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

When Everything Old is New Again

Obama and the End of Racism?

By CARLOS FIERRO

I’ve made no secret about my less than enthusiastic response to Obama’s candidacy and subsequent election.  That being said, it wasn’t Obama in particular that I was unenthusiastic about.  Obama showed himself, within the context of the US presidency, or one vying for the US presidency, to be little better or little worse than past presidents or presidential candidates.  My qualms weren’t directed at Obama as a special case, aside from the fact that he, more so than in recent memory, was able to garner within people a wide range of believes in his ideas and policies that were in fact contrary to his ideas and policies.  Last month I called the phenomenon temporary insanity and amnesia; those terms still seem to apply.  

The liberal minded among us who told us that first and foremost we had to make sure that Obama got elected, but that after the election the real work would begin, have remained oddly silent as the Obama administration begins to take shape.  First it was the announcement that Rahm Emanuel would become Obama’s Chief of Staff.  Emanuel, who is one of the most ardent supporters of apartheid Zionism practiced in Israel on Palestinians, also voted for the trillion dollar give away to banks, voted to authorize the war in 2002, and worked to defeat an anti-war candidate in Illinois (see Tammy Duckworth v. Christine Cegelis).  Then there was the announcement that Lawrence Summers would head the National Economic Council and act as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.  Mr. Summers found fame when, as president of Harvard, he publically suggested that women are inferior to men in math and science, which accounted for Harvard’s disproportionately low numbers of women in math and sciences.  Mr. Summers lost his gig as president shortly after.  And lastly we learn that Hillary Clinton will be named Secretary of State, as hawkish a hawk there has ever been. 

Even with this, it is hard to deny that the symbolic significance of Obama’s election to president is indeed staggering.  It certainly wasn’t lost upon me.  I was teaching as the election results began to come in, and we had a TV on in the background.  My disinterest in the results didn’t mean that I couldn’t appreciate the historic nature of the event; historic it certainly was.  The significance can be overblown, however. 

THE END OF RACISM, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM,  & EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

A few years back, Brit Hume (on Fox’s Sunday morning show) made the claim that racism in the US was no longer an issue.  The argument Hume gave went unchallenged by the other panelist.  Hume suggested that racism couldn’t be a problem in US because large numbers of white kids listen to and immolate black entertainers.  Of course, this makes as much sense as saying that racism wasn’t a problem during slavery because white slave masters partook in raping their black slaves.  Or that racism wasn’t a problem in the 20s, 30s, and 40s because white kids swayed to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington. 

So it came as no surprise that the election of Obama brought about all number and variety of questions concerning the end of racism in the US.  Very few of those questioned, aside from perhaps Brit Hume (though I must admit I have not heard Mr. Hume comment on the subject), suggested that Obama’s election marked the end of racism.  The Reuters article, “Obama’s win does not end U.S. racism, activists say,” demonstrated this quite well.  In the article, Earl Ofari Hutchinson is quoted as saying, “There is an acceptance among wide segments of the population that a qualified African American (Obama) can be accepted in the highest office, but that does not magically make the problems go away for the average person of color. Nothing has changed and for many the negative stereotypes are still very much there.” 

The article also quotes Chuck D, of Public Enemy. “People will say: ‘You guys have got a black president so it's cool. It's straight.’ But it does not erase the discussion (about race) that you need to have.”

On the other hand, many in the news media point to Obama’s win as evidence that there has been a drastic change in the racial landscape.  To a degree this is true, especially when one considers the history of the US.  For a country founded on genocide, slavery, and theft to elect a black man president is an astounding moment.  Considering that the US was one of the last nations to have in place an institutionalized system of apartheid the symbolic significance of the election of Obama cannot be overplayed.

Unfortunately, the election of Obama can be little more than symbolic.  Imagine that Obama, rather then winning the US presidency, was named the CEO of Walmart.  No one would deny that this would be a symbolically significant event; likewise, no one would imagine that Obama would disband Walmart or make it something other then Walmart.  The US presidency is an institutional position that requires presidential action.  US presidents act like US presidents.  They are tasked with maintaining the US’s primacy in the world: economically, militarily, with regard to consumption, pollution, and access to resources.  With the job come certain responsibilities that are inescapable.  Obama has already shown himself up to the task.  He has made no secrete that he will act as US presidents act, and that he thinks like US presidents think.  It is within the mental framework of the presidency that he should think it perfectly acceptable that he has the right to even discuss plans for a partial pullout, scaling down, or maintaining residual forces in Iraq.  IRAQ DOES NOT BELONG TO US! VENUSULA, BOLIVA, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, PALESTINE DO NOT BELONG TO US!

Only the Hubris of a US president would allow one to discuss such things as drawing down but maintaining forces in Iraq so that we can ratchet up our presence in Afghanistan.  To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  To a man with the hammer the size of the US military, the whole world looks like a nail. 

When the missiles continue to fall on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan after Obama is sworn in, ask them if those missiles hurt any less?  Ask them if they kill and dismember their family members any less?  Ask the people of Central and South America if US imperialism is any less destructive being that Obama is at the helm?   Militarism and imperialism are still militarism and imperialism regardless the occupant of the White House, Republican, Democrat, white, black, man or women. 

Racism does not die with a black man in the oval office, but that doesn’t mean that notions of US exceptionalism aren’t progressed.  A simple google search of the terms “Obama,” “end,” and “racism” reveals a disproportionate number of returns concerning a story that made the rounds through mainstream media shortly after the elections concerning France’s push to end racism, of course the implication being that the US has shown the rest of the world, or at least France, that racism is not the way to go. 

We heard other proclamations that usually begin “Only in America.” Such as Tom Holbrook’s Examiner.com article titled “Obama…Only in America.”  Holbrook writes, “As I said at the top... only in America!!!  An amazing, meteoric rise for any man in the political world but even more amazing is the fact that, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an Arabic black father of Kenya, and a white American mother from Kansas, is the first black person in the history of the United States to ascend to the highest and most powerful political office in our country.”  Russell Redenbaugh in his article “Barack Obama: Only In America” wrote, “Obama’s climb to the Presidency is the definition of the American dream”.  A The San Diego Union Tribune editorial stated that “[Obama’s] election is an affirmation of American ideals to a world that has grown increasingly skeptical of our actions and intentions”. Of course Obama himself has said that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

Obama’s election has also allowed some among us to feel better about ourselves.  Black friends have told me stories about white acquaintances, or even strangers pointing to “Obama 08” bumper stickers on their cars, as if signs of…what(?)…solidarity…liberal credentials…a sign that they are not racist?

Chuck D goes on to say in the Reuters article that, the election of Obama may become “a weapon of mass distraction.”  Obama’s election is certainly historic, but racism, & let’s not forget classism, will still be interwoven in the fabric of the US so long as the war on drugs is used as an excuse to lock up black and brown people at disproportionally higher numbers and for longer terms.  So long as we continue to build walls around our borders to keep those undesirables out, so long as we turn our hateful eyes toward the weakest among us, the poor, the immigrants, the homeless, the infirmed racisms/classism remain an integral part of our society.  So long as our foreign policies privileges US lives & economic interests over Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, Palestinian, Cuban, Haitian, Mexican, and Sudanese lives then Obama’s election doesn’t mark the end of racism, but more of the same.

Carlos Fierro lives in Fresno, CA, where he teaches Journalism & Mass Communication at a local college.  He is the founding editor of The Undercurrent, an independent monthly newspaper, where this article originally appeared.  He can be reached at editor@FresnoUndercurrent.net.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont