Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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The Wool Over Our Eyes

A Nation of Sheep

By RICHARD RHAMES

“The Labour proposal is modeled on a compulsory system in America where parents are threatened with jail if children are not immunized.”

“No MMR jab, no school under new plans,” Telegraph, UK, 5/10/08

Against my better judgment, Monday evening last, I attended a local city budget meeting where officials cut about a million dollars from public education next fiscal year. The audience, largely composed of public school staff and advocates applauded the final decision. (The earlier proposed cuts were closer to $2 million.)

It was all quite civil really as such matters often are, here in the land of the allegedly “free” and “brave.” Well behind most of the developed world by many reasonable measures of civilized life and civic engagement, the US population has apparently been effectively neutered and now more or less serenely accepts each new application of the lash administered by those above them in the reigning political/economic order.The resolutely grasping pay-or-die American medical profit machine leaves 47 million people without medical insurance annually, and kills a minimum 18,000 of these uninsured each year. Yet the public, despite occasional squeaks of mild objection, placidly tolerates the steadily mounting body count.

Ralph Nader, in a recent article, (CounterPunch, 5/6/08) cites a Wall Street Journal piece detailing the sad story of one Lisa Kelly, afflicted with both leukemia and “limited insurance.”Shackled to a health care system rated only 37th in the world, that makes for a grim prognosis. Nader mentions the reaction of a “Dutch visitor” who, when shown the WSJ article “blurted in anger -- ‘you are a nation of sheep.’”

Yes, people in civilized countries are often shocked by the US public’s acquiescence in routine totalitarian cruelties and usurpations practiced here. And when pieces of The American Way are floated for implementation overseas, the democratic reaction is worthy of note. Uppity and free publics resist such crap.

As noted recently in this space, Britain’s Labour party got badly beaten in the May Day election, largely because they tried to squeeze and punish their base (as the Democratic party does here).Now, as Labour readies for parliamentary elections, it appears that part of their “health manifesto” may propose compelling primary schools “to demand proof that pupils have had a full range of jabs -- including measles, mumps and rubella -- before allowing them to register.” (Telegraph, UK)

Here, such a policy has smoothed the way for routine mercury-laced vaccine injection of pregnant mothers, newborns and pre-schoolers. It is apparently linked with the current epidemic of autism in the young which now dwarfs the polio “epidemics” of the 40s and 50s in scope.

But Britain’s rascal public isn’t particularly receptive. Dr. Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association told the Telegraph that mandating forced vaccination was “morally and ethically dubious” and would march the nation “beyond the nanny state to a police state.”Meldrum deplored the proposal as “a Stalinist approach” which would likely “backfire on an unprecedented scale, and...increase opposition to vaccination.” Based on current “jab” rates it’s projected that nearly 100,000 kids would be barred from British schools.

Jackie Fletcher, speaking for the parent support group Jabs, protested, “This is scandalous. Parents will fight it tooth and nail. To bully families by threatening children’s schooling is appalling.”

In March, before May’s electoral thumping the Labour government also floated the idea of mandating a pledge of national “allegiance” for schoolchildren. The International Herald Tribune quoted Welsh Labour MP Paul Flynn: “It’s a non-starter. It will rank as one of the more foolish government proposals...I’ve seen newspaper polls showing the support is zero. And it will upset the 2.5 million republicans in this country.”

Flynn characterized the idea of pledging allegiance to Britain “a weak attempt to copy the American practice” which “does not reflect the reality of the United Kingdom.”On March 12, the BBC published a few cheeky draft “pledges” penned by the apparently underwhelmed and insurgent citizenry.

Kiltie Jackson suggested: “I pledge my oath of allegiance to my Queen and my country. I promise to watch all reality TV and to emulate those who are put before us as examples of fine citizens. I will honour all sporting figures and raise them upon pedestals until such times as they make an error where upon I will pillory them and mock them to the ends of the earth.

As an upstanding member of British society I vow to claim as much social benefit as possible to ensure that my binge drinking does not sink to sub-standard levels. But most importantly, and over everything else, I swear that I will not take myself, or my country, too seriously because I am proud to be British and that is how we do it.”Steven Jones: “I'm not British, English or anything other than human, I belong to one race - the human race, I worship no god, and kneel before no false monarch, I'm a free human and shall do what I please with no regard to the laws set in place by the Roman usurpers that invaded our shores.”

Darren Maxwell suggests something almost American-ish -- until the subversive bit at the end: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Constitution and its laws, one Nation, with liberty justice and equality for all.”In the US, of course, we’ve fallen into a herd mentality. We wait eagerly for the new-told lie: Who to hate, who to kill, which brand to buy, which corporate lackey to support. We offer up our children to injection, indoctrination, technical training, and cut-rate preparation for cog-in-the-wheeldom.We lay waste to other lands while ours rusts, and tumbles to ruin. We stoically arrange voluntarist “walks” and bake sales for the sick and dying.We graze. We lift our heads.Here comes the herdsman.

What’s that in his hand?

Richard Rhames lives in Biddeford, Maine. He can be reached at: rrhames@xpressamerica.net

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