Today's Stories

January 14, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

January 14, 2009

Even Recessions Have an Upside

The End of Property Porn

By ADITYA CHAKRABORTTY

London.

At the start of this century, a new race took over British television. They didn't look so different from the people in whose living rooms they took up residence: they had the same receding hairlines and weight issues. But they had one apparently magic power: they could turn bricks into money. 

They were property presenters, and they had come to teach viewers how to cash in on the real-estate boom. Their programs fell into the genre of reality documentaries, where real people did real things (such as buy or sell or renovate houses), only with a film crew breathing down their necks. The format was stale, but the subject - investing in property - was intoxicatingly new. 

Real-estate debutantes could watch To Buy or Not to Buy for advice. Once you'd bought your home, the House Doctor was on call to tart it up. Fancied seeing how the neighbors were doing? Television allowed you to spy on Other People's Houses. And when the time came to cash in and sell up there was Trading Up. Within a few years, the genre had advanced onto Property Developing Abroad - even this risky, fiddly business was now considered fun. Only one subject was guaranteed never to be covered: what to do if you couldn't keep up the mortgage payments. 

This flood came during the biggest real-estate boom in British history, with house prices rising by around 20 per cent a year. Mid-market newspapers regularly splashed property surveys across their front pages, while venerable home-furnishings magazines junked features on the perfect table lamp for spreads on kitchen extensions. 

Still, it was television that really got the housing bug, showing 20 different programmes a season at the height of the bubble. Every day of the working week, a property-drunk nation could stagger back to their homes - which had appreciated more that day than their owners had earned at their jobs - and soak up an evening's advice on how to cash in on the boom. Digital channels offered repeats to keep one going into the small hours. 

The presenters were not shiny TV folk or (heaven forbid) probing journalists. No, they were from the property industry: estate agents, developers, interior designers. That these people had a vested interest in keeping the bubble inflated seemed to pose no problem: many kept on their day jobs, or leveraged their new fame into other real-estate businesses. 

Yet they did not pass on expertise so much as a dogma: buy it, fix it up, flog it, pocket the proceeds - and do it all over again. 

Summing up this attitude was Sarah Beeny, a mumsy blonde 30-something who presented Property Ladder. Her show pulled in more than four million viewers, making Beeny a semi-celebrity. 

Yet it was a one-trick programme: every week, she would track couples (they were always couples) who had just bought a home they planned to do up and sell at a vast profit. The sums they spent and stood to make floated over the screen in large graphicised figures. 

Before Beeny and her gang pitched up, TV's interest in property had been restricted to decorating and DIY. The genre's icon had been Barry Bucknell, who specialised in nailing ugly hardwood over pretty Victorian doors. But commissioning editors were slow to pick up on Britain's growing interest in house prices. When Margaret Thatcher began selling off public housing in the 1980s, fewer than 60% of the population owned their homes; by 2000 that figure was more than 70%. In the decades following the second world war, housing had been a necessity to be provided by the state; now however, it was solely an aspirational good, to be saved up for by private individuals. 

This was a bandwagon Labour wanted to ride. Just before becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown plotted how his country would become a "home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy." For many modern voters, however, the three were the same: a home was an asset that was a source of wealth. After the dotcom bust, after the scandals at Enron and WorldCom, and under increasing pressure to look after their own pensions, the British turned to their piles of bricks and mortar to provide. 

So the British stopped thinking about houses as homes, and started treating them as properties - commodities to be traded like shares. 

Beeny articulated this shift. "I think there is a bit of everyone that thinks it would be nice to be a property developer," she said. A successful developer herself, she tried to show them how. Yet almost every week her would-bes slipped back into bad old sentimentalism; they sought to make their properties individual, personal or downright nice. Under the new rules of the property game, they were only meant to make them profitable. To bend le Corbusier, houses were now machines for printing cash. 

Beeny's students usually knuckled under. After all, they were also in it for the money. As the presenter noted: "You go into these houses and there are shelves full of self-help books like How to Be a Millionaire in a Year." 

And a new home aesthetic caught on. David Pollock has been an estate agent for over 25 years in a part of London often featured on the TV shows. As the decade wore on, he noticed a change in the get-up of local houses. "The walls were magnolia or eggshell white - you wouldn't get bright blue or dark red," he says. 

"It was bland, boring, characterless - and about 20% of all the properties we were selling were like this. Forget about individual touches: people were designing their homes with one eye on selling, rather than living in them." Television had taught its viewers well. 

These programmes soon had a name: property porn. The term was coined by Rosie Millard, a former BBC arts correspondent turned property pundit (perhaps only in today's Britain would that career move be considered a good one). "Property porn is addictive,"she wrote in 2002. 

"You a) work out how much your London home is worth. Then, b) turn to the advertising pages of the property section[s]. Figure out whether you would like to move to a stone farmhouse in [the countryside]... a nine-bedroom manor... or the neo-Palladian palace... We had dirty thoughts about the Rookery, which has an orchard and a moat." 

If all Londoners did this, the gap between capital prices and those in the rest of the country would soon vanish. But like her readers, Millard was not bothered about the big picture. 

"Every week the papers are full of juicy graphs and prophecies that show the remorseless escalation of house prices in the southeast," she went on. "The danger is that you start to worry about moving into, say the Rookery, in case your old house appreciates without you in it. Which was when we started to venture down the buy-to-let route."   

Ah, the letting boom. This was the height of Britain's property fever. As the masses got used to the idea of trading houses, they quickly graduated onto buying them to let out. It was, after all, the same bet on rising house prices - but doubled up. A mere 29,000 buy-to-let mortgages at the end of 1998 had risen to 850,000 by the end of 2006, making almost a third of the UK's entire private rented housing buy- to-let. First-time buyers found themselves competing for one-bed flats with purchasers twice their age not after somewhere to live, but a nest egg. Newly built flats were a particular favourite among amateur landlords, with over 60% of new property in London in 2006 bought to let out. 

Anyone could see that buy-to-let was a new, potentially risky experiment. After all, one of the British banks to have collapsed this year, Bradford & Bingley, specialised in buy-to-let mortgages. Yet property TV treated it as absolutely normal. Presenters counseled homeowners on how to rent out their London pad and buy a place in the country on the income (just as Rosie Millard longed to do), or gravely advised them about the rental prospects of that bolthole in the Dordogne or Tuscany or Krakow. 

How much was property porn responsible for the inflation of the bubble? Long before becoming chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, Adam Sampson did academic research on sexual pornography. He sees the two as having a similar impact: "Pornography can make feelings and behaviours that are otherwise unacceptable seem normal. Property porn didn't invent the pastime of using houses to make money - but it gave it legitimacy." 

And now the game is up. In the past year, property prices in Britain have dropped around 10% - and many expect them to fall by around the same again. Amid a recession, TV producers are not only wary about making get-rich-quick programmes; they also find it difficult to find the necessary material. 

Now that bank loans have all but dried up, few can raise money to buy and renovate that promising Victorian terrace. Now that the housing market is frozen, few want to put their homes on the market - let alone put in offers on others. One BBC series last summer showed programme after programme in which the TV presenter and his or her would-be house sellers waited for viewers to pop in - only for one or two couples to pay the most cursory of visits. 

"I don't think property will ever be off air, but it needs a different approach," one senior TV producer told The Guardian last month. "Property investment shows are over." 

Even recessions have an upside.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a journalist at The Guardian, London.

This article appears in the January edition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles  from LMD every month.

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