Today's Stories

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
November 28-30, 2008

CounterPunch Diary

In Time of Trouble

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

There have been bleaker Thanksgivings, to be sure, than the one Americans celebrated yesterday. The circumstances of the storied first feast in 1621, (very interestingly discussed on this site this weekend by David Yearsley and Mike Ely) on the Massachusetts shoreline actually took place in the ruined Indian village of Pawtuxet. As every schoolchild knows, the Wampanoag Indians  brought the little band of Puritans wild turkeys. Cortez had  shipped turkeys back  to Europe from Mexico  and a decade later, by the 1530s they were well-known  in Germany and England, hailed at the festive board as part of  tradition immemorial. The Puritans had domestic turkeys with them in New England, gazing out at their wild relatives, offered by the Indians who regarded them as somewhat second-rate as food. They also brought along with corn and seasonal squashes.

The Indians had scant reason to rejoice since their numbers had been reduced by some 95 per cent by smallpox introduced in 1614 by an earlier British expedition. If he heard the thanks raised to heaven by the Puritan leader John Winthrop, the English-speaking Indian known as Squanto probably declined to translate it for his fellows. Winthrop  saluted the epidemic as a miracle. As he wrote later to a friend in England, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”

Afforded their toehold in the New World by the blessings of plague, the Puritans prospered and the hectic tread of land grabs and capital accumulation  carried America on its great journey towards this last 387th Thanksgiving, one marked by  economic circumstances more frightening than most raised in this country have experienced in their entire lifetimes. An American would have to be over 75 to remember as a child the desperate circumstances of the late 1930s when, after five years of Roosevelt’s  New Deal,  there were still 20 million unemployed. The economic darkness only lifted with the arrival of World War Two. Someone born in 1961, the year John Kennedy was inaugurated, would have been a seven-year old amid the joyous Thanksgiving  when the postwar boom crested. There were some gloomy economic Novembers in the late Seventies, early Nineties and the expiring balloon of the .com boom eight years ago, but nothing like today’s grim landscape.

I spent Thanksgiving Day on St Simons Island, Georgia. Two days earlier, on neighboring Jekyll Island –- another of the four Golden Isles – they unveiled a sculpture of three large, curved sails, representing The Wanderer, the last slave ship known to have landed in the United States, docked on the south end of Jekyll Island in November, 1858, fifty years after Congress had officially outlawed the slave trade. This floating prison disgorged 400 African men, women and children to be sold at auction.

Before Thanksgiving I’d driven down I-26 and then 1-95 from Campobello, in the north-west corner of South Carolina, where  a friend of mine owns a small trailer park. By the late summer as local factories started closing, long-term tenants said goodbye and went on the road in search of work. The vacant trailers were soon filled by families walking away from mountains of mortgage debt and foreclosed homes. They live on budgets so tight that my friend says that they can just make the $500 monthly rental, but $550 would put them under. He pointed to one where an older man had just arrived from Michigan, 650 miles north up Interstate 75, heart of the US auto industry and already in economic ruins long before the major auto companies went begging for bailout in Washington DC in the last couple of weeks.  States in the industrial heartlands, like Michigan or Ohio, have been reeling for years as the factory owners redeployed to China, but others like New York or California or Washington and Oregon in the Pacific northwest now face budgetary implosion and cuts in services of up to 25 per cent.

This is the first time since I came to America in 1972 that I’ve heard almost every day of well-off people sounding somewhat distraught at the money they’ve lost. From this richer crowd one hears daily stories of portfolios worth half or less of their value three and four month ago, of people losing high salary jobs, often only months shy of log-scheduled retirement on full benefits.

Amid the plunge in the nation’s economic fortunes, as in any hospital ward, gloom alternates with determined good cheer. Flying across the country last week I could hear snatches of optimism in airport lounges from the tv sets blaring CNN news bulletins. The market “may have hit bottom”. The bounce back after the Citibank bailout was “the quickest two-day climb” up the graphs since the recovery from the crash of ’87. Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard, I watched five huge cranes just south of the Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace  busy servicing a  enormous  new hotel/casino  complex about halfway to completion. The sponsoring party here is MGM Mirage, the owner of Bellagio, New York-New York and MGM Grand  and other properties, and the project is the 68-acre “CityCenter”, scheduled to include more than 6,000 condo and hotel rooms, 165,000 square feet of casino space and its own power plant based around a 60-story casino and hotel. Its $7.4 billion budget schedules it to be the single most expensive privately funded project ever in the Western Hemisphere. All told, in Las Vegas right now, there are seven major projects budgeted at $23 billion.

It’s hard to tell whether these huge gambles are being staked on economic quicksand. The local housing market certainly has been soft. The man at Dollar Car Rental, a Hispanic fellow, said he’d come to Las Vegas because he couldn’t afford the $400,000 or so a decent house in Los Angeles would have cost him. The house in Las Vegas he’d just bought had been advertised at $240,000 and he just signed on the dotted line for $165,000. He was happy.

“Inexplicable enrichment” often features in criminal charges leveled against Americans running afoul of the law. Watching the fistfuls of $100 poker chips being tossed down by the tourists, I thought once again that America’s underground, off-the- books economy must be far larger than official estimates.

Against this larger Thanksgiving backdrop of high national anxiety the tone adopted by the impending Obama administration is, unsurprisingly, one of measured gravity and regular advisories that although help in the form of a half-trillion stimulus program is on the way, recovery will be a long, very slow business. Even this somberly soothing news thread is somewhat undercut by the familiar,  shopworn features of those being picked by president-elect Obama to mastermind the salvage operation. Here’s  prospective  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, currently head of the New York fed and therefore one of the architects of the present reeling rescue program. And here too as Obama’s White House adviser is Lawrence Summers who ran the Treasury for part of Clinton-time and fought savagely against those warning that the subprime boom was about to blow and take the economy with it.

As a bracing bucket of cold water I commend to all CounterPunchers Michael Hudson’s piece on this site  “The Obama Letdown” (http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11262008.html).

Reality had to raise its ugly head. Barack Obama was elected with overwhelming approval to inaugurate an era of change…. No doubt he will bring about a welcome change in race relations, environmental regulations, and a more civil rule of law…Where losses cannot be avoided, the government will bail out the rich on their financial investments, but not wage earners on their debts…this week’s appointment of the “Yeltsin” team who sponsored Russia’s privatization giveaways in the mid-1990s – Larry Summers and his protégés from the Clinton’s notorious Robert Rubin regime – shows that he knows his place when it comes to the proper relationship between a political candidate and his major backers….after resembling President Carter by running a brilliant presidential primary campaign to win the nomination (will a similarly disappointing administration be about to come?), Obama is looking more like Boris Yeltsin – a political umbrella for the kleptocrats to whom the public domain and decades of public wealth were given with no quid pro quo.

Obama’s ties with the Yeltsin administration are as direct as could be. He has appointed as his economic advisors the same anti-labor, pro-financial team that brought the kleptocrats to power in Russia in the mid-1990s. His advisor Robert Rubin has managed to put his protégés in key Obama administration posts: Larry Summers, who as head of the World Bank forced privatization at give-away prices to kleptocrats; Geithner of the New York Fed; and a monetarist economist from Berkeley, as right-wing a university as Chicago. These are the protective guard-dogs of America’s vested interests.

“It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility.  The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.”

That’s Paul Craig Roberts. In the latest edition of our subscriber only newsletter Roberts lays out the big economic picture  with bleak and compelling vigor. It’s must reading if you want to know the shape America is really in.   Subscribe to read his powerful essay.

Subscribe too, and read Judy Gumbo Albert’s risposte to Sarah Palin. Judy writes a great memoir of the late Sixties, from the Yipster perspective of one who famously said, when the Weathmen blew up a lavatory in the Capitol, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”

You also get co-editor Cockburn writing about food in the modern age, so different from those exalted moments  in the history of balanced diet which I describe in the newsletter, “with Australopithecus healthily subsisting on ‘fruits, leaves, larvae and bugs,’ along with modest gobbets of carrion. ‘His large teeth, powerful jaws and oversize gut were all adapted to coarse, fibrous plant matter … Even his small size – he stood barely four feet tall and weighed forty pounds – was ideal for harvesting fruit among the branches.’ Three million years later, we arrive at the far end of an inexorably descending arc, with 400-pound, low-income specimens of Homo sapiens swollen by excessive intake of calories, their guts compromised by lack of fiber, many of them diabetic, draped over their scooters, harvesting the aisles of Albertsons or Safeway for sugar, salt and fat-saturated snacks that will hike their blood pressure, clog their arteries, and propel them to an early grave.”

Subscribe, and read on.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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