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The New Campus McCarthyism

There’s a McCarthyite campaign in full spate across higher education in the U.S. today.  For every headline case, like Norman Finkelstein or Joseph Massad, there are three or four less-publicized smear campaigns. In the sights of the witch-hunters are faculty targeted as “anti-Israel”, as terror-symps, as leftists. In our latest newsletter we feature the personal history of Victoria Fontan, a Frenchwoman who came to a US campus from field work in the back alleys of Fallujah and found out just how devastating academic warfare can be.  ALSO --  Saving the Florida Everglades – Alan Farago reports from the battlefront. PLUS -- They aimed at Moscow, They Hit Kabul:  Serge Halimi on Sarkozy and  NATO’s Mission Creep. 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 gear make great presents.

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Today's Stories

March 27-29, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Fall Guy

Arno J Mayer
Too Big to Fail?

Michael Hudson
How the Scam Works

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

Andy Worthington
A Letter to Obama From a Guantánamo Uighur

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Hog Wallow

Souad N. Al-Azzawi
Iraq: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves

Dave Lindorff
A Financial History Lesson

Ian Masters
The Zombie Presidency

Jami Tarn
Smearing Tristan Anderson

Diane Farsetta
The Nuclear Industry Targets Wisconsin

David Ker Thomson Against Democracy

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu and the Future of the Peace Process

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Shiites' One-Word Demand

Wajahat Ali
Writer as Fighter: the Genius of Ishmael Reed

Nick Egnatz
Whatever Happened to the Fierce Urgency of Now?

Gregory A. Burris
The Insolents Abroad: a Defense of Iceland

Missy Beattie
This Land

David Yearsley
How They Built Bach's Face (Is the Bard Next?)

Lorenzo Wolff
Pat Boone Syndrome

Website of the Weekend
Ann Coulter: a Portrait by Ben Tripp

 

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

 

 

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

 

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

 

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest

The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

 

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

 

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar

A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

 

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?


Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

 

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Weekend Edition
March 27-29, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

Obama's Fall Guy

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Since America is in its worst economic mess in seventy years and since President Obama’s designated  Mr Fixit is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, you’d think the Obama presidency is in desperate shape. The reason? Mr Fixit is surely the most derided man running the US Treasury since Andrew Mellon cut spending and raised taxes amid the onset of the Great Depression in 1932, prompting the derisive ditty recently quoted in this site.

Hoover Blew the Whistle,
Mellon Rang the Bell,
Wall Street Gave the Signal,
and the Country went to Hell!

The bounce on Wall Street after the launch of Geithner’s most recent effort to bail out the banks at tax payers’ expense  merely accelerated the chorus of abuse.

Stentorian in  denunciation is Paul Krugman,  Princeton economics professor and winner of last year’s Nobel prize for Economics. Week after week from his pulpit at the New York Times Krugman gives the Obama administration another walloping from the left for wimpish groveling to Wall Street.

Even before Geithner unveiled his latest plan (in an off-camera presentation planned to mitigate the Treasury Secretary’s meager rhetorical skills), Krugman was abusing it as “zombie ideas”. No doubt Geithner’s insistence on the Hill  on Thursday that he yearns for a legislative green light  to discipline irresponsible Wall Street will be duly and correctly flayed by Krugman as mere persiflage.  In his official obituary for the bank bail-out scheme, published in the Times on Monday – the same day as the scheme’s  offical birth -- Krugman announced somberly that “This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.”

Yes, this does sound a bit pompous, even though Krugman is a crisp columnist. As connoisseurs  of the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf and other prominent economic Cassandras down the decades know well, there’s nothing like a widely-read economics column to induce a tone of self-importance in the author.  “I’m concerned about Europe,” Krugman began a column grandly a few weeks ago.

By this week’s end Krugman was conclusive in judgement. “I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.”   Far more acrid have been CounterPunch’s A-team of economic commentators – starring former assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Hudson, Pam Martens, Michael Whitney, Peter Morici and  other contributors too numerous for individual mention.

Of course Geithner got off on the wrong foot by coming to public attention during his nomination hearings before Congress for failure to pay certain federal taxes when he was at the International Monetary Fund, even though the IRS – a branch of the Treasury – reminded him of the omission more than once. However dilatory or devious in their own dealings with the taxman, Americans are merciless in moral posture towards the public figures  exposed as having done the same thing.

Geithner’s appearance is against him too. Treasury Secretaries are supposed to evince gravitas, not resemble just the sort of rumpled 40-something investment banker whose funny-money antics put capitalism on the ropes.

But while  Obama’s Mr Fixit is only a hair’s breadth away from becoming a stock comic figure on the comedy shows, not much of the public derision is rubbing off on the boss.

Though the prevailing consensus is that the bailout and stimulus packages are saddling Americans with trillions in debt, with a far better than even chance most of the money will miss its purpose, undermine the dollar and bring on hyperinflation, Obama continues to ride pretty high.

The latest round of polling has his ratings very respectably in the mid-60s, with one spectacular dip into the low 40s, reflecting the public’s low opinion of his handling of the AIG bonuses. On that issue, as I suggested here last week, Obama danced on the edge of the volcano and got singed.

Predictably enough Obama has been standing by his man. “I have complete confidence in Tim Geithner and my entire economic team,” he said mid-week. In the president’s opinion, Geithner “is making all the right moves.”  He’ll say the same thing right until Geithner makes his terminal right move through the hangman’s trap door.

Obama wouldn’t be the first president to realize that it does no harm to have public odium pleasantly deflected onto a subordinate. Year after year George Bush watched the mud getting hurled at Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. It was the late great historian Walter Karp who argued that the most politically adept of all Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, conceived his notorious court-packing proposal – up to six new Justices on the Supreme Court – to deflect attention from serious difficulties on other fronts.

So Geithner gets pelted with mouldy cabbages, while Obama --  entirely responsible for the basic economic strategy of bailing out the banks rather than taking them over – charms the nation.

It won’t go on forever. If things go badly , the peple know perfectly well where the buck stops. There’s already a powerful drumbeat of disquiet that Obama, for all his smoothness, is Hoover-like in his timid orthodoxy. Back from the political graveyard last week came former N.Y. governor Eliot Spitzer arguing in a strong column in Slate that Obama’s $200 billion payoff to AIG was the real scandal, not the $180 million in bonuses.

A few days after the column Spitzer was on CNN giving his views. At this point in this unexpected renaissance one of the agents of Spitzer’s downfall gave him an untimely nip on the ankle. The madam running the call girl business patronized by the governor disclosed that another of her clients had been the baseball player New Yorkers love to hate, Alex Rodriguez.  Spitzer, A-Rod and Madonna  linked hands in a Daily News gossip item. For now, Obama sails smoothly on, transferring wealth upward to the bankers from the rest of us.

McCarthyism and Middle Eastern Studies

Viciously strident on some campuses, deviously low-key on others, there’s a McCarthyite campaign in full spate across higher education in the U.S. today. In the sights of the witch-hunters are junior and senior faculty targeted as “anti-Israel”, as terror-symps, as leftists. For every headline case, like Norman Finkelstein or Joseph Massad or Juan Cole there are three or four less publicized smear campaigns, methodical onslaughts to derail a hiring, head off a tenure appointment, disinvite a speaker, fence off the campus from all dangerous thoughts. The consequence: a climate of fear, of methodical censorship, of cowardice.

A woman on a Midwest campus constantly on the receiving end of such assaults read the personal history by Victoria Fontan we print in our latest newsletter and remarked that line after line struck a chord: the imputations to female targets protesting their treatment of “hysteria”, or “paranoia”, of unscholarly bias, the volunteer student stoolie filing his report like a FBI field agent, the previously supportive faculty suddenly all running for cover.  As she said, bludgeon or soft shoe, “It happens all the time.” As the poet William Empson writes in “Missing Dates”, “Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills.”

I highly recommend Fontan’s narrative. Subscribers also get Alan Farago’s update on the battle to save the Everglades.

When NATO was only ten years old my school chum Freddy Fitzpayne and I used to represent our school,  Glenalmond, in  the Scottish schools’ debating league. Our topic was “Britain Must Leave NATO Now!” Our opponents would have their own prepared theme, entirely different from ours. Dollar Academy, for example,  fielded a duo who spouted speeches in support of some controversial form of pig-breeding. Freddy and I reached the semi-finals with our seditious topic, and were headed to final triumph, until a newspaper in Blairgowrie ran a photo of us toasting our victory with pints of peer, and that was the end of it. At our own school of Glenalmond Warden Barlow hauled us into his study and nixed any further debating.

That was then. Britain’s still in NATO, and the repellent Sarkozy has just returned France to participation in NATO’s command structure. Now all the staff officers can jump on the train from Brussels to Paris for important conferences in 3-star restaurants and costly nightclubs. In our latest newsletter Serge Halimi reports from Paris on NATO’s mission creep.

Subscribe Now!      

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com


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How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism
 
 

 
 
 


The Occupation
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Humanitarian Imperialism
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