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Today's
Stories
February 27, 2004
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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February
27, 2004
Nader, Risk and Hope
An
Enemy of the People...in Power
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
Ralph Nader has defined a perfect moral dilemma
for thinking Americans.
He finds himself in a situation resembling
that of Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's drama, "An Enemy of the
People." Dr. Stockmann discovered the municipal baths were
contaminated, but good burghers worried about the destructive
effects of the truth on the town did not want the doctor revealing
it.
A number of America's good burghers,
fearing the effect of Nader's candidacy on the Democratic candidate's
prospects, have warned him against running for office, some are
reported to have stopped supporting the many worthy public-service
organizations he founded, and some are writing nasty little pieces
calling him names.
The Democrats are, of course, part of
what Nader is concerned about. Quite apart from the oily-establishment
and war-friendly Kerry, the Democratic party itself has come
to stand for very little. You might call it America's parlor-polite
alternative to the selfish stench of the Republicans. Putting
up Kerry to replace Bush is like putting up Rutherford B. Hayes
to replace Calvin Coolidge. It may be possible for Kerry to win,
but, really, what difference to anything would his victory make?
Bullwinkle the moose miming John Kennedy at the next State of
the Union.
Nader sees the fundamental problems of
American society as few other national figures do. His focus
is different than my own, being, naturally enough, more concerned
about domestic results than international ones. Still, these
things are related.
Nader is not likely to win, and, if he
were somehow able to win, he would quickly find himself up against
the most entrenched, retrogressive legislative system in the
advanced world. Still, he represents some hope for the birth
of a new dynamic in American politics, something important to
Americans and to the world.
Nader's focus is on "corporatism"
having taken over civil institutions in America. This is true.
Americans are no longer citizens, they are consumers - language
adopted even by their politicians. The reason for this is simple:
America is well along with building a set of monster corporations
intent on supplying most of the world's goods and services. The
corporations must be monstrously big to achieve this, because
it is through economies of scale that they can undercut the costs
of companies in other nations. Companies that dominate markets
for nearly three-hundred million Americans are in a position
to muscle out the companies in most other countries. Size is
also important as a means of gaining concessions from governments,
including, as it turns out, their own.
The growth of American monster-corporations
does not threaten only international harmony, it rapidly is changing
American domestic life.
These corporations adopt bizarre, almost
anonymous identities. Many of them have had their names reduced
to sets of three letters exhibiting little connection with their
original business or birthplace, but they go well beyond this
symbolism.
The relationships these corporations
have with those to whom they market can perhaps best be compared
to the relationships you have with the people who send spam to
your computer. You can place an order from the spam you receive,
but you can't respond otherwise, and the mechanism for deleting
your e-mail address often is extremely slow or defective.
The corporate marketers reach you when
they please through direct mail or calling centers, and they
have a lot of personal information about you (much of it obtained
from local governments without your permission) on their computers
enabling them efficiently to hunt you down for their schemes.
You may have noticed the marketing letters you receive often
have no return postal address, only a toll-free telephone number
that reaches a boiler-room order-taker unable to deal with any
other matter.
These particulars are small points, but
they suggest a sinister character. The scale of a thing always
changes its very nature. A small cyclonic wind, a dust devil,
moving harmlessly across a patch of earth shares fundamental
structural characteristics with a tornado, but what a difference
the difference in size makes.
Bear with me if you think my next statement
a great exaggeration, but George Orwell's fictitious world of
1984 seems to me no more sinister than what is gradually emerging
in America. What Orwell emphasized about human freedom was conditioned
by his living through a period when various forms of totalitarian
government darkened Europe, but there are subtler methods of
control than jack-booted tyranny. The continued advance of technology
will assure a bountiful choice of tools to the corporations which
invest in them, own them, and are best placed to fully exploit
them.
America is becoming a society where huge,
almost anonymous, corporations own virtually every scrap of your
personal information and own patents on many aspects of the natural
world around you, perhaps even on some of the genes of your body
or those of your neighbors. Their manufacturing and other needs
effectively control the quality of the air you breathe and the
water you drink. Their adventures abroad influence whether your
son or daughter is sent to war, although I am sure this will
one day be limited by automated killing machines which will be
so much more dependable than soldiers, cause less stress over
interventions on the home front, and cost far less than maintaining
all those pesky military dependents and pensions over the long
term.
So perfect will be their marketing information,
the companies' computers will know exactly the extent to which
you are even worth bothering about in each and every aspect of
their operations. There will be a large pool of people not worth
bothering about, the American losers in the globalization race
for ever cheaper or more capable substitutes in every aspect
of manufacturing, marketing, and distributing. This pool already
is being created, but it likely will become much larger. For
example, when those Pentagon killing machines are perfected,
the armed forces will cease providing the jobs they have for
millions of young people with marginal skills.
The emerging social structure of the
United States very much resembles that of 1984. There are the
owners and senior managers of the vast corporations. Their positions
and privileges are in every respect comparable to Oceania's elite
Inner Party. Then there is a large pool of educated, middle-class
people, the types who stay at the office twelve hours a day to
complete a project and have the benefit of a corporate gym. They
are sometimes exposed to very sensitive material, but there is
a well-developed ethic and some severe penalties for ever revealing
any of it. They are Orwell's Outer Party. Finally, there is the
large and growing pool of unskilled workers whose prospects become
increasingly dim. The "end of welfare as we know it"
may well have reflected expected growth prospects for this group
rather than simply political discontent. Orwell calls them the
Proles.
America's Proles have virtually no role
in politics. They have no money and no influence. They generally
do not vote, a fact which may reflect inertia more than anything
else, but it is also true that many local practices, as we saw
from the way polls were run in Florida, positively discourage
their votes. Ex-convicts, and this is a huge group in America,
for example cannot vote. The Outer Party provides voters and
campaign workers. The Inner Party endows acceptable candidates
with small fortunes to assure their prospects.
This structure is self-reinforcing and
explains many domestic policies and practices. One example suffices.
America is the only advanced nation not to have some form of
national health insurance. Why? Because the existing employer-pays-for-private-insurance
system suits the political and economic structure so well. Inner
Party members and senior politicians receive the very best of
everything possible, often having their own elite hospitals.
All the Outer Party members receive good, and often excellent,
insurance from their employers. This keeps the politically active
group satisfied about healthcare. Indeed, it is only when benefits
start dropping around the fringes of the Outer Party, as during
economic setbacks, that healthcare becomes a national political
issue. The Proles are uninsured or so poorly insured at meager
jobs that they may as well be uninsured.
There is no way to forecast a clear picture
of where these trends lead, but the prospects are discouraging
to say the least. Powerful private companies possessing information
and resources and working hand-in-hand with government to achieve
their goals are capable of doing anything not specifically regulated
or forbidden. The revolution in technology is quickly changing
even what is or is not a crime or abuse, but with government
as a full and intimate partner, what impulse is there for new
regulation and laws limiting corporations?
Ordinary Americans have completely embraced
the idea that whatever is good or necessary for large corporations
is somehow good for them. This may have been true in 1949, but
it is certainly not true now. Americans are remarkably passive
about everything from steaming toxic dumps left behind by closed
factories to bloody interventions abroad.
Corporations already have a tight grip
on national politics, but their ability to influence - with personal
connections, information, financial resources, and the discretion
to shift investments - increases disproportionately as they grow
and absorb all former competitors. Corporations are, of course,
the training grounds for the many lawyers inhabiting Congress,
and they provide comfortable repositories for retired politicians
who retain influence.
War is very much a reflection of this
influence on government, as you would expect when these companies
are engaged in aggressive global campaigns, when they enjoy supplying
the bottomless-pit needs of the Defense Department, and when
they are involved in the unbelievably-profitable rebuilding of
distant places overrun by the military. It is true that stock
markets don't like big wars, but what Americans have learned
since Vietnam is that stock markets don't so much mind quick,
dirty little wars that come mixed with new opportunities for
profit.
The huge number of colonial wars the
United States has fought since the end of the Second World War
demonstrates this conclusively. The name, Defense Department,
is outmoded. Not one war in which the U.S. has engaged since
1945 has involved defense, unless you are speaking of the defense
of America's corporate interests abroad.
Nader a political risk? If there is any
chance of sparking a new political movement that could even moderately
alter America's course, isn't it worth some political risk? If
not, what is?
John Chuckman
lives in Canada.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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