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SHOULD SCOOTER LIBBY'S LAWYER BE DISBARRED? Law school dean Lawrence Velvel says, Maybe he should, if he sat idly by while client Libby spouted lies. What lies at the core of Zionism? Michael Neumann tortures Alan Dershowitz, without a warrant! "Sex-mad adulterer from British aristocracy claims to have 'revolutionized' philosophy." Yes, Bertrand Russell, they mean you! Alexander Cockburn on Smearing 101 in the British press. Get the answers you're looking for in the subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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November 26 / 27, 2005 Alexander Cockburn November 25, 2005 David Price Brian McKenna Jeff Halper Ray McGovern Leigh Saavedra Ingmar Lee Website of the Day
November 24, 2005 James Petras Bob Shirley Mike Fox Niranjan Ramakrishnan Greg Moses Alexander Cockburn
November 23, 2005 Ramzy Baroud Mike Whitney Stan Cox Linda S. Heard November 22, 2005 Kevin Gray
/ Mike Hersh Ralph Nader Michael Donnelly Mike Ferner Pierre Tristam Marshall Auerback Website of
the Day
November 21, 2005 Mike Marqusee Josh Frank Mike Whitney Norman Solomon Russ Baker Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts
November 19 / 20, 2005 Fred Gardner Rep. Cynthia McKinney Ron Jacobs David Vest J.L. Chestnut,
Jr. John R. Bomar John Ross Phillip Cryan Dave Lindorff Dick J. Reavis Jeremy Scahill Dan Wright John Stanton St. Clair / Vest / Walker Phyllis Pollack Dr. Susan Block Poets Basement
November 18, 2005 Michael Neumann Dave Lindorff Michael Donnelly Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer Don Monkerud Tom Kerr Trish Schuh
November 17, 2005 John Walsh Rep. John Murtha Brian J. Foley CounterPunch
News Service Dave Lindorff Mark T. Harris Cockburn /
St. Clair
November 16, 2005 John F. Sugg Noam Chomsky Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Sam Husseini Pierre Tristam Greg Bates Farrah Hassen Bill Christison Website of
the Day
November 15, 2005 Todd Chretien Leah Caldwell Frederick Hudson Harry Browne Jason Leopold Ingmar Lee Diana Barahona Tom Andre Website of the Weekend
November 14, 2005 Diana Johnstone Paul Craig Roberts Conn Hallinan Joshua Frank Christopher
Reed
November 11 / 13, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gwyneth Leech Elmas Mallo Michael Neumann Saul Landau Sam Husseini Brian Cloughley Ron Jacobs Lila Rajiva Michael Donnelly Joe Allen Roland Sheppard Justin E.H.
Smith Ben Tripp St. Clair /
Vest Poets' Basement Website of
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November 10, 2005 Peterside,
Ogon, Watts and Zalik Pat Williams Steve Higgs Jimmy Massey Lucson Pierre-Charles Anthony Newkirk Lawrence R.
Velvel Website of the Day November 9, 2005 Gary Leupp Tariq Ali Chris Floyd Elaine Cassel Joshua Frank Alison Weir Diana Johnstone
Paul Craig
Roberts Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Jim McGrath David Bloom Stan Goff
November 7, 2005 Dick Reavis Jason Leopold Dave Lindorff Eli Stephens David Swanson M. Junaid Alam Matt Reichel Naima Bouteldja Jeff Halper Website of the Day
November 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Lawrence R.
Velvel Diana Johnstone Roosa / Nevins Niranjan Ramakrishnan John Ross Mike Whitney Mark Engler Juliano Mer-Khamis Ron Jacobs Jill S. Farrell Missy Comley
Beattie Mitchel Cohen Evelyn J. Pringle Reza Fiyouzat Charles Sullivan Zachary Richard Ben Tripp St. Clair / Vest
November 4, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Dave Lindorff Phillip Cryan Christopher Brauchli William S.
Lind Daryl G. Kimball George Beres Peter Montague
November 3, 2005 James Petras Saul Landau Rep. Cynthia McKinney Michael Dickinson Joshua Frank Remi Kanazi Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day
November 2, 2005 Cockburn /
St. Clair Robert Oscar Lopez John Walsh Brian J. Foley Ramzy Baroud M. Junaid Alam Todd Chretien Bruce K. Gagnon Website of the Day
November 1, 2005 Ron Jacobs Gary Leupp John Ross Bill Quigley Joseph Nevins Dave Lindorff Linda S. Heard Heather Gray Michael Dickinson Jeffrey St. Clair
October 31, 2005 Elaine Cassel Mark Weisbrot Mike Whitney Norman Solomon Farooq Sulehria Nicole Colson Madis Senner Paul Craig
Roberts
Cockburn /
St. Clair Peter Linebaugh Tim Wise John Chuckman Steven Higgs Brian Cloughley M. Shahid Alam Nikki Robinson Ralph Nader Joe DeRaymond Joshua Frank Laura Santina Fred Gardner Michael Dickinson Ron Jacobs Dr. Susan Block Vanessa S. Jones Jeffrey St.
Clair Poets' Basement Website of
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October 28, 2005 Jared Bernstein Virginia Tilley Phil Gasper Jennifer Matsui Manual Garcia,
Jr. Monica Benderman Jason Leopold Dave Lindorff
Saul Landau Stuart Hodkinson Ingmar Lee Lila Rajiva Ilan Pappe Niranjan Ramakrishnan Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Cockburn / St. Clair
October 26, 2005 Kathy Kelly Gary Leupp Mike Marqusee Eric Ruder Patrick Cockburn Joshua Frank J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Website of
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October 25, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn Conn Hallinan Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Jackie Corr Robert Day John Sugg
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Christison
October 22 / 23, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Billy Sothern Saul Landau Ralph Nader Behrooz Ghamari Brian Cloughley Diana Barahona Fred Gardner Lee Sustar Patrick Cockburn Laura Carlsen James Petras Joshua Frank Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Michelle Bollinger Missy Comley
Beattie Kona Lowell Ben Tripp Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of
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Dave Lindorff Ray McGovern Jeremy Brecher
/ Patrick Cockburn Kevin Zeese Ross Eisenbrey Randy Shields Justine Davidson After Lucas
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Weekend Edition An Interview with David RoedigerWorking Toward WhitenessBy SETH SANDRONSKY David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled "The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The House I Live In" on November 17 at the Marxist School of Sacramento. After screening this WW II film that stars Frank Sinatra, Roediger discussed what it tells us about the limits of anti-racisms that imagine we can subordinate justice to unity. He connected the film to the themes of his recent book Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White. Roediger's research interests include race and class in the United States, and the history of U.S. radicalism. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, and History against Misery (Charles H. Kerr). Seth: Your area of interest is critical whiteness studies. Please explain the term for those unfamiliar with it. David: The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for explanation. Instead of accepting what James Baldwin called the "lie of whiteness," many people in lots of different fields and movement activities have tried to productively make it into a problem. When did (some) people come to define themselves as white? In what conditions? How does the lie of whiteness get reproduced? What are its costs politically, morally and culturally? Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites. The work of such writers as Baldwin, Cheryl Harris, Ida B. Wells, Américo Paredes, W.E. B. Du Bois, Leslie Silko, and Toni Morrison has deepened such traditions. For radical white writers wishing to forge interracial movements of poor and working people, whiteness has also long been a problem, with Alexander Saxton and Ted Allen making especially full efforts to understand whiteness in order to disillusion whites unable to see past the value of their own skins. Seth: What black author and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called nearly a century ago "the color line" between whites and non-whites remains a force to reckon with in U.S. society. Where does the concept and practice of whiteness fit into this social process? David: At about the same time of the famous "color line" quotation, Du Bois added that what he wonderfully called the idea of "personal whiteness" (Cheryl Harris would similarly refer to "whiteness as property") was not timeless or permanent or even very old. He argued that it had held sway less than 250 years of all human history. That would make it no more than 350 years old now and would place its origins, as Marx did, alongside the primitive accumulation of capital and especially the slave trade and the taking of Indian land. On this view whiteness is both materially rooted and a powerful ideology propping up the order which created it. Seth: Some consider the New Deal era as a kind of golden age for liberalism in the U.S. How did New Deal policies affect the nation's skin color divide? David: As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal -- and one in which it succeeded -- as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe and workers of color in unprecedented ways. The New Deal never rethought the draconian racist immigration restriction policies of the 20s, of course, but its electoral base rested significantly on "ethnic" voters, whose activism was both hemmed in and rewarded by the Democrats. Southern and Eastern Europeans were included as secondary leaders of the new industrial unions, and as entitled citizens qualified for social security, unemployment compensation, and fair labor standards protections, even as workers of color were largely left out of key areas of the welfare state. This was critically true in the case of massive federal subsidies to (white) homeowners through the Home Owners Loan Corporations and the Federal Housing Authority. Seth: Jews and the Irish were seen as non-whites when they first arrived in America. How did their loss of humanity under the market economy connect with their eventual crossover into whiteness? David: In some ways Jews and
the various largely Catholic and often poor European immigrant
groups were "white," as the historian Tom Guglielmo
has recently put it, "on arrival." Where naturalization
law was concerned, for example, ample precedents recognized their
ability to become citizens, a right explicitly resting on their
"whiteness." But they also remained, as Working toward
Whiteness puts it, "on trial" for a harrowingly long
time. This enabled capitalists and petty bosses on the job to
pit various groups against each other not only during periods
of organizing and strikes but every day in hurrying and pushing
and cursing to get out production. The pioneer labor historian
John Commons was not wrong when he wrote around World War One
that exploiting and Seth: The effects of the American Civil War spurred a major "moral impetus" for the U.S. working class, you write, citing Marx. Which writings of his have been most useful in your research and teaching, and why? David: My use of particular parts of Marx's work very much depends on what I am working on. For example, my first book was (with the late Philip Foner) a history of movements for a shorter working day in the United States and it sent me continually back to Capital and especially to Marx's incomparable sections on the hours of labor. In my undergraduate classes I am most apt to assign Marx's very early manuscripts on alienation, often alongside Herman Melville's short stories on labor, and for graduate students I frequently suggest Marx's later writings on ethnology, so brilliantly evoked in Franklin Rosemont's "Karl Marx & the Iroquois." Both of these choices show how passionately Marx hoped for alternatives to the misery of the capitalist order, for new worlds. I'm also very much a partisan of Marx's writings on slavery and the Civil War, especially those on U.S. slavery in relation to both capitalism and misery. Unfortunately, the work of Eugene Genovese, who for a time advertised himself as a Marxist, spread the notion among many U.S. historians that Marxism places slavery outside of the capitalist world and even as an honorable alternative to it. Reading Marx on the U.S. quickly dispels such a view. Seth: You are a Caucasian, male American. Please explain how you became a critic of white-skin privilege. David: I grew up mainly in a "sundown town." Such towns, cities, and suburbs, the subjects of a great new book by James Loewen, threatened to prosecute and/or persecute African Americans who stayed after sundown. The quarry town in Illinois where I grew up had a 6 p.m. whistle to warn off Black visitors, but the whistle was more-or-less superfluous as day and night the town stayed all-white. But I also lived, summers and many weekends in a very different kind of racist town. It was Cairo, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at the southern tip of Illinois. Cairo's civil rights movement matured very late in the 1960s, in conjunction with Black Power. Brutal vigilante and police violence was strongly resisted. As it happened the small Black Catholic parish where I had long attended mass -- I was attracted at first simply because the priest there raced through the service quickly -- became a center of that resistance. I was inspired and ended high school trying -- it only seems odd in retrospect -- to organize student support for the Cairo struggles in the sundown town where I went to school. Seeing early on that racism differed from place to place, and that it could be resisted, mattered a lot. Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace
Action and a co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's
progressive paper. He can be reached at ssandron@hotmail.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.               |
