Today's Stories

March 27-29, 2009

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

March 24, 2009

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

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

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

Weekend Edition
March 27-29, 2009

Can You Feel It?

Against Democracy

By DAVID KER THOMSON

Democracy is the problem, not the solution. 

Parliamentary democracy and capitalism are the two major distancing mechanisms in the practical ontology of the West. These are the two ways of collective being, both of which find their meaning in being elsewhere. 

Capitalism has been devastating the earth for centuries, but there is another sense in which we have not even had capitalism until now—the now of a curiously refined finance capital which comes ever more comfortably into its own precisely to the extent that its meaning is dissipated along a thousand plateaus of abstraction, of not being amongst its own. 

You can feel this with an object as simple as a cash machine.  Is there not something weirdly literary about thrusting that smoothly inscrutable text of plastic into its slot and sensing the action resonate outward into its global contexts?  The evocations are anthemic, legion, a multitude.  Standing there on the sidewalk at Yonge and St. Claire, you touch the world.  The brute fact of a lined rectangle coupling impossibly with the numinous, what English teacher has not been here before?  Your interaction with the machine cannot fully signify without its various residues—something of Calcutta or Kerala and of China and of Fort Knox, for example, but there is no end to the murmur of global whispers presaging that deliciously strangled little ten-note fanfare like a leprechaun’s trombone when the bills come popping out.

As my seven-year-old walked by and watched me type that last line, he told me what I’d forgotten, that I’d urged him to memorize that funny sound so that he could remember it later in life.  What had I been thinking?  That he could shore up against the ruins with it, or that it was the ruins?

Money abstracts us.  We are not ourselves, but a series of representations.  There is no taxation without representation, and we are forever taxed, and so find ourselves spoken for—represented—elsewhere.

Of the ruinous potential of capital there is no lack of criers, but who speaks against democracy?  The problem with democracy is not that it represents us badly, but that it represents us at all.  The cluster of unsavory politicians with which we are asked to identify is not a bit of bad luck, but the likeliest outcome of our concession to spectacle, of letting ourselves be, elsewhere.  Democracy’s real force is corporatist, not because people are too stupid to understand that lobbyists perform an end run on representation, but because capital and democracy are manifestations of the same ontological dislocation.  Which isn’t to say that the freak value of watching ourselves consent to sleeping with some truly dreadful characters isn’t part of the morbid thrill of self destruction.  I found a rat in the basement the other night.

* *  *

Oh, that rat.  I wrote those lines above a year ago, on the way to speak at a philosophy conference to which some York grad students had invited me.  How much has changed in that year, and how little.  Capital in crisis!  Canadian capital!  But capital was born in crisis, and thrives on it.  And even capital’s critique was born in crisis.  1848!  Marx!  And that rat.  I know just where I was going with that rat.  Nowhere.  I’ll be hearing from readers on that one, murmurs of corroboration, no doubt.  York fell apart this year, everyone’s saying, riven by strikes.  And my friends in high places in the universities in this neck of the woods, with their hints of jobs, now they’re turning their palms up.  The crisis.  What can you do?  Just when I was getting myself ready to be sorely tempted by mammon, and to remind myself not to say things like, “the whole administrative class of the universities should disband itself,” suddenly it’s no mammon for old Dave.  Things are shaping up nicely for Michael Dickinson’s world-wide strike against money at the lighting of the Olympic flame in 2012.  And Liam’s eight, when he was seven as recently as a year ago.  One side of my brain is perpetually astonished by this magic trick, and sometimes colludes with the other side for a general riot of befuddlement.

And that rat.  Just one of a group of characters I often meet in a series of adventures with which I hope to tax my readers on a future occasion, when we will be less or more in crisis, as the Tao rises or falls.  The series, Travels in my Basement, tenders the claim that this rat here is more important than the whole executive branch of a distant empire, according to a principle designated by the philosophers as an attribute of this rat, and perhaps of all rats.  The principle of here-ness.  Not a pretty word.  A drone and a hiss.  But if it’s going nowhere you want to talk about, it gets the job done.  Stay tuned.

Here at City without Cars, or whatever face of nowtopia we are these days, we are not at all progressive.  We do not, for example, hope that one day the politician fools will grant us a city of green electric cars running on the new clean nuclear and the new clean West Virginia mountaintop removal.  We have no intention of cleaning up the empire.  We have already chosen our lives.  Our relationship to democracy is one of abutment and juxtaposition.  Contiguity, if you will.  We are right up against the democratists, right snug up against them.  We are against democracy.

Opposition is a kind of touch.

Because what we are is what we are right here, our form and our content know where to find each other.  We go just where our critics say we go: nowhere.  And when they say, you said it, pal, we feel their speech as much as we hear it, here it.  That’s how close we are.  We function at the level of form.  Because we are close not just to ourselves, but to the democratists, like it or not, we feel each of their distancings.  We brace ourselves in the midst of their hurlings, their castings about and abroad.  When they lesserevil the empire, we feel it right here.  When they dismiss themselves, send themselves in effigy to the empire, instruct a lesser evil to perform an antic version of their best intentions, we are right here in the midst of their struggle.

And what else would we feel in this stethoscopic claustrophobic life but abandoned?  Pressed in tight against democracy, we feel the eternal procession of the self away from the self, the inaugural and formative instinct of the Western manchild to endlessly rehearse his abandonment as self-abandonment.  Womanchild, her, abandonment.  When the democratists hurt, and they always hurt, we feel it here.  Come on, put your hand right here.  That’s the pain.  That’s the rent in the curtain of Oz, that’s the scream of the abandoned child.  That’s me in the corner, losing my religion.  It’s always rapture day, and we’ve all been left behind.

This rubber sheath here on the keyboard.  For when Liam spills milk.  Yeah?  But my family has gone off to America for a few days, off over the pewter lake and away.  Rapture day.  I have forgotten how to travel, even vicariously.  So I spill myself onto the sheath, the whole of my self welling up and disgorged onto the rectangular sheath, all the sadness and loneliness of a stay-at-home father.  Lonely empty-nested man, loved his babies too much.  For eight years, thirteen years, whole year-long booster versions of his children have been breaking off and spinning backwards into spacetime.  How do you keep up?  These wondrous consolation prizes every year, strange children on the doorstep, beautiful, prickly sweet.  “I’m a level eight human,” Liam informs me, “and a level four gnome.”  He tries to keep me abreast of things.  But the disappearances and appearances never quite add up, the way an appearance is not quite the same as an apparition.  Perhaps it is not addition, but multiplication.  I must consult new registers, learn to move more quickly.

I will seep today, and not howl.  But I have known the first letter in the primer of self-awareness, the appley a of knowledge that stands for abandonment, the beginning of all things.  I will be out in the city today, feeling the vinous veinous thrust of blood, the apple-red circulation of democracy, its carnal knowledge without wisdom.  I will be fondling quarter panels, admiring the skin of our pods of isolation.  I will be pulsing, skittering, hailing my fellows of the street.  I will be so close to democracy you won’t be able to see sunlight in there.  I am in a tetchy, weepy, expansive mood, and I will align my loneliness and democracy’s, and see what comes of it.  I am against democracy.  I can feel it. 

David Ker Thomson lives in Oz, the name street people use for the area around Ossington subway station in Toronto.  Oz is halfway between the equator and the North Pole.  Dave.thomson@utoronto.ca

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