Today's Stories

August 16 / 17, 2008

Conn Hallinan
Georgia on My Mind

Robert Fantina
Russia, Georgia and Bush

August 15, 2008

Steve Niva
The Surge in Iraqi Female Suicide Bombers

David Remington
Sharpening Occam's Razor on the Forged Intelligence Documents

Michael Winship
The Imperial Presidency

Paul Craig Roberts
The Neocons Do Georgia

Farzana Versey
Taming the Islamic Shrew

Harvey Wasserman
McCain Goes Nuclear

Felice Pace
The Politics of Smoke

Julian Critchley
All Experts Agree: Legalize Drugs

Website of the Day
The Farting Preacher

August 14, 2008

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
The Shape of Cuba's Reforms

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Surge in Afghanistan

Mike Whitney
Georgia and U.S. Strategy

Reza Fiyouzat
U.S. and Iranian Relations: What Does Normalization Entail?

Ralph Nader
Single-Payer Health Care in an Age of Two-Party Politics

Christopher Brauchli The Cheerleader in China

Jack Bradigan Spula
Plowing Through the Farm Bill

Patrick Irelan
After the Flood

John Walsh
Buyers Remorse Over Obama

Dan Bacher
Schwarznegger Pimps the Water Bond

Website of the Day
Zevon: Renegade

August 13, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
"President Bush, Will You Please Shut Up?"

David Remington
Forgery, Fakery and Fatigue (Scandal, That Is)

Brian Cloughley
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Press

Glen Ford
Are Black Politics Headed Toward the Graveyard?

Brendan Cooney
A Shattered Myth in Georgia

Dave Lindorff
This War Has Been Approved By Your Government

Tom Lewis
Morales After the Bolivian Referendum

Stan Cox
Let's Handcuff the Property Cops

Alan Farago
Crimes Against the State: Bushism and the Florida Mortgage Crisis

Martha Rosenberg
Fear and Loathing Behind the Plexiglass Curtain

Website of the Day
Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Young Workers and Social Security

August 12, 2008

Uri Avnery
Obama and the Middle East

Anthony DiMaggio
Master of Ambiguity: Obama's Non-Plan for Ending the War in Iraq

Bill Christison
No NATO Membership for Georgia

Eric Walberg
War a la Carte: How the US Invited a War in S. Ossetia

Kate Connolly
Old Cold Warriors Never Die: Brzezinski Compares Putin to Hitler

Diane Farsetta
Cracking the Pentagon Pundit Code

Peter Morici
The Trade Deficit and Job Losses

Thom Rutledge
Equal Opportunity Judgment: Reason, Morality and the Edwards Scandal

Lee Patton
How to Swiftboat McCain

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Technological Titans, Moral Midgets

Website of the Day
Mr. Hot Buttered Soul

August 11, 2008

Ishmael Reed
Politics of the Race Card: McCain Gurgles in the Slime

Paul Craig Roberts
The Moronic Party: From Off-Shore Drilling to the Georgian War

Gary Leupp
The Neo-Cons' Dream Forgery: the Habbush Letter Revisited

Douglas Kammen
Rice and Circus in East Timor

William Willers
New Paths Toward the Loss of Our Public Lands: Subsidies, Volunteerism and Outsourcing

Greg Moses
The Smell of Propaganda in the Morning: Press Calls for War in the Caucasus

Jeff Leys
Showdown at Fort McCoy

Cynthia McKinney
We Are Not Hopeless

Alan Farago
The Olympic Spectacle and the New China

Website of the Day
Mahmoud Darwish, RIP

August 9 / 10, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
You Want More Still Proofs the Crony, Old-Line Press is Dead?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Pools of Fire: the Looming Nuclear Nightmare in the Backwoods of N. Carolina

Bruce Jackson
Hamdan's Secret

Kevin Young
Targeting Civilians: the Path to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Chris Floyd
The Serpent's Egg: Solzhenitsyn and the Origins of the American Gulag

Joshua Frank
Inside Obama's Fundraising Operation

Robert Fantina
Of Campaigns and Timelines

Brendan Cooney
The Eagle is Wounded

Mark Almond
Plucky Little Georgia?

Lois Gibbs
The Lost Lessons of Love Canal

Rev. William Alberts
Blind Patriotism? McCain's Counting On It

Kathy Kelly
The Big Voice

John Ross
The Cutthroat Games: the Decline of the Olympics from Mexico City to Beijing

David Michael Green
The Fire This Time: the GOP and the Economy

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
A Novel Approach to Politics

Ron Jacobs
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy (Or Why John McCain Wants Cindy to Show Her Tits)

Richard Rhames
The Greatest Degeneration

David Yearsley
Once More Unto the Albert Hall, Dear Friends

Lee Sustar
Justice for the Freightliner Five: a Struggle for the Soul of the UAW

Brenda Norrell
Turning Sewage into Snow on the Sacred San Francisco Peaks

Ben Terrall
Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Jenkins, Ibn Salma and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Tuli Kupferberg's Fig Leaf Olympics

August 8, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Nationalist Surge

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Voting: a Ritual of Justifying Biases

M. Shahid Alam
The Zionist Stratagem

Andy Worthington
Salim Hamdan's Sentence

Lawrence J. Korb
Bad Advice from Generals

David Model
Instant Genocide

Alan Farago
When Miami Goes Bust: the Politics of the Housing Crisis

Diop Olugbala
What About the Black Community, Obama?

Firmin DeBrabander
When the Olympics Went Green--with Algae

Website of the Day
Summer Reading: CounterPunch's Favorite Novels

August 7, 2008

Dr. Trudy Bond
Fixing Hell and Curing Obesity

William Blum
Breaking Young Hearts: Obama and the Empire

Paul Craig Roberts
Do You Feel Safe Now?

Ralph Nader
Gouged in the Skies: Gotcha Capitalism in the Airline Industry

Robert Weitzel
Obama and the Two Walls

Jacob G. Hornberger
Why Wasn't Ivins Declared an Enemy Combatant?

Binoy Kampmark
Driving Bin Laden

David Macaray
What Does a Radical Labor Union Look Like?

Howard Lisnoff
Echoes of the Sixties: Refusing to Recite the Pledge

Website of the Day
Bono's Retirement Fund

August 6, 2008

Marc Herold
Obama and Afghanistan

Greg Moses
The Unnecessary Execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin

Sheldon Rampton
The Anthrax Cover-Up

Kevin Young
The Atomic Bombing of Japan: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Re-Examines the Japanese Surrender

Michael Estrada
What I Re-Discovered in Mexico

Robert Weissman
The Commercial Games

Dr. Susan Block
The Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church Killings: Did Rightwing Talk Shows Drive Him to Kill?

Cindy Sheehan
This is Horseshit

Ace Hoffman
The Unholy Trinity

Website of the Day
Over to You, Paris

August 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Anthrax Attacks and the Assault on Civil Liberties

Jeff Halper
An Israeli Jew in Gaza

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Better? With Three Wars Going On?

Nancy Welch
"What Did My Father Do to Deserve Such Treatment?" An Interview with Laila al-Arian

Peter Morici
Rear View Mirror Economics

Sousan Hammad
The Antisemitism Incitement Craze

Eamon Martin
The Audacity of Despair

Shepherd Bliss
Slow Food Nation Gains Momentum

Tim Matson
Keeping Cool and Saving BTUs

Website of the Day
Top Heavy Greens?

August 4, 2008

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Exit

Saul Landau
Reflections on the Cuban Revolution

David W. Remington
The Face of the Modern War Criminal

Rev. Jesse Jackson
The Question Conscience Asks

Dave Lindorff
The Cheney Doctrine: Shoot Your Friends First

Peter Morici
The Lingering Economic Malaise

Joanne Mariner
Debating Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism in Britain

Ramzy Baroud
Through the Israeli Looking Glass: Obama Joins the Club

Christian Wright
Why We're Protesting at the Democratic Convention

Website of the Day
The US and Karadzic

August 2 / 3, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Ongoing Persecution of Sami al-Arian

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Worst Day of Ted Stevens' Life?

Patrick Cockburn
Who's Really Running Iraq?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Is the King of Pork Dead?

James Abourezk
Lies the Oil Companies Peddle

Andy Worthington
The CIA's Secret Prison on Diego Garcia

Brian Cloughley
Baleful Imperial Power

Robert Fantina
Redefining Progress in Iraq

Benjamin Dangl
Total Recall in Bolivia

Marlene Martin
Living in Hell for Life

David Yearsley
The Sound and Fury of Wet Balloons Rubbed with a Big Sponge: Yes, Bill O'Reilly, This Your Kind of Music!

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Qualifies "Them" for the Death Sentence?

David Michael Green Obama as Dukakis

Harvey Wasserman
Meet the Real Terrorists of the 1960s

Jason Hribal
Moja Has Mojo: How a Few Elephants Turned the Zoo Industry Upside Down

Phyllis Pollack
The Rolling Stones' Exile on Geary Street: an Interview with Rock Photographer Dominque Tarle

Laray Polk
Tongues of Fire, Plains of Grace: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Ron Jacobs
Jerry Garcia Meets Barack Obama

David Macaray
Labor, Management and the Adversarial Relationship

David Rosen
Teen Prostitution in America

Dan Bacher
Schwarzengger's Water Empire

Joe Allen
Batman's War of Terror

Poets' Basement
Graham, Stevens, Cory and Fleming

Website of the Weekend
Get Your War On: the Watch List

August 1, 2008

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians Face Home Demolitions Spree by Israel

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain's Mad Dog Advisor Max Boot

Rannie Amiri
Islamobamaphobia: a New Word Enters the Lexicon

Peter Morici
U.S. Economy Loses Another 51,000 Jobs

Christopher Brauchli
South Dakota's Abortion Fairy Tale

M. K. Bhadrakumar
Coup in the Great Caspian Play

Patrick Cockburn
Turkish Court Says Ruling Islamic Party Can't be Shut Down

James J. Brittain
The Continuity of FARC-EP Resistance in Colombia

Dan Bacher
Warren Buffett, Salmon Killer

Website of the Day
Shark Genocide: 100 Million Deaths a Year

July 31, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Next Big Bail Out: State, Local and Private Pensions

Carl Finamore
Protest Politics and the Democrats: A Street Protester Looks Back at 1968

Mike Whitney
What's Going on in Afghanistan

Joshua Frank
Obama's Green Coal: Another Myth from the Change Agent

Andy Worthington
The Peculiar Case of Jarallah al-Marri

Ralph Nader
The Living Legacy of Rosa Parks

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The Wave of Capitol Crimes

Robert Weissman
The Collapse of the WTO Talks

Dave Lindorff
Bush Judge Does the Right Thing on Executive Immunity

Website of the Day
Perils of the New Pesticides

July 30, 2008

Brian M. Downing
Assessing the Surge

Chuck Spinney
Should Obama Escalate the War in Afghanistan? A Thought Experiment

William S. Lind
Why McCain is Wrong on Iraq

David Ker Thomson
Against Bike Lanes

Karl Grossman
Nuclear-Powered Amphibious Assault Ships?

Mike Whitney
Apocalypse Down Under

Martha Rosenberg
Heifer Palooza

James Murren
Where Your Life is Worth One Bullet

Dave Lindorff
The Impeachment Hearing

Ron Jacobs
A Conspiracy to Kill Iraqis?

Website of the Day
Mapping Job Loss to China

July 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
King of the Hill Indicted! Ted Stevens' Empire of Corruption

John Ross
Return of the Gunboat

Peter Morici
When Will Henry Paulson Learn?

Alison Weir
Israeli Strip Searches

Gary Leupp
"Bewilderment and Confusion on the Left?"

David Macaray
The Calculus of Union Strikes

Brenda Norrell
Censored in Indian Country

Marjorie Cohn
End the Occupations: Of Iraq and Afghanistan

Eric Ruder
A New Consensus on Iraq?

Website of the Day
"If You Could See Me Now ... "

July 28, 2008

Dr. Bryant Welch
Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psychological Association

Kathy Kelly
Pictures from Summer Camp on the West Bank

Mike Whitney
Bad News and Bank Runs

Peter Morici
Spreading Layoffs, Sagging GDP

Christopher Brauchli
Death by (Power) Surge in Baghdad

Clifton Ross
The Spectacle and the Movement in Colombia

Stephen Lendman
The Bush Administration's Secret Biowarfare Agenda

Website of the Day
Stone's Dubya: the Trailer

Weekend Edition
August 16 / 17, 2008

Right is Wrong

Arianna Huffington's Blind Spot

By SETH SANDRONSKY

Arianna Huffington has turned it around. She was in the GOP but is now a vocal critic of the party, especially the Bush-Cheney White House. Her body of work joins a growing field of criticism for the Republican Party leadership, with Conservatives Without Conscience by John W. Dean an example of a critic-from-within the party. Huffington has a “liberal” focus in contrast to that of Dean. She inveighs against the “takeover of the Republican Party,” one at odds “on the mainstream issues.” But this trend of reaction in the U.S. polity has roots far deeper and wider than that, which she gives short shrift in Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. The author’s view of the state’s role in its two-party form of government, by and for the needs of a U.S. upper class limits the effectiveness of her analysis.

The scope of Huffington’s book is the rise of the Bush II White House, propelled by the terror attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001. Her purpose is to reveal, critically, “the Right’s playbook” on a host of policy issues at home and abroad. A prolific author and editor-in-chief of the popular Web site Huffington Post, she finds much to fault with media corporations such as Fox News, and its commentators like Ann Coulter, a voice for the Right’s agenda. “As the Right took power, so did its media mouthpieces,” according to Huffington.

She notes, accurately, the Washington press corps’ concern with maintaining its access to politicians as a large factor in the decline of American journalism. The examples Huffington cites of media coverage during the U.S. government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq is telling and the book’s strengths. The so-called “liberal media” is anything but that. But is the concentrated wealth driving the decline of critical reporting in newsrooms across the nation a function primarily of the “Right” and its power? Or is the “Right” a wing of the U.S. state which an upper class relies upon for the purpose of garnering capital in national and global markets? For example, the deregulating of the U.S. telecommunications industry occurred on the watch of Bill Clinton in 1996, a Democratic president. Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., which owns the jingoistic Fox News, benefitted. This is a significant trend which is a part of—not apart from—U.S. economics and politics. The state’s role in this is not peripheral but is central.

In chapter four, in a discussion of U.S. energy policy, Huffington reveals her worldview to personalize the modern market economy and polity. She writes: “There are steps we can take right now that will begin to slow—and eventually reverse the drain of dollars to the petro-vampires, foreign and domestic. The result would be a stronger, safer, and cleaner America that would, once again, be leading the rest of the world to a more promising future.” Three pages later Huffington claims that Hugo Chávez, the elected president of oil-rich Venezuela, is a “Marxist dictator.” Is this a progressive foreign policy or a page from the playbook of Fox News, purveyor of talking points for the Bush White House? What such demonization of Chávez does partly is to fog the bipartisan unity for Washington’s investor-friendly stance in Latin America and worldwide. The typical political rhetoric for U.S. public consumption is to attack the credibility of foreign leaders like Chávez. He survived a U.S.-backed ouster in April 2002, and continues to use the nation’s oil revenues to improve the lives of low-income Venezuelans. The U.S.’s two-party system fears and loathes this development. It represents the “threat of a good example,” not the favorite cup of tea for the future quarterly earnings of corporate America and its political representatives.

Huffington prefers to lay the blame for resource conflicts such as the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the feet of President George W. Bush. To wit, his “fatal deed was invading Iraq,” she writes to open chapter six. On this count, her methodology is to understand how the Iraq “war was, from the very start, a cherished project of the Right.” Presumably, the Democrats in Congress did not and do not cherish the conflict in the same way. Thus there is no sense of the continuity in Iraq policy under President Clinton’s two terms. Recall he pursued the hideous U.S.-led trade sanctions against Iraq, which kept it from having normal commercial relations. Clinton pursued a policy of punishing Iraqi citizens by denying them medicine and other life-saving goods. This paved the path from Gulf War 1 to the March 2003 U.S. attack against this long-suffering Persian Gulf nation, as U.S. activist Kathy Kelly has witnessed first-hand and written of in Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison. For maimed and murdered Iraqis, Clinton’s approach was a prelude to the U.S. attack in March 2003. Nevertheless, Huffington lays out a commendable excavation of the evasions and omissions of the Bush administration and its enablers with Fox News and the mainstream media in the run-up to the war and the subsequent U.S. occupation.

She laments the congressional Democrats who “failed to use the power of the purse” to stop funding the U.S. occupation of Iraq after winning the midterm elections of 2006. Where is the evidence from the party’s post-World War II record to suggest its dissent to the growth of U.S. bases and forces around the world? Further, Huffington takes Iraq’s government to task for dragging its feet to meet “key benchmarks for the Iraqis” including those on “oil revenue sharing.” Apparently, the need for the Iraqi state to furnish the legal-political structure for the benefit of U.S. energy companies to re-acquire control over the nation’s vast oil fields and their revenues is a fair policy.

Huffington organizes her case against the Right with assertions that beg questions. Here is one example. At the close of chapter nine she writes “that whatever differences the Democrats may have—and however heated and divisive the party’s primary race became—when it comes to endless war, the two parties are headed in wildly different directions. The Democrats are all looking to the future while the Right remains mired in a Neanderthal past.” Consider the speech of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to AIPAC on June 4, 2008. That alone, demonizing Iran as the largest threat to Israel and Middle East peace, speaks volumes about the Right’s policy in the region being more similar than different to that of the Democratic Party. In all fairness to Huffington, Obama delivered his AIPAC address after her book was published. Nevertheless, his war rhetoric should inform us about Obama’s perpetual war credentials to defend the Jewish state. Democrats and Republicans alike are friends of a feather in this standard business-as-usual for the U.S. state and the military-industrial complex. Investors in both nations applaud all the way to the bank. Crucially, Huffington skips past this decades-long business of war for profits and power under Democrats and Republicans, which perpetuates insecurity for citizens in Israel, the U.S. and Palestinians under Israeli-occupation.

“With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Right lost its Lodestar,” Huffington writes in chapter 12. “Opposition to communism was the most basic of all conservative beliefs.” Wrong. This belief system was a main ingredient of the left-liberal consensus for U.S. anti-communism during the Cold War. Such bipartisanship helped to wreck independent labor unions and thereby build ruling class power. That process, in turn, helped to solidify military-industrialism as social policy for both political parties until revulsion against American apartheid and the Vietnam War spurred popular uprisings to revolt against such priorities. She observes in the same chapter regarding the growth of income inequality and the Iraqi front of the U.S.-led war on terror: “The 2008 Democratic convention needs to link the reality of the Two Americas with Bush’s miserable failures in Iraq.” Yes, but if the past is any indication of what lies ahead, getting such a linkage will be the result of broad-based movements, rooted in the real lives of various people who labor for a living. This push-back from below is nowhere yet on the horizon in the U.S., politically bound up in a two-party straightjacket. Part of the reason for this domestic quagmire brings us back to the fall of the Soviet Union. That world-historic event has in part squelched a vision of grassroots’ pressure on policy-makers to address the costs of empire at home and abroad, and seed a decent society striving for more not less equality. The rise and demise of Soviet communism, for some U.S. liberals, “proves” that alternatives to “free-market” U.S. capitalism are foolhardy and fated to fail, always and forever. This view helps to legitimate in part the objective conditions now in the U.S. for a tiny percentage of the populace to grab a growing share of economic growth to the harm of wage-earners. As a class, they increasingly face the prospects of disease, poverty and prison.

Huffington’s presentation of the effects of the U.S. health-care crisis is on the mark. Yet laying the blame for it on the Right absolves the Democrats for their long-standing involvement in boosting what author and economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute calls the “medical-industrial complex.” For instance, the state’s vital role to eliminate competition and subsidize product development for pharmaceutical firms via the patent system is a bi-partisan affair. This state-directed welfare policy for corporate investors is not a monopoly of the Right. Perhaps with the descent of the Bush-Cheney White House there will emerge a new body of work which opposes the GOP/Right and the party across the aisle from it, operating in a co-dependence to maintain a minority rule against the majority. The Right can’t do that job alone.


Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com

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