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Today's
Stories
April 9, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Fading American Economy
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Congressional
Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings
April 8, 2008
Mike Whitney
Should
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?
Nikolas Kozloff
Bush
Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal
Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas
Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft
John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS
Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing
John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts
Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates
Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?
Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty
Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later
April 7, 2008
Ishmael Reed
The
Irish Black Thing
Harry Browne
Irish
Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported
Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine
Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven
Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy
Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free
Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role
Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests
Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War
April 5 / 6,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
Did
the Elites Want MLK Dead?
Ramzy Baroud
There
are No Checkpoints in Heaven
Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts
David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down
Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America
Paul Craig
Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show
Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot
Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig
John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students
in Ecuador Bombing
Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values
David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad
Missy Beattie
McCan't
Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe
Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers
Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press
Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie
Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up
Poets' Basement
Diamand
and St. Clair
Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop
April 4, 2008
Dave Lindorff
The
Night I Heard King Had Been Shot
Greg Moses
Missing
King
Ron Jacobs
Two Murders, 40 Years On: Bobby Hutton and Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Alan Farago
Show Me the Size of Your Bail Out and I'll Show You Mine
Alison Weir
Funding
Our Decline: U.S. Aid to Israel
David Rosen
Rape as an Instrument of Total War
Robert Weissman
The Unrealized Dream
Jacob Hornberger
Was Killing Iraqi Children Worth It?
Jackie Corr
Hillary and Obama Head for Butte
Carl Finamore
Taking On United Airlines
Laray Polk
We Are All Dith Pran
Susie Day
Advice for the War-Torn
Website of
the Day
Winter Soldiers: a Video Portrait
April 3, 2008
Peter Morici
The Deepening Recession
Joe Bageant
The Audacity of Depression
Andy Worthington
Cleared But Still Detained:
The Ordeal of Moroccan Prisoner Said al-Boujaadia
Nikolas Kozloff
Condi's Divide and Rule Strategy in South America
Rannie Amiri
The U.S. Disdain for Mideast Democracy
David Macaray
More Labor Strife in Hollywood
Stephen Lendman
Lynne Stewart's Long Struggle for Justice
Website of
the Day
The
True Face of Da Vinci?
April 2, 2008
Diane Farsetta
Indian
Point on the Potomac
Harry Browne
Bertie
Ahern Laid Low by Secretary
Wajahat Ali
The Folly of Attacking Iran: a Conversation with Steven Kinzer
George Wuerthner
Open Season on Wolves
Col. Dan Smith
The
Militarization of America
Philippe Marlière
The Politics of Bling-Bling in France: Sarkozy's Cultivated Anti-Intellectualism
Steve Early
A Purple Uprising in Oakland
Bernard Chazelle
Saving the American Left
Reza Fiyouzat
Bowling in Hell
April 1, 2008
Jeff Leys
Fracturing
the Peace to End the War
Thomas P. Healy
Restoring the Constitution: a Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg
Winslow T. Wheeler
When Pigs Sprout Wings: Mangled Rationales for a Fatter Defense
Budget
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
New Deal Nostalgia
Patrick Irelan
Cocaine, Colombia and the Cartels
Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani
John V. Walsh
The Shunning of Ralph Nader
Michael J.
Smith
Woolly Mamet
Robert Weissman
The New Philip Morris--Even Worse Than the Old?
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Defining Moments
Martha Rosenberg
Brain Mist Disease: Boss Hog's Gift to Humanity
Website of
the Day
Support Briana!
March 31, 2008
Mike Whitney
Dead
on Arrival: Paulson's Fixit Plan for Wall Street
Mats Svensson
Walls,
Tunnels and Daily Humiliations
Paul Rockwell
Hillary's
Lies About Outsourcing
Paul Craig Roberts
A Third American War in the Making?
Patrick Cockburn
Sadr
Calls for Ceasefire
Peter Dale Scott
The Showdown
Alfredo Molano
Cultura Mafiosa in Colombia
Peter Morici
Why Paulson's Reform Plan Falls Short
Uri Avnery
Day of the Land, 32 Years Later
Michael Simmons
The American Bard in New Orleans
Betsy Roberts
/ Karen Orr
The Clorox Coup
Phyllis Pollack
First the Sun and Then the Moon: Scorsese Does the Stones
Website of
the Day
Five Years Too Many
March 29 / 30, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
When
They Pick Up the Phone at 3 AM, What Will They Say?
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Police Refuse to Back Maliki's Attacks on Medhi Army
Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Big Bail Out Plan
Christopher Brauchli
The Pastor of Armageddon and the Slave Sale: McCain, Lieberman
and Rev. Hagee
William Blum
China, Tibet and the Propaganda Olympics
Robert Fantina
Iraq
Troika: McCain, Obama and Clinton
John Ross
AMLO, the Comeback Kid? Fighting the Privatization of Mexico's
Oil
Allison Kilkenny
Shady Lending Hits Home
Nelson P. Valdés
Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context
Suzanne Baroud
The Great Lake of Gaza: a New Crisis in the Making
Richard Rhames
Social Security: Throwing Granny from the Gravy Train
Christopher Fons
Transcending the 60s? Obama and the Baby Boomers
Carl Finamore
Misery at 35,000 Feet: Mergers Stall, Fares Soar, Services Slump
and Consumers Sour
Eamonn McCann
Hillary Misremembers Again!
Missy Beattie
Justice and the Monsters of War
Fred Gardner
Jim Thorpe, All-American
Kim Nicolini
Cock Chuggers and Cheese Curls: Richard Kelly's "Southland
Tales"
David Yearsley
"All the World's a Hospital"
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Booked Up
Poets' Basement
Valentine and Ko Un
Website of
the Weekend
Hidden Iraq
March 28, 2008
Saul Landau
Growing
Dread About Iraq
Alan Farago
Other People's Money: the Chop Shop Economy
Peter Morici
Knocking Down False Economic Gods
Andy Worthington
Plight of the Uyghus: a Chinese Muslim's Desperate Plea from
Guantánamo
Felice Pace
Ashes of Lies: Why No One Trusts the US Forest Service
Peter Montague
Sierra Club Cleans House -- With Clorox!
Dave Lindorff
The Mumia Exception
March 27, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Basra
Erupts
Binoy Kampmark
Free Market Apostates
Joanne Mariner
"Was George Washington a Terrorist?"
Norman Solomon
NPR News: National Pentagon Radio?
William S. Lind
Mars Only Knocks Once: a Prognosis for Iraq
John V. Walsh
Obama's Speech: a Touch of Bigotry?
Robert Weissman
How Things Work
Ron Jacobs
Meeting Charlie Ehlen
Ralph Nader
Put Impeachment Back on the Table
David Macaray
Court Rules Against Grocery Workers
John Borowski
Clearcutting the History of Forest Destruction
Website of
the Day
Going Out for an English
March 26, 2008
Stan Cox
The
Germs Next Door
Sharon Smith
Greed
Pays: Welfare on Wall Street
Anita Sinha / Jill Tauber
Dreams Turned into Rubble in New Orleans
Matt Vidal
So Much for the Self-Regulating Market
William S. Lind
Operation Cassandra
Joe Mowrey
The Audacity of Hypocrisy: Obama's Pandering to Israel
Dave Lindorff
Duck and Cover (Up): Hillary Under Fire
Ray McGovern
Frontline's War: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late
Justin Smith
Why Race and Gender are Separate Issues
Sam Husseini
The Winter Soldier Hearings and Indy Media
Martha Rosenberg
Blood on Ice: Gentlemen, Pick Up Your Clubs
Michael Dickinson
Politicians as Dogs
Website of the Day
The Wal-Mart Virus: How the Infection Spread
March 25, 2008
Ishmael Reed
The
Crazy Rev. Wright
Corey D. B.
Walker
The Politics of Jeremiah Wright
Linn Washington Jr.
Racism in America and Other Uncomfortable Facts
Alan Farago
The Money Launderers: a Picnic for Wall St. Insiders
Vijay Prashad
A Glimmer of Hope From the Gulf Coast
Joshua Frank
A Silver Lining to the Bush Years?
Ralph Nader
How Public Servants Can Help End This War
David Rovics
If I Can't Dance: Why is the Left So Boring?
Peter Morici
America's Banks are Broken
Dave Zirin
Olympic Flames: China's Crackdown in Tibet
David Krieger
The Crisis in Tibet
Website of
the Day
Memorializing Iraq
March 24, 2008
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Blonde
Ambition: Hillary's Berserker Campaign for 2012
Peter Morici
Digging Out of the Recession
Uri Avnery
Two Americas
Wajahat Ali
First of the Mohicans: an Interview with Rep. Keith Ellison
Paul Craig Roberts
Inside the Shell Game
George Ciccariello-Maher
The Coming War on Venezuela
Stephen Lendman
Sami Al-Arian's Long Ordeal
Christopher
Brauchli
Possessing Someone Else's Country
Cat Woods
A Letter to Mom on Obama
Stacey Warde
Tax Burden
Dave Lindorff
The American Dead Hits 4,000, But Who's Counting?
Website of
the Day
Live from the Longest Walk
March 22 /
23, 2008
Ralph Nader
Bush
Blisters the Truth on Iraq
Nicole Colson
Can You Afford to Feed Your Family?
James Petras
The Cost of Unilateral Humanitarian Initiatives
Laura Carlsen
From Bombs to Markets: The Andean Crisis and the Geopolitics
of Trade
Greg Moses
Tolerance and the American Pulpit
Andy Worthington
Torture Stories Dog Guantánamo Trials
Michael Dickinson
Art on Trial
John Ross
Bush's Surge Hits Mosul
Missy Comley Beattie
Killer Economics
David Michael
Green
Happy Anniversary, America!
Ramzy Baroud
The Coming Uncertain War on Iran
Martha Rosenberg
Easter Egg Shells from Hell
Paul Watson
Evolution is Going to the Dogs in the Galapagos
Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's
Raid on Brazil
James Murren
Logging v. Water in Honduras
Jacob Hornberger
Sex and the Immigration Officer
Kathlyn Stone
Ben Heine, Master of the Art of Resistance
Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking New Mexico's History
Kim Nicolini
Class, Gender and Abortion in Communist Romania
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Booked Up: What I'm Reading This Week
Poets' Basement
Wilson, Woods, Gibbons and Orloski
Website of
the Weekend
Merci, McCain!
March 21, 2008
Marleen Martin
Land
Behind Bars: the Hidden Casualties of America's "War on
Crime"
Peter Montague
Run
Your Car on Coal? Maybe Not
Saul Landau
Monroe's
Deadly Doctrine
Anis Hamadeh
Merkel in the Knesset
Jacob Hornberger
McCain's Al Qaeda Scare: Slip or Tactic?
Khalil Nakhleh
Al Nakba of 1948: How Long Will It Persist?
Adam Isacson
Colombia, Paramilitary Threats and Assassinations
Kenneth Couesbouc
Money for Nothing
Madis Senner
Will the Feds Underwrite the Stock Market?
Monica Benderman
The Costs of Freedom: What Are You Willing to Pay?
Website of the Day
Stop Foreclosures and Evictions
March 20, 2008
Damien Millet
/
Eric Toussaint
The
Triple Failing of the Big Private Banks
Mike Whitney
Winding
Up Bear
John Ross
What Do We Owe Iraq?
Dave Lindorff
Paying the Piper: the Bodies and Bills are Piling Up
Wajahat Ali
Pakistan on Fire
Jill Nagle
Memo to Sex Workers: Stop Financing Shock Journalism
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Obama and the Psychic Auto-Shrink-Wrapping Called Race in America
Dan La Botz
Obama's Race Speech
Robert Weissman
Alternative Power: Shutting Down the API
Stella Dallas
/
Jennifer Matsui
Apostasy Now! Mamet, Enter Stage Right
Website of the Day
The Angry Monk
March 19, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
A
War of Lies
Robert Fisk
The Little Men and the Inferno
Jeff Taylor
Five Years of War in Iraq
Ed Ruggero
From Pinkville to Iraq: the Dark Anniversary of My Lai
Ron Jacobs
Who'll Stop the Rain?
Christopher
Fons
Obama Takes the Race Bait
Sherwood Ross
In Defense of Rev. Wright
Cynthia McKinney
An Urgent Crisis: Confronting America's Racial Disparities
Joshua Frank
The Kool-Aid That Kills
Robert Weissman
Monsanto's Genetic Food Gamble
Walter Brasch
It's a Welfare State--If You're Rich
Yifat Susskind
Iraqi Women Resist the Occupation
Andrew Wimmer
War Demands Its Due
Website of
the Day
Glimpses of Nature
March 18, 2008
David Price
The
Military "Leveraging" of Cultural Knowledge
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Collapse of American Power
Tim Wise
Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack
Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Patrick Cockburn
One of the Most Disastrous Wars Ever Fought
Conn Hallinan
Afghanistan, a River Running Backward
James T. Phillips
Monsters: Past, Present and Wannabe
Uri Avnery
The Killing in Bethlehem
David Macaray
Could Wal-Mart Revive the Labor Movement?
Marjorie Cohn
Beware an Attack on Iran
Peter Zinn
Obama in New Orleans
Dan La Botz
The Economic Crisis, Labor and the Left
Monica Benderman
Where are We Going?
March 17, 2008
Pam Martens
The
Fed's Wall Street Dilemma
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The US, Iran and the Policy of Dual Containment
Nelson P. Valdés
The Imperial Branding of Simon Bolivar and the Cuban Revolution
Peter Morici
The Corrosive Consequences of the Trade Deficit
Wajahat Ali
Disrobing the Nine: a Conversation with Jeffrey Toobin on the
Supreme Court Since 9/11
Ronnie Cummins
Beyond Progressive Malpractice: Taking Down Big Pharma
Shaun Harkin
Saint Patrick's Day in Fortress America
Ali Khan
No Pardon for Musharraf
Robert Jensen
Beyond Peace
P. Sainath
Oh, What a Lovely Waiver!
Greg Moses
Jeremiah was a Bullhorn
Dr. Susan Block
Advice for Eliot Spitzer
Website of the Day
No Cowboys
March 15 /
16, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
How
to Destroy a Country in Five Years
Mike Whitney
Bearly
Alive: Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief
Ralph Nader
Of
Laws and Men
Robert Pollin
It's Still the Economy, Stupid
Diane Christian
The Poetics of Perversity: From Boccaccio to Spitzer
Wajahat Ali
Faking the Hood: a Conversation with Ishmael Reed
Tom Wright
/
Therese Saliba
Rachel Corrie's Case for Justice
Alan Farago
Back to Florida: Where Bushtime Began
Greg Moses
Raiding the Family Room in Texas
Michael Hudson
A Grand Global Bargain?
Martha Rosenberg
Why Hillary's Favorite Chicken Company is Eying China
John Goekler
Fourth Generation Warfare in a Fifth Generation Conflict
Uzma Aslam
Khan
A Letter to Barack Obama: Where's the Change, Barack?
Oren Ben-Dor
The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon
David Underhill
Mammon, Morals and the Mobile Tanker Deal
Fred Gardner
The Education of Eliot Spitzer
David Michael
Green
Why Spitzer Should Have Resigned (and Why He Shouldn't Have)
Rev. William E. Alberts
Jesus, Entombed in Heaven
Gail Dines
It's All About the John: Prostitution and Male Power
David Yearsley
Conducting, Anarchy and the Problem of When to Begin
Chris Clarke
Walking with Zeke: the Luckiest of Dogs
Poets' Basement
Anderson, Lodge & Subiet
Website of
the Day
Deviant Art
March 14, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Watching
the Dollar Die
Don Santina
Vichy
Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons
Tim Rinne
StratCom
Rules! The Next War Will Start in Nebraska
Robert Fantina
In
Torture We Trust
Saul Landau
Letter
to the Presidents-in-Waitings
David Macaray
Common
Myths About Labor Unions
Franklin Lamb
Is
the Bush Administration Switching Horses in Lebanon
Michael Neumann
The
One State Illusion: Reply to My Critics
March 13, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Republicans
and "Free Market" Zealots Bring Disaster to America
Mike Whitney
Meltdown
Looms Larger As Credit Markets Freeze
Assaf Kfoury
"One-State
or Two State?"- Sterile Debate on False Alternatives
Andy Worthington
Afghan
Hero Who Died in Guantánamo: The Background to the Story
Adam Federman
From
Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
March 12, 2008
Dave Lindorff
Bringing
Down Spitzer: It's the Big Brother Who Should Bother US
R.F. Blader
The
Spitzer Backlash
Yonatan Mendel
How
to be an Israeli Journalist. Never Write "Murder" or
"Palestine"
Jonathan Cook
One
State or Two? Neither. The Issue is Zionism
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Fallon
and Gates -- At Least One Cheer
James J. Brittain
Was
the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders
Ron Jacobs
"All
the Money You Make Will Never Buy Back Your Soul"
March 11, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
to End the Subprime Crisis
Ed O'Loughlin
How
Israeli Troops Invade Homes in Gaza, Brutalize, Smash and Steal
Ramzy Baroud
'Unwavering
Commitment' to Inequality
Kathy Christison
One
State or Two? The Debate Over Israel and Palestine
China Hand
PRC
Plays it Cool, as U.S. Tries to Amp Up Pressure on Iran
John Joslin
Thank
You, Nafta! Welcome to Weirton, Home of the Discount Cigarette
Mike Averko
Serb
Politics, Kosovo and the Moscow-Washington Divide
Ben Rosenfeld
Gavin
Newsom's Kneejerk Plan
Thierry Paquot
High
Rise, Low Spirits:The Curse of the Tower Block
March 10, 2008
Uri Avnery
"Kill
A Hundred Turks and Rest": The Five-Day War in Gaza
Col. Dan Smith
Scoring
the "Surge" and What Lies Beyond
R.F. Blader
Why
"Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key" is Losing its
Sheen
Michael Neumann
The
One-State Illusion: More is Less
Bob Fitrakis
and Harvey Wasserman
Did
the Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory in Ohio?
James J. Brittain
Anti-Uribe
Protests in Colombia and the World
Missy Comley
Beattie
The
Passion of John McCain
March 8-9,
2008 Weekend Edition
JoAnn Wypijewski
The
Only Way to Fight the Clintons
Mike Whitney
Sorting
Through the Rubble in Post Bubble America
Peter Morici
Fed
and Treasury Fiddle as Economy Plummets
Ralph Nader
The
Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering that Candidates Ignore
Jonathan Cook
The
Meaning of Gaza's Shoah
Steve Niva
Behind
the Israeli Escalation in Gaza
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Crisis
over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax
Hervé
Do Alto and Franck Poupeau
Bolivia:
Morales is Checked
Eric Walberg
To
Leave and Stay at the Same Time: Putin to Medvedev to…?
Scott Johnson
City
of A Thousand Foreclosures
Mark Scaramella
James
Brown's Gate
Bill Clinton
President
Clinton's Remarks on Naming William M. Daley as NAFTA Task Force
Chairman
Poet's Basement
St.
Thomasino, Engel, Davies and Willson
Website of
the Weekend
Hillary
Blackens Barack
March 7, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Iraq Could Blow-Up in John McCain's Face
Robin Blackburn
Question
for Barrack Obama: Why Afghanistan is the'Right War'?
Saul Landau
The
Stupid Economy
Binoy Kampmark
When
Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats
Chris Floyd
Crushing
the Ants: Admiral Fallon and His Empire
Andy Worthington
Spanish
Drop "Inhuman" Extradition Request for Guantánamo
Britons
Will Potter
Before
the Smoke Even Clears in Seattle: Bringing Out the T Word
March 6, 2008
March 6, 2008
Vincent Navarro
The
Next Failure of Health Reform
Forrest Hylton
High Stakes in the Andes: Colombia's Cornered President
Peter Morici
Why the Dollar is So Cheap
George Ciccariello-Maher
Counter-Attack of the Bureaucrats
John Ross
Taxi! Taxi! The Dark Side of the Oscars
Jacob Hornberger
No Standing to Lecture on Justice
Paul Watson
Illegal Japanese Whaling by the Numbers
Dan Bacher
Off the Deep End
Website of the Day
A Katrina Reader Online
March 5, 2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)
Joanne Mariner
After Guantanamo
Fidel Castro
The Raid on Ecuador: Underestimating Rafael Correa
Christopher
Brauchli
The Turkish Invasions
Steven Sherman
Obama and the Prospects for a Renewal of the Left
Dave Lindorff
Busting Bush & Co. in New England
James Murren
Bombing Somalia
Adam Engel
Necropolis Now
Website of Day
Remember Song
March 4, 2008
Wajahat Ali
Mumbo
Jumbo: Naming Names with Ishmael Reed
William Blum
How Could Hillary Have Known?
Bill Quigley
The Cleansing of New Orleans
Ralph Nader
The Prince Harry Solution
Patrick Irelan
Oil and Health in Venezuela
James J. Brittain
/
R. James Sacouman
Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America
Norman Solomon
The War Election
Jacob Hornberger
Hillary in Waco: the Missing Apology
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the European Parliament
Mike Averko
Kosovo and the Press
Website of the Day
Tex-Mex Primary
March 3, 2008
Jennifer Loewenstein
Gazan Holocaust
Alan Farago
American Politics and the Faltering Economy
Richard Gott
Colombian Deaths in Ecuador
Wajahat Ali
Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims? Analyzing the World Gallup
Poll with John Esposito
Paul Craig Roberts
The Mukasey Conspiracy: a Bi-Partisan Attack on the Constitution
Robert Weissman
When Multinationals Say Adieu
Uri Avnery
Good Morning, Hamas
Martha Rosenberg
When Your Meat is a Downer
Eva Liddell
Leave the Next Dance for Bill
Michael Donnelly
Will Ferrell Does Flint
Website of the Day
Muddy Waters: Train Fare Home Blues
|
Apri1
9, 2008
The New Deal at
75--Lessons for Today
Confronting
the Economic Crisis
By DAN LA BOTZ
When I was growing up in the 1950s,
a photo of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932-1944) still
hung in the homes of some family members and friends. Our only
four-term president was remembered by them as the leader-and
even the savior-of the country. Those like my parents, who experienced
the Great Depression and World War II, were transformed by the
experience of Roosevelt's New Deal into life long Democrats.
Union members, immigrants, and African Americans, and then their
children, stuck with the Democrats through thick and thin for
fifty years, largely held in place by their experience of the
New Deal.
Seventy-five years ago President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to put together that series of
social and economic institutions that he called the New Deal,
measures that profoundly transformed American society. At the
same time under FDR's leadership, the Democratic Party succeeded
in constructing that bloc of social classes, ethnic groups, and
organizations that came to be called the New Deal Coalition and
that constituted the party's social base of political power into
the 1970s. FDR's New Deal-both the program of reforms and the
coalition of forces-represented the most dynamic, durable and
ultimately successful political achievement of America in the
twentieth century. FDR's New Deal also laid the basis for what
Henry Luce of Time Magazine called the American Century,
less than a century, but more than fifty years of American supremacy.
A New New
Deal?
Today, as the nation once again
confronts an economic crisis, some are turning to look back at
Roosevelt's New Deal in the hope of finding a solution to our
country's current problems. Perhaps this is in part because some
see in Barack Obama a Rooseveltian figure, one who might be the
broker of new social pact. We naturally then look back to the
1930s.
The Nation, for example, under the heading "Toward
a New New Deal," recently asked a dozen prominent
Americans, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, SEIU President Andy
Stern, and historian Howard Zinn, to comment on the New Deal
on its anniversary. By and large those commentators suggested
that we might turn to the New Deal for inspiration, as a model
for taking political power, and as a program to resolve the country's
economic difficulties. Zinn suggested that today's presidential
contenders might ask the American people to undertake a new
New Deal and wondered if, "Perhaps the momentum of such
a project could carry the nation past the limits of FDR's reforms,
especially if there were a popular upsurge that demanded it."
But does the New Deal of the
1930s represent the way forward for America in the 2000s? Did
it even represent the best way forward for America in the 1930s?
Do we want to go that route again? And, if we did, would it even
be possible? The answers to these questions, I think, point in
another direction. What we need today is not a New New
Deal but a different sort of coalition under different leadership
and with altogether different objectives: a Different Deal. Turning
to look back at the New Deal of the 1930s we find that there
was another path, a road not taken, an alternative for the country
which we might pursue today.
The Crash,
the Depression, Roosevelt
Many think of Roosevelt as
a man who took office planning to help workers and to create
a fairer economic system. In truth, Roosevelt had no plan. The
New Deal emerged from a series of conflicts between the government,
the corporations and working people. And much of the initiative
for change came from below.
The Great Crash of 1929 devastated
the American economy: banks failed, businesses closed, and within
a short time 25 percent of workers were unemployed. The government
of Republican Herbert Hoover failed to respond to the economic
crisis, so in 1932 voters elected to the presidency Franklin
D. Roosevelt, descendant of a patrician family, cousin of former
president Theodore "Teddy Roosevelt," and governor
of New York. FDR, who took office without a plan, surrounded
himself with advisors of differing ideologies and indicated his
willingness to experiment. His approach would be pragmatic; he
would see what worked. What was clear from the beginning was
that Roosevelt's goal, while alleviating some of the pain of
the depression, was to save American capitalism.
The Crash and the Depression
set America's working people in motion. The Communist Party organized
the unemployed to demand relief and jobs under the slogan "Fight
Don't Starve!" Farmers formed the Farm Holiday Association
and, carrying signs reading "Be a Picket or a Peasant,"
struck and rioted in the Midwest. American veterans, unemployed
and desperate, descended on Washington, D.C. in the Bonus March
of 1932-only to be driven out of town by tanks and troops with
bayonets. Socialists, Communists and Trotskyists formed unemployed
workers councils in cities throughout the country.
By 1934 a new labor movement
began to emerge as workers succeeded in organizing city-wide
general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo and
won recognition for new unions of industrial workers. Conservative
leader of the United Mine Workers John L. Lewis jumped in front
of the workers parade and proclaimed the founding of the CIO,
the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Many people throughout
the country wondered if capitalism had failed and would now be
replaced by socialism through a working class revolution.
The New Deal resulted from
the interplay between the Roosevelt administration, the corporations,
and the mass movements of farmers and workers. FDR's particular
genius was in his ability to contain and capture the energy and
ideas of those mass movements and to use them for his own ends.
Forces that initially chartered their own path, or that challenged
or threatened his administration were brought around to support
it through a brilliant combination of populist rhetoric, social
reforms, and the building of a multi-class coalition.
The Roosevelt
Style: Pragmatism and Experimentation
Breaking with the conservative
past, Roosevelt was willing to use government to inhibit the
market, to restrain corporations, and to build social welfare
programs, though, as would soon become clear, he would not threaten
the fundamental capitalist character of the economy. His creativity
in using the government, the Democratic Party, and the mass media,
through his famous fireside chats, allowed him instead to become
the broker of a new coalition and the author of a new social
pact.
Roosevelt was imaginative and
dynamic. During his first 100 days he pushed through Congress
an unprecedented series of measures that provided emergency assistance,
jobs, and mortgage relief for homeowners and farmers. By the
mid-1930s programs such as the Civil Works Administration, Works
Progress Administration, and Civil Conservation Corps employed
millions in planting trees, building roads and bridges, schools
and airports.
Roosevelt's attention was particularly
focused on the problem of preventing capitalist competition from
bringing down the entire system. He established the FTC to regulate
big business and then the National Industrial Recovery Act to
stop cutthroat competition by imposing market shares, production
levels, prices, and wages on the corporations. After the Supreme
Court declared the NIRA/NRA unconstitutional, Roosevelt continued
to try to use government to regulate capital, to build public
works programs, and to expand social welfare. To do so, however,
he had to rebuild the Democratic Party.
The Roosevelt
Coalition: The Cross-Class Alliance
Some think that Roosevelt transformed
the Democratic Party into a progressive coalition of unions,
immigrants and blacks on order to move America to the left. But
that was simply not what happened.
True, Roosevelt realized that
if he was to succeed in reforming and reconstructing American
capitalism, he would have to broaden the social base of the Democratic
Party. The Democratic Party that had elected him in 1932 had
been based on the corrupt political machines of big cities like
Chicago and New York, on the white votes of the Solid South,
on the American Federation of Labor, and on financiers like Bernard
Baruch who reportedly "owned" sixty congressmen whose
campaigns he had financed. That base was simply too narrow to
deal with the upheavals in the industrial cities of the Great
Lakes region and among the farmers of the Midwest.
The patrician Roosevelt had
by 1936 adopted a populist discourse, calling for the overthrow
of America's "economic royalists," as symbolized in
the public mind by the Morgan Bank. But his radical rhetoric
belied the reality, for FDR was also courting capitalist power.
Unlike the Republicans who saw the revival of the economy coming
through heavy industry and high finance, FDR and his inner circle
had become convinced that revival would come through capital-intensive
industry and consumer goods. He was constructing a new coalition
that included Rockefeller's Chase National Bank, and other non-Morgan
banks, Lehman Brothers, Standard Oil, Sears Roebuck, Remington
Rand, Bendix, and other banks and corporations like them. Roosevelt
worked with these capital-intensive industries which were driven
by consumer demand to find a way to save the capitalist system.
The key to reviving those industries would be through Keynesian
policies of deficit spending, programs providing jobs for workers
and welfare benefits for the unemployed and the elderly.
At the same time FDR also worked
to expand his coalition by incorporating more plebeian forces.
Roosevelt, his Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and Senator
Robert Wagner carefully maneuvered to contain the worker upheaval-sit-down
strikes, mass picketlines, conflicts with the police and National
Guard-that swept the nation. At the same time, Congress passed
the Wagner Act which for the first time at the federal level
gave workers the right to unionize, but also channeled their
organizing efforts into legal structures that subordinated the
unions to the corporations whose workers they represented. The
National Labor Relations Board shaped a pattern of industrial
relations that brought about a management-labor partnership in
the principal industries. Roosevelt's labor policies, ambivalent
as they were, nevertheless succeeded in bringing into his coalition
the Congress of Industrial Organizations with its new unions
made up of millions of immigrant and African American workers.
Roosevelt, however, refused
to reach out to African Americans, believing that he could not
even appear to sympathize with them-that was his wife's role-since
any gesture toward blacks would jeopardize political support
in the Solid South where blacks were not permitted to vote. Consequently
African Americans in the South remained trapped in Jim Crow segregation
and disfranchisement, and continued to be the victims of lynching,
all of which enforced the labor regime based on low-wages. Blacks
got no New Deal from FDR, but they voted for him because some
of the jobs and relief programs, though rife with racism, still
improved their situation. By 1936 they had left the party of
Lincoln for the party of Roosevelt where they have stayed ever
since.
A New Social
Pact
Roosevelt succeeded in expanding
the Democratic Party to include industrialists from the capital-intensive
industries-the dominant force-as well as the workers of the CIO
unions, immigrant communities, and even African Americans. And
he did so without giving up the backing of the corrupt big-city
machines or the southern white supremacists. This broadened support
made it possible for Roosevelt to win large majorities in the
1934 congressional and the 1936 presidential elections. By the
end of the 1930s Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in Congress
had succeeded in laying the foundation of a new social pact based
on the pillars of the National Labor Relations Act and Social
Security.
Some believe that Roosevelt's
New Deal ended the Great Depression, but that was not the case.
By 1938 unemployment levels had risen once again to nearly 20
percent. Roosevelt only brought the country out of the depression
by leading the United States into war, the same war for the division
of the planet between the great powers that had begun in 1914,
paused between 1918 and 1939 so that the rival powers could rearm
and harvest a new generation of youth, and then started up again,
this time not only in Europe but also in Asia. The multi-class
coalition of the Democratic Party and the social pact between
capital and labor that Roosevelt had begun to bring together
were forged in the crucible of the war. Government brought capital
and labor together to win the war of production and that led
to a capital-labor partnership that would last into the 1970s.
The war which destroyed European
and Japanese capitalism through massive bombing, and which did
away with a whole generation of class-conscious workers, left
the United States virtually the only capitalist power on the
planet. Just after the end of the war, the United States with
5 percent of the world's population collected 50 percent of its
wealth. The U.S. domination of the world economy made it possible
for American corporations to produce the revenues that financed
the New Deal social pact, but that was only possible by the adoption
of a permanent war economy, military Keynesianism, the production
of weapons for the permanent war on Asia: from Japan to Korea
and Vietnam.
What was
the Social Pact?
Roosevelt's social pact, breaking
with the laissez-faire past, represented a profound reform of
American capitalism. Government regulated corporations to a much
greater degree and established the first major national social
program: Social Security. At the same time the NLRB created the
framework in which labor unions came by the 1950s to represent
35 percent of America's work force. The American prosperity which
lasted from 1940 to roughly 1970, based on U.S. dominance in
the world economy, meant that many Americans' lives improved
under first the New Deal and later under its expansion with Johnson's
Great Society.
Yet the New Deal pact was not
all it seemed to be or might have been. While about one-third
of working Americans came to benefit from labor unions with their
pensions and health and welfare funds, two-thirds of Americans
remained in the other economy of the Old Deal. The New Deal,
augmented by the Great Society, congealed into a system that
could not deliver America from the capitalist boom-bust economic
cycle and that could not be separated from the American drive
to militarism and war. By the early 1960s writers like Michael
Harrington had discovered The Other America of profound
poverty in the nation's inner cities and the rural hollers.
Even the expanded version of
the American welfare state, however, never approximated the programs
of the social democratic governments of Western Europe with their
four- to six-week vacations for all, national public health programs,
and free higher education. Western European states created those
social programs during the post-war period in competition with
Soviet and Eastern European Communism where workers had guaranteed
jobs, nearly free housing, and free medical care. The New Deal
was not such a great deal when compared to the European states
where labor and socialist parties had led the fight for change.
Most importantly, the New Deal
turned out to be not only a social pact; but also a social trap.
Roosevelt had succeeded in capturing the CIO unions and the left
as well; the Socialists joined the Democrats virtually en
masse, and the Communists, who came to see in the New Deal
an American version of the Popular Front, were absorbed into
the coalition too. Once inside the Democratic Party the unions
and social movements found that it became impossible to reassert
their independence. The Democratic Party was not just a coalition;
it was also a kind of cage.
That New Deal Coalition evolved
into the contemporary alliance of the Democratic National Committee,
banks and corporations, bureaucratic labor unions, African American
civil rights organizations bereft of the movement that had made
them, and the National Organization for Women which institutionalized
the former feminist movement. By the 1980s the Democrats has
lost the social support they once had and had given up on fighting
to defend and expand the welfare state. Ronald Reagan and the
Republicans, adopting the neoliberal model, committed themselves
to dismantling the New Deal social welfare programs and returning
to laissez-faire.
New Deal
Redux?
Is a New New Deal Possible?
To envision another New Deal is to envision a reform that makes
possible the continuation of capitalism with its periodic economic
crises and its foreign wars. It is to conjure up another cross-class
coalition dominated by capital and subordinating labor. It is
to imagine a system that makes life somewhat better for some,
but leaves many with the Old Deal. In any case, it is not clear
that such a path is possible.
A modern replication of the
New Deal would require not only the construction of a new regulatory
system and new social welfare programs, but also the bolstering
of the American economy sufficient to produce the revenues and
the profits to pay for it. The expansion of American capitalism
today can only come through economic victory in the competition
with the European Union, Japan and China and the gaining of control
over the world's natural resources and raw materials.
Central to an American victory
in the economic realm is the struggle to control the oil fields
of the Middle East and the geopolitically strategic trade routes
of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. That is, the Democrats'
hope for a New New Deal lies through the Republicans'
dream of a New American Century. This is precisely the
reason that the Democratic candidates can give no straight answers
about the future of the U.S. in Iraq.
The Road
Not Taken
How do we find the right road
forward this time? Well, that is our project. Looking back on
the 1930s, we find that there was also a road not taken, a trail
that was being blazed by the industrial unions, independent workers'
parties, and an incipient socialist movement. We might take the
path not taken in the 1930s. The alternative to the New New
Deal involves envisioning a society founded on equality, democracy,
and a peaceful foreign policy. The way forward does not lie through
a New New Deal, but through the struggles of the social
movements and the building of a working people's party to fight
for a Different Deal: the end of capitalism and the construction
of a democratic socialist society.
Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer
and activist. He can be contacted at DanLaBotz@gmail.com
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