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The Battle Over the Israel Lobby

As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's long awaited "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" draws hysterical abuse, former CIA intelligence officers Kathy and Bill Christison define the Lobby's real nature, trace its history, and measure its actual power. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now

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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

September 22 / 23, 2007

Jennifer Loewenstein
Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security

September 21, 2007

Karim Makdisi
Letter from Lebanon

M. Shahid Alam
A History of Violence

Alan Farago
Who Will Buy My House?

Joshua Frank
The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus

Dave Zirin
Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Short History of Lending and Borrowing

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein
Mass Health Care Failure

Ben Terrall
The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi

Steve Fournier
Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here

Frederico Fuentes, et al
Voices in Defense of Bolivia

Website of the Day
Sabra and Shatila, Remembered

 

September 20, 2007

Kathleen Christison
Whatever Happened to Palestine?

Zoltan Grossman
An Endless Occupation?

Paul Craig Roberts
As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed

Stan Cox
and Wes Jackson
Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet

Russell Mokhiber
AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead

Charles Modiano
Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power

Raymond J. Lawrence
Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion

Brendan Cooney
Body-Snatched Nation

Website of the Day
Mind Control for Breakfast

 

September 19, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By?

Paul Krassner
The Power of Laughter

Sgt. Martin Smith
The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq

Seth Sandronsky
Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own?

Claud Cockburn
Looking back at the Great Crash

Victoria Buch
Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer

Robert Weissman
Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger

Mike Ferner
Can We Talk?

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water

Website of the Day
Housing Cost Calculator

 

September 18, 2007

Mike Whitney
U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel

Alan Farago
Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It

John Ross
America's Great Wall:
Where Will the Workers Go
When They Finish It?

Ron Jacobs
Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md.

Alex Doherty
Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible?

September 17, 2007

Marjorie Cohn
Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom

Paul Craig Roberts
Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be

Ricardo Alarcón
The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era

Marc Levy
Fake Vets Chasing Fame

Eva Liddell
In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like

Website of the Day
Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel

Sept. 15-16, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The General Came to Washington

Vicente Navarro
How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy

Mike Whitney
Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch

Herman Mindshaftgap
Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future?

Ellen Cantarow
Girls! Music! Palestine!

Jordan Flaherty
K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D.

Zachary Hurwitz
Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development

September 14, 2007

Debbie Nathan
New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator"

Franklin Lamb
Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later

Patrick Cockburn
Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha

Farzana Versey
The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon

Alan Farago
This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption

Hank Edson
Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache

September 13, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official

Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot
The Barksdale Nukes

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last

Michael Baney
Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past

Dr. Susan Block
Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern?

September 12, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
American Economy: RIP

Stan Goff
The Petraeus Report

William Blum
When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It.

Manuel Garcia
Forgetting 9/11

Debbie Nathan
Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time

September 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Fakery of General Petraeus

Iain Boal
Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse

Michael Dickinson
Osama on 9/11

Guerry Hoddersen
Free Speech is Not Given, but Taken

Bill Hatch
Irish Politics in Old Time California

Gary Leupp
The Legacy of Luciano Pavarotti

Website of the Day
Elisa Salasin's "My September 11th"

September 10, 2007

Uri Avnery
A Big Victory Against the Wall

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus's Closet

Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
Screwing Up In Iraq

David Michael Green
Why Fred Thompson is Uniquely Qualified to be the GOP's Nominee

Pius Adesanmi
A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick

Betty Schneider
How to Deal With Sex Offenders

 

September 8 / 9, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Will the US Really Bomb Iran?

Saul Landau
The Irrational Drama of a Declining Empire

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Hurricane Katrina and Bush's Wars

Ray McGovern
Petraeus, the Westmoreland of Iraq

Matthew Abraham
Finkelstein's Legacy at DePaul

Alan Farago
The Governor and the Growth Machine

Christopher Brauchli
Grand Old Party Animals

Rannie Amiri
Battle of the Camps

Fred Gardner
Will Snoops Get Stopped?

James L. Secor
B-52 Flexing Nuclear Muscles: H-Bombs Over Barksdale

Missy Comley Beattie
Choices: Shall We Stay or Shall We Go Now?

Ben Tripp
Still in the Clover

Francis Boyle
The University of Illinois' Little Red Sambo Show

Joe Allen and Paul D'Amato
Jason Bourne vs. James Bond

Website of the Weekend
Drilling Wyoming: the View from Above


September 7, 2007

Robert Fantina
Those Iraq Reports: Bush vs. Reality

John Ross
Coca-Cola's Raid on a Sacred Mountain

James Brooks
The Occupation Within

Russell Mokhiber
Robert Reich and the Elimination of Corporate Criminal Liability

Joshua Frank
The Green Implosion Continues: Cyberlynching John Murphy

John Walsh
On the Green Party

Mark Brenner
New York Taxi Workers Strike Over Tracking Devices

Mike Ferner
"I Will Salute No More Forever"

Website of the Day
Help Save Osny Zachary's Life

 

September 6, 2007

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand

Allan J. Lichtman
When General Petraeus Speaks, Don't Listen ...

Norman Solomon
The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman

Yifat Susskind
Hurricane Felix's First Responders: Courage and Tragedy on the Miskito Coast

Catherine Fenton
Why I Am Going to the Protest

Laura Santina
Can the War Machine be Contained?

Farzana Versey
Fission Kashmir

Yves Engler
Haiti: Where a Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry to Pay

Kelly Overton
Bang Bang; Shoot Shoot: Is Hunting Racist?

Michael Simmons
One Jew's Views: The Strange Genius of Drew Friedman and Kominsky Crumb

Website of the Day
Dams and Genocide in Guatemala

 

 

September 5, 2007

Stan Goff
The End Begins

Michael Dickinson
Working for Mother Teresa: Memoirs of a Rebellious Volunteer

Matthew Abraham
Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and DePaul's Heroic Students: a Defining Moment

Patrick Cockburn
The Basra Debacle

Dave Lindorff
Beware the Wounded Beast

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Are the Fanatics?

Clifton Ross
Ecuador and the Struggle for Latin American Unity

Elizabeth Schulte
Katrina's Forgotten Refugees

Joseph Grosso
Labor Day in New York City

Ben Terrall
Where's Nancy? On Trying to Protest Pelosi in San Francisco

Website of the Day
A Guide to Narco Dollars

 

September 4, 2007

Jean Bricmont
Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran

Patrick Cockburn
Cut and Run in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime

Tom Kerr
Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row

Gary Leupp
The Case of Jose Maria Sison

Sonja Karkar
The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine

Heather Gray
The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham

Fidel Castro
The Super-Revolutionaries

Jackie Corr
Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand

Sunsara Taylor
Katrina and the Progress of the System

Website of the Day
Colombia Journal

 

September 3, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Brits Flee from Basra

Eamon McCann
Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes

Joshua Frank
The End of the Green Party?

Chris Floyd
Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph

Marjorie Cohn
A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans

Walter Brasch
The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq

Matt Reichel
Redefining the American Dream

Website of the Day
Don't Get Fooled Again

 

September 1 / 2, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Entrapment Snares Larry Craig

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo

Saul Landau
The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five

David Keen
An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror

Patrick Cockburn
The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services

Diana Johnstone
Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket

George Longstreth, MD
& Karen Longstreth, RN
The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank

Linda M. Woolf
A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights

Ralph Nader
Wrapping the World with Advertising

Fred Gardner
The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD

Ben Tripp
Enquiry in America Today

David Michael Green
American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut

Missy Comley Beattie
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance

Michael Dickinson
Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana

Paul Krassner
Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark

Ron Jacobs
A Sports Nation of Millions

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z

 

 

 

 

Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition
September 22 / 23, 2007

The Meaning of Mattel's Strange Apology

Genuflecting to China

By ALAN FARAGO

Mattel apologizes to China and to the Chinese people for safety lapses which resulted in the recall of 21 million Chinese-made toys in recent months. Excuse me?

Does anyone else feel a backlash rising against China, that is fundamentally different from the trade complaints of the past and skirmishes over the value of the Chinese yuan?

The sight of a major American corporation going on bent knee to a nation that flouts the rule of law, cares not about human rights, freedom of speech, product and food safety, has emerged as a global factor in a warming climate, can't get its pollution under control-- is terrible.

Now, China is right to point the finger at the United States on this nation's arrogance toward the causes and consequences of global warming.

But of greater concern for now is the position of our economies in relation to each other, and the growing sense that the United States is the subordinate partner.

Our own trade policies (successive presidents) encouraged the massive transformation of the US economy to a low inflation environment that is regulated, not by what we manufacture, but by what China does. So what do we do when Chinese products threaten the health of children, we apologize?

Because the United States embraced this subordinate position, we find ourselves doing exactly what subordinates do: placate those with power over us.

Listening to Jim Cramer last night out of the corner of my ear, I heard him tell television viewers that we shouldn't worry about the smashed value of the dollar, we should just try to figure out ways to make money from it.

But if this is the good news about the "free market", why don't I feel good about it? Why don't I feel good about the US economy turning into a flea market for the world's stronger currencies?

I don't believe apologies to China takes America anywhere this nation wants to be.

The Chinese government views its co-dependency with the US dollar as economic trade-off with diminishing value.

It is no secret: China has announced its intention to diversify its portfolios out of the US dollar. It is the single threat hanging over the intense efforts by former Goldman Sachs chief, Treasury Secty Hank Paulson to smooth relations with China.

Chinese economic ministers are most certainly astute and must feel badly burned by their choice to invest in credit through financial derivatives tied to the US housing industry, now turned to junk. We don't hear much about China's dissatisfaction with America, except when we see the reaction of a US corporation, like Mattel, to answer a presumed slight: the recall of 21 million toys.

Who, after all, are Americans to complain about the services we receive from China?

Alan Farago of Coral Gables, who writes about the environment and the politics of South Florida, can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com.





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