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Special Issue: the Collapse of America Paul Craig Roberts gives CounterPunchers the definitive data on what is happening to jobs in America. Not just blue collar jobs. Middle-class, white collar jobs. Roberts' stunning probe is the first true picture of what the U.S. economy is fast becoming and of the savage class wars that lie ahead. Plus Mike Ferner on what it really means to investigate war crimes in Iraq. 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! |
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Today's Stories July 31, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Robert Fisk Amina Mire Marjorie Cohn Sibel Edmonds / William
Weaver John Ross Ron Jacobs James Ridgeway / Alicia
Ng Brian Tokar Alexander
Cockburn
July 29
/ 30, 2006 Michael
Neuman Vijay
Prashad Ramzi Kysia Werther Robert Fisk Patrick
Cockburn Ralph Nader Rachard
Itani Eduardo Galeano Gary Leupp Eve Poretsky John Chuckman Fred Gardner Juan Santos Punyapriya Dasgupta Liaquat
Ali Khan Israel Shamir William
A. Cook Stanley Heller Dave Lindorff Moshe Adler Susie
Day Pat Williams Anthony
Papa John V. Whitbeck Jackie
Corr Myles Palmer Tom D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 28, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Renee Bowyer Robert
Fisk Patrick Cockburn Ramzy
Baroud Don Fitz Elaine
Cassel David Price Mike Whitney Mickey Z. Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Charles
Glass Website
of the Day
July 27, 2006 Tanya
Reinhart Saul Landau Ramzi
Kysia Tom Barry Joseph
Grosso Sharon Smith Gale Courey
Toensing Christopher Reed Werther Yusuf Mansur Richard
Harth Website of the Day
Norman
Solomon Barbara
Olshanksy David
Nally Jonathan
Cook Patrick
Cockburn William
Blum Joshua
Frank Gabriel
Kolko Daniel
Cassidy Michael
Dickinson Robert
Fisk Uri
Avnery Website
of the Day
July 25, 2006 Harry
Browne Marjorie
Cohn Robert
Bryce Sharat
G. Lin George
Bisharat CounterPunch
News Desk Zena
El-Khalil Larry
Lack Mike
Mejia Ashraf
Isma'il Website
of the Day
July 24, 2006 Mark
Levy Robert
Fisk Maher
Osseiran Paul
Craig Roberts Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
July 22-23, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Paul
Craig Roberts Gilad
Atzmon Robert
Fisk Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Christopher
Reed Dr.
Susan Block Najla
Said Uri
Avnery July 21, 2006 George
Galloway P.
Sainath Aseem
Shrivastava Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day July 20, 2006 William
S. Lind Robert
Jensen John
Ross Tom
Hayden Paul
Craig Roberts July 19, 2006 Patrick
Cockburn Trish
Schuh Jonathan
Cook Vicente
Navarro July 17 / 18 2006 Mike
Whitney Kathleen Christison Atrocities in the Promised Land
July 14 / 15,
2006 Alexander Cockburn Tanya Reinhart Robert Fisk Daniel Cassidy Winslow Wheeler Hugh O'Shaughnessy M. Shahid Alam William S. Lind Ramzy Baroud Gilad Atzmon Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Samar Assad Ron Jacobs Lee Ballinger Walter Brasch Dave Lindorff Clifton Ross Tom Crumpacker Ricardo Alarcon William Hughes Susie Day Farrah Hassen Poets' Basement
July 13, 2006 Rev. William
Alberts Ramzi Kysia Rep. John P. Murtha Radford / Santos Stan Cox Saul Landau José
Pertierra Website of
the Day
July 12, 2006 John Ross John Stauber Robert Boston Wayne S. Smith John Graham Kevin Prosen Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
July 11, 2006 Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin Mokhiber / Weissman Amira Hass Clare Hanrahan Brian Cloughey Felice Pace Raed Jarrar Website of the Day
July 10, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn
Stephen Green Paul Craig
Roberts Greg Moses Ralph Nader Laura Carlsen Conn Hallinan John Chuckman Fred Gardner Dr. Tod Mikuriya Pierre Tristam Lucinda Marshall David Swanson Heather Gray Dave Zirin
/ John Cox Mark Engler Michael Lettieri Ron Jacobs Jamal Juma' Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
July 7, 2006 John Ross July 6, 2006 Nick Dearden John Stanton Ralph Nader Laray Polk Saul Landau Joshua Frank William S. Lind Adelman / Lindorff Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
Mike Whitney Saul Landau Ramzy Baroud Missy Comley Beattie Arthur Neslen Vincent Maruffi Paul Cantor Paul D. Johnson David Price
Col. Dan Smith Chris Floyd Marjorie Cohn James Brooks Medea Benjamin Matt Reichel Elisa Salasin Rick Wilhelm Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
July 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Dr. Bouthaina Shaban Julia Olmstead Dave Lindorff Andres Gomez Alan Singer Alexander Cockburn
Paul Craig
Roberts Stephen T.
Banko Daniel Cassidy Fawzia Afzal-Khan Jeff Taylor John Ross Greg Moses Laura Carlsen Justin E.H.
Smith Brian Cloughley Anthony Papa Mike Ferner Jerry Tucker Jane Goodall / Rick Asselta Phyllis Pollack Poets' Basement
June 30, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Heather Williams Burbach / Cantor Nick Dearden Michael J.
Smith Brian Concannon Virginia Tilley
Bill Quigley Ron Jacobs Paul Craig
Roberts June 28, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Greg Moses Mark Weisbrot Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff William S.
Lind Mike Ferner Zoltan Grossman
Marjorie Cohn Benjamin /
Jarrar William Hughes Doug Giebel Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn
June 26, 2006 Don Santina Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Rafael Rodriguez-Cruz Evelyn Pringle Jonathan Cook
June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
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July 31, 2006 Why Howard Dean Denounced Our Puppet in IraqKeeping the American Street in LineBy STANLEY ROGOUSKI A moderate Arab politician (and for "moderate" read "pro-American) engages in a complex dance with both the American government and what is commonly known as "the Arab Street. For the Western media, you talk about "democracy" and "pluralism". Behind closed doors with American power brokers, you give them assurances you won't threaten the state of Israel and that you'll continue to keep the supply of oil flowing west. For your own people and for the Arab media, you give fiery speeches denouncing the Israelis and the American imperialists. Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, who's dependent on the American military for his survival and who is, thus, more "moderate" than most Arab politicians, is no exception. On one hand, he's a founder of the radical Shiite "Dawa" Party, which means he's basically an Islamic theocrat with views not terribly different from Muqtada al-Sadr Hassan Nasrallah. On the other hand, during an interview with the BBC, he remarked that he was in favor of "a pluralist Iraq whose various ethnic and sectarian groups regarded each other as equals". Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin all know how the game is played and they rarely object to it. In spite of some window dressing put out by John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha earlier this year, the Democrats fully support the occupation of Iraq and vote with their checkbooks (and our tax dollars). When Kerry and Feingold introduced a bill that would have had all American troops taken out of Iraq by 2007, it went down in flames, 87 votes to 13. On June 23rd of this year a vote to approve a $517.7 billion war budget for fiscal year 2007 (including $50 billion designated to maintain the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) passed unanimously. That's right. All 13 Senate Democrats who voted for the Kerry/Feingold Bill, including Kerry and Feingold, voted to keep the supply of money flowing into the Green Zone and, consequently, to the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Nevertheless last week the Democrats decided to throw a tantrum. Nouri al-Maliki's statement condemning the Israeli attack on Lebanon threw them into a spasm of rage. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel called on Maliki to cancel his planned address before Congress. Chuck Schumer, who didn't show up for the July 26 speech at all, wondered about Maliki's loyalty to the west. "Which side is he on when it comes to the war on terror." Harry Reid and Dick Durbin demanded that Maliki make some ritualistic statement of support for Israel and against Hizbollah. And Howard Dean turned the volume up to 11, labeling Maliki an "anti-Semite" during a speech in Palm Beach, Florida. The Republicans, "liberal hawks" like Peter Beinart, and conservative newspapers like the Washington Times, quite understandably, labeled it "pandering". The powerful Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was open about his contempt for Dean. "I dismiss Howard Dean," he told Fox News. "Really, he's a disappointment, even to Democrats. I don't care to deal with that." This is strong stuff from a southern aristocrat like Warner, who's usually the type to likes to respond to his political opponents with a smile. Beinart was even more contemptuous. "The Democratic Party's single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft," he wrote in his editorial in the Washington Post, "it is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. Given the party's behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why". That Beinart, who's basically a paid employee of the pro-Israel lobby, would denounce Dean's clumsy attempt to pander to Jewish voters isn't surprising. Jewish voters and the various pro-Israel lobbies in Washington aren't stupid. They understand the game with "moderate" Arab politicians as well as anyone else, and it's unlikely that anybody at AIPAC wants Maliki to commit suicide by coming out with a statement in support of Ehud Olmert's attack on Lebanon. But what Beinart and John Warner don't quite understand is that the Democratic Party, like Prime Minister Maliki, is facing an insurrection of its own. In spite of his wretched performance in the debate with Joe Lieberman, it now appears that Connecticut millionaire and nominally anti-war politician Ned Lamont is on the verge of knocking Joe Lieberman out of the race altogether. The polls have closed to within the margin of error. In spite of his support by Bill Clinton, the Lieberman campaign is still faltering, and, just yesterday, Lamont picked up the endorsement of the New York Times. Ned Lamont is safely pro-Israel. The statement on his website leaves no room for doubt. "At this critical time in the Middle East," Lamont says. "I believe that when Israel's security is threatened, the United States must unambiguously stand with our ally to be sure that it is safe and secure. On this principle, Americans are united." But the Democratic party rank and file that's behind Lamont's campaign, the grassroots, or "netroots" as they are popularly known, is not. In fact, they're exploding with anti-Israel sentiment. For the first time in recent memory, the American people are not united and don't stand unambiguously with Israel. With their systematic destruction of the infrastructure of Lebanon, the Israelis have failed to destroy Hezbollah, but have done enormous amounts of collateral damage to their own reputation, and it's not only the stray leftist diary on the Daily Kos that reflects it. Unlike the American occupation of Iraq, images of the civilian casualties coming out of Lebanon are not being censored. This will change, of course, but, as of now, CNN has over 20 people in Beirut and mainstream journalists like Tucker Carlson seem surprisingly willing to call Israeli propaganda for what it is. Lebanon is a western country and the Lebanese look and act like Europeans. The constant stream of images of dead Lebanese children and oil soaked beaches shock us in a way that similar images coming out of sub Sahara Africa or out of the Gaza strip do not. Carlson, in fact, seemed genuinely taken aback by the thuggish Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to compare the entire country to a host body in the horror movie "Aliens". In other words, the American street is starting to get restless. We don't like the idea that those same beautiful Lebanese girls we saw last year protesting the Syrian occupation might now be the targets of Israeli bombs. The hype around the elections in Iraq and in Palestine in 2005 failed to achieve their objective of putting dependable American/Israeli puppets in power, but they did succeed in calling into question Israel's claim to be "the only Democracy in the Middle East". George Bush had opened the Pandora's Box that all of those Kissingerite realists and dour, pessimistic Democratic politicians had predicted he would. The configuration of the Middle East is rapidly changing and not in a direction that benefits Israel. Damage control had to be done. A line in the sand drawn for anybody in the rank and file of the Democratic Party who might expect the victory of Ned Lamont to signal a more "even handed" American policy towards the Israelis and Palestinians. Who better to play the role of taskmaster than Howard Dean, once as much a darling of the Democratic left as Ned Lamont is now? Dean, who famously got into trouble with the pro-Israeli lobby for his "even handedness" remark in 2004 is no ideological soul mate of the pro-Israeli right or the neocons. Instead, he's an opportunistic politician whose views change with whatever audience he happens to be addressing at the time. In 2003 and 2004 when he was running a grassroots, anti-war campaign and was dependent on the anti-war left for his support, he tilted away from the Israelis and ever so mildly towards the Palestinians. In 2006, as chairman of the DNC and as the Democratic Party's primary fund-raiser, he's cranked up the pro-Israel, anti-Arab rhetoric to a deafening level. And yet, Dean is still widely mistrusted on the pro-Israel right (note Beinart's contempt for his "pandering") and still has a good deal of credibility on the anti-war left. So his statements denouncing Maliki's utterly reasonable denunciation of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were bound to have a dampening effect on the debate within the Democratic Party. Let's look at what Maliki actually said. "The Israeli attacks and air strikes are completely destroying Lebanon's infrastructure. I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers' meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression." What's striking about this statement is not that it's anti-Semitic but that it's decidedly not anti-Semitic. If this is the most anti-Semitic thing that the Democratic Party could dig up from the Arab world than the problem of "anti-Semitism" we here about so much in the Middle East is a lie. Indeed, for an Islamic theocrat and Shiite politician, Maliki sounds an awful lot like a secular leftist politician in Western Europe, and that was what so angered Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. Any of them could have easily gone to the Memri (an organization set up by Israeli intelligence to publish the most inflammatory anti-Semitic and anti-American statements coming out of the Arab world) website and picked out something from the platform of the Dawa party about the status of women or gays, or about the Sunni minority in Iraq that would make your hair stand on end. So why pick out a rare statement by an Arab politician which denounces the Israeli government but says nothing about Jews or Zionism or anything else we'd find offensive? The Democrats weren't interested in denouncing anti-Semitism but in keeping the American people in line. Maliki's sin was not in being an anti-Semite (which he may or may not be) but to break the framing that "moderate" Arab politicians are supposed to stay inside. A "moderate" Arab politician is allowed to give blood curdling, anti-Semitic rants about Israel that stay inside the Arab world. He's not supposed to speak in a way that both the Arab street and the American anti-war left can both understand. He's not supposed to address the American people. And we're not supposed to listen. Whether or not we will is still open to question. But if we do, we can expect to have Howard Dean and the Democratic Party's elites screaming in our ears that we should "la la la la don't listen" all the way. And it's doing to get a lot louder and more vehement as Lebanon continues to burn. Stanley Rogouski can be reached at: stanleyrogouski@yahoo.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
