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Today's
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August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
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August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
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
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
New
York Says No
Why
the City Should--and Will--Demostrate Against the Republican
Convention
By
MARK ENGLER
Like many New Yorkers, I am not native
to this place. I arrived from elsewhere, and have made the city
my home. My extended family lives in the Midwest. They do not
understand New York. I have an uncle who labors with an iron
work ethic in carpentry and flooring. He gets up every morning
at 5:00 AM, and I have often seen him working, trying to finish
off a floor, after 9:30 at night. My uncle tells me that he could
not live in New York City. It's "too busy," he says.
I laugh, wondering how he could get any busier than he is in
rural Wisconsin.
Such feelings about New York
are frequently expressed by my relatives. Their judgements aren't
based on any real knowledge of the city, its rhythms or its neighborhoods.
Rather, my family members use New York as a landmark. For them,
it is an imaginary place. The city is some place different from
where they live. It embodies a different way of life. When they
express distaste for New York, they do not intend to denigrate
those who live there. They merely wish to express appreciation
for what they have, for the places they have settled.
I respect that. I know that
there are many people in this country who feel as they do, and
it does not bother me at all. Unlike some of our city's more
chauvinistic promoters -- yes, they do exist -- I do not regard
New York as the best possible place for all people to live. Yet
I will defend New York, as a city and as a way of life, when
called to do so. This is a week in which we are called. The Republicans
are trying to use New York to advance a social agenda that assaults
the diversity and tolerance at the heart of the city, and to
promote a fiscal program that starves urban centers. New Yorkers
are right in refusing to provide a cheerful backdrop for the
Party's week of self-promotion.
For members of the cultural
right wing in this country, New York occupies a place in the
imagination very different from that pictured by my relatives.
In the view of social conservatives, the city is a corrupted
place. It is an immoral place. They see our city as a hive of
feminism and homosexuality and illegal immigration. It is Gomorrah.
After the 9/11 attacks, televangelist
Jerry Falwell said, "I really believe that the pagans, and
the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle,
the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried
to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say
'you helped this happen.'"
For New Yorkers, this ranks
with the overt slander of the city offered by baseball player
John Rocker. "The biggest thing I don't like about New York
are the foreigners," Rocker explained in a famous Sports
Illustrated interview. "You can walk an entire block
in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians
and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish
people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in
this country?"
"Imagine having to take
the 7 train to the ballpark," Rocker continued, "looking
like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple
hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who
just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old
mom with four kids."
These statements went far beyond
the pale, of course, even for staunch conservatives. Falwell
was compelled to apologize. Rocker has been universally reviled.
Yet I fear that their opinions tap into sentiments that are more
often felt than stated openly. The vision of the city that they
invoke lives on, and milder versions of their views appear regularly.
Brad Stine, a popular fundamentalist comedian who makes busy
rounds of Promise Keepers conventions and other right-wing events,
jokes: "I thank God we've got a Texan in the White House...
You'll notice the terrorists didn't attack Texas."
The audiences laugh, but I
puzzle over what this is supposed to mean. What if we had a New
Yorker in the White House? The terrorists did attack New York.
We were attacked.
I was recently targeted in
passing by conservative talk radio station which, to discredit
a column I had written, simply labeled me as "another left-winger
from that bastion of truth, New York City." That was all
that needed to be said. The content of my views did not need
to be discussed. The city, apparently, had irreparably mutated
my Iowan DNA.
The New York Times editorial page reported on July 10,
2001 that "Mr. Bush has been heard to say privately that
he cannot stand New York." The politics pursued by the President's
party have long reflected this dislike. Urban centers, with many
people of color and few reliable Republican voters, routinely
receive less in Federal support than they pay in taxes -- $11.4
billion less in 2002, according to the Mayor's office -- with
cuts in social services disproportionately affecting city residents.
Even after 9/11, New York, an obvious target for future attacks,
ranks 49th among cities in per capita anti-terrorism funds from
Washington, receiving $5.87 per person, compared with $35.80
for Tom Ridge's Pittsburgh or $52.82 for Jeb Bush's Miami.
This week, the Republicans
want to use New York to promote their militarism and their moralism.
If the stage managers at their National Convention can help it,
Jerry Falwell, who offered a prayer at the 2000 convention, will
not be in the cameras, nor will Senator Rick Santorum. Yet these
figures remain all too welcome in the Republican Party. Asked
if she was worried that prominent evangelicals were going to
get short shrift at the convention, Roberta Combs, president
of the Christian Coalition, told the Associated Press that she
was unconcerned. "We'll have a huge presence there,"
she said. "We have the president."
Those who will be on stage
are exactly the type of Republicans that the hard right has all
but boxed out of the Party. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani --
being pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and pro-gun control, not to
mention a noted adulterer -- would be viciously attacked and
marginalized in party primaries across the country. On the national
scene, New York's vision of Rockefeller Republicanism is all
but dead.
I can accept the reality of
short-changed funding from Washington. I can stomach the dislike
from cultural conservatives. Those on the right can say what
it will about New York. But they cannot both revile our city
and then claim it as a launching pad for their political ambition.
They cannot have it both ways. We will not let them.
In early August, the local
ABC news affiliate reported that "a Manhattan public relations
firm found 83 percent of those polled do not want the Republican
convention in town." It is likely that demonstrators on
Manhattan's streets, outraged by the Party's extremism, will
outnumber the convention delegates by more than 50 to one.
The question, then, is whether
New Yorkers are wise to protest. Some liberal critics, most notably
ex-1960s activist Todd Gitlin, have arguing in the past weeks
that protests outside the Convention are liable to play into
Bush's hands. They cite Chicago 1968 as an ominous comparison.
Some have even suggested that the Republicans chose to have their
convention in New York as a deliberate provocation, with party
leaders believing that they would benefit from unruly demonstrations.
While the commentators deny it, one might judge from the tenor
of their argument that they would prefer that there were no protests
at all. Whatever their intention, their actions have the effect
of discouraging attendance.
In some measure, I am scared
to go on the streets. I am not scared of the few activists, who
do indeed exist, who have an exaggerated sense of what vandalism
can accomplish. I am scared because the authorities have emphasized
the risk of terrorism and advertised the new weaponry they will
use to control demonstrations. I am scared because the tabloids
and the police have trumpeted the danger of "violent anarchists"
-- an image that has been repeatedly used to justify the militarization
of police responses to peaceful crowds, and that has little actual
correlation to any marginal acts of property destruction. I am
scared because I have seen pre-emptive arrests and unprovoked
assaults first hand. I do not relish a clash in the streets.
Nevertheless, I will go. I
will go with the belief that a large protest is better than a
small one. I have no doubt that the Republicans will try to spin
any protests to their advantage. And I have no doubt that the
protests will not poll well. They never do. Even the most stately
processions of the Civil Rights movement drew criticism for "going
too fast," and for operating outside bureaucratic channels
for change. But this does not mean that the demonstrations cannot
be effective.
The Republican Convention is
meant to be a tightly choreographed pageant. It is meant to be
a sunny, week-long advertisement for the Party. Republicans didn't
choose New York to provoke a battle in the streets. They chose
New York so that they could wrap their convention in images of
9/11. They chose New York so that they could take our city's
grief and use it to advance their agenda. They wanted to take
the memory of those days when we mourned together, honored our
public workers, and asserted that our diversity was a source
of strength, and use it as the backdrop for their pageant. They
chose New York because they thought they could get away with
it.
Already there is indication
that, as they have before in their planning, those in the Bush
administration may have miscalculated. Their Party is not receiving
a triumphant, welcoming reception, nor does it seem that many
in the city will cooperate in producing scenes of pliable nostalgia.
It is always preferable, the convention managers know, to stay
on message, to keep attention trained on the stage show. Protesters
are making this difficult. They are proposing a different message.
They are telling a different story, one not carefully crafted
to ensure reelection. The great majority of those who will protest
this week have thought hard about fashioning creative and dignified
expressions of their beliefs. And the great majority of those
who protest will be New Yorkers. What neither the police nor
the liberal commentators have said is that the more residents
who pick up signs during the week and refuse to be extras in
the Republican's advertisement, the richer our dissent will become.
The more New Yorkers who exercise their liberties, the better
it is for our democracy.
After all of their scolding,
revulsion, and fiscal slights, the Republicans want to claim
New York City as their own. This week, New Yorkers are telling
them that they can't have it.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City,
can be reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.
Research assistance for this
article provided by Jason Rowe.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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