Today's Stories

March 5 , 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 5 , 2009

State of Denial

The Unseen Crisis

By SAUL LANDAU

The medical dictionary defines crisis as “the turning point of a disease for better or worse.” Doctors with cool heads understand their procedures may produce recovery or death for their patients. The mainstream economic crisis “experts,” however, have offered Washington politicians a less than helpful way of responding to catastrophe: panic and denial. Indeed, the gurus and politicos apparently made their diagnosis without even glancing at the larger context or at recent foibles.

After the November election, liberal Democrats began to scream for rapid bailouts and threw money at bankers who then shocked the lawmakers by behaving like bankers. They took the taxpayers’ money and spent it on themselves. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” (“The Rich Boy,” 1926)

In mid November, the very rich of the auto industry flew in lush corporate jets to DC to beg money from the impoverished public. The car CEOs displayed an unusual candor in revealing their stupidity, arrogance and greed at Congressional hearings. They characterized as “unfair” their competitors’ (Japanese carmakers) tactics -- like innovation.

No Senator asked, even rhetorically: “Why not gradually phase out rather than immediately bail out this industry? Even by producing ‘green’ cars as the core of the US economy, doesn’t the future of the automobile seem incompatible with the future of life on the planet?” The most environmentally friendly car still needs for its production massive amounts of steel and other metals, rubber, plastic (petroleum products) and acids – not to mention the ingredients needed to build levels of parking garages, highways and other quintessentially un-green operations associated with this so 20th Century transportation.

The legislators did not refer to the larger crisis. The worsening environment has become the context not only for current economic collapse, but will induce devastating hardship in the near future. Think of the hits that the insurance and reinsurance businesses will take, the serious shortages of food and other needs. Respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil and natural gas) and cutting down forests have created a global peril. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which in 2005 the White House called “the gold standard of objective scientific assessment,” issued a joint statement with 10 other National Academies of Science: “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action… that all nations identify cost-effective steps … to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.” (Joint Statement of Science Academies: Global Response to Climate Change [PDF], 2005)

The stimulus bill does not address the need to decrease – now -- heat-trapping pollution. Scientists have now reduced their internal debate to how much and how fast the heat-trapping emissions will bring doom.  They project devastating impacts on the economy from rising seas flooding coastal cities and contaminating water supplies; extreme heat, droughts and floods will increase in frequency and strength. People will die; property will be destroyed: agriculture will become problematic.

The raging February fires of Australia offer Nature’s most recent illustration of human helplessness when flames and high winds combine. A display of such destructive power –along with hurricanes and California fires -- should help to end the idiotic babble about the virtues of man controlling the “free market. For those who think tax cuts for corporations and dribble down economics will work, Disney should make a new film called “The Flintstones Return,” where both animals and people work for the giant entertainment corporation in a deregulated world.

As Nature demonstrates, human inability to “control” it for fashioning economic production models, the US President assumes greater power in national security affairs. Obama comes to office at a time when the idea of the United States controlling other areas of the world has become ridiculous. It’s time, as Pat Buchanan wrote, to “liquidate the empire.”

Congress follows the same foolish path. Instead of placing the present economy and foreign policy in its larger and more vital environmental context, without which all else becomes moot, deal-making Members of both Houses bickered about cutting a couple hundred billion here and there from the stimulus package as economic indicators – and voter fear and anger -- continued to flash disaster signs. Republican Senator John McCain righteously mounted an attack from the Senate floor on February 6, parroting Rush Limbaugh. “This is a not a stimulus bill. It’s a spending bill.” McCain and fellow Republicans still demand tax cuts, which have failed to stimulate anything more than the prostates of a few very rich and old men.

“Are you kidding?” replied the Democrats. “When the government spends money it automatically stimulates the economy, stupid.” But to what end? The righteous Democrats like the blinder mice across the aisle did not address the greater crisis within which exists the downward spiraling world economy.

Aside from pitying the poor polar bears deprived of food by arctic melting and the thousands of other species now endangered by the warming and melting, the venerable Solons appear to have gone not back to their home states, but rather to the state of denial. By limiting debate on Obama’s stimulus to how much spending and where it was going and not to the environment, the context for all economic and other activity, Congress took a virtual leave of absence from its responsibility – to say nothing of its oath of office.

Indeed, it took a federal lawsuit to force government agencies to address global warming implications of their overseas financing activities. In August 2002, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the city of Boulder, Colorado, sued (Friends of the Earth, Inc., et al. v. Spinelli, et al.) the US Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation for illegally spending $32 billion to finance and insure decade long fossil fuel projects without assessing the projects contribution to global warming as demanded under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Between 1990 and 2003 these projects “produced cumulative emissions that were equivalent to nearly eight percent of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly one third of annual U.S. emissions in 2003.” So much for the environmental consciousness of two Bushes and Clinton!

Finally, in August 2005 a federal judge allowed “cities suffering economic and other damages from climate change” to sue the government. Shockingly, the court heard expert testimony that climate change is both real and caused by human activities, and therefore “pollutants can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.”

“We can no longer consume the world’s resources without regard to effect,” Obama declared on January 20. The February 2009 settlement of the global warming lawsuit should compel federal agencies to stop backing fossil fuel projects. It should compel the President to put such guidelines into the stimulus plan.

Obama alone, however, cannot challenge the inapplicable axioms that Congress and the media still assume work as guidelines to policy. Few of these brilliant observers and actors seem to reflect on their immediate surroundings.

Look at Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, or downtown Mumbai. In almost every major city of the world, monstrously tall office buildings dominate the area. Those who work in the millions of offices inside the edifices produce nothing useful for the world – certainly not food or clothing. Yet, the corporate lawyers, brokers, advertisers, accountants, etc. require their space to be heated and or cooled 24/7, 365 days a year. Even if sun and wind energy eventually replaced harmful fossil fuels, one would think that a few visionaries would ask questions about why immense investments should continue to pour into such non-productive entities.

Does President Obama need a “Department of Future Planning and Office of Dealing With the Crisis of Climate Change” to assemble a team of thinkers to put questions to the public and challenge law makers to deal with the overarching crisis that threatens the future of life?

Indicators point instead to him amassing a national security management team to run the empire. Escalating the US military presence in Afghanistan, for example, might well turn the man who admired President Lincoln into a caricature of Emperor Napoleon – but without scoring the initial battlefield victories. If, however, he returns to the humility that characterized many of his campaign speeches and his Inaugural Address, Obama could not only help save this economically depressed nation; he could inspire the world.

Saul Landau received the Bernardo O’Higgins award from the Republic of Chile for his work on human rights. His latest book is A Bush and Botox World (AK/CounterPunch Press).

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont