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Inside Iraq's Resistance HOT HOT HOT New CounterPunch Print Edition! Meet actual Iraqis and not just Western caricatures. Laith al-Saud interviews top man in Iraq's national resistance. It's not just Abu Ghraib and bids to kill Fidel Castro. Torture and assassination are integral parts of America's imperial machine. Don't miss Andrew Wimmer's searing journey into the soul of a nation that tortures as a way of life. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the killing of General Kassem. PLUS Sam Sillen's rollicking exhumation of Edmund Wilson as Malthusian Trostskyite. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch Writer Daniel Wolff in Portland on Race, Music and Ashbury Park Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Today's Stories October 6, 2005 Robert Pollin Is the Dollar Still Falling? October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Militarization is Not an Answer for Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines Robert Jensen Is Bush a Racist? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Final Choice: America or the Empire Col. Dan Smith Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything is Bad" Dave Zirin Barry Bonds Laughs Last Paul Craig Roberts Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons Took Over Alan Maass Doing the Right Wing's Dirty Work   October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Shocking the Two Party System: a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt. Mike Roselle Houston, You've Got a Problem Joshua Frank The Scoop on Harriet Miers John Chuckman War Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say Alan Farago Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers, Hurricanes and the Keys Mickey Z. An Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski Christine & Ethan Rose Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History Website of the Day Rodney Crowell on Bob Dylan   October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare   October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze Dave Marsh A Direction Home: a Message from Bob Dylan Ralph Nader Gutless, Spineless and Clueless Flavia Alaya Showdown at Sheriff's Plaza Uri Avnery The Gladiators: Sharon's Victory Chris Kutalik The Battle at Northwest Airlines Greg Moses Bill Bennett's Book of Cracker Virtues Brian J. Foley I Gave My Copy of the Constitution to a Pro-War Vet Nicole Colson Hunger Strike at Gitmo Ray McGovern Abu Ghraib is a Command Responsibility Fred Gardner Ricky Williams Takes a Late Hit Justin Felux Save America from Crime: Abort Every White Baby! Will Youmans "Free the P": Hip-Hop for Palestine Mike Ferner What Else Shall We Do? David Krieger The War in Iraq: a Broken Covenant Agustin Velloso Samson Returns to Gaza Saul Landau The Constant Gardener: Serious Cinema Ben Tripp Right Down the Middle Poets Basement Peddibone, Crowell, Engel and Albert Website of the Weekend Holler If Ya Hear Me   September 30, 2005 Mary Geddry Why I Marched: They Made My Son Kill Paul Craig Roberts Bush is Cooking Up Two New Wars Dave Lindorff Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary Jail Time Gregory Wilpert "The Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" Benjamin Dangl "Gringo, Go Home:" an Interview with Orlando Castillo James McMurtry We Can't Make It Here Anymore T.R. Johnson Return to the Ninth Ward   September 29, 2005 Sen. Russ Feingold Bush's Iraq War is Weakening America Carl G. Estabrook Obama the Enabler Ramzy Baroud Rhetoric and Reality of War Dave Lindorff What Opposition Party? Mike Whitney Brownie's Comic Opera Jozef Hand-Boniakowski What Noble Cause? Gary Handschumacher Getting Arrested with Cindy Sheehan Winslow T. Wheeler No Leaders in Congress Against This War: Lame Democrat and Tame Republicans   September 28, 2005 Dr. Eyad Serraj Letter from Gaza: What Disengagement Sounds Like William A. Cook Bush's Security Barrier Liaquat Ali Khan The Invention of Porno Torture Mike Whitney Apartheid Justice in America Joshua Frank Sheehan and the Democrats: Anybody Home? CounterPunch Wire New Orleans Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters Chris Genovali Cutting the Bears Out of the Great Bear Rainforest Linn Washington, Jr. White Affirmative Action: How John Roberts Got to the Top   September 27, 2005 Forrest Hylton Political Murder in Puerto Rico: a Matter for Our Movement Jason Leopold The Decline and Fall of Bill Frist Jennifer K. Harbury Torture is US Policy, Not an Aberration Ray McGovern Torture and Cowardice: Why are American Religious Leaders Silent? Mike Ferner Bringing the War Home: Arrested at the Pentagon Antony Loewenstein When the Truth Comes to Town: What You Can't Say About Israel in Australia Harry Browne Live from Hollywood: the IRA Disarms   September 26, 2005 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Assassination in Puerto Rico: the FBI Murders a Legend Joshua Frank Democrats Flee Peace Protests Lamis Andoni The Railroading of Taysir Alony Mike Marqusee Those Pesky "Urban Intellectuals": Blair, Spiro Agnew and the Antiwar Movement Rep. Cynthia McKinney They Can't Fool Us Anymore Ron Jacobs A Small March for Me, a Giant March for the Antiwar Movement Norman Solomon The Media and the Antiwar Movement John Chuckman Bush in a Bottle Paul Craig Roberts America is Running Out of Time   September 24 / 25, 2005 Kathy and Bill Christison Polluting Palestine: Settlements & Sewage Ralph Nader Stealing the Moment: How Corporations Cashed in on Katrina Saul Landau The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada Greg Moses A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau Roger Burbach Hugo Chavez's Mission Vijay Prashad America's Shame Laura Carlsen After NAFTA Robert Fisk When Man and Nature Conspire to Expose the Lies of the Powerful Dave Lindorff A Gusher Called Katrina: They Fix Oil Prices, Don't They? Kirkpatrick Sale / Thomas Naylor Secession from the Empire: the Middlebury Declaration Maj. Anthony Milavic The US Military and Torture: the View of a Former Interrogator Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti: the Time for Action is Now   September 23, 2005 CounterPunch News Service In Which, Phil Donahue Demolishes Bill O'Reilly Diane Farsetta Katrina and Right-Wing Think Tanks Robert Sandels Militarizing the Market Christopher Brauchli Bush: the Good Samaritan for Corporations Alan Farago Bird Flu Takes Flight Dave Zirin When Sports & Politics Collided: Redeeming the Olympic Martyrs of 1968 Maxine Conant A Simple Test for Bush David Price Workers Get Hit Twice: Katrina and Davis-Bacon Profiteering   September 22, 2005 Smith, Wood, Leas, and Greenfield Which Way Forward for the Green Party? a Report from Tulsa Patrick Cockburn Iraqis: This Government has No Authority Manuel Garcia, Jr. Thinking is Religious Freedom Lucia Dailey Trial of the St. Patrick's Four: Day One Mokhiber / Weissman Are You a Speed Freak? Russell D. Hoffman The Nukes in Rita's Path Kona Lowell God's Hurricane? Jason Leopold GOP Fiscal Policy and Katrina Website of the Day Robert Pollin on the Global Economy   September 21, 2005 Jorge Mariscal Military Recruiters: Counselers or Salesmen? Linda S. Heard Double Standards in Iraq: Basra Brit Jailbreak Joshua Frank NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan Eric Ruder "The Problem in Iraq is the US": an Interview with Camilo Mejia Pierre Tristam The Struts and Bull Presidency Dave Lindorff The Real Story of the German Elections Mike Ferner Sit Down in DC Missy Comley Beattie Bush's Katrina Bling Bling Jeffrey St. Clair W Marks the Spot Website of the Day New Orleans: Survivor Stories   September 20, 2005 Steve Breyman Toxic Gumbo: Katrina and Environmental Justice George Galloway Et Tu, Greg Palast? Patrick Cockburn What Happened to Iraq's Missing $1 Billion? M. Shahid Alam Gen. Musharraf and Israel: Is Pakistan Selling Out? Mike Whitney The Gitmo Hunger Strikers Winslow T. Wheeler It's Not Rocket Science Niranjan Ramakrishnan Back to the Future: North Korea's Gambit Paul Craig Roberts Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?         Subscribe Online

October 6, 2005 The Latest Twists in Global Neoliberalism Is the Dollar Still Falling? By ROBERT POLLIN In his classic work, The General Theory, published in the depths of the 1930s Depression, John Maynard Keynes famously observed that "Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done." Keynes's Depression-forged insights have been routinely reaffirmed over the subsequent 70 years of global capitalist history, not least during the current movements of decline, revival, and renewed drop in the value of the dollar in global currency markets. And as Keynes emphasized, the main issue here is not merely the behavior of financial markets, which never has been more rational or socially redeeming than Las Vegas or Monte Carlo (as was obvious during the Wall Street bubble years under Clinton). The real issue is rather how the behavior of financial markets define the limits of acceptable economic policies about things that matter well beyond the confines of the casino, like unemployment, the distribution of income, and the economic possibilities for our children. In a piece last April in CounterPunch, I wrote that "Between January 2002 and December 2004, the dollar fell by 34 percent relative to the euro, and 22 percent relative to the Japanese yen. The prospect is for the dollar to keep declining at least through 2005." I was accurate then in describing what the prospect had been at that moment. But in fact, between April and August, events have rendered that prospect increasingly uncertain. Between May 1 and July 1 of this year, the dollar rose by 7.7 percent against the euro and by 6.3 percent against the yen. Then, between July 4 and August 15, the dollar fell back by 3.7 percent against the euro and 2.1 percent against the yen, before rising again to roughly their July levels by October 1. One of the main points of my April piece was to explore the factors that would work against the continued dollar decline that proceeded through 2002 ­ 2004, and would, more generally, produce a more uncertain future path for the dollar than was being widely asserted at the time. The first and most straightforward factor that I had mentioned was that U.S. policymakers themselves would not passively allow a dollar collapse. I said then that the key policy tool for the U.S. to support the dollar against the darkening opinion of global currency speculators was to raise interest rates-i.e. sweetening the interest rate returns for global bond purchasers if they keep holding their wealth in U.S. dollar bonds. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has done just that in the ensuing months, having pushed up the Fed's main monetary policy rate (the federal funds rate) from 2.75 to 3.75 percent just since April, and with promises of more increases to come. I also said that any movement among European policy makers away from the neoliberal policy agenda that has prevailed for roughly two decades would spook currency markets and push the euro down against the dollar. Neoliberalism in Europe, including low government deficits and high interest rates, have conspired to maintain unemployment in the range of 10 percent for a most of the past 20 years in most European countries. European elites appear just as committed to neoliberalism today as they were in April. But the European people have made it clear that they've had enough. The most vehement expression of this sentiment came when voters in France and the Netherlands both decisively rejected the European Union constitution last May. Global currency speculators did not miss this unequivocal message from the European voters, even while European politicians expressed disgust over the people's irresponsibility. The EU's then President Jean-Claude Junker of Luxembourg declared that "This evening, Europe no longer inspires people to dream." A third change in the global currency landscape since April was something I did not discuss in the earlier piece ­ the decision last July by the Chinese to allow their currency, the yuan, to adjust slightly upward relative to the dollar. The Bush administration had been lobbying heavily for the Chinese to make this move, given that a low-valued yuan helps the Chinese to keep pushing cheap imports onto the shelves of Wal-Marts and the rest of the U.S. market. This makes the U.S. trade deficit-our purchases of imports in excess of our sales of exports-grow correspondingly. The trade deficit, in turn, along with the federal government's $400 billion budget deficit, are the primary forces pushing the dollar onto its downward trajectory in the first place. U.S. policymakers have long complained that the Chinese haven't truly embraced the rules of neoliberal global capitalism, giving themselves an unfair advantage by holding down the value of the yuan. This is entirely true. For decades now, the Chinese have been ignoring neoliberal precepts in this and many other ways, through which disdain they have produced something approximating to the fastest rate of sustained economic growth in world history. One would think that this new Chinese gesture­ and to date nobody,including probably the Chinese themselves, knows whether this move amounts to more than a token nod in behalf of U.S. sensibilities ­ will immediately work to nudge the dollar back onto the downward path that prevailed between 2002 and 2004, at least at first. This is because with the dollar now being less valuable relative to the yuan, it is correspondingly also less valuable for everyone else in the world that has been using dollars to purchase imports from China. However, if a more expensive yuan does contribute to a smaller U.S. trade deficit, the net result from the smaller trade deficit could be to push the dollar back up. Still another possibility is that, with the dollar cheapened relative to the yuan, the Chinese may then decide to stop purchasing U.S. government bonds as heavily as they have done the past few years. The purpose of U.S. bond purchases by the Chinese (along with an even more voracious customer, the Japanese) was to prevent the dollar from falling too rapidly, which would thereby render Chinese products more expensive in the U.S. market. However if the Chinese did decide to cut back on their U.S. bond purchases, this would produce serious downward pressures on the dollar against the euro and other currencies, not simply against the yuan. Alan Greenspan would then likely push U.S. interest rates still higher in self-defense. The U.S., in short, may not find themselves entirely enamored with the exchange rate policy they wished for from China. Such uncertainly is the very stuff on which the global currency casino thrives. Is the dollar going to keep rising, as it did between April and July, or return to its downward trajectory of the previous two years? The dice keep rolling. As Lord Keynes, again, famously remarked, "on such matters, we simply do not know." Still, whether or not the dollar continues falling was not the main question I posed last April. My main concern was rather, would a dollar decline be good or bad news? Nothing has changed since April to undermine my basic point then, which is, there is no simple answer to that question, not least because the question inevitably itself pushes us well beyond the environs of the financial market casino. We can't consider whether a dollar decline is good or bad news without asking, "for whom?" Wall Street? U.S. manufacturers? U.S. workers? French, Dutch or Chinese capitalists or workers? How about South African workers? The answers don't break down easily along well-defined political lines. Thus, under neoliberalism, U.S. workers have been badly hurt by the U.S. trade deficit and globalization more generally, since it increasingly places them in competition for jobs with workers elsewhere. U.S. workers therefore benefit from a weaker dollar, since a weak dollar makes it easier to sell U.S. products in foreign markets and harder for imports to compete with U.S.-based manufacturers. But U.S. workers would benefit far more from an anti-neoliberal commitment to full employment policies in the U.S., something akin to what the French and Dutch voters appeared to be effectively endorsing in May. A full employment program in the U.S., as well as France and the Netherlands, would also benefit workers in other countries as well, including those in poor countries. If governments in rich countries were committed to creating jobs for their residents, then differences over trade policies and exchange rates ­ the struggle to 'beggar-thy-neighbor,' to create more jobs at home by taking jobs away from neighboring countries­ would diminish to a second-order problem. But as long as exchange rates and trade policy remain a first-order problem, the U.S. does face a serious and unavoidable trap, which is the legitimate source of the hand-wringing about the dollar's decline from 2002 to 2004. Even without the help of the Japanese and Chinese purchasing U.S. government bonds at their recent heavy rates, the U.S. can probably counteract the long-term downward pressure on the dollar generated by our persistent trade and budget deficits. But the Fed will have to keep raising U.S. interest rates to accomplish this. Persistently rising interest rates will then push the U.S. toward recession, especially given that the U.S. housing market bubble is founded on this now cracking foundation of low interest rates. The threat of recession therefore hangs heavily over the remainder of the Bush -2/Greenspan era, with the fundamental problems extending well beyond simply the ups and downs of the dollar. But this should be no surprise, given that Bush/Greenspan, just as with Clinton/Greenspan, have never wavered in behalf of a fundamentally neoliberal agenda. The real issue is therefore the one that that French and Dutch voters pushed into the faces of Europe's elites last May: how long will neoliberalism continue to call the shots, defining the limits of acceptable economic policy? The answer to that question, ultimately, is about politics and not economics. Neoliberalism will continue to make the material circumstances of life worse for the overwhelming majority of people throughout the world. But the Alan Greenspans of the world also know how to prevent full-blown economic meltdowns. Opponents of neoliberalism therefore can't simply wait for Greenspan and company (including his successor, to be named soon) to slip up and allow a calamity to happen. The historical transition away from 25 years of neoliberal ascendancy will only come when the "no" to neoliberalism votes, such as in France and the Netherlands, can be transformed into positive and successful programs and movements throughout the world. Robert Pollin is professor of economic and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachuesetts-Amherst. His groundbreaking book, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity, has just be released in paperback by Verso with a new afterward. He can be reached at: pollin@counterpunch.org. A recent interview with Pollin can be read at the PERI site.                                       CLARIFICATION ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH We published an article entitled "A Saudiless Arabia" by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the "Article"), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the "Website"). Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism. As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi's lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website. We are pleased to clarify the position. August 17, 2005

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Coming This Fall Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair