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Will the US Labor Movement Rise Again in Chicago? Or is this just a power play at the top? JoAnn Wypijewski details what's really at stake in the great showdown as some of labor's most powerful bosses threaten to quit the AFL-CIO. No-holds-barred profiles of the SIEU's Andy Stern, Hoffa of the Teamsters and the other "insurgents". Jeffrey St Clair tells the incredible saga of the $30 billion bailout of Boeing. How the scandal reached the White House and Don Rumsfeld screamed, Let the woman take the fall. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the Judy Miller story. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest 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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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by Kathy Kelly  Today's Stories July 26, 2005 JoAnn
Wypijewski July 25, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts M.
Shahid Alam Uri
Avnery Stan
Cox Norman
Solomon Ramzy
Baroud Mickey
Z. Website
of the Day
July 23 / 24, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Tariq
Ali Robert
Fisk Dave
Lindorff Ricardo
Alarcón Col.
Dan Smith Brian
Cloughley Kevin
Zeese Bill
Quigley Fred
Gardner Rep.
Ron Paul Joshua
Frank Shivali
Tukdeo Gilad
Atzmon James
Petras Ben
Tripp Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 22, 2005 Heather
Gray David
Domke Lance
Selfa JoAnn
Wypijewski
July 21, 2005 Rose
Ann DeMoro William
Blum J.L.
Chestnut, Jr. Christopher
Brauchli Joshua
Frank Brian
Concannon, Jr. Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
July 20, 2005 Cockburn
/ St. Clair Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz Ray
McGovern Chris
Floyd Uri
Avnery Dave
Lindorff Norman
Solomon Bill
Quigley
July 19, 2005 Tariq
Ali John
Ross Davey
D. Greg
Weiher Brian
McKinlay Norman
Solomon Dave
Lindorff Bill
Christison Joshua
Frank
July 18, 2005 Joshua
Frank M.
Shahid Alam Jude
Wanniski Ron
Jacobs Mike
Whitney William
MacDougall Seth
Sandronsky Richard
Lichtman Paul
Craig Roberts Website
of the Weekend
July 15 / 17, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Jeffrey
St. Clair Paul
Craig Roberts Harry
Browne Uri
Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron Andrew
Rubin Patrick
Cockburn J.L.
Chestnut, Jr. Fred
Gardner Christopher
Brauchli Chris
Floyd Ben
Tripp Col.
Dan Smith Jason
Leopold Jack
Random Norman
Solomon George
Ochenski Website
of the Weekend
July 14, 2005 Jeffrey
St. Clair Subcomandante
Marcos Dave
Lindorff Joshua
Frank Jude
Wanniski Dave
Zirin Kevin
Zeese Robert
Jensen Reza
Fiyouzat Carol
Norris Website
of the Day
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Cloughley George
Galloway Carlos
Fierro Sarah
Knopp Norman
Solomon Mickey
Z. Jim
Minick Pat
Williams Andrew
N. Rubin Website
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July 12, 2005 Laith
al-Saud Kara
N. Tina William
A. Cook Jack
Bratich Amina
Mire Dick
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Zeese Paul
Craig Roberts Website
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July 9 / 11, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Uri
Avnery Sheldon
Rampton Bill
Christison Robert
Fisk Stephen
Winspear Saul
Landau Behrooz
Ghamari Karl
Beitel Brian
Concannon, Jr. Fred
Gardner John
Whitlow Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Lila
Rajiva Laura
Carlsen Jackie
Corr Dave
Lindorff N.
D. Jayaprakash Seth
Sandronsky Norman
Madarasz Ben
Tripp Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 8, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Tariq
Ali Monica
Benderman Rick
Jahnkow Christopher
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Peterson Joshua
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Solomon Website
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July 7, 2005 Cockburn
/ St. Clair John
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Random Norman
Solomon Len
Colodny Cockburn
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July 6, 2005 Elaine
Cassel Sean
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Leupp Website
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Ghamari Elaine
Cassel Ron
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Libal Dr.
Peter Rost Mark
Engler Gideon
Levy Dave
Zirin Sameer
Dossani
July 2 / 4, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Lenni
Brenner Laura
Carlsen James
Petras William
A. Cook Brian
Cloughley Saul
Landau Tom
Crumpacker Greg
Moses Dr.
Susan Block Fran
Shor Fred
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Adler David
Model Seth
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Baroud Suzan
Mazur Ben
Tripp Justin
Taylor Brendan
Bailey Poets'
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of the Weekend
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Brauchli Pat
Williams Gary
Leupp John
Stauber John
Chuckman Justicia
y Paz Cockburn
/ St. Clair
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Kelly John
Stauber Virginia
Rodino Jason
Leopold Dave
Lindorff Greg
Moses Norman
Solomon Joshua
Frank Alexander
Cockburn
June 29, 2005 Mike
Schaefer Roger
Burbach / Paul Cantor Sharon
Smith Sam
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Stauber Ahmad
Faruqui Linda
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McGovern
June 28, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Landau
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Whitney CounterPunch
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Cockburn
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Kelly
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Cockburn Jennifer
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B. Hudson Poets'
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June 24, 2005 Ray
McGovern Jorge
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Neumann Website
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Brauchli Clay
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Kelly
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& Bill Christison
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July 26, 2005 Biography as Wish-FulfillmentJefferson, Hitchens and AtheismBy LENNI BRENNER I'm old fashioned. I criticize anyone in writing, he gets a copy. When I say God is the Great Sinner in the Sky, (he made the world), I email him. Badmouth Hitler & it goes to Mr. Nice Guy in Argentina, a bit old, but still planing a comeback. So Christopher Hitchens also got my July 4th CounterPunch review of his book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. I send my articles to folks. I added Benjamin Banneker's complete 1791 letter to Jefferson & his reply, discussed in CounterPunch. So I sent them to Hitchens. He responded:
In his book, Hitchens declared that
Naturally I asked him a question. "What evidence do you have that Jefferson was an atheist?" He came back with:
There's more.
I also "wonder." Why would I hesitate to "mention" Jefferson's letter "to the readers of CounterPunch"? I had concluded my article with "You don't need to read anyone's book about Jefferson. Read him. With his faults, he was a gifted writer. Come to your own conclusions as to his proper place in history." So Jefferson to Barlow is below. Hitchens recommended reading Gordon-Reed, where I would get my comeuppance. She is on the Advisory Board of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello & authored Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. What he didn't know is that she read me:
Building a reputation for "lone and flinty integrity" is hot, dirty, sweaty work. If I ever worried about losing it, I've been saved by Hitchens' reply. Now all the world can see that he hasn't a stitch of evidence behind his speculation that Jefferson was a closet atheist. Hitchens has Jefferson saying that he faced extinction "'without hope or fear.'" To be precise, he wrote a 3/14/1820 letter to John Adams:
Hardly proof of atheism. Jefferson was well past concern for political effect when he wrote a 6/26/1822 letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse:
But he never joined the movement because, "much I fear, that when this great truth shall be re-established, its Votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and Confessions of faith." Jefferson believed in God & heaven. He told Waterhouse that
In a 4/13/1820 letter to William Short, Jefferson had explained that he differed with Jesus. "it is not to be understood that I am with him in all His doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of spiritualism." Why then did he believe in God & his heaven? Look to his wife dying in childbirth. It devastated him. Then four of his six children by her died. For all his materialism, he needed heaven. If he wasn't going to meet them in the hereafter, why did his children live for no purpose? With this mentality, he concluded a 6/5/1824 note to John Cartwright with
No atheism here. Hitchens reminded me that "No man of any cloth was asked to his well-anticipated deathbed." But in a 1/8/1825 letter to Waterhouse, Jefferson explained that, altho he was
Clearly absence of a Unitarian minister isn't evidence of atheism. Hitchens further claims that "his headstone/obelisk more or less speaks for itself." But his 1826 note on his Epitaph simply reads,
Proof of atheism? After giving 'evidence' that doesn't prove Jefferson to be an atheist, Hitchens insists that "There's more in the book but I guess if you'll take dictation from a magazine with the standards of CounterPunch you will elide what you don't know or else what doesn't fit." I'm an atheist. Why would I or CounterPunch "elide" - suppress - documentation of Jefferson's atheism if it existed? So much for Hitchens. He will forever more be a standing joke among scholars of the American revolution. There are profound reasons for being exact as to Jefferson's religious ideas. Slaveholder he was, but his Declaration was the central ideological document of the modern world's 1st successful revolution of republican commoners. Then, as President, 1801-09, he continued to build the "wall of separation between Church and State" that distinguished that republic from every government before it. His monument lists authoring
the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom as his 2nd most
important accomplishment. He presented it to the Virginia Assembly
in 1779. It failed because of the opposition of Patrick Henry,
an Episcopalian establishmentarian fanatic. It passed in 1786,
while he was in France as the American Ambassador, via the persuasive
arguments of James Jefferson's 12/20/1787 urgings from Paris: "I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion," were also crucial in convincing Madison to add the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. (He had felt that "experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its control is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State.") When the world at large looks at George W. Bush's administration, the 1st thing it sees is his linking of religion & politics. Government funding of faith-based charities at home, his "crusade" against Islamic terror abroad. All this is done in an office under the Constitution, with its Article VI, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," & the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." From a constitutional perspective, Americans have no choice but to see Bush as the reigning heavyweight political champion, defending his title against all challenges, in a boxing ring designed & built by Jefferson & Madison. Were they slaveholders? Black lawyers don't care. When they come before the Supreme Court, there is nothing like a quote from these great anti-clericals to throw at Clarence Thomas. Look at any government action. It is either constitutional or it isn't. Has Bush gone beyond the Constitution? Have the courts gone beyond their constitutional authority? The 1st place a constitutional student must look for answers is in Jefferson & Madison's writings. What limits did they set? Of course they aren't holy writ on religion or anything else. But they are classic authorities. When we go beyond them we must show good & sufficient reason to do so. Of course courts have had to move with the times. The Bill of Rights & separation of church & state originally only applied to the federal government. Some of the 13 founding states insisted on keeping their established churches. The Supreme Court didn't fully apply the 1st Amendment to the states until the 20th century, via the post-civil war 14th Amendment's "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." But when we look at their writings, we see that they always wanted the Bill to apply to the states & had to accept state churches, hoping, in this case correctly, that they would sink in the wake of their glorious victory at the federal level. They founded what in their time were called the Democratic Republicans, now the Democratic Party. Again, we should use them as benchmarks to judge our herd. When an atheist got a federal court to drop "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, John Kerry & every other Democratic Senator denounced the decision. But go to Jefferson. We find him on 1/1/1802 explaining that "I do not proclaim fastings and thanksgivings, as my predecessors did." What would he say about Kerry & the self-proclaimed 'liberals' who voted for him? Indeed, what would he say about the Pledge, with or without God? Few Americans know that Jefferson was in Paris when the Bastille was stormed. But enlightened French saw him as the embodiment of what they wanted & strategized against their King in his residence. He wrote to Madison on 8/28/1789:
Some historians are struck by his moderate role in on site French politics. He notified the court that some gentlemen would be meeting with him. But he was his country's representative to Louis XVI. Washington couldn't have won independence from Britain without his aid. When he returned to the US to become Washington's Secretary of State in 1790, he continued to support the revolution until Jacobin fanaticism made that impossible. Jefferson, Tom Paine & the Marquis de Lafayette share the singular distinction of being present during the 2 great revolutions that opened up modern times. In that sense, Jefferson in Paris was the secular equivalent of the Catholic laying on of hands. He & America kicked off the French revolution. That drama inspired Marxism & the subsequent waves of revolution that still are with us. Clearly, for Americans & worldwide, Jefferson's ideas, right & wrong, will always be worth studying. But he wrote over 19,000 letters plus numerous drafts of state & federal documents, etc. Where should a general reader begin? I have recently published Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism. Now Gordon-Reed is about to publish a Jefferson Reader on race for Princeton University Press. That's the way to go. Read him on your topic, whatever it is. But do so in conjunction with a chronology of his entire career & a collection of his works on another issue. That's the best way to see his strengths & weaknesses in his times & where he is still relevant to ours. Lenni Brenner is the editor of Jefferson & Madison on Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He also edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com. ***** Thomas Jefferson to Joel Barlow Dear Sir, It is long since I sought to have acknowleged the reciept of your most excellent oration on the 4th of July. I was doubting what you could say, equal to your own reputation, on so hackneyed a subject. But you have really risen out of it with lustre, and pointed to others a field of great expansion. [unclear] a day or two after I recieved your letter to Bishop Gregoire a copy of his diatribe to you came to hand from France. I had not before heard of it. He must have been eagle eyed in quest of offence to have discovered ground for it among the rubbish massed together in the print he animadverts on, you have done right in giving him a sugary answer, but he did not deserve it. For notwithstanding a compliment to you now & then he constantly returns to the identification of your sentiments with the extravagancies of the Revolutionary zealots. I believe him a very good man, with imagination enough to declaim eloquently, but without judgement to decide. [unclear word] He wrote to me also on the doubts I had expressed five or six & twenty years ago, in the Notes on Virginia, as to the grade of understanding of the negroes, & he sent me his book on the literature of the negroes. His credulity has made him gather up every story he could find of men of colour (without distinguishing whether black, or of what degree of mixture) however slight the mention, or light the authority on which they are quoted, the whole do not amount in point of evidence, to what we know ourselves of Banneker. We know he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs, but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicott, who was his neighbor & friend, & never missed an opportunity of puffing him. I have a long letter from Banneker which shows him to have had a mind of very common stature indeed. As to Bishop Gregoire, I wrote him, as you have done, a very soft answer. It was impossible for doubt to have been more tenderly or hesitatingly expressed than that was in the Notes on Virginia, and nothing was or is farther from my intentions than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed a doubt. St Domingo will, in time, throw light on the question. I intended, ere this, to have sent you the papers I had promised you. But I have taken up Marshall's 5th volume & mean to read it carefully, to correct what is wrong in it, and commit to writing such facts and annotations as the reading that work will bring into my recollection and which have not yet been put on paper. In this I shall be much aided by my memorandums & letters, and will send you both the old & the new. But I go on very slowly, in truth during the pleasant season I am always out of doors employed, not passing more time at my writing table than will dispatch my current business. But when the weather becomes cold I shall go out little. I hope therefore to get through this volume during the ensuing winter; but should you want the papers sooner, they shall be sent at a moment's warning. The ride from Washington to Monticello in the stage, or in a gigg is so easy that I had hoped you would have taken a flight here during the season of good roads. Whenever Mrs. Barlow is well enough to join you in such a visit, it must be taken at ease. It will give us real pleasure whenever it may take place. I pray you to present me to her respectfully, and I salute you affectionately. ***** Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire Sir, I have recieved the favor of
your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so
kind as to send me on the "Literature of Negroes."
Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I
do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself
entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted
to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are
on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal
observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the
opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable,
and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore
with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent
it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was
superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord
of the person or property of others. On this subject they are
gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances
are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing
with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore
to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me
to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which
cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.
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