Today's Stories

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Miliary

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

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

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

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

December 4, 2008

The National Temperance Beverage

Obama-Cola

By JENNIFER MATSUI

In 2004, American voters were offered a choice between two presidential candidates in an elaborately staged "taste test" based on consumer preference for one brand of Cola over the other. More recently, voters were faced with yet another soft drink challenge, but this time it was based on the dominant brand's ill-advised attempt in 1985 to "mess with success" and re-launch its product under a "new" label. Unlike the Bush/Kerry campaign that pitted competing (but otherwise identical) corporate interests against one another, election 2008 more closely resembled an internal struggle within a single corporate entity.

This time around, GW played the unenviable villain role of the Coca Cola exec responsible for his company’s disastrous decision to tamper with the formula and packaging of a beloved, much touted brand of carbolic soda, while Barak Obama played the dissenting marketing genius who comes to the rescue and restores the poisonous product back to its original flavor. Having put the genie, so to speak, back into the bottle, the whiz kid replaces the despised and disgraced CEO much to the relief of customers and shareholders alike. In this fictionalized retelling of the story, the youthful upstart's deceptively bold campaign to oust his former boss is launched with the support of his enthusiastic and idealistic marketing team, most of whom were eventually given the pink slip once the new CEO settled into his upper floor suite. McCain’s minor role as hired mouthpiece attempting damage control for the outgoing CEO was a comical and insignificant aside to bigger picture premise of an arrogant and deluded leader being challenged by a charismatic and visionary upstart. Never mind that the “visionary” envisioned nothing more radical than a return to the recent past of putting the requisite amount of high fructose corn syrup in aluminum cans.

While Pepsi may have profited handsomely in the short term from Coca-Cola's mishandling of its newly launched product and the public relations fiasco that followed, it was Coca Cola that ultimately prevailed, outselling the rival brand two to one within six months of reintroducing the old formula as "Coke Classic". In subsequent retellings of the events in 1985, Coca Cola's swift and repentant capitulation to consumer demand would be upheld as an example of "the power of the people" in shaping corporate policy, citing the example of millions of angry Coke drinkers bombarding the company's Atlanta headquarters with angry letters and staging public events to express their anger over what they felt was the company's arrogant disregard of customer loyalty. What is most often overlooked in this updated David vs Goliath parable is how the beleaguered Behemoth, while publicly licking its wounds, was in fact, laughing all the way to the bank, even as the competition gained short term windfalls over the ensuing "scandal". Also absent from this feel good retelling of 'The People vs New Coke' is how this so-called consumer movement was not in fact a spontaneous rising up of angry citizens against an arrogant giant but a mostly media-generated spectacle that took its talking points from Pepsi's PR department, hoping to cash in on the "controversy".

The media/entertainment industrial complex pushes forward these faux story lines, substituting substance with empty calories while prioritizing the trivial at the expense of truth telling. Our system of governance in collusion with its corporate overseers relies on a lazy and willfully misinformed citizenry to effectively function. Like the carefully orchestrated spat between the identical blonde "frenemies" of The Hills, the presumed enmity between Team Obama and Team Bush (and even Team Clinton) was a merely a plot device to enhance the selling points of deodorant and hybrid cars during a profitable election cycle.

Voters, not unlike soft drink aficionados can be counted on to rally around a non-cause perpetrated by multiple corporate entities all profiting from a well orchestrated marketing blitz - just as they can be counted on to take these falsely constructed narratives and marketing campaigns at face value, eschewing facts for factoids, truth for "truthiness" and reality for the MTV version. Coverage of November's landmark presidential election puts forward a similar feel good spin on what really amounts to a a staged confrontation between costumed rivals. Admittedly, it's difficult not to applaud the triumphant outcome of the "underdog" in this elaborately choreographed "battle". The poised and telegenic President-Elect is a flawless package, even if his sleek exterior conceals the same corrosive elements that defined his predecessors. Once again, a multi-lateral marketing campaign yielded a simulacrum democratic movement under a new slogan. "Yes, we can!" heralded as a stroke of (marketing) genius on par with "I have a Dream" (but without all the pesky nuance, intellectual depth and angry black guy connotations) was less a continuation of Dr King's groundbreaking speech than having evolved from the brain trust that once declared Coca-Cola "The Great National Temperance Beverage".

By the time he officially enters the White House with his revived cabinet of Clinton appointees, President Obama will have calmed the angry public backlash at the executive responsible for tampering with an established brand of “soft” Imperialism and exposing it as a crude, corpse strewn land grab. Like the subsequently re-branded ‘Coke Classic’, Brand Obama has never been about “change” but merely reversion to an executive branch that pretends to “feel your pain” while continuing to inflict it even more brutally on vulnerable and impoverished populations overseas.

Still weeks away from officially taking office, and already President-Elect Obama's early supporters; those insignificant and ultimately embarrassing hordes of anti-war "progressives" who dug into near empty pockets to launch his grassroots campaign are feeling the sting of betrayal with each passing news cycle announcing his cabinet picks. Perhaps we should not be surprised by his choice of hawkish economic and foreign policy advisors and "experts", or the appointment of Lady MacClinton herself as Secretary of State. After all, contrary to popular belief, no one at Coca-Cola was fired or otherwise penalized for their role in perpetrating what is widely perceived as the worst marketing decision ever made for the simple reason that for all its bad publicity, the "miscalculation" proved ultimately beneficial to the architects of this "failure". "Catastrophic success" then as now describes the unintended benefits that befall the mighty in the wake of a seemingly insurmountable setback.

Presidential candidate Obama might have questioned Senator Clinton's judgment in authorizing the war in Iraq with her 'yes' vote, but having measured the decorous curtains in his plush new quarters, perhaps he can afford to be magnanimous towards his former nemesis Bill Clinton. No doubt the old horn dog is salivating over the prospect of spending quality time with his next booty call while the Missus waddles across the world stage to collect her next consolation prize.

What pundits describe as the "seamless" White House transition currently underway should give us more reason to despair than hope. This smooth and apparently amicable transfer of power that the pundits insist is proof that civility and pragmatism are being restored to the nation's highest office merely confirms that "change" and "hope" are, and always have been, euphemistic terms for "Business and Empire as Usual". That should have been obvious when the "anti-war" candidate shifted his rhetorical stance from ending the bloodshed in Iraq to escalating the US military presence in Afghanistan. His groveling campaign speech to AIPAC was another indication that his conscience and intellect were impediments on the path to his “historic” presidency; short-term glitches in an otherwise flawlessly executed marketing campaign. His swift post-election appointment of Likud Party poster boy Rahm Emanuel as Chief-of-Staff, Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden as Vice-President, and of course, the selection of Hillary ("I will obliterate Iran") Clinton to lead the State Department are further indications that the next US president is gearing up to serve as Israel’s next outsourced leader.

As he prepares to fulfill his duties overseeing the vast corporate/ military apparatus required to sustain his newly adopted homeland, the last thing we should expect from this "agent of change" is, say, a rational and humane response to the humanitarian crisis currently playing out in Gaza as Israel's deadly blockade of the occupied territories intensifies, or a swift withdrawal of US troops from Iraq as promised early on his campaign. Nor should we expect the media under an Obama presidency to relinquish its role as the propaganda arm of an National Security State comprised of a willfully misinformed electorate unable to distinguish between Brand A Cola and its political counterpart. After all, voters, content to passively adore their beloved candidate from a viral YouTube video or a Huffpo blog post extolling his sterling qualities, did not set a mandate for their "agent of change" or otherwise instruct him to implement policy that represented a significant departure from the current one. It was enough, it turns out, to project one's hopes on to an abstractly held notion of "change" and bask in the warm glow of being part of a movement, even if the movement was little more than a disgraced brand's temporary recall of a product tainted by bad publicity.

The one time community organizer turned politician has finally revealed himself as a viral marketing phenomenon on par with Max Headroom, Coca Cola's virtual, lantern jawed mascot whose appeal rested on his ability to convey nothing and everything simultaneously. Depending on the psychological profile of the consumer, the remote, disembodied Cola mascot was either a figure of strength and authority or a "new wave" icon thumbing his digital nose at the old order. The enigmatic shape shifting Max Headroom was reborn in the Senator from Illinois who similarly and deceptively conveyed youth and rebellion while advocating the same kind of muscular foreign policy of his predecessors. This cynically contradictory message did not appear to cause discomfiture among Obama's centrist base, who insist to this day that the "grassroots" nature of his early campaign and the "cool" factor he was able to engender in a process that traditionally overlooks the role of young voters somehow mitigates the President-Elect's transformation from agent of "change" to establishment hawk waiting to serve out Bush's third term.

Where "Classic" was once stamped on a hastily reconfigured pop can to distinguish it from its internal rival, "Hope" became the official slogan of a disgraced brand desperately seeking to re-establish its dominant market share with a quick fix solution. Just as consumers never noticed that the cheaper sweetening agent that had replaced liquid cane sugar in the "old" Coke was now the staple ingredient of "Classic" Coke, most of us remain blissfully non-cognizant of the sleight of hand deceptions going on behind the scenes as Brand USA relaunches itself as a continuation of the status-quo.

Jennifer Matsui can be reached at: jenmatsui@mac.com

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