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Today's Stories September 5, 2007 Stan Goff The End Begins September 4, 2007 Jean Bricmont Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran Patrick Cockburn Cut and Run in Iraq Ron Jacobs The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime Tom Kerr Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row Gary Leupp The Case of Jose Maria Sison Sonja Karkar The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine Heather Gray The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham Fidel Castro The Super-Revolutionaries Jackie Corr Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand Sunsara Taylor Katrina and the Progress of the System Website of the Day Colombia Journal   September 3, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Brits Flee from Basra Eamon McCann Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes Joshua Frank The End of the Green Party? Chris Floyd Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph Marjorie Cohn A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans Walter Brasch The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq Matt Reichel Redefining the American Dream Website of the Day Don't Get Fooled Again   September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Entrapment Snares Larry Craig Andy Worthington Britain's Guantánamo Saul Landau The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five David Keen An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror Patrick Cockburn The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services Diana Johnstone Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket George Longstreth, MD & Karen Longstreth, RN The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank Linda M. Woolf A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights Ralph Nader Wrapping the World with Advertising Fred Gardner The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD Ben Tripp Enquiry in America Today David Michael Green American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut Missy Comley Beattie Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance Michael Dickinson Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark Ron Jacobs A Sports Nation of Millions Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z   August 31, 2007 Jeff Gibbs Why I Am Not Going to the Protest Paul Craig Roberts The War Criminal in the Living Room Ray McGovern Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran? Robert Weissman The Benchmarks Iraq is Missing Matt Vidal Subprime Lending and Shady Mortgages Robin Mittenthal The Biofuels Trap Chris Kutalik Auto Makers Push Health Care Trust Solution for Industry in Crisis Richard Forno Watching Freedom's Watch Binoy Kampmark Dianified Dave Zirin Kenneth Foster Lives Website of the Day Free the Jena 6   August 30, 2007 Gary Leupp Larry Craig on the Seat John Ross Dead Forest Defenders Anthony DiMaggio Arabic as a Terrorist Language: the Right-Wing Assault on the Gibran Academy Jordan Flaherty Racism and Criminal Justice in New Orleans Michael Donnelly The Sierra Club Greenwashes Al Gore (and Desecrates John Muir) Russell Mokhiber Whiskey is for Drinking, Water is for Fighting Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond Global Financial Apartheid William S. Lind The Truth Tellers Martha Rosenberg They Call Him Dr. Cruel Jeff Leys / Brian Terrell Seasons of Discontent: a Presidential Occupation Project Website of the Day Bragg: "Old Clash Fan Fight Song" August 29, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Maliki and The Mass Shia Pilgrimage to Kerbala Winslow T. Wheeler The Costs of the Afghanistan War David Rosen The GOP's Outed All-Stars: The Forced Freeing of Gay Men from the Republican Closet Dave Zirin Confronting Katrina Paul Craig Roberts More Shame, More Sorrow Diane Farsetta Christie Todd Whitman's Nuclear Spinning Wheel Ben Davis Who Won't Stand Up for Kenneth Foster?: Charles Rangel, For One Alan Farago The Housing Crisis and the Environment Jenna Orkin Echoes of 9/11: Another Fire at Ground Zero Don Monkerud The Vanishing American Vacation Richard Nasser Surfing Gaza: More Uplifting News from NPR Website of the Day Don't Sleep on the Struggle   August 28, 2007 Uri Avnery The Language of Force Bill Quigley Katrina, Two Years Later Joshua Frank The Fight to Save the Rocky Mountains China Hand "I am Alden Pyle:" Bush's Vietnam Fantasy Firmin DeBrabander Drug Wars: From Afghanistan to Baltimore Charles Peña Nuclear Fear Factor Andy Worthington Good Riddance, Gonzales Ramzy Baroud Abbas and the Abyss Anthony Papa Roger Stone's New Patsy Ashley Smith Drawing the Line at Kennebunkport Website of the Day B is for Bomb August 27, 2007 Jorge Mariscal The General Reports Bill Christison Why the US and Israel Should Lose Middle East Wars Manuel Garcia, Jr. 911 Emergency! Calling Robert Fisk!: You are Now Entering a Black Hole Anthony DiMaggio Chronicle of a Coup Foretold?: Bush, al-Maliki and the Press Bruce A. Roth India and the New Nuclear Era John Walsh Abe Foxman's Genocide Denial Roadshow, Part 2 Dave Lindorff Gonzo's Gone Ron Jacobs Taking It to the Streets Binoy Kampmark Poshed Up: Why the Beckhams Should Go Back to Brighty Russell D. Hoffman My Favorite Scientist: John Gofman, Bane of the Nuclear Industry Website of the Day George W. Told the Nation   August 25 / 26, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Don't Carpool with Nouri al-Maliki James Petras The Great Financial Crisis Jeffrey Buchanan / Chris Kromm Where Did the Katrina Money Go? Marjorie Cohn Turning Iraq into Vietnam Rev. William E. Alberts Jesus, the Theological Prisoner of Christianity Robert Fantina Ari Fleischer, Freedom Watch and the Pro-War Lobbyists Brian Concannon Whitewashing the History of Abolition Ralph Nader What Do They Have to Hide? Laura Carlsen Extending NAFTA's Reach Fred Gardner Notes from Hempfest David Michael Green History, the Last Refuge of Scoundrels Stephen Soldz Why Mary Pipher Returned Her APA Award Mike Ferner Combatants for Peace: Former Enemies Find New Way Forward Paul Krassner Mort Sahl's Punchline Ben Tripp Resistance is Impossible--But Not Futile Missy Beattie President Druzilla Website of the Weekend Blue Print for Gulf Renewal   August 24, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts A Hegemonic Hubris Greg Moses A Cruel and Unusual Excuse William Schroder Bush, Vietnam and Iraq Alan Farago The Pain of Paper Millionaires Jackie Corr Uncle Ben Bernacke and the Nanny State Jeff Ballinger Naomi Klein and the Path Not Taken Bill Quigley Pere Jean-Juste Comes Home Dave Zirin Inching Toward Insanity Richard Rhames Deaver and the Making of Reagan Ryan Haygood How Newark Can Mend Website of the Day Lindorff's Iraq Rag   August 23, 2007 Kathy Kelly We Shouldn't be Causing This P. Sainath Meeting the Mahatma Ron Jacobs Bush, Vietnam and 14 More GIs Dead Christopher Brauchli Beyond Kafka: Mistakes, Soreheads and Eavesdropping D.K. Wilson When Sports Journalists Talk Race Joshua Frank The Weeds of Willapa Bay Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's True Lies About Dams and Canals Brenda Norrell Bush's House of Snakes: Indians, Border Biometrics and Migrating Corporations John Wright The Ongoing Tragedy of Afghanistan David Vest Elvis and Racism, Round 2 Website of the Day Urgent Plea: the Black Agenda Report Needs Your Help!   August 22, 2007 Norman Finkelstein Remembering Raul Hilberg Marc Levy Sleepless in Iraq Lawrence R. Velvel When Courts Bow Down to Secrecy Ray McGovern Bush's Iran War Drums Beating Louder Norman Solomon How to Survive at the Pentagon on $2 Billion a Day John Walsh Abe Foxman's Genocide Denial Road Show Michael Dickinson Little Brother is Watching You William S. Lind Operation Kabuki?: the Credibility of David Petraeus Bill Hatch A Short Walk into the Valley of Death Kenneth E. Foster and John Joe Amador How We Will Protest Our Executions David Vest Predictable Parallels: CNN and PBS Website of the Day The Once and Future Steve Perry August 21, 2007 Saul Landau The FBI's New Power Alan Farago Sand Houses and Missing Beaches John Stauber Iraq: the Gift that Keeps on Bleeding Phillip Rizk Gaza and the Jordanian Option Debbie Nathan Giuliani's Garden District Binoy Kampmark The Art of Sinning Martha Rosenberg The Fastow Economy Sunsara Taylor Back to School During Wartime Website of the Day Coffee with the Troops   August 20, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Padilla Jury Opens Pandora's Box Uri Avnery Stumbling Toward Another War Rannie Amiri Nasrallah's Surprise: a Warning from Beirut's No Bluff Zone John Ross The Fine Art of Bad Elections Harvey Wasserman The Senate's Radioactive Rip-Off Robert Billyard Canada's Disgrace: the Cases of Maher Arar and Omar Khadr Dave Lindorff Excuse Us, Nancy Pelosi James Rothenberg Why Your Vote Will Never Matter David "DC" Larson To Smear a King Website of the Day Bird Cinema August 18 / 19, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Exit Karl Rove, Everyone's Useful Demon Saul Landau The FBI in War and Peace Ralph Nader Greed and Folly on Wall Street Patrick Cockburn A Bloody Week in Iraq Robert Fantina Cannon Fodder: Beau Biden and other "Deployable Assets" Robert S. Eshelman Azar's Story: an Iraqi Refugee Living in Syria P. Sainath The Last Battle of Laxmi Panda Dave Lindorff Tossing Fuel on a Fire: US Military Aid to Israel Anthony DiMaggio Iraq, Iran & the Vanishing Context in American News Fred Gardner The Politics of Schizophrenia Ron Jacobs The Virtues of Resistance Tom Turnipseed War Profiteering and Corruption: From Lexington, S.C. to the White House Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: Special Preachers, Priests and Clerics Edition! Ben Tripp I'm So Screwed Andrew Wimmer Living With Grief Nancy Oden Where Inmates Can Grow for Free N.D. Jayaprakash India Backtracks on Disarmament Rick Smith Reflections on Cuba: an Interview with Doug Morris Missy Beattie The Suicide Bomber Poets' Basement Engel, Ford, Orloski and McLellan Website of the Weekend Imperial Storm Troopers in Action August 17, 2007 Joanne Mariner Terrorizing Social Protest Paul Craig Roberts China is not the Problem Shepherd Bliss Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Chile, 30 Years Later Dave Lindorff Convicting Padilla: Bad News for All Americans John Muthyala The Water and the Road: Katrina, Poverty and the American Dream Patrick Cockburn Deepening Divsions in Iraq Sherwood Ross Military Interrogators are Posing as Lawyers at Gitmo Phil Doe The Old West Moves East: the Political Science of Colorado River Water David Michael Green Karl Rove and the Damage Done Website of the Day Gorilla Slaughter: a Personal Account August 16, 2007 Jonathan Cook The Second Lebanon War, a Year Later Christopher Brauchli Babes in Toxic Toyland Norman Solomon Backspin for War Lee Sustar / Orlando Sepuldeva Victory on the Picket Line: How Immigrant Workers Won Their Strike Against Cygnus George Bisharat Boycott Movement Targets Israel Binoy Kampmark Tasteless: Gordon Ramsey and the Death of Gastronomy Evelyn Pringle Protection Racket?: the FDA and Avandia Hugo Blanco The Epic Struggle of Indigenous Andean / Amazonian Website of the Day Burning Man: the Field Recordings         Subscribe Online

September 5, 2007 Neoliberalism and Labor's Stirrings Labor Day in New York City By JOSEPH GROSSO This past weekend saw the annual end of summer weekend that culminates on Labor Day. For the city of New York this weekend has in recent times become known for the massive West Indian culture festival that takes place in central Brooklyn, which in spite of some ongoing gentrification remains a settling place for Jamaican and Haitian immigrants. However grand this festival is, it draws millions of participants, it isn't the only such cultural festival in the city this weekend. Sunday was also the 23rd annual Brazilian Day festival held nearby the Brazilian embassy in Manhattan. While on a smaller scale than it West Indian counterpart, this festival also managed to draw about a million people to enjoy its ethnic food and pulsating music. Only blocks from there an interested tourist could have strolled over to the Museum of Modern Art that was rebuilt and expanded only a few years ago. Indeed by all mainstream accounts these are magical times for the world's most diverse city. Both the current and previous mayor of New York have been mentioned as presidential material (the former being Rudy Giuliani a current Republican frontrunner), real estate remains white hot despite a national downturn, tourists keep flocking, crime is low, and the debate rages about who or what actually "saved" the Big Apple. Largely lost in all the excitement was the actual holiday of Labor Day. In fact, and quite tellingly, Labor Day is one of the few national holidays in New York without its own parade down 5th avenue, and this in a city that features such a parade for Columbus Day, St. Patrick's Day, Thanksgiving, Gay Pride, and Puerto Rican Day (the largest parade of all) among many others. Flipping through the local city newspapers in the preceding days, one wouldn't have come across a news story involving Labor Day (or labor period) and yet would have seen the words "Labor Day Sale" printed on countless full page corporate advertisements. It wasn't always this way. There was a time when Labor Day was able to bring crowds to the streets, and walking by a yuppie filled Union Square this past weekend it would have been difficult to imagine that it was once the site of large May Day demonstrations. So the question begs itself: are the media boosters, real estate moguls, and cultural elites correct in painting New York City has a rescued neoliberal paradise where issues of labor and class are outdated notions dug up by bitter radicals? Ignored, or perhaps tacitly approved of, by the galaxy of cheerleaders is that New York City is one of the most unequal cities in the world and owns a poverty rate more than twice the national average (with many others living in near poverty) and well above its own poverty rate from two decades ago. The public school system is still woeful, its public transportation system has been crippled twice this summer by inches of rain, and a recent study by the Bookings Institute classifies only 16% of the city's neighborhoods as middle-class- the lowest percentage in the country. A new book by Kim Moody titled From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974-to the Present describes how the city's powerful business elite used the economic downturn of 1974-75 to seize control and establish one of first neoliberal regimes in the world (years before Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative" regime in Britain). The targets of this regime, which has remained in power through the Giuliani and Bloomburg years, included the CUNY university system (where tuition was newly charged and hiked ever since), welfare roles, the homeless, business taxes, and worker wages. In the process a virtual who's who list of billionaires and tough guy politicians has taken center stage to national acclaim: Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, William Bratton, Bruce Ratner, and Michael Bloomburg (a perfect teleological blend of the two). However the results were not beneficial to all New Yorkers. Moody describes the economy of the late 1990s: The real wages of the city's low-income workers remained stuck where they were in 1992. The number of working poor had grown by 80 percent from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, compared to about 25 percent for the countryBy the late 1990s, the average income of those in New York's top fifth of families was 20 times that of the lowest fifth Combined with neoliberalism were more aggressive police methods (despite the fact that the starting salary for police officers has dipped to a paltry $25,000 a year). A glaring footnote to the pomp and circumstance of Giuliani's crime fighter persona, on which he has collected millions since reluctantly leaving office, is that as the crack epidemic of the 198s burned itself out, violent crime in the city was already dropping before Giuliani became mayor. As Moody documents the number of arrests for violent crime, and other felonies, dropped consistently in the 1990s while the number of misdemeanor arrests (mostly for petty drug offenses) skyrocketed by almost 70,000 a year from 1993-1999. In addition the number of people detained on these arrests, rather than just given court dates as was the standard practice before, rose from 48% in 1995 to 85% in 1998. It goes without saying that most of these arrests targeted minority communities, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, who were also subject to several high profile police shootings and other incidents of brutality. As New York City has joined the nation-wide shift over the last quarter-century from an industrial center to a service economy, it has become a city of financial, legal, and real estate elites funding large-scale cultural and high rise projects while living on an underpaid pool of service labor terrorized by intrusive policing. During the Bloomburg years these trends have accelerated and plans are works to reshape some of the few historically working class neighborhoods. While most attention has focused on Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards that would knock down many housing units and bring the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn (further signaling the "arrival" of the old borough), other projects will redesign the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Manhattan with luxury high-rises and transform whatever is left of the city's industrial centers. Local community resistance has been able to get some of the money earmarked for affordable housing, though the definition of "affordable" remains quite blurry. While it looks bleak all hope should not be lost. New York still has about a million union members, some of whom have showed signs of a resurgence after years of retreat and accommodation with the neoliberal regime. In December 2005, at the height of the Christmas shopping boom, subway and bus workers went on a three day strike, over fierce opposition of the mayor and awful attacks from the city's conservative media, in protest of a proposed creation of a two tiered pension and changes in their healthcare benefits. In April 2006 thousands of New Yorkers joined the immigrant rights protests that swept the country. During that same month the city was also threatened with a strike of 28,000 doormen. Even some of the old, staler unions such as DC 37 (the union this librarian belongs to) have won decent contracts for their members as of late, and this very week features talk of a strike by taxi drivers over a plan to install Global Positioning System devices in yellow cabs. This possible resurgence is in its initial phase and still largely defensive in scope. However even if this year's Labor Day passed rather quietly, the potential and necessity exists for a new era of labor militancy in New York City. The time may yet come when the elites wearing a mask of shallow liberalism will discover that the battle is not yet over as the beautiful cultural mosaic of labor makes it clear to them that they have had it all their way for far too long. Joseph Grosso is a librarian and writer living in New York City. He can be reached at: ax4130@aol.com Your Ad Here

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