Today's Stories

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar
A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

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

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

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?

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

March 24, 2009

Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Obama and Cuba

By ROBERT SANDELS

Is it too early to consider President Barrack Obama the eleventh president to not get it? Is it too early to pronounce his Cuba policy a failure?  Some think so because of the timid reforms he signed into law March 11. Others are expecting major policy changes at next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, so what the new legislation says does not matter much. What seems clear is that the Obama administration wants to distance itself from Congress' tentative stab at reform through amendments to the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, by portraying it as leftover Bush business while keeping his foreign policy apparatus silent on the matter.

The Cuban portions of the spending bill were expected to make good on Obama's campaign promise to lift the 2004 restrictions on travel by US citizens and residents to visit relatives in Cuba. The legislation does not do that but instead suspends enforcement.

Bush reduced allowed trips from once a year to once every three years, cut allowable travel expenditures while in Cuba and imposed new rules on gift packages, among other things. The gift rules were the stuff of late-night TV humor. Under those rules, it was illegal to send gift packages containing soap, fishing rods and underwear. Was the idea that unwashed Cubans unable to fish in their underwear would undermine communism in Cuba?

Some of these lunatic slices of foreign policy are now rectified in the Omnibus bill, which prevents the Treasury Department from using federal funds to enforce the 2004 family travel rules, restrictions on business travel to Cuba and a 2005 Bush rule forcing Cuba to pay cash in advance for food and medicine imports from the United States. All the Cuba portions of the bill expire when the spending bill itself expires at the end of the fiscal year in October.  Non-enforcement of these rules does not void them.

Congress moves but not far

To put these changes into perspective, it should be noted that Congress often made more progressive efforts on these issues when it was under Republican control than it does today under Democratic leadership. In 2000, the House approved an amendment on travel more extensive than the current one when it voted to block the use of federal funds to prevent US citizens - not just those with relatives in Cuba - from traveling to the island. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) stripped the offending amendment from the bill.

If the current Congress had been equally serious about lifting these travel restrictions it might have considered dismantling the Treasury Department's currency controls. When the Reagan administration renewed the government assault on travel in 1982, it successfully argued before the Supreme Court that its actions were justified due to the exigencies of the Cold War, in which Cuba was regarded as a player and an enemy. The court ruled in 1984, that there was "an adequate basis . to sustain the President's decision to curtail, by restricting travel, the flow of hard currency to Cuba that could be used in support of Cuban adventurism."

Twenty five years later this seems a pathetically antique justification. There being no Cold War, it would seem plausible for Congress to argue that there is no longer a basis for such restrictions.

Geithner sets Cuba policy for now

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is, for the moment, the lead actor on Cuba.  That's because the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is under his jurisdiction. It is an administrative agency with great power to set policy by interpreting and managing the economic blockade (embargo) against Cuba. Only recently, OFAC announced punishment for a US branch of the French dairy company Lactalis for money transactions with the island. OFAC is run by Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, a Bush appointee whom Geithner has retained. OFAC began legal action against the company in the waning days of the Bush administration, but this is the first such enforcement action under Obama/Geithner/Levey.

Congress' preference for minimalist reforms through the Omnibus bill was matched by the Obama administration's preference for minimizing the minimal. Consistent with congressional wishes, OFAC issued generous guidelines on the politically safe issue of family travel but effectively "stripped" the trade-related portions of the bill in a way Tom DeLay would probably have approved.

To help congressional leaders achieve passage of the bill, Geithner wrote to Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) on March 5 and 9, assuring them that the trade-related sections would be narrowly interpreted or even ignored. He promised to gum up business travel with bureaucratic impediments that he did not impose on licenses for family travel.

"Any business using the general [travel] license," Geithner wrote the senators, "would be required to provide both advance written notice outlining the purpose and scope of the planned travel, and, upon return, a report outlining the activities conducted, including the persons with whom they met, the expenses incurred, and business conducted in Cuba."

As for the cash-in-advance rule, Geithner assured the senators, "Treasury believes that this change likely will have no influence on current financing rules." He reminded the senators that  the words "cash in advance" in the 2005 rule also appear in the original legislation permitting exports of food and medicine to Cuba (the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000).  Since the Omnibus bill did not "modify or negate the statutory requirement in the 2000 Act, exporters will still be required to receive payment in advance of shipment and will not be permitted to export to Cuba on credit other than through third-country banks."

This bit of Treasury Department casuistry effectively gutted the cash-in-advance section of the bill and is reflected in the subsequent OFAC guidelines issued March 11.

Administration pleads ignorance

A reporter asked White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs if Geithner's letter did not amount to a signing statement to alter the intent of Congress, a practice so beloved by Bush and denounced by candidate Obama. Gibbs inarticulated this reply:

"Well, I mean, Jake, there's obviously, as you know, there's interpretations -- interpretations of what different provisions in each bill mean and those interpretations obviously are active -- it's like a presidential signing statement, except it's not the President and it's not a signing statement."

Gibbs referred the questioner to the Treasury Department for help on divining the letter's intent.

Over at the State Department, where foreign policy is supposed to be formulated, Acting Spokesman Robert Wood referred a reporter to Geithner on a similar question:

"QUESTION: And you don't know specifically what this - what the cut in funding for Cuba to enforce Cuba restrictions does to the restrictions that are in place?"

"MR. WOOD: No, but I think with regard to the Cuba portion of that, I'd probably refer you to Treasury, because Treasury can give you more specifics with regard to, you know, what can and can't happen under sanctions."

Press reports on the letter suggest that if the White House did not know what Geithner meant, Nelson and Martinez well understand him. Martinez said he interpreted the letter to mean, "the White House intends to reissue a regulation that will be very similar, requiring cash be paid before it the shipment goes."

Nor were many of the senators who voted for the bill in doubt about Geithner's intent. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and 14 colleagues, including some Republicans, wrote to Geithner on March 17, asking for clarification of his letter and describing it as "contrary to the intention" of the bill to end the Bush interpretation of regulations.

There is the appearance of congressional disingenuousness in all of this because of an obvious lack of serious purpose on the part of the bill's architects.  If the idea was to end family travel restrictions, why was the legislation put in a spending bill that expires in six months and that encourages trips to Cuba that would still be illegal?  And if Sen. Baucus and friends wanted to end cash in advance, why did they not remove the requirement from the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, or do what a previous Congress tried to do in 2003 by allowing private funding for Cuban imports? The most direct way to permanently end these restrictions is to excise them from the Helms-Burton and other blockade legislation.

Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar - a Republican - issued a report in February prepared by the Republican minority staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that examines the failure of US Cuba policy and lays out a moderate plan for methodically dismantling the blockade.10

The murky history of the Cuba elements in the spending bill may only indicate that perhaps Cuba and the rest of Latin America are just not much of a priority right now and that at the April Summit of the Americas, Obama will propose deep policy changes. But for now, Obama seems to regard the Cuba reforms in the spending bill as Congress' business. In Geithner's March 9 letter reassuring senators that nothing really very bad was going to happen, he was careful to write this disclaimer: "As you know, the Obama Administration had nothing to do with these or any other provisions of that bill."

As to what Obama's intentions are, all is not clear. No, wait. One thing is emerging with some clarity. Obama and his foreign policy team have played no noticeable role in setting an agenda on Cuba. Instead of reacting to specifics about the Omnibus bill's limited and transitory policy tweaks, both Clinton and Geithner have implied that more serious changes are ahead as the administration reviews Cuba policy. Except for pro forma remarks at her confirmation hearings about promoting democracy in Cuba, Clinton has not entered the debate. This explains why Gibbs and Woods deflected questions about the Cuba issues and why on a number of questions posed about Latin America recently, administration spokespersons have been reticent or mute.

If by identifying the Omnibus bill with the era of the departed Bush, Obama signals that he wants to start afresh on Cuba policy, one has to ask how fresh can you be if your ideas about Cuba are based on the tired clichés of the past, such as this from one of Geithner's letters:"We are currently reviewing United States policy toward Cuba to determine the best way to foster democratic change in Cuba and improve the lives of the Cuban  people."

In his elusive search for bipartisanship, Obama may well consider the Lugar report, which has the distinction of challenging foreign policy stupidity head-on instead of making excuses for it. The report repeats many of the same questionable assumptions about Cuba and myths about US intentions that have sustained that failed policy for 47 years, but that should be no barrier to taking the report's roadmap seriously.

Robert Sandels is a specialist on Latin America and a historian by training. He wrote this essay for CounterPunch and Cuba-L Direct.

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