Today's Stories

February 13 - 15, 2009

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

George Cicarriello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

February 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's First Bad Week

Ishmael Reed
Saint Thelma's Book

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

William Blum
Obama and the Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

Henry A. Giroux
Educating Obama

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Darwin's Living Legacy

Mouin Rabbani
A New Low on Gaza?

David Yearsley
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Springsteen!

Saul Landau
The Wrestler: an American Tragedy

Jules Rabin
Israel's Disproportionate Responses

Raymond J. Lawrence
A Country Awash in Money But Going Broke

Janette Habel
Castro's Socialism in Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Economy on a Thread

Missy Beattie
Blackout at the Gaza Zoo Massacre

Dale Gieringer
The Opium Exclusion Act of 1909: Marking 100 Years of Failed Drug Prohibition

John Ross
Davos vs. Belem; Swine vs. Pearls

Richard Rhames
Jobs is a Four Letter Word

Bob Wing
Obama, Race and the Future of U.S. Politics

Robert Bryce
Corn Dog Update: Another Study Exposes Bio-Fuel Scam

David Macaray
AFL-CIO and Change to Win in "Re-Wed" Talks

James L. Secor
Inaugural Questions Nobody Asks: Notes from Kuala Lumpur

Jason Flom /
Anthony Papa
The Scourging of Michael Phelps

Norm Kent
Ten Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

Kim Nicolini
When Utopia Crumbles: Why Revolutionary Road was Shut Out of the Oscars

Lorenzo Wolff
Ridiculous Flow: How Cee Lo Green Sells Soul

Poets' Basement
Emily Dickinson (with Commentary by Daniel Wolff)

Website of the Weekend
S.J. Gould: Darwin's Untimely Burial

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

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

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

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

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

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

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

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

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

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

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

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

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

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

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

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

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

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

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

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

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

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

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

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

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

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

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

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

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

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

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

January 27, 2009

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

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

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

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

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

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

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

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

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

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

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

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

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

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

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

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

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

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

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

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

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

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

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

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

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

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

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

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

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

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

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

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

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

Weekend Edition
February 13 - 15, 2009

Of Super Powers and Superbowls

Bowled Over

By SAUL LANDAU

Super powers show they have the biggest stick in the playground just like Super Bowl competitors exhibit their super muscles. This year, I watched the Super Bowl not from the warm and crowded Tampa, Florida arena where tens of thousands made their religious pilgrimage to this year’s holy shrine, but from a friend’s garage on a super wide plasma screen.

On this realer than life screen, I watched General David Petraeus representing the military. Dwarfed by the giant players surrounding him, he offered embarrassed smiles for the cameras. “Why isn’t he in Afghanistan?” asked one of my fellow viewers.

“Priorities,” responded another. “What’s more important?” No one answered him.

Following the coin toss, I awaited ads from banks that have lost billions in the Wall St. scandals. Passes, runs, kicks, commercials, penalties, fumbles, interceptions – and the folksy John Madden discussing these themes as if they belonged in a course in the philosophy of football, one step down from business ethics.

Who to root for? Every spectator needed to pick a favorite. Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburg Steeler quarterback and Harley Davidson motorcycle fanatic, or Kurt Warner, the Arizona Cardinal’s playmaker who told the public before the game that God would decide the winner? I live in neither city, but recall the Cardinals once played in St. Louis like their baseball brethren. I rooted for the refs, but they would disappoint me as well.

Christmas, Yom Kippur, Easter, Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday have become the nation’s religious holidays, the host announced, to explain his reason for throwing a party in the midst of serious economic malaise. Metaphorically, the game symbolizes a clash of disciplined athletes who will show the less powerful how they too can become insensitive to pain. The very words “Super Bowl” should renew men’s religious faith, “and their potential for idiocy,” said one woman in the small viewing audience.

Most of the women sneered at the prospect of watching football and retreated to another room to see the final Austraila Open match between Federer and Nadal. NBC had its token woman doing “color” reports from the sidelines during the actual game.

Women have yet to try to do the dangerous things men do on football fields. Women “serve” football as cheerleaders for those meat wrenching contests and are supposed to know how to emit proper sounds of approval and disapproval during the course of the game. “That was a super play,” said one young woman trying to impress her boyfriend after a receiver dropped a pass. He looked embarrassed.
Men discuss strategy. Most women don’t – and shouldn’t – care about such exclusively man-made “sports.”  Football, like war, needs battle plans and is played under certain rules -- enforced by “officials.” Men focus their aggressive energy – no it’s not sexuality -- against each other’s bodies for the duration of the contest. Each player uses his flesh, muscle and bone in ways that would cause normal (untrained) people to suffer serious injury or death. Officials penalize teams only when their players make premature advances or unleash “unnecessary” violence. For example, a tackler can spear a receiver in midair, in the midsection before he comes down with the ball. The sound of the collision is audible as the tackled player falls heavily to the ground.

I watched a Cardinal wide receiver leap, catch and get speared by a Steeler defensive back. I flashed back to August 12, 1978, when Jack Tatum, an Oakland Raiders’ defensive back, hurled his body through the air into Darrell Stingley of the New England Patriots, during a pre-season game at Oakland’s Coliseum. Stingley lay unconscious on the turf. Tatum’s body force had compressed Stingley’s spinal cord and fractured two of his vertebrae. The refs ruled Tatum’s “tackle” as “legal.” Subsequently, the NFL made a minor adjustment to penalize the kind of tackle Tatum administered. Tatum later proudly described his “hard hit” in his autobiography, Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum. (Stingley became a quadriplegic and died in 2007 at 55)
Almost thirty one years after that painful collision, I watched several similar body impacts on the HD screen. Luckily, the hard-hit players managed to force the cobwebs out of their brains and ran or limped off the field. Dozens of injured heroes from the Steeler and Cardinals sat on the sidelines or watched from hospitals as their steroid-riddled brethren -- juiced by injections of speed – showed the world what “competitive” means.

More than one injured player eagerly received a Novocain injection to mask the pain so he could keep playing. “That shows heart,” explained the announcers, referring not only to the recently injured player but to those who had endured seventeen games of mutual battering, bone breaking, concussions, torn cartilages and sprains.

Half time! During the intermission at Super Bowl 38, Janet Jackson had also showed heart, well, a breast that accidentally slipped from its flimsy covering. CBS paid huge fines for their insult to public decency even though Jackson discretely replaced her exposed milk gland so the players could resume their publicly decent mauling. That’s clean sport!

The guys dressed in black and white striped shirts called several “unnecessary roughness” penalties, including roughing the passer and the holder. One wit suggested a penalty for “roughing the football.” In other words, it’s “legal” to hit a rival hard enough to knock him out, or paralyze him, as long as the hit is made during the play itself and doesn’t involve “dirty” play, like punching or kicking. A player can use a shoulder or forearm to administer a knockdown blow, but not a karate chop.

This year, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with Steve Van Zandt performed 12 minutes of boring tunes with indecipherable lyrics; but with high energy and enthusiasm. As the 60 year old rock laureate slid across the stage on his knees in an act of rock bravado, NBC executives breathed a collective sigh of relief. Bruce had no mammary glands to fall out of his costume.

The super famous Springsteen had opened the inaugural festivities. By signing him to “party” at the Super Bowl, NBC could use his name plus the ritual itself to sell more than $200 million worth of advertising. Advertisers spent $100,000 per second to market their brand names.
           
During half time, some of the women who were watching tennis came in with 3 D glasses to watch the commercials on the wide HD plasma screen.  I saw them with the 3 D glasses and still don’t remember them. But they were impressive! Subconsciously, I’ll probably think of Doritos when I get images in more than one dimension. Hmm, nice and salty!

In the past, I have viewed the great football ritual in sports bars, hardly comparable to Romans watching a live performance of lions chewing Christians. Like many in the viewing garage last week, I slipped a chip into some dip and raised my beer glass without ever taking my eyes off the screen, because I didn’t want to miss a super athletic feat or at least a super act of violence. Hey, I live in a Super Nation – well, it used to be.

No other empire has such super football teams or such a super military apparatus. So what they haven’t won a war since 1945 – that one with a little help from the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler’s armies. So what they had to drop two atom bombs on Japanese cities!

The super economy, however, has sunk into recession or worse. How sad to see a super mall with lots of empty parking spaces and few customers in mall stores, which have laid off employees, to benefit from post holiday super sales, and super discounts!

Less affluent sectors, however, still experience super emotions in the realm of psychic and material deprivation.  Think of the spiritual uplift tens of millions received from ingesting the strength generated by the protein-laden heroes of The Super Bowl, the most watched television event in the country.

Medical experts say more men will suffer heart attacks and strokes from eating too much fat, drinking too much and feeling depressed over the loss of money they had wagered on the Cardinals. A small price to pay for super sports culture! We love sports. We play them when we’re kids and bet on them ever after.

Luckily at my friend’s party, no one drank too much so we didn’t have to witness someone’s wife reading a riot act to her husband who got overly inspired, albeit vicariously, by the antics on the screen. What a super experience, watching a Super Bowl, living in a super power and getting to witness such competitive sport in high definition! Wow! Maybe next year the Pentagon will allow us to watch the war in Afghanistan as well!

Saul Landau’s films with Fidel are available on DVD from roundworldproductions.com. His A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD was published by CounterPunch / AK Press.

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