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The Democrats Bow to Bush on War: How the Anti-War Movement Failed
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Today's Stories June 6, 2007 Alain Gresh June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Jonathan Cook David Vest Robert Fantina Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury John V. Walsh Richard Cretan Adam Engel William S. Lind Myles Hoenig Jim Minick Website of
the Day
Nizar Latif Diana Johnstone Gregory Wilpert Paul Watson Susan Rosenthal,
MD Richard Ward Eva Liddell Zali Khouri Evelyn Pringle China Hand Karyn Strickler Website of the Day
June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Marc Levy Martin Smith Diana Johnstone John Ross Uri Avnery Sunsara Taylor Richard Neville P. Sainath Missy Comley
Beattie Nisrine Abiad Rannie Amiri Margot Pepper Eric Stewart Ralph Nader Dan Bacher Shaun Harkin Richard Rhames Frederick Hudson Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Dave Marsh Saul Landau David Phinney Robert Jensen Stanley Heller Yifat Susskind Robert Weissman Paul Buchheit William S.
Lind Sherwood Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Robert Bryce Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Kathy Kelly Marjorie Cohn Chris Kutalik
Corporate Crime Reporter Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway Franklin Lamb Terrence E. Paupp Uri Avnery Alan Maass Rock and Rap
Confidential Ralph Nader Nirmal Ghosh Jean Daniels Tom Barry Website of the Day
Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
May 26 / 27, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Franklin Lamb Jean Bricmont Gary Leupp James Petras William Peace Judith and John Sharpe Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Democracy in Iraq, Tyranny at Home? Jonathan M.
Feldman Dave Lindorff Missy Beattie Mike Whitney Badruddin Khan Ron Jacobs Zoe Blunt Arjun Chowdhury, Heather Gray N. D. Jayaprakash Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
Robert Jensen David Vest John Stauber Evelyn Pringle Corporate Crime Reporter Susan Rosenthal,
MD Roberto Rodriguez Steve Fournier Patrick McElwee Robert Weissman Website of the Day
Franklin Lamb Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fantina Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff Sen. Russell
Feingold Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury
and Mark Hoffman Caroline Paul Eva Liddell Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Rev. William
Alberts Joe DeRaymond Sudhanva Deshpande
Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Rannie Amiri China Hand Zoe Blunt Nivien Saleh Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Joshua Frank Harvey Wasserman David Mos Masumoto Sonja Karkar Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff Jeffrey Kolakowski Evelyn Pringle Jim Baumer Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson John Ross Stephen Fleischman M. Shahid Alam Ron Jacobs Peter Rost, MD Alan Farago Paul Buchheit Website of
the Day
May 19 / 20, 2007 Andrew Cockburn Uri Avnery Peter Gelderloos Saul Landau Robert Fantina Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Jean Daniels Reza Fiyouzat Missy Beattie Robert Alvarez Sonja Karkar Dave Lindorff Jeff Sher Julian C. Holmes Clancy Sigal Prairie Miller James Murren Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 18, 2007 Adam Jones Sharon Smith Christopher Brauchli Peter Rost,
MD Denise Maloney Pictou David Swanson Ali Khan Susan Rosenthal,
M.D. Samer Assad CP News Service Website of the Day
May 17, 2007 Tariq Ali Yifat Susskind Dave Zirin Brian J. Foley W. John Green Eric Johnson-DeBaufre Badruddin Khan Martha Rosenberg China Hand Dan Vojir Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Ashley Dawson Joshua Frank Corporate Crime
Reporter Ray McGovern Glen Ford Joe Bageant Sonja Karkar Mickey S. Huff John Chuckman Kaz Dziamka Website of
the Day
May 15, 2007 Michael Neumann Patrick Cockburn Ashley Smith Marc Gardner Dave Lindorff Ben Terrall Ron Jacobs Harvey Wasserman Marcus Mabry Dr. Susan Block Website of the Day
May 14, 2007 Jennifer Roesch Jeffrey St.
Clair George Bisharat Diane Wachtell Ramzy Baroud Rosemary and
Walter Brasch Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Roberto Rodriguez Jonathan Culp Website of
the Day
May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Diane Farsetta Ralph Nader Jean Bricmont Marcus Breen Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Fred Gardner Juan Santos
Eve Bachrach Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Niranjan Ramakrishnan Susie Day Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
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June 6, 2007 A Different Take on the Summer of LoveLuv n' HateBy RON JACOBS June 1, 2007 saw the first of what is certain to be many dates celebrated in the media forty years after the so-called Summer of Love. That day was the day, of course, that the Beatles' legendary album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. According to most rock critics who look at the subject historically, this album heralded in a new phase of rock and roll. The album was reviewed in normally staid newspapers that had previously considered rock music in the same way they regarded pig racing. In other words, it didn't exist unless there was a scandal. Of course, with rock and roll being rock and roll, there were plenty of scandals, usually involving drugs and sex. I turned twelve in 1967 and was only slightly aware of the Summer of Love phenomenon. It's not to say that what I knew about it didn't interest me, but in the suburban town where I lived, boys were still being thrown out of junior high school for having hair that covered the top of their ears and girls' parents were called if their skirts were more than two inches above their knees. Of course, that didn't prevent students from testing the rules on a daily basis. Nor did it prevent the school authorities from enforcing their rules as if they were punishing hardened felons. Our radios played "If You're Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" and it seemed like the cool guy at the local record store played Sgt,. Pepper's every time I went in to see what was new on the Top 40. The one or two kids that ran away to become hippies were the stuff of local rumor and legend, but no one really knew whether they had gone to San Francisco or merely to Georgetown--Washington DC's hippie ghetto. Both were miles away, literally (in San Francisco's case) and figuratively. There was a fellow named Daniel I knew when I lived in Berkeley. He and I used to spend hours hanging out on Telegraph Avenue and many other places. Daniel was the quintessential street freak. If the Hog Farm and other communes were communities of freaks who lived in an alternative reality that they helped create, Daniel was the loner in the picture. He left Ohio in 1967 for the Haight-Ashbury when he was fourteen looking for the magical place he had read about. He found a lot of magic. but he arrived just in time for the first of many police crackdowns. These occurred with almost weekly frequency as the authorities tried to get rid of the situation created by the migration. As Daniel told the story, each attempt by the police to clear an area by force was usually met with resistance. This naturally resulted in a series of riots and an intensification of fear and anger from both sides of the cultural divide. Groups like the Diggers tried to help the migrants with food and clothing while some of the local hip businesses tried to work with the city to calm things down. The carnival in the Haight was getting ugly, just as it was in other big cities across the country, especially New York and Detroit. Why Detroit? Like most other cities that saw the summer of 1967 bring an influx of young people looking for the hippie culture, Detroit had been the site of a flourishing counterculture community before 1967. Chief among its members were John Sinclair, Leni Arndt and John Grimshaw. These three were members of a group that ran the Grande Ballroom in Detroit and put on concerts and other events in the Detroit hip community. In October 1966, these three were arrested along with more than fifty others in a well-publicized dope raid. Sinclair went to prison for six months and when he got out the Summer of Love was in full swing. The police and city authorities watched the goings-on carefully and did their best to maintain what they considered to be order. Concerts were harassed and youths arrested for pot smoking, but the events in another part of Detroit that summer took most of the police department's energies. Those events were, of course, the Detroit insurrection. This uprising by African-Americans began July 29, 1967 after the Detroit police raided an after-hours club in the city's predominantly black west side. The police expected to find just the owners of the club present, but instead came upon close to a hundred men and women at the club celebrating the return of two local men from the war in Vietnam. Instead of retreating and coming back later, the cops began to arrest everyone in the club. As the patrons were put into paddy wagons, a crowd of local residents began to gather and yell at the police. Things soon escalated and shortly thereafter, the uprising began. The riots and street fighting lasted five days and the uprising was one of the most destructive riots in US history. US President Johnson ordered thousands of army and National Guard troops into the city to mount what was essentially a block-by-block operation to regain control. At the end of the week, there were more than forty dead citizens, close to 500 reported injuries and over 7,000 arrests. The writer John Hersey uniquely documents the reasons for the insurrection and the event itself in his prize-winning book The Algiers Motel Incident. Rumors continue to exist that US fighter planes were seen flying over the city either performing reconnaissance or actively searching for potential targets to strafe. In a scene that was inspired by these rumors from Ralph Bakshi's film version of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat, the "camera" points to the sky during the riot scenes and one sees fighter planes soaring overhead, their roar growing louder as they come closer to the city streets. As a friend of mine who was a nineteen year old living near the epicenter of the riot at the time put it: "I was thinking of going out to San Francisco and getting me some of the Summer of Love when I got my letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for the army. I was trying to decide if I was going to do that when the riots started. After seeing all them police and army men with guns pointed at all of us black folk I decided that Vietnam might be safer for a black man than Detroit. So I signed up as soon as the curfew was ended." To emphasize the catastrophic nature of the Detroit uprising, there were also bloody African-American uprisings in several other US cities and US towns that summer including Boston, MA., Newark, NJ, Cairo, IL, Buffalo, NY, Memphis, TN, and Cambridge, MD. Yet, Detroit was the worst in terms of casualties and destruction. Over in Vietnam, the US war continued to expand. By summer's end there were over 300,000 US troops in Vietnam. More than 11,000 US troops and unreported numbers of Vietnamese died that year in the war. The number of US deaths in 1967 was nearly double the number of US deaths in the preceding year. In June, Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion for refusing to be inducted into the service because of his opposition to the war. He joined thousands of other men with his refusal. At summer's end, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the beginning of the construction of the McNamara Line--a network of 20,000 air dropped listening devices combined with 240,000,000 Gravel mine and 300,000,000 Button mines and 19,200 Sadeye cluster bombs laid just south of the DMZ between northern and southern Vietnam. The purpose of the line was to prevent unnoticed "intrusions by northern Vietnamese troops. By October of 1967, polls showed that close to fifty per cent of US residents considered Washington's involvement in the war to be a mistake. The Summer of Love and the phenomenon it represented was many things. It was a media-contrived event and it was a human created event picked up by the media. It was a mostly white-skinned phenomenon and it borrowed from many non-white skinned cultures. It was a rejection of the culture of war and the gray flannel suit and it was a celebration of eros. It was escapism and it was a new way of involvement. It was apolitical in the sense of having a party line and it was political in the sense that it challenged much of what the capitalist world stood for at the time. At its core it was a spiritual movement with a chemical as one of its greatest sacraments. Like most spiritual movements, it was doomed to fail in its temporal goals. As its champions and adherents discovered when the authorities truly became threatened by the movement and the moneychangers saw the profits that they could make, love isn't all you need. (Luv N' Haight is the title of a song on Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On album). Ron Jacobs is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground,
which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill
Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art
and sex, Serpents
in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up,
is forthcoming from Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net
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The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn   Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont             CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
