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CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
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Today's Stories November 3, 2009 Mike Whitney November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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A Metaphor for Contemporary PoliticsKatrina and the Paralysis of FearBy FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY The vast Mississippi Delta in Louisiana is sinking as sea water from the Gulf of Mexico seeps in to destroy its fresh water marshlands. The Army's Corps of Engineers says it cannot protect New Orleans from the inevitable storm surges caused by hurricanes. Some may dismiss this warning as alarmist hype, and the Army's Corps of Engineers certainly does not have an enviable track record in this regard. That said, the Corps' warning does make evident the political-economic detritus left over from Hurricane Katrina. Inferentially, the warning also highlights the hollowness in the scare tactics used by global warming advocates to raise money for their far more costly ambitions, not to mention the paralyzing political-economic consequences posed by the politics of fear practiced by the Pentagon. The reality of the Delta thus becomes a metaphor for the larger emptiness that now pervades American politics. The most immediate threat to New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is the clear and present dangers posed by man's efforts to tame the Mississippi River by controlling and canalizing its route, together with the ecological damage to the freshwater marshlands wrought by the canal and pipeline systems that now move 35 percent of our natural gas and oil through the Delta. To be sure, recent rises in the sea level exacerbate the problem, but they are not the proximate cause of the catastrophe. Bear in mind, there is nothing new about our appreciation of the threat to the Mississippi Delta: hydrologists, civil engineers, and ecologists have been warning about it since at least the 1950s, long before global warming was deemed a politically fashionable problem. Hurricane Katrina merely converted that threat from a future inevitability into a current reality. The continuing disaster begs a larger political question: Will the United States ever muster the political will to raise the money and manpower needed to tackle what are clearly real, understandable, avoidable manmade ecological dangers? The Corps of Engineers says that the total cost to place the Delta's ecology on a glide path to better health will be on the order of $200 billion. This is, no doubt, an underestimate, and probably a large one. It also raises the collateral possibility of waste and smarmy political corruption at the local level -- long bugaboos raised by the operating culture of the Corps of Engineers. Nevertheless, the task of placing Delta's ecology on an evolutionary pathway to better ecological health, while huge and highly problematic in conception, pales in comparison to that of solving the far more distant, less well-defined, ecological problems hypothesized by the more hyperbolic global warming advocates. These dangers, if ever taken seriously, imply corrective costs of untold trillions of dollars, enormous collateral waste, and a degree of heretofore never-achieved international cooperation, all for what, at the end of the day, is a highly uncertain venture into an unproven theory that the evolutionary interplay of chance and necessity on a global scale can be made predictable and tamed by man. If there is one thing the so-called taming of the Mississippi ought to have taught us, it is that a little humility is in order when messing with Mother Nature. Notwithstanding its evident uncertainties, the current estimate to fix the Delta or move New Orleans to a safer location can to be placed in a contemporary political perspective. A $200 billion underestimate to fix the Delta would be less than one third of what the United States now shovels each year into the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) to finance the ever-growing costs of its unending wars of empire, the increasingly costly maintenance of the bloated overhead needed to support the MICC's cold-war inspired force and international basing structures, and to buy out its current wish list of new weapons that are high-cost, outdated legacies of the now defunct Cold War thinking. In fact, the Corps' underestimate for "fixing" the Delta is less than the current underestimate of the the $298 billion it will cost to procure the planned fleet of Joint Strike Fighters over the next 25 to 30 years, a kludge of an airplane plane the Obama Administration just committed to in order to buy off political opposition to its plan to terminate the equally unneeded F-22. So, when compared to the problem of financing the MICC, the problem of fixing the Delta appears to be relatively small in economic terms. But it is also small in political terms, when compared to the problem of reining in the ambitions of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex or MICC. Taken together, the MICC's ambitions pose a political problem that, in contrast to the ambiguities implicit in the various global warming hypotheses, is clearly understood, but one where corrective action is paralyzed by uncontrolled factional dynamics infecting America's contemporary political-economy. Yet despite the comparatively small size of the problem posed by human activities in the Delta, it is quite unlikely, four years after Katrina, that the US political apparat will ever muster the political will to divert the flow of resources needed step up to tackle this real problem in a serious way. The deficit hawks in Congress, the think tanks, and the media will argue that the United States can not afford it, although in the same breath, they will also say we must waste more money propping up the MICC. The MICC will continue to use the politics of fear to siphon increasingly scarce technical and economic resources into its ever more wasteful activities. And all the while, Americans will continue to be distracted by an ever growing flood of alarmist reports -- the politics of fear again -- about the long range threats caused by hidden mathematical assumptions buried in computerized global warning models which lack sufficient data (in the form of long time series of actual observations for a large numbers of different locations around the globe) to scientifically test the "truth" of those assumptions. If we can not muster the will to tackle the human, ecological, and economic detritus left over from Katrina in some way (perhaps the only choice would be to abandon/move New Orleans and redesign the energy infrastructure), it is patently absurd to imagine our political system will tackle global warming in any substantive way. That is why the grim reality of Katrina, when compared to the intractable political reality MICC and the political fantasy of mustering meaningful action on global warming, becomes a metaphor for the emptiness of contemporary American politics. Franklin Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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