Today's Stories

April 17-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

Weekend Edition
April 17-20, 2009

Obama's Evolving Cuba Policy

From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

By MANUEL GOMEZ

A lot of talk about Cuba policy, now that the President will visit with all the Americas, except Cuba, during the OAS-sponsored summit in Trinidad and Tobago on April 17-19.  The meeting will be ripe with both irony and tragedy. 

The dates provide the irony, because they coincide with the landing and defeat of the US-manufactured Bay of Pigs invasion on exactly the same three days in 1961.  The tragedy is that the hubris and ignorance that were at the core of US policy at that time are still the core of the policy today, and it’s frightening to hear similar noises laced through the Administration’s recent and welcome announcements.  The hubris is not even questioned in what otherwise seems like a vigorous discussion about changing the policy. If I may paraphrase Jose Martí, the towering figure of Cuban letters and independence, the discussion is not radical enough, because it is not going to the roots. Every detail of possible tactics is dissected, but where is the analysis of what has been wrong with the policy all these years?

The recent changes in travel restrictions, though modest, are certainly welcome, and long overdue for simple reasons of humanity to Cuban families. I trust they will be followed soon by broader elimination of all travel restrictions.  And the discussion is certainly not bad.  Quite the contrary, I welcome it.  Much of it focuses on what the President may or may not say about Cuba while at the Summit, what other countries are likely to say, and especially about the infinite tactical iterations available to the President to disentangle the mess of our relationship with the island, with all the resulting domestic and international repercussions.

All for the good, necessary, and very timely, too.  After all, the bankruptcy of our Cuba policy may be about the only issue with a strong and bipartisan consensus in both Washington and the country today. Everybody wants to change it:  Senator Lugar, hawkish liberals, the Left, the US Chamber of Commerce, farmers in Nebraska and Alabama, the tourist and pharmaceutical industries, academics of all hues, 185 of the 192 members of the United Nations’ General Assembly, and even formerly hard-line but recently born-again mainstream Cuban-American organizations, just to name a few.  Some of the latter, incidentally, or their friends, threatened my life and that of many others in the 1980s, when I was more in the public eye of advocacy for a policy change towards my country of origin.  If Jesse Helms were alive, what would he make of this?

Despite all the megabytes of advice pouring out about tactical issues, however, it is deeply troubling that little is being said about the fundamental premises of that policy.  There is much talk about “change,” but the debates are still mired in the goals and assumptions of those days in 1961. Why? Because of hubris, along with the ignorance and blindness that accompany it.  It is hard to translate, but there is a wonderful saying in Spanish that goes something like this: The worst blindness is that of those who refuse to see.

When you strip it down, the goal of the Bay of Pigs, and that of nearly every administration since then—Carter gets a partial pass--has been to overthrow the Cuban government, to dictate to Cuba how it should run its affairs.  We will be nice to you if and when you “behave” (a word usually reserved for children, not nations, by the way).  The direct military component is largely gone today, to be sure.  The support for terrorism and sabotage lasted until very recently, however, and could still rear its ugly head again. Most of the other “policy tools” (or should I say weapons?) have changed only in form, not in their underlying premises.  The policies of economic strangulation, isolation, and relentless publicity wars started with Eisenhower.  The public record now makes it clear that he actually tried to “overthrow” the Revolution even before they came down from the mountains!  Kennedy picked it up, and nearly every President since that time has been blatant about it.  At the core, the policy has always been a “conditional” one: We will lift our siege, but only if you “behave” according to our rules, in your own country.

What these policies ignored in 1961, and still ignore today, is that the resounding defeat at the Bay of Pigs, and the subsequent strength of the Cuban Revolution, derive from its basis in sovereignty and independence, along with a profound search for social justice.  The crucible of that strong sense of nationhood were the wars for independence from Spain, the last of which was truncated practically at the point of victory when the US intervened by declaring war on Spain.  The second act in this history of national frustration were the efforts to try to prevent, first, and to erase, later, the infamous Platt Amendment, a clause inserted into the Cuban Constitution that gave the US government the right to intervene in Cuba at will.  And intervene we did.  Platt, by the way, was a US Senator. At about the same time, we “won” a treaty to hold Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity. Can anyone imagine the US Constitution with a clause saying that France or Canada could intervene in our internal affairs when they saw fit—and hold Baltimore Harbor in perpetuity to boot?

It took until the 1930’s, and much struggle, for Cubans to take that clause out of their Constitution, and by that time the island was largely dominated by, and dependent on, US economic interests. The sense of indignation and the feeling of being little more than a US dependency only grew stronger, as the victory of the Revolution was to prove in 1959. Skipping many other important stages for the sake of brevity, the latest act of this nationhood story is the Cuban Revolution.  You can love it or hate it, but one thing is clear: The US has not been able to tell Cuba how to “behave,” or to extract concessions. The lesson is that no policy will be successful that is based on trying to dictate to the island in the future.

The other recent fashion in Cuba discussions was the “transition” on the island. This fashion had its grandiose start during the collapse of the old Soviet Union, and we tend to forget how wrong the predictions were then.  Cuba is still right where it was. Most recently, the fashion was re-incarnated as a multi-million dollar effort under the Bush Administration to actually plan such a transition in the US, a modern version of the Platt Amendment.  Can one imagine greater hubris?Cuba’s future is to be planned in conference rooms in the US?  

All this “transition” talk ignores that Cuba has little to do with the spent systems in Eastern Europe or Pinochet’s Chile, and will not have a “transition” of those kinds.  On the contrary, the Cuban Revolution is akin to the Mexican, Vietnamese and Chinese revolutions of the last century. Each was unique, but similar in the sense that they were all three deeply rooted in national aspirations and a search for greater social justice.  They have also each taken their disparate directions with time, and continue their “transitions” rooted in their national histories and indelibly marked by their revolutions. 

A transition is already happening in Cuba, make no mistake. It is happening in the context of its own history and will be led by Cuban actors, not by commissions in the US, and certainly not by conditions or demands for concessions.  I do not know what directions it will take, though I hope for the best in terms of those goals of sovereignty and social justice, as well as many others that I also hope will enrich them.

But for those who are impatient with Cuba—from the left or the right—I say please don’t forget that it took another, earlier revolution, despite its proclamation that “all men are created equal,” nearly a century and a wrenching civil war to end slavery, another century to eliminate segregation and other forms of overt racism, and about a century and a half to grant the vote to half its population.  Throughout those changes, no other country had the right to “demand” that the US “make concessions,” or “behave” in a certain way, nor would the American people or government have permitted it. Each country moves at its own pace, and within its own history.

So my humble advice to President Obama is not about astute political maneuvers or tactical issues. Instead, I would urge him to take advantage of the Summit in Trinidad and Tobago to begin to shed the hubris that has blinded US policy for so long, and to launch a truly new one.  A new one based on an understanding and respect for the search for national independence and social justice that has been the driver of the last fifty years on the island.

I must confess that I shuddered this week when I heard—in the midst of welcome if modest changes-- some of the echoes of the failed premises of the last fifty years in recent Administration statements. These were, by the way, also pathetically and dutifully reflected by several born-again organizations in Miami, the same ones who followed President Reagan in his hubris decades ago.  I hope they are simply political mumbo jumbo, not core premises. Mutual influence among countries is fine, often desirable.  They are also inevitable for the US and Cuba; we are simply too close together.  But hubris and demands need not be part of that equation.

As for the practical, I am confident that the Cuban government will negotiate all kinds of bilateral issues, as countries always do when they have relations. Trade. Immigration. Travel. Drug trade. Mutual security. Health. Environment. Culture and education. Even the issue of expropriated American property will be on the table, although Cuba will play very hard ball with its own demands for compensation for the cost of the US siege of the last 50 years.  They will not, however, negotiate their political, social and economic system, anymore than the US would negotiate how to run its primaries, modify its indirect elections for President, address the legacy of racial injustice, or reform its judicial and penal systems. To expect Cuba to do the equivalent is hubris. And, besides, it won’t work. So for the sake of principle, first, and also consistent with good old American pragmatism, I would urge President Obama to abandon the conditions and the hubris, and start to build a truly new policy.

Manuel Gomez emigrated from Cuba when he was 13 in 1961. He has been active in efforts to normalize relations with the island for decades. He has traveled extensively on the island, and in the 1980s he founded and led the "Cuban-American Committee," a Washington-based citizens group that for years advocated an improvement in relations.

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