Today's Stories

February 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's First Bad Week

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

Henry A. Giroux
Educating Obama

Jules Rabin
Israel's Disproportionate Responses

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency & Anthropology: Roberto Gonzalez on Human Terrain Systems

Bill Moyers
Obama's Wars: an Interview with Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

George Ciccariello-Maher
From Oakland to Santa Rita: "Fired Up, Can't Take It No More"

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

Allan Nairn
What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

Gareth Porter
Generals Move to Obstruct Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Orders

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
"Too Big to Fail:" a Bailout Hoax

Dave Lindorff
The Ugly Truth: the American Economy is Not Coming Back

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

Andy Worthington
Blame the Chef: How Cooking for the Taliban Can Get You Life in Gitmo

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

Lorenzo Wolff
Playing Down a Bad Reputation: the Lovin' Spooful's Near Perfect Record

David Yearsley
When Orfeo and Euridice Lived Happily Ever After in Upstate New York

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

Paul Craig Roberts
Is It Time to Bail Out of America?

Riz Khan
The Future of Gaza: an Interview with Jimmy Carter

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

Gregory Vickrey
What About the Environment? Cap and Trade and Selling Out

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

Alison Weir
Killing Palestinians Doesn't Count: Fact-Checking Ceasefire Breaches

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

Weekend Edition
February 6-8, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

Obama's First Bad Week

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Barack Obama is certainly not the first president to get taken down a couple of rungs by nominees who get shipwrecked in their confirmation hearings. Bruised by these setbacks he has also taken serious fire for his $900 billion stimulus package, not just by Republicans but the sizable chunk of his own party who are Republicans in all but name. By the end of the week, particularly with his speech to the House Democrats at their retreat on Thursday night, there were encouraging signs that Obama was dropping the tedious nonsense about bipartisanship and beginning to fight like a man. A day later he had his deal and celebrated by adding three more corporate ghouls to his economic advisors.

But what’s been surprising in the last week is how a politician as smart as the new president could have failed to sense imminent peril concerning his nominations.

Since America’s political system is one of institutionalized bribery, overt (the legal political “donation”) and covert (the bag of cash ) and has a tax code with 50,000 pages of fine print, it stands to reason that of any ten nominees enduring scrutiny by White House investigators, by the staff of the Senate Finance Committee plus the occasional journalist probably 98 per cent will have some sort of explaining to do. Throw in infidelity and kindred offenses outlined at detail in the opening books of the Bible and maybe only Rep Ron Paul would survive.

Part of the problem is that most people reasonably think Mr Obama, who raised more money for his presidential run than anyone in history, is at the personal level an honest fellow. The last president who could be safely put in that category was Jimmy Carter. So when Obama puts up and then stands by nominees who are obviously severely compromised by corporate ties, odious enrichment or serious problems with the Internal Revenue Service they’re taken aback by such permissiveness in one so insistently high-minded in tone and so quick to announce supposedly tough new ethical guidelines for members of his administration.

On the one hand we have President Obama prohibiting individuals from working for government agencies they have lobbied in the past two years; on the other we have him nominating a defense industry lobbyist, William Lynn to be the number two man at the Pentagon, thus possibly the next Secretary of Defense. Lynn gets a waiver.

What’s amazing in the case of Tom Daschle, nominated to be Obama’s health czar, is the fact that neither the president, nor his staff, nor Daschle’s former colleagues in Congress nor the Washington press corps could see that his nomination was inherently preposterous, long before Daschle’s tax problems surfaced.  Was health reform’s best advocate to be a former US senator who managed to make $5.3 million in two years  trading on his former position as a rainmaker for a powerful law firm, hauling in consultancy and speaker fees from inmates of the self-same Augean stables he was charged, as Health Secretary-designate, with cleaning up?  Was he going to get a waiver too, like Lynn?

It’s not entirely clear why Daschle finally threw in the towel. The New York Times editorialized against him, but that’s not an automatic death sentence. His former senatorial colleagues blubbered with dismay when he quit, so they weren’t going to vote against him There is a theory that the White House felt Daschle couldn't be allowed to survive his tax problems once Killefer had been forced to drop out. More likely, Daschle  or the White House felt another forkful of manure was about to drop out of his filing cabinet.  But the net effect of his withdrawal, and that  -- also for tax problems -- of  Nancy Killefer, Obama’s nominee as a White House budgetary watchdog, was to rekindle public indignation about the confirmation of Treasury Secretary of Tim Geithner.

Geithner only owes his position to the fact that the White House  felt that the infinitely more capable Larry Summers mightn’t survive  nomination hearings, if put forward for the job he held in Clinton-time. At issue was Summers’ role as Harvard’s president in the scandal-ridden collapse of a Harvard advisory program in Russia, for which the US government levied a fine of $31 million on Harvard and other parties.

As with Daschle no one seems to have been perturbed by Geithner’s CV. Geithner had worked for the IMF. No problem.  You can toil diligently for an outfit that is properly execrated as  the Waffen-SS of international financial institutions and no one raises a bleat. Stiff Uncle Sam by not paying Social Security taxes for the maid who cleaned your quarters in the SS compound and you’re in trouble!

Geithner’s an obvious light-weight. As Treasury Secretary he’s in overall charge of the IRS and since tax season is gathering on its haunches to pounce, tax filers probably feel encouraged that an admitted scofflaw is in charge of the chicken coop. Anything to lower the moral tone, particularly when you’re in anxious conclave with your accountant about what precisely you think you can get away with.

But Obama isn’t in the business of promoting moral relativism, so how come Geithner survived, when Daschle and Killefer, not to mention Bill Richardson (who withdrew as nominee for Commerce Secretary over charges of favoritism in contract awards) all went down? The populist answer you hear often enough is, What the bankers want, the bankers get, and they wanted Geithner. His designated role is to be prime exponent for their cause, which is continued government bail-out at tax-payers’ expense.

Geithner and his boss, president Obama, are all for ongoing bail-out of the banks, and – it seems – for the so-called “aggregator bank” or “bad bank” that will relieve at face value the bankers of their worthless assets. There’s talk of another $1 trillion or so for bank rescue. Senator Jim Tester of Montana said this week he thinks the bank bail-out tab will rise to $11 trillion.

As Daschle withdrew, Obama called in the networks seriatim and told them (this is from the NBC transcript)  that “I've got to own up to my mistake which is that ultimately it's important for this administration to send a message that there aren't two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes."

After the lunatic obduracy of Bush Jr that he’d never made a mistake, it was refreshing to hear a president admit equably he’d screwed up, though he probably shouldn’t do it again for at least  a year. But people aren’t so stupid as not to realize that what nomination hearings mostly show is that there are indeed two sets of rules and Geithner’s successful confirmation and the ongoing bank bailouts confirm they are securely in place, however manifestly honest a fellow the new occupant of the White House may be.

Incidentally, there’s something  distinctly sexist about the treatment according Killefer (gone) and Hilda Solis, whose confirmation hearing as Labor Secretary has now been suspended. Both these women’s supposed problems with  the IRS are in a different category to Daschle’s and Geithner’s defalcations. Solis’ purported problem is that her husband has a federal tax lien against his name in the public record. Killefer’s difficulty was $900 in unpaid unemployment taxes for domestic help in 2005. Really! This is all an argument for the flat tax.  Of course Solis’ real problem is that she supports the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to unionize.  Republicans and many Democrats in Congress have been told firmly by their corporate sponsors that EFCA must not pass.

Dr Gupta’s Case Book

Of all the nominations and suggested appointments to Obama’s team, the proposed installation of CNN’s TV doc, Sanjay Gupta, as Surgeon-General is possibly the most frivolously objectionable, just as Daschle’s was one of the most arrogantly disgusting.  Why not go the whole hog and put up Hugh Laurie?

I’m glad to say that CounterPunch can make available a measured dissection of Doc Gupta’s qualifications by Vicente Navarro, long recognized as an authoritative voice on genuine health reform. In the new edition of our newsletter, Navarro reviews Gupta’s services to the pharmaceutical industry, his ignorance about public health issues and his opposition to Single Payer and writes:

“I find it highly worrisome that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is likely to be appointed head of the USPHS. He is not an expert on public health and is not sufficiently knowledgeable, or competent, to do the job. Training and experience in neurosurgery do not provide the public health knowledge that the position requires. But, what is far more alarming is that he will most likely be the media spokesperson for the task force on health care reform. And this means that a person hostile to a single-payer system (the type of system that has most support among people in the U.S.); a person clearly unsympathetic to the principle of the government’s guaranteeing universality of health care coverage; a person who is  part of the media that have been obfuscating, negating, and avoiding the real problems in health and medical care in this country , will be in control of selling the message of change in U.S. medical care. Is this the change we were promised by candidate Obama?”

It’s an important piece. Also in this new edition of the newsletter  is an exceptionally powerful and well informed review by Bruce Page  of Michael Wolff’s slavish new book The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Page, a renowned reporter and editor,  takes a scalpel to  Murdoch-myths; excavates the infamous role of his father in sliming with anti-Semitic slurs one of Australia’s authentic heroes; exposes the utter fraudulence of claims by himself and his acolytes that Murdoch is somehow a rebel and a thorn in the side of the Establishment; dissects  the degraded nature of his journalism and his tireless whoring  of his properties to the powerful.

And also in this new edition of our newsletter, part 2 of Paul Craig Roberts’ brief outline of economics – the shortest, sharpest ever written. This one’s on the myth of “free trade”.

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Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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