Today's Stories

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

December 1, 2008

Alchemists of Resentment

The Fires in South Asia

By VIJAY PRASHAD

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world would be in such tumult over so little that is understood. Unimaginable violence, most of it for triumphs that are obscure. Politics buried so deep in their actions, that the motives disappear in the flames, and the suffering itself becomes the end.  Aerial bombardment of entire countries, cold-blooded massacre of citizenries. Armies set in place to hold people down, and themselves held down by their inexperience and bewilderment. Populations motivated for revenge rather than for revolution, harmed beyond belief and then diverted from their oppressors to take their justice where it comes. A cheapened world, where values are given over to pieties, and tears quickly dry into the very rage that created them in the first place. Time is circular: this is the myth of eternal return, with the avenging angel appearing once as Demon, then Angel, then Demon again. This is our cauldron.

* * *

Aye dil he mushkil jeena yahan
Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
[O heart, living here is difficult,
Be alert, be crafty, this is Bombay, my love.]
Majrooh Sultanpuri, “CID.”

So many bombs over Bombay! The ten men came out of the dark waters, walked past the Gateway of India and created mayhem in the hotels and restaurants, Jewish Center and rail station, and in the hearts of a city. But these men are only the latest installment. The line of culprits who have gone after this city is long: flagitious politicians and their feral goons, depraved gangsters of Dalal Street and of the Underworld. They have produced a gallimaufry of disorder and despair. This is the context for the current violence. Bombay is not virginal. It is experienced. But this violence has struck at the heart of the enclave of the elite. When they say that this is Mumbai’s 911, it is true. This is an attack into the heart of the zones of comfort in Indian cities. Other dates resonate in other neighborhoods. Some of them refer to events forgotten or unresolved: killers remain at large, justice remains unfulfilled. Almost a thousand people died in the riots of 1992-1993. They died in places like Dharavi and Pydhonie. Two hundred thousand Muslims fled the city in its aftermath. Three hard right functionaries went to prison in 2008 for one year. In 1993, car and suitcase bombs in hotels and in the stock market killed 257 people. The culprits were linked to a former Bombay gangster, D-Company boss Dawood Ibrahim, who is believed to live between Dubai and Karachi. One hundred people have been convicted of this crime, several given the death penalty. From there the bomb blasts have escalated: 2002, 2003, 2006, and now 2008.

Outside Bombay, in the countryside and in the smaller towns, violence has also become commonplace. Time bombs on a short fuse were left across the agrarian belt of Vidharbha; agricultural polices destined to create distress forced thousands of farmers to suicide. Agricultural failures and deindustrialization created a footloose population, a pool of labor that is on the move, destined to a nomadic life. Random murder on the byways provides work for the actuaries of the morgues, but little remorse from the system. Some of the dead are women, many on the road to Bombay’s red light area, Kamathipura.

Bombings have their rituals. When blasts rocked a Muslim neighborhood in Malegaon, a city northeast of Mumbai, the authorities followed a by now familiar script. They initially blamed the matter on the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a group formed in 1977 and banned by the government in 2002. I remember meeting two activists of SIMI about fifteen years ago; they were young men, with remorseful eyes, angered beyond belief by the destruction of a 16th century mosque in the town of Ayodhya, driven by frustrations that had no outlet. Their organization had little of the expansive ability to bring these young men into a politics of national transformation. Their politics was governed by a sense of loss. The investigative agencies determined that the three they arrested (Noor-ul-Hooda, Shabeer Batterywala and Raees Ahmed) were not only with SIMI, but also with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba. The Lashkar is one of those organizations that emerged in 1991 out of the detritus of the Afghan jihad (it was formed in Kunar province). Carter’s Brzezinski vowed to “sow shit in the Soviet backyard.” His Afghan toilet overflowed into South Asia.  The Lashkar is the armed unit of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, centered in a seminary at Muridke, Pakistan. It is a particularly repellent organization that feeds on the unsettled conflict in Kashmir. But some careful investigation by the government found, two years later, that the culprits were neither SIMI nor the Lashkar, but a group of hardened activists with histories in the hard right Hindu organizations, such as the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal. One is a monk (Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur) and another is a military officer (Lt. Col. S. P. Purohit). These activists of Abhinav Bharat came to trial on November 24, 2008, shortly before the Mumbai attacks. One of those careful investigators was Hemant Karkare. He died in the recent attacks, in the line of duty.

Abhinav Bharat, Lashkar-e-Toiba, one deriving its sustenance from Hinduism, another from Islam. They are the children of States that have failed to deliver on social development, and which have since given up on the agenda of equality to throw themselves into a celebration of upward mobility and spectacular consumerism. The Abhinav Bharat and its parent groups sustain themselves on hatred of Muslims and of Pakistan, on the cultivation of fear about Islam and of its assaults on the Hindus. The Lashkar and its various kin thrive on hatred of Hindus and of India, and harvest young people who feel threatened by India and angered by their shallow understanding of the Kashmir conflict. In October 2008, the Lashkar’s leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, told his lieutenants, “The only language India understands is that of force, and that is the language it must be talked to in.” This could have come out of the mouth of the VHP’s Pravin Togadia (and this is what he did say, “If our government is ready to finish Pakistan, we are ready to wait”). The Lashkar’s animosity toward India often spills over to its hatred for the leadership in Pakistan (responsibility for the September 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriott that killed 54 might lie at the entrance to the Lashkar’s seminary). After the 2005 earthquake that crushed the Pakistani side of the Kashmir mountains, Saeed blamed the Pakistani leadership, “They blatantly ridiculed the commandments of Allah. Thus they invited the wrath of God in the form of the earthquake.” Mirror images of each other, the VHP and the Lashkar offer nothing for the future, but boil the resentments of selected parts of the population, to artificially hasten their hope for change with promises of martyrdom and paradise. These are the alchemists of resentment, who use bombs and swords, guns and axes to do their magic for them. There is no development of the protracted struggle to change the conditions of the present, only the irrational commitment to fleeting acts of terrible violence. Terror in saffron robes or draped in green flags has absolute contempt for the desperate needs of people who are increasingly abandoned by the policies that bring homelessness and hunger to the hundreds of millions.

* * *

The evil that I do, I understand full well.
But a passion drives me greater than my will.
Euripides, “Medea.”

In December 1992, I was near Seelampur, in Delhi, which was in the midst of a riot. I was studying the process by which oppressed castes enter such conflagrations on the side of oppressor castes who otherwise disdain them. Silence, screams, gunfire, silence: this was the sound track of the riot. I was in a temple consecrated to the sage Valmiki, revered by an oppressed caste, the Balmikis. By nightfall, the empty temple opened its doors to young boys who were sweaty with excitement and bloodshed. These were the shock troops of the riot. We spent the night in the courtyard of the temple. They were boys, not men, filled with the kinds of cheap jokes and anxieties of teenagers. Their eyes sparkled and then became cold in an instant, for these were not just any boys. They had killed and seen their friends die. The oldest of the lot shook incessantly, filled with longing for the heroin that his aged mother brought to him, breaking the curfew that he was too scared to risk. The bile of these boys had been somehow harnessed to the lusts of older men, who had agendas unclear to those who held the guns for them. In my diary I wrote that this bespoke an end to politics. They acted politically, and with political effect, but they themselves had little political vision. They were motivated by an endless cycle of revenge and bitterness; the present was given over to the past. There was no future in this.

* * *

Disoriented, like a musth elephant, the State seeks easy solutions: more draconian legislation, more fiery rhetoric, and more warmongering. The Congress-led Government is pushed from the Right by the BJP, who seem to want an instant attack on Pakistan, a sort of Bush reaction to 911. Those in the government in charge of intelligence and security have been sacked. Discussions are in process for how to move forward. The Communists caution against hasty action, and have urged the government to make a motion to the UN rather than to the Indian Air Force. The Pakistani Worker Communist Party sends its condolences and says, “Crimes of such barbarity must make people realize that the moment has arrived for the people of both India and Pakistan to develop a unified commitment towards peace and harmony in the world and to combat extremism and terrorism in all its shades and colors.” The call for unity seems remote in these times, and yet, utterly necessary. Hopes slumber even in those who take aim for the debauched. More blood feeds the beast; it is food, shelter and conviviality that transform it into a neighbor.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu 

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