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

Love America or We'll Kill You

Open Season

By RICHARD RHAMES

Many years ago, after graduating from college and spending a year learning from a wonderful group of third graders at Biddeford’s Kennedy school, I took a position on the 3rd shift at a local electronic components factory. My brief career in public education was effectively over, though I didn’t actually know it yet.

Like many young men of that time I had become classified as 1-A by the local draft board. That meant that I could be yanked away and set to work killing Vietnamese people in great numbers. They called such spilling of blood “serving my country.” They still call it that. Only the killees have changed.

During that contentious year, the board and I discussed whether or not they would put me in jail. It was quite unpleasant.

Popular opinion had turned substantially against the Vietnam invasion/occupation by then with polls showing the public opposed to the project as “morally wrong” and “not a mistake.” But the press and the political class were dug in. Just like today, they were very reluctant to condemn the imperial thrust. It’s commonly alleged that the congress and the media were then filled with leftist “peaceniks.” Today’s school kids are taught that the evening news was filled with gory footage, “bringing the war into people’s living rooms.”

Closer to reality is Michael Arlen’s assessment of the coverage: “A nightly stylized, generally distanced overview of a disjointed conflict which was composed mainly of scenes of helicopters landing, tall grasses blowing in the helicopter wind, American soldiers fanning out across a hillside on foot, rifles at the ready, with now and then (on the soundtrack) a far-off ping or two, and now and then (as the visual grand finale) a column of dark, billowing smoke a half mile away, invariably described as a burning Viet-cong ammo dump.”

John MacArthur’s " Second Front " notes that despite the current hallucination of a 60s media establishment wild with anti-war hysteria, in 1967 a Newsweek poll “found 67 percent of viewers surveyed stating that television coverage had increased their inclination toward ‘backing up the boys in Vietnam.’ ”

Just as today’s barbaric wars of aggression are presented as noble efforts ---partly defensive, partly altruistic “democracy promotion” / “nation building”--- the problems stemming merely from “mistakes” made in advancing an honorable cause, so was the Vietnam “police action” presented as a difficult struggle based on the purest of motives. The “dinks,” and the “slopes,” and the “gooks” were seen as lower forms of life who needed our intervention, just like the “hagis” and “ragheads” of today. To suggest otherwise was to be un-American.

It’s quite remarkable how little has changed, or perhaps, how far we’ve regressed. Looking back, I remember a particular night in the component plant’s break room. I was one of the first male employees at this place. The lunch tables were always packed with women. I often sat next to a grandmotherly type of gentle and supportive demeanor. We often talked. But when, on one occasion the conversation turned to Vietnam, she revealed an unexpectedly hard edge. I was lamenting the bombing and the great loss of civilian life among the peasantry. But she brought me up short. “What good are they anyway?” she challenged.

I’m no longer surprised by such blunt expressions of racist solidarity in the imperial project. But I was younger then, and naive.

That said, however, it’s still somewhat overwhelming; the ease with which the public can be whipped up to venomous rage against whatever enemy-du-jour the political class deems it expedient to attack.

The right wing has now seized power, over only the most pitiful objections from tepid centrists called “liberals.” The resulting numbskull name-calling coarsens a squalid exchange of “talking points” that now passes for “debate.”

People that the right wing theocrats don’t like usually get labeled as un-American. It’s long been understood locally that I am an un-American. “Communist” used to be good enough, but then, my stated lack of enthusiasm for murdering Iraqi children gained me the “Osama” label. This is what standing up for labor rights and against state terrorism gets you these days.

Now even spineless corporate tools like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are being tagged as un-American by the hysterical right. Using the same kind of voodoo calculus that for years pegged Maine as having nearly the highest “tax burden” in the nation (not true they lately admit, but so what?), the Republican attack machine now alleges that Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. He’s supposed to be some kind of left fringe dweller.

Fun fact: The financial sector has donated more money to Comrade Obama than to Field Marshall McCain. He has been auditioning for them for years and they understand that he poses no threat to their continued supremacy.

Now comes news that someone’s erected an 8-by-12 foot sign on Route 101 up in New Gloucester (Maine) picturing a young McCain in his flight suit, all set to bomb civilians and power plants in Vietnam. Next to the “Retired Captain” the sign depicts a turbaned “Barack Hussein Obama” labeled “No US Military Service.” Press accounts note that the aim of the sign is to promote McCain as “more American” than his rival in the race for Commander in Chief.

Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) has called for investigations into who’s anti-American and who isn’t. “Most Americans are wild about America,” she says. Sure we’re deindustrialized, downwardly mobile, and distracted. But we’re very well armed. So watch out what you say. “We” know where you live.

In my case, there’s not far to go and not much investigation needed. People like me who’ve advocated for majority rule, economic rights for all, and less state terror are clearly un(or anti)-American.

Guess it may soon be open season.

Richard Rhames is a dirt-farmer in Biddeford, Maine (just north of the Kennebunkport town line). He can be reached at: rrhames@xpressamerica.net

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