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Today's
Stories
August 5, 2004
Mike Ferner
The Kerry Show: When Peace is Off
Message
Bruce Anderson
Two
Rejections
Robert Fisk
The Tale of Saddam's Cameraman
Todd Chretien
Florida
Comes to California: the Democrats' Plot Against Nader
Peter Linebaugh
Doing Time for Political Crime:
Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 4, 2004
Mickey Z.
Two
Traditions: WMD and Disinformation
Justin Huggler
The Hunt for Bin Laden
John Ross
Mexico's
Dirty War Never Ended: Inside Puente Grande Prison
August 3, 2004
Uri Avnery
The
Oligarchs
Ray McGovern
The 9/11 Commission Chimera
Jack McCarthy
Sexual Politics in Jeb's Florida
Eric Ruder
Meet Barak Obama: the Democrats' New Liberal Star
John L. Hess
Crying Wolf: Orange Alert!
Elaine Cassel
Civil Liberties Elections: 1800 v. 2004
Jules Rabin
The Man Who Didn't Walk By
Website of the Day
No Wall
August 2, 2004
Robert Jensen
Kerry's
Hypocrisy on the Vietnam War
Joshua Frank
Greens, Kerry and the Politics of Mendacity
Mike Whitney
The 9/11 Commission and Civil Liberties: "We Need an American
Police State"
Gary Leupp
Beyond
Good and Evil: Some Thoughts on Invasions
July 31 / Aug.
1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
July 30, 2004
Kolhatkar /
Ingalls
Shattering
Illusions: Kerry's Speech Tells Anti-War Activists They're Not
Wanted
Dave Lindorff
Murder
Not So Foul?
Bruce Jackson
Walt Whitman on the Sound of Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Fidel Castro
The
Pathology of George W. Bush
Maximilien Robespierre
Memo to Kerry and Bush: Why They Resist
Saul Landau
Bush
Charges Castro with Sex Tourism; JFK Rolls Over in His Grave
July 29, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal: What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
Frank Bardacke
What
Michael Moore Left Out of F9/11
Tom Barry
Shallow and Formulaic: Kerry's Latin America Plan
Ron Jacobs
Kerry
and Lennon: Hawking the CounterCulture
Robert Fisk
The Unreported War
Lichtman /
Kellis-Borok
What Kerry Must Do to Win (But Probably Won't)
William S. Lind
The 9/11 Commission Report: Cashing in on Failure
CounterPunch
Wire
Doonesbury Onto John Kerry in 1971!
Website of
the Day
Jabbing JibJab: Copyright Madness
July 28, 2004
Robert Fisk
The
Occupation at 114 Degrees: Baghdad is Swamped in the Smell of
the Dead
Kevin Mink
Kerry's Misperception of Palestine
Ray McGovern
Israel and the Iraq War: How the 9/11 Report Soft-Pedals Root
Causes
United for
Peace & Justice
An
Open Letter to John Kerry: Winter Soldiers and Summer Patriots
Mike Ferner
Vets Demand End to Occupation: "Pull the Troops or Face
Impeachment Mvt."
Imraan Siddiqi
Turning Tricks with Ann Coulter
Alexander Cockburn
Candidate
Kerry
Website of
the Day
Iraq Vets Against the War
July 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
the Democrats Deserve Nader
Dave Lindorff
Back to the 19th Century: Globalization's Coming!
Mike Whitney
Control Room: Inside Al Jazeera
Ali, Anderson, Bello, et al.
If We Were Venezuelan, We'd Vote for Chavez
Stefan Wray
Texas Plan to Grab Los Alamos Takes Hold, as DOE Shuts Down Labs
Louis Proyect
Reflections on Nicaragua: First Came the Contra Butchers, Then
the Sweatshops
Rick Giombetti
Faith in Freedom: the Challenge of Thomas Szasz
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
The
9/11 Report and Its Weak-Kneed Consensus: Dogding Israel/Palestine;
Blinkered on Causes of Terrorism
July 26, 2004
Todd Chretien
Green
Resistance: a Reply to Normon Solomon & Medea Benjamin
Robert Fisk
Terror
by Video
Richard Forno
Security
Theater in Boston: Security Expert Harrassed by DHS for Exposing
Flaws at the Fleet Center
Mitchel Cohen
Report from a Boston Demo: Arresting the Curious
Richard Moreno
Rockers
for Justice: an Interview with Tom Morello and Serj Tankian
Alexander Cockburn
Boston
Awaits a Dead Party
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
Dennis
Hans
Those 16 Words Still Smell, Mr. Bush
Patrick
Cockburn
The Struggle for Iraq is Only Beginning
Josh
Frank
The War Path of Unity: Dems Reject
the Peace Movement
Justin
E.H. Smith
Christianity and the Left: the Latin
American Experience
Tariq
Ali
What's at Stake in Venezuela
Fred
Gardner
The Politics of Pot: Year of the
Antagonist
Mark
Scaramella
There's Dope and There's Dope
Ron
Jacobs
The Weather Underground's Prairie
Fire Statement...35 Years On
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No
One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War:
Psychologists Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's
be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go
On and On
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular
Patricipation" and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the
Rest of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of
Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition
to Iraq War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations
is Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything
Wrong with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War
Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe:
Coffin Bombs in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP,
But a Movement in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
July
15, 2004
Heather
Williams
McMissing
the Point: Supersize Me Crashes on Its Message
Werther
Iraq: Follow the Money
Tom
Crumpacker
The Birds of Guantanamo
Brian
Cloughley
What Does the Bush Regime Object To?
Bill
Christison
Reorganize the CIA? Of Course,
But...
July
14, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Chronicle of a Nomination Foretold:
the Green Deceivers
Neve
Gordon
Of Socrates and the Apartheid Wall
Diane
Christian
The Priesthood of Death
Stefan
Wray
Who Benefits from Missing Data at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab?
Josh
Frank
The Nader / Dean Debate
Conn
Hallinan
Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Bring My Brother Home!: Class, War
and Education
Website
of the Day
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of US Empire
July
13, 2004
Ray
McGovern
The CIA and Iraq: an Intelligence
Debacle...and Worse
Mark
Donham
The Sierra Club's Inexplicable Treatment of Cynthia McKinney
Ben
Tripp
Politus Interruptis: With Friends Like
These, Who Needs Electorates?
Mark
Gaffney
Slipping Towards Armageddon: Israel
in Iraq
Dave
Lindorff
Osama Wins! Election Postponed!
Chris
White
Double Think: the Bedrock of Marine
Indoctrination
July
10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
Janine
Pommy Vega
Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against
War
Sherry
Wolf
From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassen
A Transfer of Power, Sort Of
Michael
Donnelly
How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004
Stanton
/ Madsen
Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda?
Richard
Lichtman
The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology
Gila
Svirsky
Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall
Kurt
Nimmo
Clinton's Life
Toni
Solo
Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means
Ron
Jacobs
The Black Panthers and the Rest
Camelo
Ruiz Marrero
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
Omar
Barghouti
Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance
Poets'
Basement
Curtis and Albert
July
9, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger
Stands Up Against War
Justin
Delacour
Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About
Latin America
Robert
Fisk
Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Two Congresses and a Funeral
William
S. Lind
The October Surprises
Sibel
Edmonds
Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth
Ron
Jacobs
Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future
Gary
Leupp
The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and
the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link
July
8, 2004
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Inexplicable John McCain
Toufic
Haddad
Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall:
a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent
Dave
Lindorff
Liberation as Martial Law
Joshua
Frank
The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard
Dean
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card
James
Petras
The Truth About Jimmy Carter
July
7, 2004
John
Chuckman
Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence
of Meaning
Virginia
Tilley
A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's
Hunger Strike
Susan
Martinez
A Letter to Bill Cosby
Mickey
Z
Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade
Michael
Donnelly
Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire
Sean
Donahue
Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown
Diane
Christian
Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq
July
6, 2004
Lisa
Viscidi
Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans
Risk Lives to Reach El Norte
Marc
Norton
The Felonious Five Ride Again: the
Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants
James
Brooks
Chemical Warfare on the West Bank?
Ray
McGovern
Porter Goss as CIA Director?
William
Cook
Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...
July
5, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept.
11, July 4 and Systematic Torture
Chris
White
A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning
of Independence Day
Joe
Bageant
Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July
Robert
Jensen
Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore
Misses About the Empire
Kathy
Kelly
"Two Days an' a Wake-Up"
July
3 / 4, 2004
Elaine
Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence
Day
Stan
Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive"
Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti
Snehal
Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak
Out
Bruce
Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens
Sharon
Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"
Josh
Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates
Robert
Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
Joe
Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!
Brian
Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine
Justin
Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons
William
S. Lind
Saudi Spillover
Linda
S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"
Greg
Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't
Back Down
Ron
Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"
Toni
Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There
Dan
Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?
Stew
Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection
Dave
Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for
Our Brando
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball
Steven
Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies
Website
of the Day
Global Peace Solution
July
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise
of the Green Party
Douglas
Valentine
Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism
Gary
Leupp
"Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities
Lee
Ballinger
Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights
Robert
Fisk
Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly
CounterPunch
Wire
"What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's
Arraignment
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right
Saul
Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela
July 1, 2004
Katherine
van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in
His Method
Joe
Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
William
James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment
Robert
Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
Website
of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
August
6, 2004
Bring
Them Home Now
An
Interview with Stan Goff
By
DEREK SEIDMAN
Stan Goff is a member of the coordinating
committee of Bring
Them Home Now, a campaign of military families, veterans,
active duty personnel, reservists against the war in Iraq. His
books include Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti,
and Full
Spectrum Disorder.
He retired as a Master Sergeant
in the US military in 1996 after serving for 26 years, most of
them with Special Forces. He lives in Raleigh, NC, and can be
reached at sherrynstan@earthlink.net.
Recently, Derek Seidman caught
up with Stan Goff to get his thoughts on "Fahrenheit 9/11",
the situation in Iraq, the possibility of a draft, the upcoming
US elections, and more.
DS: Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11" recently passed the hundred million dollar mark in
the box office. Some people on the Left have been very critical
of the film for various reasons, while others have emphasized
the broad, positive impact it's having as a conveyer of progressive
ideas and impulses to a mass audience. Of course, appreciating
the film and being critical of it are not necessarily opposed
to one another. What's your take on the film and its impact?
Anything we could or should learn from this Michael Moore here?
SG: Sure, there are a lot of
"we"s and a lot of learning to do. I'd start by making
a qualitative distinction between the different political currents
that seem to get shoehorned together as "left." Putting
liberals, class-absent populists, class-conscious populists,
social democrats, and several varieties of revolutionaries along
some kind of linear spectrum, running right to left, is a pretty
significant conceptual error. The point of unity between these
different currents right now is their opposition to the actions
of the current United States government--not the US state, and
not capitalism, but the Bush-Cheney government.
The post-9/11 drive to expand
the power of the security state domestically and to accelerate
the international plan to restructure the global accumulation
regime by military force set off alarm bells among all those
currents, then the build-up to the March 2003 ground offensive
against Iraq became the catalyst for a very big tactical alliance
that we started referring to as an anti-war movement. But all
the distinctions--and they are pretty heavy distinctions--within
that polyglot remained. I'm not anti-war and neither are a lot
of other people in this movement. We are anti-imperialist. I
don't oppose the war in Iraq. I oppose the US occupation. To
say I simply oppose the war- as war- is to deny the Iraqi's the
right of resistance. I'm sure the Bush administration now opposes
the war. They want the resistance to stand down. In this, they
share a goal with pacifists, who say no one should fight. As
long as there is a US occupation, I must defend the Iraqi's right,
even duty, to resist.
Anyway, now there is a spate
of documentary films coming out from several of these currents.
Moore's film was well financed, because he had the money from
his class-populist bestseller, "Stupid White Men,"
and a rep from "Bowling for Columbine" and "Roger
and Me." Moore has finessed that money, that rep, and his
in-your-face style into an extremely effective form of publicity.
His clash with Disney over distribution hooked the capitalist
media like a brown trout. Moore is from Michigan, where fishing
is very popular.
Whomever "we" is,
some of us seem to be learning how to make incursions into mass
media, and to break down the confidence of people in what they
 usually get from mass media.
There's a lot we need to learn from that.
I don't think it makes much
sense--aside from advancing a critical analysis among socialist
intellectuals of the ideological current that Moore represents--to
burden the film with unrealistic expectations. When we know Moore
is thinking of his old neighbors in Flint as his audience, and
we have heard Moore say things that show clearly he is not going
to attack Zionism or embrace what he considers the coffee-house
intellectual left--a straw man, but one he believes in--then
why would we expect his film to depart from his populist formula?
There are good reasons to be
critical of Moore's movie, and I emailed back and forth with
Robert Jensen, who was pretty hard on it, about my own criticism
of his criticism that I posted a while back on a listserv. Robert
Jensen and I have served on panels together. We are both very
interested in correcting our own and the left's ignorance--I
know, I just said "left"--on gender. We share a lot
of ideas about a lot of things, and we like and respect each
other. Bob assured me that his criticism was intended as part
of that critical analysis, and I admit that much of my reaction
to his piece was ill-directed at him, but was really my own impatience
with the kind of endless kvetching that was beginning to dominate
socialist discourse, and the fact that people weren't having
discussions about specifically how to take advantage of the film's
impact.
This tendency of thought, of
constantly crying about the world not conforming to our wishes,
is a symptom of a deep malaise among socialists. There's good
reason for that malaise. We've been getting our asses kicked
for a long time, and we're still trying to learn some hard lessons
from history. But history is moving into a period right now where
we are needed, and not as a bunch of whiners. We have to break
that habit, which can provide excuses for not organizing and
teaching the way we need to. And the masses don't respect it.
There is a desperate need to
refound the so-called left, and trying to refound it on ideological
lines will not work. The masses don't follow just well-articulated
ideas in a crisis. They follow those who can organize an effective
fight. That's why Moore's in-your-face style, even as it presents
ideas that are not well developed, is very attractive to people.
We identify with that anger, and we identify with that combativeness.
And a lot of the kind of knee-jerk
criticism was about what the film did NOT do. That's kind of
a critical fallacy in looking at a two-hour film. The list of
things any film does not do is infinite. The question is, in
my mind, what did the film DO--beginning with the understanding
that Moore is coming at this as a class-populist, and having
no illusions about that perspective? And what I mean is, what
impact did the film have on its mass audience, and who was that
audience?
Because, while there is no
linear continuum from right to left that mechanically defines
the diversity of social positions or ideas about politics, there
are definitely conjunctures and events that raise important questions
that have the potential to shake up ideological categories and
cause people to question aspects of their own world views. The
whole post 9/11 conjuncture is doing that, and Moore's film moved
into the dominant ideological space--the mass media--where it
effectively undermined some hegemonic premises. That doesn't
mean that it brought us to the doorstep of the revolution, and
it doesn't mean that Michael Moore's world view is not rooted
in a sectoral, or mixed, or limited if you will, consciousness.
DS: Do you know how the
film has been received in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, especially
with regard to reaching folks in the military and their families?
SG: I don't live in Fayetteville,
and I haven't for almost nine years. But my son and grandson
are there, and we visit often. There is also a very energetic
group associated with the Bring
Them Home Now campaign of Vets for Peace and Military
Families Speak Out, and they were impressed with the impact
the film had. It was massively attended, and massively attended
by military personnel and their families, who came out with a
lot of doubts about the war that weren't there before they walked
into the cinema.
The reaction was a good example
of what Moore's film DID do. It undermined confidence in the
mass media. It exposed what superficially looks like cowardice
and hypocrisy among Democrats. It undermined the sort of unspoken
faith in the political omniscience of heads of state. It exposed--again,
a sectoral reality--the war profiteering associated with the
war in Southwest Asia. It gave many people their first look at
real images of the effects of war, and of the kind of sadistic
transformation that happens to the young people who are tasked
to carry the war out. And it highlighted class relations in the
war. The other thing it did, which is something we really need
to learn, is it connected with people's affective lives. It hit
people in the gut emotionally.
DS: In your latest book,
Full Spectrum Disorder,
you often invoke the concept of "the initiative" in
military and political struggle. Can you define what you mean
by it, and how would you assess the current situation in Iraq
through this perspective?
SG: In any open strategic conflict,
whether it is chess game, a boxing match, a social movement,
or a war, there are actions and reactions. Those actions are
based on decisions. Each decision is the culmination of a decision
cycle. Military theorist John Boyd described this as an OODA
loop, meaning we observe the situation, we orient to what is
significant for us in that situation, we decide what action to
take... observe, orient, decide, act--OODA. That action then
changes the direction of the unfolding situation, and the cycle
begins again. The initiative is when you have moved "inside"
your opponent's decision cycle and disrupted his ability set
the terms of the next move. It is basically when you are making
the decisions to which your opponent must now react, meaning
he no longer has the ability to adequately observe and orient.
In games with rules and predetermined
end-points, we technically have a standard for that result, for
who wins. But in conflicts where this cannot be resolved in a
linear way, we can only at any given point assess the progress.
We can only ask who is winning for now. Who is in control of
the tempo, time, and place of the conflict? Not who is killing
the most people, the body count method, or even who controls
so-called strategic terrain. Who has the initiative?
In war, we have to take that
a step further. Military outcomes are not determined in the final
analysis by tactical outcomes, but by political outcomes. War
is a political activity, not a football game. If we look at Iraq
and Afghanistan right now, we have to ask what are the political
objectives and what are the political costs? Moreover, what are
those goals and costs not just in-theater, but internationally,
and domestically?
Using these criteria, the US
is losing--for now--the war in Southwest Asia.
The US military has long attempted
to use Boyd's discoveries to reconfigure the military. But neither
the institution of the military nor the US state can really adopt
Boyd's principles of tactical agility. Boyd worked his principles
out in aerial combat, and they are principles for conscious actors.
The military is too bureaucratic, foreign occupiers have difficulty
"orienting" accurately, and the political goals of
the US state create and amplify their own resistance.
And the ruling class is stuck in its own thought process. They
reduce everything to a technical problem to "solve."
That's how Rumsfeld's so-called Revolution in Military Affairs
came about. They take a concept like tactical agility, and they
try to apply it with a digital thought process.
But strategic conflict is not
ultimately resolvable through technology.
Technologies change the framework,
but strategic conflict is a contest of consciousness, and war
is political, again subject to human agency. That's why I haven't
been able to share the anxiety of many allies about US military
invincibility, or even about the attempt to create a panopticon
society here. We're better off focusing on understanding their
vulnerabilities, so we can fight them. We have to consciously
reject internalizing their gaze, as Foucault might say.
In fact, Boyd's principles
contained a strong dose of chaos theory. Every action creates
a cascade of consequences that are unpredictable and often momentous...
the butterfly effect. That's precisely why tactical agility is
achieved with minimal long-term planning and the refinement of
the intuition in order to go through the OODA cycle faster than
your opponent. This makes an ally of that so-called chaos, instead
of an enemy. Look at Iraq right now, and tell me who is reacting
to whom.
The Rumsfeld doctrine was one
that was applied in Iraq to "solve the problem" of
how to establish these "lily pad" forward bases through
the region in order to facilitate rapid projection of a highly
technological, highly lethal force. So the goal of the invasion
was not to nation-build and all that.
It was very simple. Get the bases. All the other bullshit is
ideo-mystificatory window dressing.
They asked themselves, can
we force our way in with these bases and hold them? They answered
themselves, yes. But the reality was not that simple, and the
actual post-invasion situation confronted the Bush administration
with a political problem and consequently a military failure.
When we measure the tactical
success or failure of this operation at the end of the road,
we have to look at that. Do they have the bases? Yes. Can they
keep them? Well, that's still open, isn't it?
But the ultimate test is still
political.
My assessment of Iraq right
now is that it has the US state tied up in a war it cannot leave
and it cannot win. My question is what can we do with that? What
do we observe? What are the aspects of this conjuncture that
we need to orient upon, specifically emerging vulnerabilities?
What are we going to do? And when we do it, let's take stock
as often as we can of how what we are doing is changing the dynamic.
DS: There's a lot of speculation
being thrown around about the possibility of a military draft
in the not-so-distant future. With the recent call-ups, the transferring
to Iraq of troops stationed in South Korea, and the crunch in
numbers that the occupation is taking and will continue to, it
seems there is certainly cause for this speculation. What do
you think about it all?
SG: I hope they do bring back
the draft. Bush has put himself out on a limb on troop strength,
and Kerry is painting himself into a corner on it by promising
to become the Lyndon Johnson of Iraq. It's a vulnerability. We'll
eat their asses alive with the draft. The person who seems to
understand this most keenly, and for whose intelligence I generally
have little respect, is Donald Rumsfeld. He is violently opposed
to the draft, even as he conducts a backhanded draft through
stop-loss orders that indefinitely extend troops' service obligations
beyond their discharge dates.
Again, the important thing
to understand about all this is not how wicked and powerful they
all are. They are just doing what they do. This whole adventure,
which is scaring the bejeezuz out of the technocratic element
of the American political class, is accelerating the crisis which
it is intended to interdict. They are not operating from a position
of strength, but of incredible weakness.
The technocrats didn't oppose
invading Iraq. They opposed doing it in a way that undermined
the US state's legitimacy. But the conquest of Southwest Asia
is, in the final analysis, a necessity from the standpoint of
the capitalist class. The entire restructured accumulation regime
that developed beginning from the Nixon administration to the
present is in eminent danger of collapse.
DS: With the occupation
dragging on indefinitely, have you seen a growth in interest
and activity around groups like Bring Them Home Now (and other
military and military family antiwar organizations) from people
serving in the military? What types of activities are you doing
these days?
SG: As they said in "Fargo,"
oh, you betcha.
The activity coming out of
the military is not like the Vietnam era GI work. So much is
different, particularly the absence now of the general social
turmoil that created more spaces of resistance for GIs to gravitate
to as they moved out of the military. Lots of folks base their
expectations now on what happened then, and some people are even
attempting to organize the same models. We'll see what works
best through trial and error. What we see now is, first of all,
a putative volunteer military, embedded in a society that is
unlikely to exercise meaningful solidarity with GIs who resist
openly, faced with draconian penalties for dissent, and not a
lot of great options outside the military. These kids in the
military today have grown up not in a period of non-conformity
like we did during the 60's, but in the 90s, probably the most
conformist period since the 50s, drowning in consumerism as an
unrecognized ideology and brain-dead from it. So it's a tougher
proposition to get resistance going within the military.
But there have been two points
of vulnerability that we looked at with the Bring Them Home Now
campaign.
One, there is a ruling class
fight taking shape between the Department of Defense and the
generals. This Iraq debacle is creating very real institutional
problems in the military itself that will take years to sort
out. Many of the generals, who are the custodians of that institution
and often genuinely devoted to it, are very unhappy with the
way the executive branch is using the institution up, and with
how they are making massive and often stupid changes in doctrine.
They are also not particularly happy with the impacts of privatization--the
contracting out of every task in the military, now including
even some combat missions. This is worth exploiting. It's kind
of a weird tactical alliance, but it need not be a coordinated
alliance.
Second, and where we have made
the biggest inroads, is among the family members. They are in
a unique position, both inside and outside the institution and
the war. Rather than try and go face-to-face with the troops,
which is logistically difficult when most are deployed or living
in communities that frighten activists, we have reached out to
a spontaneous movement among the families, often parents, mostly
spouses, and the majority women. The latter is important, because
their gender identity is not so thoroughly tied up with warfare.
Again, the so-called left has
not been good in the past as accounting for these powerful affective
realties. Male sexual terror and the violence that accompanies
it, often called masculinity, is a real and potent thing that
colors everything it touches. Often, the only person who has
access to a GI somewhere inside that masculine emotional armor
is his wife, sweetheart, or mom.
There is a kind of mass-line
approach we are taking... consolidate the advanced section, win
over the intermediates, and isolate the backward. You can see
that if you read between the lines on the web site. With the
exception of the Speak Out section, which we don't edit or censor,
we evade appeals to chauvinism, even if they are "anti-war"
appeals to chauvinism... peace is patriotic, and shit like that.
We provide an abundance of information that is de-emphasized
in the media. And we punctuate with analysis that points the
way to understanding the system behind the war.
The campaign itself is a kind
of internet-based campaign that uses our web site to get people
in touch with us, and to have them link GIs up with the web site,
where all sorts of subversive information lurks. Once that contact
is established, we try and move people into one of the organizations,
Veterans for Peace for vets, and Military Families Speaks Out
(www.mfso.org) for the family members. Right now, the web site
gets contacts almost every day from various media wanting to
speak with a vet of family member who opposes the war. That's
one way we plug them in locally. And there is some one-on-one
leadership development--a lot done by Nancy Lessin and Charlie
Richardson who have become the globe-trotting reps for MFSO.
Recently, a new group, growing directly out of this campaign,
composed exclusively of Iraq vets, called Iraq Veterans Against
the War, with sixteen returnees. That's very exciting.
DS: In the last interview
we did, I asked you the question, "If you were a soldier
in Iraq right now, what would be going through your head?"
After reading Full
Spectrum Disorder as well as Catherine Lutz's wonderful study,
Homefront ((which
you mention in your book), it seems this was a loaded question
with a false assumption about the military: that it's basically
homogenous. This was lazily-conceived, and for our practical
purposes it's really not wise to think of the military-on both
a human level and a structural level- as if it's a single entity.
The people in it have incredibly diverse interests, positions
and ranks, motivations for service, political leanings, etc.
In Full Spectrum Disorder you talk about how the Left has some
serious faults when it comes to thinking about and dealing with
the military and the people it's composed of.
SG: That's the paradox of the
military. It actually IS homogeneous in one sense. That's both
a strength and a weakness. The institutional imperative of the
military is to impose homogeneity on a heterogeneous population.
By the same token, almost every GI retains a strong sense of
identification with his or her cultural roots. The longer people
stay in the military, the more homogeneous they become, but that
still doesn't mean they are robots. That's the caricature I get
wrought up about.
I am definitely, more than
anything else, a product of military culture, because I stayed
in it for so long. My sense of place is stronger by orders of
magnitude in Fort Bragg than it is in Raleigh or Hot Springs,
Arkansas, or St. Charles, Missouri. But we are not transformed
into machines, any more than someone who spends her whole life
working for IBM (no pun intended).
Actually, the message to the
left to drop the generalizations seems to have taken hold. I
see less and less of it all the time. It's a point that I wanted
to make with some force, but it seems its being made now, with
the exception of a very few but stubborn idealists who are interested
in establishing their moral superiority.
DS: In your book you write:
"Their [the neocons] true weaknesses are ruling class myopia
and astonishing hubris. They are constitutionally incapable of
understanding history as a process that involves the masses."
I thought this was one of the most insightful lines of the whole
book. Can you flesh it out?
SG: The key word is constitutionally.
This myopia is not a character defect, but the reflection of
their lived experience, as a class. As owners and rentiers, they
see the masses as a thing to be exploited and manipulated, and
their position requires them to see themselves as inherently
superior. Institutionalized as the state, they must see the masses
also as a perennial threat and therefore a potential enemy, and
themselves as the custodians of order. Their concept of history
is the one we learn in school, a history of great individuals
with human agency, directing the masses without agency, or at
best a dangerous and irrational agency.
This leads to amazing errors,
like believing you can conduct a military conquest in a place
where people are determined to resist. I didn't see that as an
original insight, just one that applied to the Bush-Cheney clique
with special force. The international anti-war movement blind-sided
them. The Turkish parliament blind-sided them. Then the Iraqis
blind-sided them. Then the Spaniards. These boys are not fast
learners.
DS: In Full Spectrum Disorder you tell
us that your next book is going to be on gender and the military.
I want to ask you about masculinity, which you have a lot to
say about. It is something that is deeply internalized in our
society, it has very detrimental effects on a lot of things.
When reactionary policies are coated in gendered terms, for instance,
it makes popular consent much easier. What are going to be some
of your main points and themes about masculinity, both with regards
to the military, and in general?
SG: Sex & War is
running behind schedule, but I will finish it and probably publish
next year.
It will be a little like Full
Spectrum, in its eclecticism. Several essays, really, pulled
together as a book, all dealing with some aspect of the interfusion
of militarism and patriarchy. I'm quite a bit more tentative
in this one for the same reason I've gone slowly on it. This
is the deep water for me, and I'm a novice swimmer. I've read
somewhere around 60 books to prepare for it, and I still should
read that many again, just to get all the perspectives that are
out there.
One thing I've discovered is
that the excuses made by many Marxists, and I proudly count myself
as a Marxist, for why we've been on our asses with regard to
gender are not very good ones. Feminist writing and feminist
theory constitute an extremely rich body of work. And plenty
of feminist theorists have been trying hard for decades to engage
Marxism, while many Marxists have simply failed to do their homework,
refused a principled engagement, or retreated into orthodoxy--"main"
contradictions and all that other schematic bullshit.
I also became painfully familiar
with some feminisms' essentialism and philosophical idealism.
My own hypothesis is that gender
IS a class war.
Just as racism in the US, for
example, is contradictory as hell, until you get your head around
it as a national-colonial question, it's hard to see how it articulates
with class struggle in the production process until you see it
as a national question.
Gender is a violent class system.
It has adapted and been adapted to social evolution. It is difficult
to see as a class struggle because, in a sense, it is a class
struggle that runs perpendicular to the class struggle in the
production dimension of society. The classes are the predominant
biological sexes, men and women, conditioned and disciplined
by gender. There are other struggles related to this struggle,
particularly now queer liberation--an extremely important arena
of struggle--but the system is fundamentally designed to exploit
and subjugate women. It's the policing of this gender order that
gives rise to homophobia.
Masculinity and femininity
are the behavioral expectations of this class order, a class
order that operates both inside and outside the productive process,
particularly in social reproduction, in the so-called domestic
sphere.
I don't argue for a new masculinity,
or a kinder gentler masculinity. I argue for the abolition of
masculinity, whereupon femininity will also disappear because
it is defined in relation to masculinity. I argue for the goal
of a classless society. I'm a gender communist.
The struggle for Marxism and
feminism is to take these perpendicular struggles and get them
on parallel.
In Sex & War, I
want to confront certain currents of feminism's tendency to essentialize
gender when they take on the military, as Cynthia Enloe has.
I also want to use the military-patriarchy interrogation to explicitly
critique many Marxisms' adoption of liberalism with regard to
gender.
Enloe, who has done a great service with the volume of research
she has compiled on the military and its effects on women, still
treats the military as if it were a uniquely malignant institution
because of its male supremacy. This is decontextualized, first
of all. The military is part of the state, and embedded in a
larger social structure that conditions what it is and how it
is. There is no inherent and isolated military culture. But she
also tends to paint the picture that the military is an outgrowth
of some inherently male characteristic.
Most Marxisms, on the other
hand, ever since Engels wrote "The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State," and even before in Marx's
explications of capitalism, has adopted a political position
only in favor of women's legal equality.
This is pure liberalism that
fails utterly to account for gender having the characteristics
of class. Would any self-respecting Marxist argue for simple
legal equality between classes? Marxism has tended to naturalize
women, explicitly so in many cases, which contradicts the rest
of our intellectual tradition. That's partly because of patriarchal
assumptions that we are unwilling to examine, and partly due
to a biological reductionist standpoint on the question of sexuality.
But these points, while important
in the book, are not the bulk of it. I prefer that my abstractions
touch the ground. So I am writing about queer people in the military,
about a serial rapist in the military, about Jessica Lynch and
how that resounded culturally, and about family relations in
the military. I'm using my own experience again as a point of
departure, not because I want to write an autobiography. It's
just what I know and a way to directly relate the ideas in the
book to the material world.
Masculinity is more than an
ideology. It is deeper than ideas, because it is enculturated
earlier and with more emotional force. So it is extremely stubborn
and intimidating. In fact, I think Robert Connell, himself very
Marxist in his interpretive methodology, has it right when he
says there are multiple masculinities. But they are all part
of policing some gender binary, and that polarity is about the
social subjugation of women. My point is that it not only damages
women, it damages us... damages men.
I've already written a few
things exploring this in more detail at Freedom Road.
The main thing I bring to this
is a different audience. A lot of men are reading my stuff, comparatively
speaking. They write me.
They are people who might not
pick up bell hooks, Joy James, Nancy Hartsock, Chandra Mohanty,
Catherine McKinnon, Gloria Anzaldua, or Maria Mies. Most people
have never heard of these women.
If they read this book however,
something called "Sex & War," written by some ex-military
thug, they will encounter bits and pieces of all these writers
and thinkers, on whom I relied so heavily, and hopefully that
will send the curious looking further into what these people
have to say.
Returning to masculinity, gender
is policed through fear, often profoundly primal and irrational
fear. It is inculcated almost from birth, and gender norms are
particularly good at disguising themselves as natural; gender
is reified.
With the combination of fear
and absolutist conviction, there is always the potential for
violence. The policing of gender is extremely violent... look
at domestic violence statistics, at rape and the threat of rape
as a social intimidator, at gay-bashing, at the incredibly cruelty
of adolescents to ensure gender conformity, and you begin to
appreciate how entrenched and hegemonic gender is, and therefore
how important it is as an arena of struggle. I myself am now
convinced that the full social emancipation of women is not a
task of the revolution after we take power, but a precondition
for effectively taking and holding power.
DS: John Kerry just finished
his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
I was a little surprised, actually. It was a little more aggressive
than I thought it would be. He'll probably get many people-including
some on the Left-behind him more adamantly now. How do you think
we should assess and respond to the upcoming elections, especially
with regards to the Democrats?
SG: The election has done us
one service. It has exposed the fault lines in our so-called
anti-war movement. We can see how many of our allies among the
chattering class are running back to cling to the skirts of the
Democratic Party.
That said, I don't think it
serves us well to decomplexify elections as a phenomenon. I will
not vote for John Kerry, nor will I vote for my oily, manipulative
Democrat Congressman, David Price. They are both cheap fucking
zookeepers in my opinion, who have pissed all over our legs then
told us it's raining.
I am enjoying watching the
Republicans confront John Kerry with his untenable so-called
position on the war. Here's the technocrat trying to weasel-word
his way past the electorate on the war, and the Republicans are
the ones taking him to the woodshed. It's hilarious in a gallows-humor
kind of way.
Not voting Kerry or Price is
more than just a protest. I don't see the point in expressive
politics. This is instrumental.
One of the things the more
politically advanced in the United States can do now, and I mean
advanced in terms of understanding the role of the bourgeois
state, is to exercise the actual political power we have in our
present state of under-development to shake up the situation--again,
a Boyd tactic, make a strike, then reassess the situation for
new vulnerabilities--is to deny the Oval Office to the Democrats,
and make it public knowledge that this is an intentional political
act.
This begins to disrupt the
inertia of the good cop/bad cop routine the two party system
keeps pulling on us. It says we are no longer so afraid of the
Republicans that we run back to their doe-eyed body-doubles again
and again. But when and if we do that, if we encourage that route
of revolutionary defeatism, then we are duty-bound to be prepared
and organized for the follow through. We have to be prepared
to escalate our tactics against the returning Republicans. Calling
on people to take risks carries with it some responsibilities.
I will vote, because there
are elections here in North Carolina and Wake County and Raleigh
that matter in very real and immediate ways as part of ongoing
sectoral struggles. Mike Davis alludes to this in his extraordinary
mapping of changing urban environments in books like Ecology
of Fear and City of Quartz, and the important if contradictory
spontaneous struggles that appear in response to those changes.
I'm not an idealist. While
I recognize that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois institution,
I acknowledge that we still live in a bourgeois society. We work
for capitalists to get money. We obey even laws we disagree with
and so on. We have to live inside the system until there is a
different one, even those of us who work to see it replaced.
There are actual struggles going on here, as there are everywhere,
that are local and immediate and that engage people less abstractly
than national elections, and there are real reasons, in my opinion,
to fight here to preserve some of the hard fought gains that
have been made in carving out spaces of Black political power,
which right now is still exercised through local Democratic Parties.
We want to hang onto that power, then struggle with ways to extricate
that power from both the Democratic Party and the abundance of
jack-leg Black comprador opportunists. It's contradictory, and
we have to work through those contradictions and not merely dismiss
them as spectators.
I still feel some ambivalence
about the national elections, for that matter, because I'm not
100 percent confident that the left is prepared to truly escalate,
and because my crystal ball doesn't work. I don't know what will
happen with another Bush-Cheney term. They are really a dangerous
crew, and we shouldn't underestimate that. They want to nuke
someone, as a trial balloon like Jose Padilla, jus to see what
they can get away with.
But in another sense, that
risk is exactly what the advantage is to having them back. Bush
is reported to be on drugs right now to mellow out his mood swings,
Cheney is as popular as cancer, and a number of scandals are
still cooking in the kitchen. I think a lot about Nixon these
days. It would be interesting to see that kind of crisis of legitimacy
flowing into the second dip of a recession... maybe even another
period of stagflation.
The form of imperialism is
unstable right now. Neoliberalism is in a serious crisis. It
is a monetary-military system, and the war in Southwest Asia
is wrecking the myth of American military invincibility upon
which the current system depends. The neocons are stepping on
the gas to try and leap the gorge, so to speak, and the technocrats
like Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, et cetera, want
to stop the car, get out, and recon for a way around the gorge.
Just as important for the so-called
left is that we continue to promote any activity that deepens
the political polarization of the United States and grow the
revolutionary left while deepening its connections to concrete
struggles.
The elections can do that through
organizing around the Nader-Camejo challenge, but I don't overestimate
the impact of that.
The election phenomenon is
ephemeral. Once the elections are over, and I'm personally impatient
to see this distraction pass, then we will have a better opportunity
to get back to the business of building and strengthening the
social movements... and pulling them away from the non-profit
NGO sector, by the way, where they are currently being contained.
That's a book that needs to be written, but not by me.
Derek Seidman is co-editor of the radical youth
journal Left Hook. He
lives in New York City and can be reached at derekseidman@yahoo.com.
He also wrote a
review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder.
Weekend
Edition Features for July 31 / August 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
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