Today's Stories

October 3 - 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
October 3 - 5, 2008

Six Packs Aren't Just for Abs Anymore

The Case for Drunk Driving

By DAVID KER THOMSON

Why I feel so lonely—this in response to my wife’s unasked question this morning at breakfast—is that every time I make a serious policy suggestion around here, everyone thinks I’m joking.  Like, son, empty the dishwasher.  Hilarious. 

Just for the record, I really did think that our faculty meetings at Franklin and Marshall College would have gone better in the buff.  Would have cut down on a lot of the posturing, and probably cut the meeting times in half, too.  I was ready to go first.

Nowadays we live in Canada, for all the usual reasons.  Also because of the fact that my head in America was becoming a suggestion box, where the combined effort of all these loose bits of notes was a sort of epic thought crime.  I’d even been called in for questioning by the Illinois State’s Attorney, not for the crimes I’d committed, but for the ones I hadn’t.  It was getting hairy.

Still, we stay in touch with America.  For example, forty percent of our electricity here in Toronto comes from West Virginia.  I have little postcards from my old Appalachian Trail days up beside each switch, and I invite my Canadian friends to perform mountaintop removal by depressing the rocker panel.  By now the kids have probably worked their way across the state line right up to my old friend Joe Bageant’s place in Winchester, but the device is sixty percent heuristic, in any case.  My students up at the university, when I have any, are impressed by this simple definition of heuristic, but we remain fully clothed.

Another thing about living here is that when people in Toronto sort through their garbage, what they can’t use they send to Michigan.  Sort of like the opposite of what Detroit’s been doing to the world all these years.  We’ve got bins marked compost, recycling, and Michigan.  Last week my parents stopped by with an extra bottle of mayonnaise.  They’re not big on refrigeration, my folks, so we sent that one off to Michigan.  Figured it wasn’t worth the carbon to rinse the bottle with hot water.  Clearly a mistake, but who you gonna call?

Just for the record, I should mention that my parents live in Dayton, Tennessee, and have over one million miles on their Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon, the one with the more substantive 400 cubic-inch V8 legacy, which has a pretty good bit of juice.  That mileage is a one with a lot of zeros and then some stray digits at the end of the string.  I advised them to seek an advertising deal with the parent company.

I’ve written an important series of articles for the popular Toronto Star, even though I noticed that the travel editor had used the word “charming” to describe a canal in the low countries.  The newspaper rejected the articles.  I sent them to Michigan.  That’s travel writing.  Lately my sense of target audience has been shifting towards a subtle desire for approval from militiamen, and I’ve stopped making jokes about Michigan which involve mittens.  I’ve changed all my passwords to charming so I can get used to typing it.

Toronto, Jesus.  Never thought I’d live here.  Our people on both sides have been here since the Ojibway reluctantly edged over to let us snuggle under the covers—that is, where our people weren’t already the Ojibway—but I didn’t know that anyone else knew about Toronto.  When we were kids we used to visit, fresh nugie imprints in our scalps from sentimental Somerville bullies who didn’t want to let us leave Boston, and we’d be singing, wo-oh, To-ronto, never been there but I’d like to go.  I secretly liked it but didn’t tell anyone, like how you like to sniff the front of your underwear.  It was so family, like a den, and like loving Jesus inordinately.  You told other people as a dare you set yourself.

Anyway, walking in Toronto this morning.  Noticed again this poster of a woman in a wheelchair, the kind that reminds you of your own more or less functional legs.  In big letters on the poster, Don’t Drive, and in little letters, drunk.  I guess, because fortunately my eyes are bad enough I can’t see the drunk.  Don’t Drive’s good enough for me.  But what I’d like to say is, if you do find it necessary to drive, could you at least, as a responsible citizen, consider the merits of driving drunk?  Another way to say this is, knowing what driving is, how could you possibly not drive drunk?  Or as I put it to myself, what kind of fucking society do we have that people can drive without getting tanked?  You get in those things and screw the planet a thousand ways to Sunday, and you don’t even think about keeping something in a paper bag to ward off the demons?  Jesus. 

I don’t drive much, if at all, what with me being just as self-righteous as the anti-environmentalists say I am, though I like to think of it as charming.  I wear a full-face American football helmet whenever I do drive, which gives me a lot of incentive to stick with shank’s mare.  Also, you can store your brew right up there by your face.

I told my friend in the parkour community that my right knee’s enough of a trickster figure that I’ve given up jumping on my neighbors’ roofs, but that I used to be able to run across streets in Montreal making use of the tops of moving cars.  Said to him, you’re young, why don’t you look into these new pedestrian-friendly Hondas?  Got an airbag in the hood, so you can hit someone at forty miles an hour and not kill them.  Now that’s a fucken hybrid, he said, maybe a little too enthusiastically.  He’s doing some early recon work with parked Hondas, seeing if he can get any loft out of one of them, and he’s going to get back to me.  I had this sneaking suspicion, though, that instead of fighting cars, he was maybe looking into getting one, with Honda now bringing gaming up to a whole new level.  Kids, don’t try this on your wii, I tell the boys, and the suggestion is filed behind empty the dishwasher.

So, you going to make me come up there and show you what your car costs the world?  You want, what, some more figures?  I’m loading the dishwasher here myself, okay, so I’m not in a good mood.  Go google your own frickin figures.  Don’t forget to factor in the Sixth Fleet, as the Irish historian Iain Boal puts it.  Me, I’m getting to the age of the lumpen proletariat here, everyone I know’s got a lump of something and the technicians are sorting through it to see if it’s cancer.  We don’t talk about lumps the way we didn’t use to talk about pregnancies until they were out of the first term—you want to know if you got something viable or not before you get bragging rights.  Stick that fact in your muffler and smoke it.  What part of this isn’t worth getting drunk over yet?

Okay, here’s another true one, worth at least three inches of Jack Daniels on your next trip to the Winn Dixie Loblaw’s consortium.  Took my nephew two and a half years to die from his last trip in a Honda, out in Seattle.  Well of course he was the smart one, top grades and all that.  You know how these stories go.  The kid was still stunningly beautiful hooked up to the machines.  Nothing that didn’t heal within a month except a little damage to one eye and the cerebral cortex.  That kind of damage, the hands go back like a boxer gathering himself for a punch.  So anyway, these two gorgeous technicians, goddesses barely older than the boy, came in every day and wrestled with him on the bed, getting him to extend his limbs.  They were backlit towards the mountains—you could see the Cascades out there between the pert cones of their breasts—and they wore these flimsy hospital robes, sort of gossamer or something, and my nephew at sixteen was a tall strong man with a great patriarch’s beard that grew visibly every day, the last of his life coursing into that luxuriant flourish.  And these three on the bed, Christ, anything more like a clash of titans too stunning and erotic for a mortal to behold, well.  Selah, as the good book says.  You want figures, I got figures.  Just my nephew’s priest and me sitting there watching this, two men in black, and we were thinking we’d lost our youth long before that, so what was there left to crush?  God called me to be a witness a long time ago.  I didn’t know that one of the things he’d make me see would be his own death.

Memo to Michigan: Don’t cry for me, Detroit.  I’ve driven my share of Chrysler Imperials and ’67 Chevies and Isuzus which were Detroit under the hood and sedans that were Japan under their hoods, and I’m not pointing any finger I wouldn’t point at myself.  Just sorting through some of the karma here and if I have anything good I’ll send it your way.

Soon as I get out of the kitchen I’m going to go paint a little American flag onto the Michigan bin.  Maybe have a little big-man cry, and then get on with it.  Stop moping.

--Dufferin Grove watershed, Toronto

David Ker Thomson’s most recent “anti-something” article is at Lewrockwell.com.  He is taking a year out from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto to write a history of American radicalism since 1637, entitled “A”.  He sandblasted uranium tanks during the Ford administration.  He can be reached at dave.thomson@utoronto.ca

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