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Today's
Stories
March 11, 2004
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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March
11, 2004
Hey, Ralph!
Why
Not Another Party of the People?
By BILL KAUFFMAN
The cynical Alabama populist Governor George Wallace
used to scoff that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference
between the two parties. Thank God that manic cracker spent the
bleak winter of 2004 in an otherworldly realm. For today there
isn't a plug nickel's worth of difference between the Democrats
and the Republicans. The parties of Jefferson and Lincoln have
clearcut the redwood forests, drained the gulfstream waters,
leveled the purple mountains and scalped the amber waves of grain
only to come up with George W. Bush and John F. Kerry: Skull
and Bones-dum versus Skull and Bones-dee.
God bless our meritocracy!
What a marvelous system we have in freedom's
land. The Democrats, barely six weeks into the primary season,
have disposed of the troublesomely frank Vermont Gov. Howard
Dean and settled upon a presidential candidate who, but for his
cadaverous countenance, might have skulked right out of the Bushes.
Senator Kerry is a rich and haughty boarding-school boy, prolonged
exposure to whom could turn the doughiest Tory into a raging
Spartacist. At Yale he was tapped for Skull and Bones, the creepily
macabre secret society whose possessions reportedly include the
skull of the Apache chief Geronimo, stolen by President Bush's
grandfather, Prescott Bush, in a bit of youthful deviltry. Despite
Kerry's recent tergiversations, he was in favor of the U.S. war
upon Iraq. A freespending statist, he is profligate with what
only the most hopeless naifs still refer to as "the taxpayers'
money."
The above description, of course, applies
equally to the incumbent president. Lop six inches off Kerry's
chin and a dozen points off his IQ and you've got President Bush
II. Well, yes, there are niggling differences. Bush was a prep-school
cheerleader and Kerry a decorated Vietnam veteran, but then Republicans
have pretty much cornered the market on  chickenhawks. To his credit,
Bush married the literate Laura while Kerry dumped his first
wife, a chronically depressed heiress, and traded up for Mrs.
Croesus, the ketchup widow Teresa, who hit the jackpot when poor
Senator Heinz splurted up to that great condiment table in the
sky.
So what is the thickskulled boneweary
voter to do?
As an old-fashioned decentralist antiwar
patriot, my dream ticket would consist of Gore Vidal and Texas
Congressman Ron Paul, noble lions of the Old Republic, of the
America before MTV and WMD and ABC and all those acronyms buried
my sweet USA, but they aren't going to be on the ballot. Ralph
Nader is. And if Nader runs the antiwar, anti-corporate, pro-Middle
America campaign he has previewed, we might finally hear the
welcome echoes of the long lost William Jennings Bryan.
Funny, isn't it, that Bryan, the most
popular and imaginatively radical major-party candidate of the
post-Civil War Era--a populist so esteemed that he overcame the
opposition of Wall Street to thrice serve as the Democratic candidate
for president--has no heirs, no legatees, no annual dinners named
after him? He exists for us only in the slanderous portrayal
of him in that silly collection of cliches, INHERIT THE WIND.
Bryan, the Great Commoner, the windbag
with a heart, tribune of the farmer and honest toiler, was a
sort of anti-Kerry. Isn't one reason suburban Democrats nominate
high-born stiffs like Kerry so that they can feel superior to
white Southerners, born-agains, working-class Catholics, and
the other gun-owning, church-going, war-hating homefolks who
used to find a home in the Democratic Party of Bryan?
WJB called, in the mellifluous tones
of his Plains, for a Jeffersonian dispersion of power--political,
economic, and cultural. How he would have despised Clear Channel,
Disney, and the NEW YORK TIMES. He'd have called for the restoration
of local ownership of newspapers and TV and radio stations; he'd
have understood that America's real enemies are the likes of
FRIENDS, Dick Cheney, SEX AND THE CITY, and the typewriter imperialists
who know nothing of the real America but serve instead the deeply
anti-American Empire.
Bryan, to be sure, would be passionately
anti-Iraq War and anti-Patriot Act, but he would also be a stalwart
defender of Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST against the
hysterical condemnation of the anti-religious corporate media.
(Well, okay, Bryan might regard Gibson's PASSION as a wee bit
Catholic for his tastes, but still. Many of us find it grotesque
that one can win praise for making films glorifying serial killers,
cannibals, and editors of the NEW REPUBLIC, but not our Lord.
Jee-zus Christ!)
I do hope Ralph Nader speaks in the great
Middle-American Bryanite accent. Defend--nay, champion--the small
farm, the small merchant, the laborer, the homemaker, the dreamy
poet. Bring the boys home--from Iraq, from Europe, from Korea,
from everywhere. Slash the war budget. Cherish the Bill of Rights--including
the Second Amendment. Dismantle the Clinton-Bush incipient police
state. Attack corporate rule at its very roots: repeal corporate
charters, break up the communications giants, eliminate corporate
welfare. These are the causes of the America beyond the reach
of HBO.
And please, Ralph, go after the folks
who voted in 2000 for Bush (who was, you will recall, the candidate
promising a "humble" foreign policy against the hawkish
Gore).
My county in rural Western New York has
been true-blue for the GOP since Abe Lincoln, and I have never
heard my Republican neighbors express such doubt, such skepticism,
even such open contempt toward a Republican president. These
people are "conservative" in a way that the leaders
of their party no longer are: that is to say, they prefer governmental
powers to be limited and decentralized, and they do not wish
to shoulder the burden of empire. The Bushies and their courtiers,
who know as little of our history as Janet Jackson knows of Jane
Austen, haven't the faintest idea that Republicans have often
been the party of peace and non-interference in foreign wars.
As President Benjamin Harrison once remarked, "We have no
commission from God to police the world." Step outside the
DC-NYC corridor and you'll find that millions of Americans agree.
And we're supposed to choose from George W. Bush and John F.
Kerry?
We have a choice, dammit.
Run, Ralph, run. Run left, run right,
run as constitutionalist liberal, as antiwar patriot, as a man
proud to stand in the Bryan-La Follette-Gene McCarthy-Paul Goodman
tradition. You'd be surprised at how many Main Street conservatives,
disaffected Republicans, and pissed-off libertarians wish you
well. Hell, I probably disagree with half your platform but I
wish you more than well. As night falls in what used to be America,
the bedfellows get ever stranger.
Bill Kauffman's
"Dispatches
from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a
Small Town's Fight to Survive" has just been published
by Henry Holt. He can be reached at: kauffman@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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