Today's Stories

April 17-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

Weekend Edition
April 17-20, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

On any rational assessment the popular new president is skating on thin ice. Pollyanna bulletins about the economy puff up from the White House and Federal Reserve, like auguries of a new Pope through the  Vatican chimney. “Habemus spem.” We have hope. We’ve just heard it from President Obama: "We are starting to see glimmers of hope across the economy." From Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who’s so far unleashed $12 trillion in booster money, we get the always sinister reassurance, like Death giving the Appointee in Samarra a friendly tap on the shoulder, "the foundations of our economy are strong".

The economic news in the near and medium term is ghastly, as Mike Whitney outlined on this site last Thursday. Retail sales crashed again in March, nowhere worse than in the car market, though electronics and building materials were way off too. They now reckon there’ll be just over two million housing foreclosures in 2009, up 400,000 from 2008. Industrial output is going through the floor at an annual rate of 20 per cent, the biggest quarterly drop since the end of the Second World War. US industry is now running at only 70 per cent of capacity, the worst number since they started tracking this stat in 1967. Job losses are currently running at 650,000 a month.

Round the next corner is credit card delinquency and  the long-heralded slump in commercial real estate, where vacancy rates are already running at 15 per cent,. Capital One, a huge issuer of Visa and Mastercard, just  said the annualized net charge-off rate for U.S. credit cards -- debts the company reckons will never be paid -- rose to 9.33 percent in March from 8.06 percent in February. In other words, Capital One – whose credit card promotions take up  hefty space in the mailbag of every US postman – is in big trouble, and  under one in ten of these credit card holders will have a messed up credit rating for several years to come.

Wall Street and its boosters are trying to pretend that indeed the worst is over. The Dow and S&P Index have been rallying for five weeks. Wells Fargo, the huge San Francisco-based bank, second biggest home lender, announced that first quarter net income rose 50 per cent to $3 billion.  No one seriously believes the bank is in anything other than continuing huge trouble, and will soon need – so Blomberg News surmises - $50 billion to settle near-term commitments. The profit figure stems from newly relaxed rules about the valuation of Wells Fargo’s assets.

In other words it’s thin economic ice from here to the horizon. Robert Reich, now teaching economics at Berkeley and formerly labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote a piece recently, titled "Why We're Not at the Beginning of the End, and Probably Not Even At the End of the Beginning". There are huge problems with the whole orientation of the US economy. The “free market” outsourcing model has failed. Even at the best of times the US consumers who account for over 70 per cent of all economic activity in the country, don’t have purchasing power to keep the whole show on the road, unless they put it on the credit cards which are now maxed out and going into default, or borrow on houses they can’t afford.

Amid a hail of well founded criticism from liberal and conservative economists alike, Obama, with Geithner, Summers and Bernanke at his elbow, remains absolutely committed to giving the bankers everything they ask for, trillion upon trillion.  As William Black, deputy director at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the thrift crisis of the 1980s, recently remarked in an acrid interview in Barron’s, (reprinted here last week) “ Unless the current administration changes course pretty drastically, the scandal will destroy Obama's administration, both economically and in terms of integrity. We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. How can it result in anything but failure?”

In foreign policy the ice is just as treacherous. As the nation emerges from its disastrous adventure in Iraq, Obama redeploys to the Afghan-Pakistan theater. The administration delightedly touts claims that its remote-controlled missiles are decimating al-Q’aida. The Washington-based journalist Gareth Porter last Thursday cited here data leaked by the Pakistani government showing that only ten out of 60 drone attack in February and March hit al Qaida leaders and the rest did what bombs and missiles usually do, namely kill civilians, 537 of them – thus immeasurably strengthening the hand of the Taliban  in the battle for hearts and minds.

Obama is no doubt unworried by this since the hearts and minds he’s mostly interested in belong to the American people and especially opinion-forming elites, who remain unflustered when high explosive falls on a wedding party in Waziristan. Failure in Iraq was re-labeled “victory” and in terms of domestic politics the chickens only come home to roost when there’s film of people climbing off the roof of the US embassy into a helicopter, or when the casualty rates among US soldiers start soaring. Soaring Pentagon budgets are popular with Congress, whose members nix any effort to cut back.

Where the ice is giving way for Obama is among those who thought he might strike out in a new direction in foreign policy. There’s not much sign of that. Whether it’s a sell-out of Haiti’s poor or acquiescence in Israel’s grim plans for the Palestinians, Obama’s game is strictly business as usual, up to and including the Cuban blockade whose damage, as Fidel Castro said here last week, “cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people. Numerous diagnostic equipment and crucial medicines --made in  Europe, Japan or any other country-- are not available to our patients  if they carry U.S. components or software.”

Obama has welshed on promises that America will stop kidnapping its enemies and “rendering” them to secret prisons overseas. As under Bush, enemy combatants languish without rights or recourse in prisons like Bagram. The torturers who flourished in the Bush years will not be prosecuted. Electronic eavesdropping continues unabated. It seems, so CounterPunch’s Fred Gardner is reporting in exclusives on this site, he and his attorney general are welshing on commitments not to harass medical marijuana operations in states where local laws sanction such activity.

Will the liberal-left mutiny? Never. Remember, Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia and kicked away life supports of America’s poorest and most of the liberal-left stayed loyal to the end and cherish his memory. The labor movement has already seen defeat for its cherished “card check” bill, designed to win a level playing field for union organizers, thus presumptively boosting effective purchasing power among working people, vital to the nation’s economic well-being.  They’re not really blaming this on Obama, even though it is his chief aide, Rahm Emmanuel who, in his years on the Hill, picked Democratic candidates who feel no loyalty to labor and refused to push for the card check bill, and though Obama recently stressed he is a “new” Democrat – transparent code for someone distancing himself from the labor movement.

Obama’s polling numbers remain good. He has only to say there are “glimmers of hope” and the pollsters duly find increasing sentiment among Americans that they feel the economy is moving in a “positive” direction. He gets good assessments from Democrats and Independents. Many  Republicans don’t like him but here again Obama is lucky, just as he was lucky – at least in the near term -  to have three Navy SEALS off the horn of Africa who were good shots. The Republican opposition is in appalling shape, lumbering from one ill-conceived stunt to the next.

Obama’s lucky to have succeeded a terrible president. He gets out a lot and talks a great game. His problem is the same as the country’s. The economic ice is cracking under his feet, and the “stimulus” is going to be about as efficacious as those cushions under the seats the flight attendants assure us are going to come in handy when the plane goes down in the North Atlantic.

The Curse of Rockefeller

He died in action thirty years ago, in intimate activity in a subterranean sanctuary at the end of a secret tunnel under a street in the West 50s in New York.  Nelson Rockefeller was one of the richest men in the world, but he never found a way to buy his way into the Oval Office. As Bruce Jackson writes in our April 16-30  newsletter, just published:

-- he was the individual more responsible than any other for the rise to power of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was on Rockefeller’s personal payroll for a decade; it was because of Rockefeller that Kissinger was brought into the Nixon administration;

-- he was responsible for the September 13, 1971 bloodbath at Attica prison;

-- in 1973 he created the most repressive drug laws in the nation. In 1973, he got the New York legislature to pass what immediately became known as “the Rockefeller Drug Laws,” These laws imposed very long sentences, many with mandatory minimums, for what were often minor offenses everywhere else. Sale of two ounces of heroin, morphine, opium, cocaine or cannabis in any form, or possession of four ounces of those same drugs brought the same sentence as second-degree murder: 15 or 25 to life, with no parole before the minimum was served and no judicial discretion.

Thousands of drug dealers, drug users and “mules” went to prison for decades under the Rockefeller laws, but few big time dealers did any more time under them than they would have under the laws that had been in place before 1973, primarily because many of them – like Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas – were not only willing to turn informer, but had enough people to snitch on to make massive sentence reductions worthwhile to the prosecutors.

Now by agreement between Gov. Paterson and the New York state assembly, these laws are about to be repealed. Read Bruce Jackson in CounterPunch newsletter on the true reasons for repeal and the awful legacy of a truly appalling human.

Also in this terrific new issue: As the economy implodes, the social fabric frays and nutball groups organize for Armageddon. Pam Martens sets forth the national game-plan of the “Free State Project”. Is it coming to a town near you?

Half a million new jobless every month and the salesmen of “free trade” still hawk their credo. Paul Craig Roberts describes what offshoring has done to America.

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A final word of congratulation to CounterPuncher P. Sainath.  Though we heartily disapprove of awards for journalists we make exceptions and Sainath is one of them. At the third Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards in New Delhi last Monday, Sainath got the Journalist of the Year Award for 2007-8.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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