Today's Stories

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

September 21, 2009

Time-Released Suicide

New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

By ALAN NASSER

Since the administration of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party has been galloping to the right like there’s no tomorrow. Countless opportunities to mobilize constituencies against the depradations of Reaganism/neoliberalism were lost, or better, deliberately misplaced. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the last rallying cry of New Deal liberalism, and it was not Nixon who initiated the Great Reversal. It was the luminaries of liberalism itself who got the ball rolling. It’s now on record that the mission has been accomplished. New Deal liberalism is dead as a doornail.

The gloves are off, and it is now officially open season on working people.

The Official Obituary

The legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society did not drop dead. It checked out over some time, and with the death of Ted Kennedy its official obituary became fit to print by the Newspaper of Record.

In the August 30 New York Times Week in Review, editor (of both the Week in Review and the Book Review) Sam Tanenhaus, in “A Vision of Liberalism Passes With Kennedy,” opens with Obama’s requiem for Kennedy: “An important chapter in our history has come to an end…Our country has lost a great leader.” Tanenhaus goes on to underscore the far more profound change signaled by Kennedy’s death: “What Mr. Obama didn’t say – and perhaps didn’t need to – was that the closed chapter was the vision of liberalism begun by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, extended during the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson and now struggling back toward relevance.”

Nowhere in the article does Tanenhaus explain how the “closed chapter” of what he calls “old-fashioned liberalism” is “struggling back toward relevance.” He does, however, provide a clear characterization of what has bitten the political dust:

“It holds that the forces of government should be marshaled to improve conditions for the greatest possible number of Americans, with particular emphasis on the excluded and disadvantaged. It is not government’s only obligation, in this view, but it is the paramount one.”

Wait a minute, this can’t be right - it sounds a lot like the socialist political agenda: the foremost -“paramount”- priority of the state is to promote the interests of wage-earners, the majority of Americans. No wonder liberals have been back-pedaling -as we shall see below- practically from the moment they mounted the Keynesian bike.

Tanenhaus provides his own historical sketch of the Democrats’ retrenchment. Liberals’ turnaround, he thinks, begins with Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism and comes into its own in the 1980s and 1990s:

“In that period, many Democrats began to rethink the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Many distanced themselves from “the L word.” And Mr. Kennedy appeared out of step. [Quoting a biographer of Kennedy:] “Even in his own party, his liberalism had seemed, at times, outmoded as the ‘third way’ of the Clintons gained ascendance in the Washington of the 1990s.” “

Pre-Reagan Liberal Democrats Get Reagan’s Ball Rolling

But on second thought, Tanenhaus concedes that the withering away of the Keynesian state was first effected from within the fold, and well before Reaganism. The older Kennedy brothers had long ago distanced themselves from New Deal politics. John F. Kennedy officially introduced post-New-Deal political cynicism, or “post-ideological pragmatism.” Tanenhaus:

“In 1962, the year Edward Kennedy was first elected to the Senate, President Kennedy asserted that while “most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democrat, liberal, conservative or moderate,” in reality the most pressing government concerns were “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” “

Tanenhaus fails to note the explicitly anti-democratic nature of this restriction of what passes as politics to the decisions of “administrative” technicians. Nix on (sic) popular participation in “passionate movements” driven by commitments to the promotion of, say, the interests of working people. The Dems proceeded to turn their backs on organized labor, and Walter Mondale became the last Democrat to even hint at the inclusion of a full-employment plank in his presidential platform. What liberals used to call the “party of the working man (sic)” turned itself into “the party of the middle class.” And the citizenry became the “electorate,” which takes on a political identity maybe every few Novembers.

What all this meant for economic policy was neoliberalism, the return to the old-time religion of market fundamentalism. The political commentariat likes to attribute this to the “Reagan revolution,” or the “new conservative agenda.” Not so.

Ditching the New Deal Not the Result of a “New Conservative Agenda”

The foundations of neoliberalism were established in economic theory by liberal Democrats at the Brookings Institution, and in political practice by the Carter administration.

Arthur Okun and Charles Schultze had each served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to Democratic presidents. Okun’s 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff argued that the interventionist goal of greater equality had inefficiency costs that injured the private economy. Schultze’s 1977 The Public Use of Private Interest claimed that politically neutral evidence proved that government policies which impact markets in the name of fairness and equality are necessarily inefficient. Schultze was quite explicit that the promotion of social goods as the direct object of government policy was bound to disadvantage the very people policymakers intended to protect, and to destabilize the private economy in the process. Schultze scolded himself for having mistakenly believed that the “mixed economy” could produce ameliorative outcomes that he had come to recognize as utopian fantasies. The big mistake, Schultze argued, was to have “denigrated markets.” Here’s how he sums up his epiphany:

“Market-like arrangements…reduce the need for compassion, patriotism, brotherly love and social solidarity as motivating forces behind social improvement… Harnessing the “base” motive of material self-interest to promote the common good is perhaps the most important social invention mankind has yet achieved…. In most cases the prerequisite of social gain is the identification, not of villains and heroes, but of the defects in the price system that drive ordinary citizens into doing things contrary to the commn good.”

Seventeen years later the neocon Charles Murray would make the same argument in Losing Ground.

The economic turnaround found its implementation in the Carter administration. Carter was the first postwar Democrat to take direct aim at social programs, which he slashed even as he goosed the military budget. Reagan picked this up and ran with it, replacing the rhetoric of capitalism-with-a-human-face with the wacky conceits of the neocons.

Clinton, the most reactionary Democrat since Grover Cleveland, went on in the same vein, withholding Aid To Families With Dependent Children, and forcing US workers to compete with Mexican and Chinese labor. As Robert Pollin explained here in 2003, the policies of the Clinton administration increased worker insecurity so as to entrench the median wage decline that had begun in 1973. By making workers accept lower wages and unpaid overtime, American corporations could retain an edge in the intensified global competition that began in the mid-1970s.

Obama’s Up-Front Neoliberalism

Obama is currently out-Clintoning Clinton, hammering superfluous nails into the New Deal’s coffin. Well before the presidential campaign, he was candid about his neoliberalism. From an interview last year with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal: “I do think that the 1980 election was different. I think that Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability... [Reagan] just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and enttrepreneurship that had been missing.”

In The Audacity of Hope Obama outed himself for mass consumption, underscoring his disdain for “..those who still champion the old time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100% from the liberal interest groups. But these efforts seem exhausted… bereft of energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization…”

Obama’s health care policy indicates that among those “excesses of the 1960” were Medicare and Medicaid. This guy means Business. Working people, take cover. If current policy stays on track, Obama will have hurt more regular folks where it hurts the most and over a longer period of time, than any president in the history of the republic. Ever-declining wages, fewer good jobs, higher unemployment levels, deteriorating public and social services and increased working-class indebtedness – that’s what the future looks like from here. (For greater detail, see the CounterPunch articles by Michael Hudson, Mike Whitney and Paul Craig Roberts.)

Some of us who have never been tempted to cast a Democratic presidential vote have nevertheless hoped that Obama would win. Here would be confirmation that any difference between the Dems and the Republicans would not be worth talking about. Obama has indeed come through: he’s given us Bush’s third term.

Sadly, mass defection to a third party of choice is unlikely, given the current absence of a conspicuous Left alternative. In these times of permanent war there is nothing resembling an anti-war movement. The media- and education-driven propaganda system makes educating and organizing especially difficult for the Left, but will we say that the apparatus of domination is invincible? History has no final chapter. The Left could be gathering its forces to mobilize what the mainstream media tells us is mass disaffection with ongoing war and transparently elite-driven domestic policy. But the Left sits on its ass and thereby incurs some responsibility for the current catastrophe.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu

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