and corrupting values of a rabid market-driven society eager and determined to high-jack social responsibility, non-commodified public spheres, and meaningful citizenship, while treating with scorn any discourse of compassion, mutual worth, and ethical responsibility.  Clearly, one challenge the current crisis offers anyone concerned about the fate of democracy is the need for a thorough understanding of how this legacy of market-driven fundamentalism can be comprehended in terms of its power in shaping subjects, citizens, institutions, culture, values, and particular kinds of actions. 

For instance, how is it that the same old values and market-driven fundamentalism used to support taxes for the rich, eliminate the social state, and discredit any commitment to the public good are being mobilized once again by Republicans to thwart Obama’s stimulus package without provoking a massive public outcry among either the mainstream media, academics, or the general public?  Or, even worse, where is the moral outrage among so many Americans who are suffering from the consequences of a thirty-year rule of neoliberal policies aimed at waging a war on the welfare state, science, dissent, the environment, workers, young people, and all aspects of the public good? 

Democratic politics and the struggles informed by such a politics cannot come about without putting into place these spaces, spheres, and modes of education that enable people to realize that in a real democracy power has to be responsive to the needs, hopes, and desires of its citizens and other inhabitants around the globe.

Democracy is not simply about people wanting to improve their lives; it is more importantly about their willingness to struggle to protect their right to self-determination and self-government in the interest of the common good.  Under the reign of free market fundamentalism, market relations both expanded their control over public space and increasingly defined people as either consuming subjects or commodities, effectively limiting their opportunity to learn how to develop their full range of intellectual and emotional capacities to be critical citizens.  Sheldon Wolin has rightly argued that if “democracy is about participating in self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture of complex beliefs, values, and practices to nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom.”7 

The militarized corporate state and the sovereign market reduce the materiality of democracy to either an overcrowded prison or a shopping mall, both of which are more fitting for a society vulnerable to the winds of totalitarianism. The fundamental institutional and educational conditions that connect social, political, and personal rights to a viable notion of agency have been under attack for the last thirty years and now face a moment of crisis as severe as the current economic crisis. 

As education turns to training in the public schools and higher education willingly models itself as a business venture or welcome recipient of Pentagon largesse, corporate culture reigns unchallenged as the most powerful pedagogical force in the country, while “democracy becomes dangerously empty.”8 Unfortunately, Obama seems less than inspiring when it comes to mobilizing a new politics that makes public and higher education central to the struggle for democracy (see Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education). A visionary politics needs to be willing to enlist and actively mobilize artists, intellectuals, academics, parents, young people, workers, and others in the struggle for a public able and willing to confront through multiple levels of resistance the institutions, policies, and values of an ever expanding military-industrial and academic complex. Obama’s call to put money into rebuilding the infrastructures of schools is to be applauded, but it is largely cancelled out by his adherence to an educational policy that views schools less as an investment than as extension of the market, to be largely driven by the corporate values and accountability schemes that the Bush administration supported.   Obama’s educational policies need to be pushed in a very different direction, one that is able to recognize the value of critical education for reasons Zygmunt Bauman illuminates with razor-like precision:

Adverse odds may be overwhelming, and yet democratic (or, as Cornelius Castoriadis would say, an autonomous) society knows of no substitute for education and self-education as a means to influence the turn of events that can be squared with its own nature, while that nature cannot be preserved for long without ‘critical pedagogy’—education sharpening its critical edge, ‘making society feel guilty’ and ‘stirring things up’ through stirring human consciences. The fates of freedom, of democracy that makes it possible while being made possible by it, and of education that breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far, are inextricably connected and not to be detached from one another. One may view that intimate connection as another specimen of a vicious circle—but it is within that circle that human hopes and the chances of humanity are inscribed, and can be nowhere else.9

Making education central to any viable notion of politics as well as making the political more pedagogical suggests that intellectuals, artists, community workers, parents, and others need to connect with diverse groups of people in those public and virtual sites and spheres that enable not only new modes of dialogue to take place but also work to move beyond such exchanges to the much more difficult task of building organized and sustainable social movements. While it is true that anyone who takes politics seriously needs to take into consideration the profound transformations that have taken place in the public sphere, especially those enabled by new technologies, and how such changes can be used to develop new modes of public pedagogy in which young people are provided with the skills, knowledge, interests, and desire to govern themselves, it is simply wrong to suggest that real change only happens online.10 

Building a more just, ecologically sustainable, and democratic future, or as Jacques Derrida puts it, the promise of “a democracy to come,”11 demands a politics in which the new technologies are important but only insofar as they are used in the context of bringing people together, reclaiming those public spheres where people can meet, talk, and plan collective actions. We must learn to resist all technologies that reinforce the sense of excessive individualism and privatization at the heart of the neoliberal world view. We need more than bailouts; we need a politics that reinvents the concept of the social while providing a language of critique and hope forged not in isolation but in collective struggle that takes social responsibility, commitment, and justice seriously.  

We live at a time when social bonds are crumbling and institutions that provide collective help are disappearing.  Reclaiming these social bonds and the protections of the social state, in part, means developing a new mode of politics and education in which a critically educated public is as central to this struggle as the future of the democratic society it once symbolized. At the heart of this struggle for both young people and adults is the pressing problem of organizing and energizing a vibrant cultural politics to counter the conditions of political apathy, distrust, and social disengagement so pervasive under the politics of neoliberalism. For this we need a new vocabulary that, in part, demands taking back formal education and diverse modes of public pedagogy for democratic purposes while also refashioning social movements and modes of collective resistance that are democratic in nature and global in reach.

Culture in this instance is not merely a resource but an instrument of political power. What must be emphasized in this vision of a democracy to come is that there is no room for a politics animated by a rationality that is about maximizing profit and constructing a society free from the burden of mutual responsibility—that is, a society whose essence is captured in the faces of children facing the terror of a future with little hope of survival.   Economic crises do more than throw people out of jobs; they also open up an opportunity for social movements and political demands that serve to educate those in power and push them in a very different direction. This is a moment in which education becomes the foundation not simply for collective change but also for a rewriting of the social contract, an expansion of the meaning of social responsibility, and a renewed struggle to take democracy back from the dark times that have inched us so close to an unimaginable authoritarianism.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

Notes.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont