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Calling All CounterPunchers!
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Calling All CounterPunchers!
Annual Fundraising AppealWe interrupt your regular reading habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch needs your financial support!
We're not in the habit of making idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near the end of our year and the wolves are gathering at the door.CounterPunch's website is supported almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter. We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations. George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets on cruiseliners.
The continued existence of CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. We get thousands of emails from you every day. Our website receives millions of hits and nearly 100,000 readers each day-and those numbers grow by the month. Of course, all these readers chew up a lot of bandwidth and that costs money.
Through the Iraq war, the daily traumas of the Bush administration, hurricanes, fires, the loss of Habeas Corpus, the bailout of Wall Street and the betrayals of the Democrats, many of you have found a refuge at CounterPunch and made us your homepage. You tell us that you love CounterPunch because the quality of writing you find here every day and because we never flinch under fire. We appreciate the support and are prepared for the fierce battles to come. And, if Obama manages win the Presidency, you know that CounterPunch--almost alone on the Left--will hold Obama and the Democrats to account.
Unlike many other outfits, we don't hit you up for money every month ... or even every quarter, like our friends at Antiwar.com. We only ask for your support once a year. But when we ask, we mean it. Please, use our secure server make a tax-deductible donation to CounterPunch today or purchase a subscription and a gift sub for someone or one of our award winning books (or a crate of books!) as holiday presents. (We won't call you to shake you down or sell your name to any lists--even Dick Cheney's.)
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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky, Alya, Deva and Kimberly
CounterPunch
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Today's Stories October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day October 16, 2008 Mike Whitney Jonathan Cook Ayesha Ijaz Khan Alan Maass Chuck O'Connell Mary Lynn Cramer P. Sainath Andy Worthington Peter Gelderloos Stephen Martin Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
October 15, 2008 Steve Conn William P. O'Connor Robert Weissman Jonathan M. Feldman Ron Jacobs Conn Hallinan Justin Podur Karl Grossman Dave Lindorff Eric Walberg Martha Rosenberg Uri Avnery Monica Benderman Website of the Day
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October 30, 2008 "It's Hard to Live on Just a Half Million a Year"Wall Street Bonus MadnessBy STANLEY HELLER You created an economy that is so unstable that the bankruptcy of a few big firms would mean worldwide catastrophe. Your policies lost the world $10 trillion on stock markets in the last month alone. You've started a worldwide recession/depression that will go on for years. So for a punishment we're giving you $20 billion in bonuses. No, this is not a Saturday Night Live gag. It's what will happen this year in the good old U S of A. It's all spelled out nicely on Bloomberg.com. The article by Christine Harper and Serena Saitto starts off by explaining that Merrill Lynch will hand out $6.7 billion in bonuses even though it has lost money for five straight quarters and saw its stock fall in value by 70%. (The company also sold itself off to the Bank of America.) $13 billion is being set aside at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Even some employees at Lehman Brothers will be given big fat end of the year envelopes even though the company has gone bankrupt. Merrill Lynch is actually raising bonuses this year by a couple of thousands. They've laid off 3,000 people so even though the pot is smaller there's more for the survivors to feast on. The average bonus will be well over 100K. The better off Wall St. companies will be giving twice that amount. You see this is what is expected on Wall Street. If you want to keep your "talent" you have to reward them. Otherwise they will go to …..hmmm. The hedge funds are shedding jobs by the thousands. The investment banks are now bank holding companies and laying off like mad. Foreign companies can't use them. Ah…if they don't get the bonuses the talent will undoubtedly run off to big careers managing homeless shelters. The article quotes Bill Coleman at the Massachusetts software firm Salaries.com as saying that Wall St. has created such an "obscene" standard of compensation that the big shots really believe "it's hard to live on just a half million dollars a year." This does not appear to be much of an exaggeration. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported securities-industry employees averaged $400,000 a year in salary alone last year. But how can the banks pay out so much money? Oh, I forgot, the US treasury is sending $700 billion into the banks to prop them up and hundreds of billions more to keep them "liquid". (as if bankers lived in deserts and were in constant danger of dehydration.) This actually doesn't have to happen. These flat world whiz kids have literally wrecked the world economy. We're just at the beginning of the collapse. It's funny how they are afraid to use the word "recession". The word "recession" was invented so they wouldn't have to use the word "depression". Depression itself was in its day a non-threatening alternative for the older term for business bust, a "panic". Heck, why not just call it a "reverse upwards boom"? The idea of basing world business on trillion feet high mountains of sliced and swapped debt is horse manure. We need completely new thinking, ideas for government owned banks to lend out money to worker-community corporations that actually produce things. There's hundreds of thousands of people out there with the technical and financial education to create such a system. They'll be happy to do the work and you won't have to pay them half a million apiece. In the meantime, here's a proposal. Some artist needs to come up with an angry vulgar graphic that can be emailed by the thousands to the Wall St. companies and to Congress along with a short sweet message in 50 size font: "Not a cent of Wall Street bonuses this year. Not on my dime. Let those con artists feast on white bread and margarine. Use the billions to keep people in their homes."
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
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