Today's Stories

October 24 / 26, 2008

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

Weekend Edition
October 24 / 26, 2008

The Americans, Redux
BY ROBERT GIBBONS

Livid, really, stepping out the car in the distant parking lot hoping to get some fresh air & exercise, only to find the person next to me still in her car, window cracked open, plastic plate of leftover buffet salad laid on the ground next to a still-lit discarded butt, the incendiary poison of which like a Sarah Palin speech reached into my nostrils, which I spewed out fast like a dragon with a curse. I tried to shake it off, walked a bit, but looked around at cars that didn’t give the right-of-way at the crosswalk, crass indifference of them all, sudden economic electoral priority as opposed to opposing an unjust war, we latter-day Germans. Don’t tell me that bothers you! I heard Palin today quote Joe the Plumber that Obama wants to redistribute wealth, that Biden claims paying taxes is patriotic. Which all adds up to her as “Socialism.” I’m a poet with a limited amount of foresight, almost as limited as fellow Man/Woman, but endowed with intuitive cane Brailing streets, sidewalks, & listening hard. For some reason the great American poet, Charles Olson, has been on my mind today since early morning. (In fact, I solicited work this morning from his archive in Connecticut for the literary journal I edit.) On my way home I wanted to say something generally nasty about the way Americans smell, as a way of distinguishing them from more civilized societies, but didn’t have either balls, or wherewithal. However, as soon as I got home I opened randomly to Olson’s book, Archaeologist of Morning, published posthumously less than a year after his death, first to a poem called, “Love,” & second, to “The Americans,” why the social stinks/-and each American stinks-/ is that it is an inadequate/ number of cells they are…/ they aren’t cooked/ and ruled by information. The next poem is untitled, but reads: turn now and rise/ Wrest the matter into your own/ hands-and Nature’s laws.

ROBERT GIBBONS is the fiction/poetry editor of the literary journal, Janus Head.

Contained in Denver -- August 2008
BY PAULETTE SWARTZFAGER

“You won’t be here long,” says the flak jacket to the t-shirts.

Here there is no Rocky Mountain sky,
just chain links ground into this warehouse floor,
a shiny silver web
to hold their tongues.

Have to move them every half hour to another pen
tied at the ankles
just in case one tries to run.

Have to hold the young in this warehouse
preserved in refrigerated pens
must be 50 degrees they say
enough to keep the tender meat cold

Have to keep them from chairs
or beds
or blankets
or phone calls home.

Here they watch brown paper bags fall one by one
emptied of the lunches
crumpled
tossed into corners
leaves blown by an unexpected wind
against chain link fences.

One young woman in shorts and a pink camisole
gathers paper from the floor
folds and tears,
tries to weave a shirt
a blanket for her brother
a pillow for her friend
a cloth to wipe away pepper spray.

She has no thread no glue no pattern.

She remembers once in lower school
a pure white sheet she folded into a crane
She made it fly out the window
thought it could fly around the world and back.

She reaches for a wrinkled brown bag
smoothes it against the concrete floor
begins to fold.

(This poem is based on interviews I did in Denver on August 27th with protestors detained in the Denver cages, particularly with a brother and sister. Their story is supported by Claire Martin’s own published testimony: "Then I was taken to another area, loaded onto a bus that took us to a warehouse in a Denver industrial park. … they assigned us to different chain-link cages, maybe 15 feet by 15 feet, all chain link, with a padlock. Between 10 and 20 of us were in one of those cages…"They pumped in cold air, in these big white tubes, all night and all day the next day. It was freezing in there. I was lucky; I had a jacket, but other people were in shorts and T-shirts. We asked them to turn off the cold air, but they didn't. "Eventually they put all of us in metal leg shackles, and re-handcuffed us in pairs, with our right hands together-right hand to right hand - so it was difficult to move. "They gave us sandwiches - baloney or peanut butter and jelly, and there was water in a big jug in each cage. "We were utterly confused…”)

PAULETTE SWARTFAGER is a poet, freelance journalist, and activist originally from New Orleans, who moved to Rochester, New York after Hurricane Katrina. In Denver, she worked with Colorado Indymedia and the legal defense teams documenting arrests and protests during the Democrat National Convention 2008. Paulette can be reached at pmsgsla@rit.edu.

Half-life times forever
BY DOUG PAYNE

In the scheme of it
they were a tricky lot
came up with
some notable stuff –
atom splitting
vacuum cleaners
lying –
mostly they were
headlong and inflated
and left behind
incalculable waste –
half-life times forever –
the most enduring thing
about them

DOUG PAYNE lives in the Adirondacks, good a place as any to sort out the competing fictions, and can be reached at paynedoug@aol.com.

Editorial Note: Submit your poems as a word document to CounterPunch's poetry editor, Kimberly Willson at: willsons53@gmail.com

Please submit your poetry by Tuesday in order to be considered for the CounterPunch Weekend Edition of the Poets Basement. The Weekend Edition will now run on Fridays instead of Saturdays. Make sure that you include a biographical sketch with your submissions.

Kimberly does not archive poetry nor biographical sketches. (At the very least, tell us where you are from and how you can be reached through CP’s Poets Basement). Thanks!

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