Today's Stories

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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The Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Conversation in Miami

By CLIFTON ROSS

I left the U.S. for Venezuela two days after the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) held a national vote for candidates in which nearly three million militants participated. In a country of roughly 26 million, three million militants in any party is a significant showing, especially if one considers that the party has 6 million members and many of the most militant revolutionaries of the country prefer to remain outside of the party structure. Many find it puzzling that the Socialist Spanish government maintains what might be described as icy relations with Socialists of Venezuela. According to a recent poll in Spain, as reported on May 30 by UPI, “The survey of 2,500 Spaniards in 2007 found the leftist Chavez ranks first among major world leaders the Spanish do not care for, ahead of the U.S. president and Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro.”

I had a chance to reflect on this curious situation en route to Venezuela when, on a twelve hour lay over, I left the moderately warm, air-conditioned Miami airport for the steamy outdoors and waited for a ride to my hotel room. When the shuttle arrived, I boarded with two other men, who turned out to be Spaniards, deeply engaged in a conversation about Latin America. The younger man, perhaps twenty years younger than I, was coming from Brazil and the elder man, perhaps fifteen years my senior, although he looked twenty years older, was coming from Nicaragua. During a brief lull in the conversation I asked the elder man, in Spanish, how things were going in Nicaragua. He glanced down his nose at me to size me up and, in that moment, I don’t think he noticed the image of Sandino on my t-shirt. “Very well,” he replied, in his native tongue,” especially since no one suffers hunger any more.”

 “Oh really?” I asked, incredulously, “I didn’t think Nicaragua had ever been free of hunger.”

No really, the man insisted, things were great in Nicaragua. I nodded. “It’s not like in Venezuela with that pinche Chavez, who’s ruined his country.”

While not overly eager to attack Daniel Ortega, even while I’m never hesitant to hide my disgust for the former revolutionary-turned-pro-life-neoliberal, I couldn’t let this pass.

“I suppose that’s a matter of opinion,” I said. Both men glared at me. I think the younger man now noticed my t-shirt. The elder man’s face turned slightly red.

“No. It’s not a matter of opinion. I’ve had two friends whose businesses were ruined by that Chávez. His policies are ruining the country.”

“I suppose there are winners and losers in every process, and most of my friends who are at the bottom seem better off,” I said.

The old man continued for a few minutes as the shuttle made its way to the airport and then, as I ceased to respond, the old man turned his attention back to the young man and began talking about what good things Lula had done for Brazil.

“It’s all about education, preparation of the people. With an apolitical education. That’s the problem. Like in Venezuela, where the education is all politicized,” the old man said. The young man readily agreed.

I thought of pointing out that all education is politicized; that what these two dinosaurs of the Spanish Empire seemed to find objectionable would be the education that enables students to see that their neoliberal agendas only work for the empire, be it Spanish or U.S.; I considered pointing out that the neoliberal “left” of Spain might be better off moving into the twenty-first century and reexamining its admiration for Daniel Ortega, who former Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal called a “dictator,” the repentant revolutionary, now neoliberal president heading a party (Sandinista) which recently criminalized abortion and cut a deal with the corrupt Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Party so as to return to power in Nicaragua. But instead I just let it go, dropped out of the conversation and slid inconspicuously back into my seat.
    
As the two Spaniards continued their conversation, I mused on the UPI story once again, mystified by how a supposedly “left” government in Spain, and people who support it, could be so anti-Chavista. But after visiting Spain in 2006 and touring the three main cities of the Basque country, a few of the smaller towns and witnessing how the “progressive” Zapatero government treated the Basques who lived in a terror reminiscent of Central America in the 1980s, I came to believe that “progressive” doesn’t always imply “anti-imperialist.”

I remember clearly that morning in the Basque city of Vitoria, when I got into a conversation in the main library with the very kind librarian, working solo at the main desk.  He whispered, as he looked around him to make sure no one was listening, about the measures the Spanish government had taken to repress any discussion about Basque independence. When I mentioned that I’d like to interview someone in Batasuna, he shook his head, his eyes filled with alarm. “It’s illegal to meet with Batasuna party members. You can be imprisoned even for being in the same room with them, if you know they’re Batasuna,” he told me. Batasuna is the peaceful wing of the Basque independence movement, but it, too was, and is, outlawed under Zapatero’s government.

Someone at Askapena, a Basque solidarity organization which defends imprisoned independentistas, explained it this way: “When the Spanish police pick you up on suspicion of being an independentista, they torture you. That’s routine and universal. After they torture you, if you denounce the torture, you are, de facto, part of ETA (the illegal armed wing of the Basque independence movement) because ETA has a policy of denouncing all torture. And, according to the Spanish legal system, anyone who advocates any ETA policy is de facto a member of ETA. And so there are people imprisoned in Spain as ETA “terrorists” simply because they were picked up, tortured and denounced the torture.”

I thought this imperial “zero tolerance” for dissent from the subjects of Spain, specifically, from the Basques, might explain the widespread hatred for Chavez in that country. Perhaps he’s seen as a “difficult child” by the Spanish government, one who talks back at the King when told to shut up. But Marc Villá, the Venezuelan documentary filmmaker, had another take on the situation.

“During the Franco dictatorship, the Acción Democrática (AD) supported the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE),” he explained to me one afternoon as we drove around Barinas last summer. The AD, for all practical purposes, a now-defunct political party which ruled Venezuela for fifty years, trading power from election to election with the Christian Democrat COPEI (also now practically defunct). AD was, and is, a member of the Socialist International and it was one of the few “socialist” parties the U.S. tolerated in Latin America through those Cold War years, perhaps because it bore very little resemblance to socialism – much like the PSOE and most European “socialist” parties today. Nevertheless, AD threw money at the arts and subverted leftist intellectuals in Venezuela and the world with generous gifts and grants handed out freely to the likes of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the PSOE.

“The PSOE incurred a great moral debt to Venezuela’s AD which it continues to pay off to this day in its media as it continues to look for any opportunity to slam Chavez and align itself with the AD, now in the U.S. backed Venezuelan opposition. Really, the Spaniards know very little of what’s happening here but they’re like so many Venezuelan “leftists” who oppose Chavez and the Bolivarian Process: they’ve lost out and a new left has come to power. People like Teodoro Petkoff (editor of the weekly newspaper, Tal Cual) and others, who were communists or socialists and who actually benefited under the AD governments and were left alone under the COPEI governments, no longer have the prestige and positions they once had under the AD. And they can’t stand it.”

The old “New Left” that limped through the collapse of the USSR and watched China gleefully celebrate an eternal capitalist Christmas even while guided by the Chinese Communist Party, seems to continue its life in the geriatric arms of the PSOE and the European neoliberal left. It may even find life in the neoliberal liberalism of Obama in the U.S. (unless it finds its backbone and, indeed, becomes a “left”), but Venezuela is continuing to define itself along new lines, directly challenging capitalism and experimenting with new models of socialism. Chávez and his in-your-face anti-imperialism, no matter what Spaniards may think, continues to be a household name in a world that can’t quite remember who Zapatero is or what, if anything, he stands for.  Perhaps that’s what the Spaniards in my shuttle hated the most about “politicized education.”

Clifton Ross is the writer and director of “Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out,” a feature-length documentary now available from PM Press (www.pmpress.org). He’s currently working on a book and a new documentary in Venezuela. He can be reached at clifross1@yahoo.com

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