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October 3, 2005 Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze Dave Marsh A Direction Home: a Message from Bob Dylan Ralph Nader Gutless, Spineless and Clueless Flavia Alaya Showdown at Sheriff's Plaza Uri Avnery The Gladiators: Sharon's Victory Chris Kutalik The Battle at Northwest Airlines Greg Moses Bill Bennett's Book of Cracker Virtues Brian J. Foley I Gave My Copy of the Constitution to a Pro-War Vet Nicole Colson Hunger Strike at Gitmo Ray McGovern Abu Ghraib is a Command Responsibility Fred Gardner Ricky Williams Takes a Late Hit Justin Felux Save America from Crime: Abort Every White Baby! Will Youmans "Free the P": Hip-Hop for Palestine Mike Ferner What Else Shall We Do? David Krieger The War in Iraq: a Broken Covenant Agustin Velloso Samson Returns to Gaza Saul Landau The Constant Gardener: Serious Cinema Ben Tripp Right Down the Middle Poets Basement Peddibone, Crowell, Engel and Albert Website of the Weekend Holler If Ya Hear Me   September 30, 2005 Mary Geddry Why I Marched: They Made My Son Kill Paul Craig Roberts Bush is Cooking Up Two New Wars Dave Lindorff Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary Jail Time Gregory Wilpert "The Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" Benjamin Dangl "Gringo, Go Home:" an Interview with Orlando Castillo James McMurtry We Can't Make It Here Anymore T.R. Johnson Return to the Ninth Ward   September 29, 2005 Sen. Russ Feingold Bush's Iraq War is Weakening America Carl G. Estabrook Obama the Enabler Ramzy Baroud Rhetoric and Reality of War Dave Lindorff What Opposition Party? Mike Whitney Brownie's Comic Opera Jozef Hand-Boniakowski What Noble Cause? Gary Handschumacher Getting Arrested with Cindy Sheehan Winslow T. Wheeler No Leaders in Congress Against This War: Lame Democrat and Tame Republicans   September 28, 2005 Dr. Eyad Serraj Letter from Gaza: What Disengagement Sounds Like William A. Cook Bush's Security Barrier Liaquat Ali Khan The Invention of Porno Torture Mike Whitney Apartheid Justice in America Joshua Frank Sheehan and the Democrats: Anybody Home? CounterPunch Wire New Orleans Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters Chris Genovali Cutting the Bears Out of the Great Bear Rainforest Linn Washington, Jr. White Affirmative Action: How John Roberts Got to the Top   September 27, 2005 Forrest Hylton Political Murder in Puerto Rico: a Matter for Our Movement Jason Leopold The Decline and Fall of Bill Frist Jennifer K. Harbury Torture is US Policy, Not an Aberration Ray McGovern Torture and Cowardice: Why are American Religious Leaders Silent? Mike Ferner Bringing the War Home: Arrested at the Pentagon Antony Loewenstein When the Truth Comes to Town: What You Can't Say About Israel in Australia Harry Browne Live from Hollywood: the IRA Disarms   September 26, 2005 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Assassination in Puerto Rico: the FBI Murders a Legend Joshua Frank Democrats Flee Peace Protests Lamis Andoni The Railroading of Taysir Alony Mike Marqusee Those Pesky "Urban Intellectuals": Blair, Spiro Agnew and the Antiwar Movement Rep. Cynthia McKinney They Can't Fool Us Anymore Ron Jacobs A Small March for Me, a Giant March for the Antiwar Movement Norman Solomon The Media and the Antiwar Movement John Chuckman Bush in a Bottle Paul Craig Roberts America is Running Out of Time   September 24 / 25, 2005 Kathy and Bill Christison Polluting Palestine: Settlements & Sewage Ralph Nader Stealing the Moment: How Corporations Cashed in on Katrina Saul Landau The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada Greg Moses A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau Roger Burbach Hugo Chavez's Mission Vijay Prashad America's Shame Laura Carlsen After NAFTA Robert Fisk When Man and Nature Conspire to Expose the Lies of the Powerful Dave Lindorff A Gusher Called Katrina: They Fix Oil Prices, Don't They? Kirkpatrick Sale / Thomas Naylor Secession from the Empire: the Middlebury Declaration Maj. Anthony Milavic The US Military and Torture: the View of a Former Interrogator Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti: the Time for Action is Now   September 23, 2005 CounterPunch News Service In Which, Phil Donahue Demolishes Bill O'Reilly Diane Farsetta Katrina and Right-Wing Think Tanks Robert Sandels Militarizing the Market Christopher Brauchli Bush: the Good Samaritan for Corporations Alan Farago Bird Flu Takes Flight Dave Zirin When Sports & Politics Collided: Redeeming the Olympic Martyrs of 1968 Maxine Conant A Simple Test for Bush David Price Workers Get Hit Twice: Katrina and Davis-Bacon Profiteering   September 22, 2005 Smith, Wood, Leas, and Greenfield Which Way Forward for the Green Party? a Report from Tulsa Patrick Cockburn Iraqis: This Government has No Authority Manuel Garcia, Jr. Thinking is Religious Freedom Lucia Dailey Trial of the St. Patrick's Four: Day One Mokhiber / Weissman Are You a Speed Freak? Russell D. Hoffman The Nukes in Rita's Path Kona Lowell God's Hurricane? Jason Leopold GOP Fiscal Policy and Katrina Website of the Day Robert Pollin on the Global Economy   September 21, 2005 Jorge Mariscal Military Recruiters: Counselers or Salesmen? Linda S. Heard Double Standards in Iraq: Basra Brit Jailbreak Joshua Frank NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan Eric Ruder "The Problem in Iraq is the US": an Interview with Camilo Mejia Pierre Tristam The Struts and Bull Presidency Dave Lindorff The Real Story of the German Elections Mike Ferner Sit Down in DC Missy Comley Beattie Bush's Katrina Bling Bling Jeffrey St. Clair W Marks the Spot Website of the Day New Orleans: Survivor Stories   September 20, 2005 Steve Breyman Toxic Gumbo: Katrina and Environmental Justice George Galloway Et Tu, Greg Palast? Patrick Cockburn What Happened to Iraq's Missing $1 Billion? M. Shahid Alam Gen. Musharraf and Israel: Is Pakistan Selling Out? Mike Whitney The Gitmo Hunger Strikers Winslow T. Wheeler It's Not Rocket Science Niranjan Ramakrishnan Back to the Future: North Korea's Gambit Paul Craig Roberts Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?   >

October 3, 2005 Ethnic Cleansing as Economic Policy Hiring Crisis for Black Teens By SETH SANDRONSKY U.S. employers added 169,000 new nonagricultural jobs in August, while the national unemployment rate declined to 4.9 percent from 5.0 percent, the Labor Department reported on September 2. Crucially the nation’s payrolls are expanding, finally, at rates of job growth similar to those 10 years ago. Yet for one group of workers in America’s labor force, there is little to cheer about. The August jobless rate for America's black teens (ages 16 to 19 years) was 35.8 percent, up by 2.7 percentage points from July. The over-all jobless rate for U.S. teenagers was 16.5 percent in August versus July’s 16.1 percent. Black teenagers are out of a job at more than twice the national rate for their age group. It is worth noting that the Labor Department’s August jobs data was collected before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina that affected African Americans most harshly. Against that backdrop, employment for black teens living in urban areas across the nation is worsened by two factors. “Housing discrimination and inadequate transportation make it difficult for these youth to leave the central cities,” writes author and economist Michael D. Yates. The under-funded U.S. public transit system is a result of over-investment in the private auto. Since skin color correlates to economic class in the U.S., it stands to reason that those who lack funds for a car would also be most reliant upon mass transit to travel to and from work. Concerning shelter, the G.I. Bill for returning World War II veterans discriminated against blacks, adversely impacting them and their descendants. “The military, the Veterans’ Administration, the U.S. Employment Service, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) effectively denied African-American GIs access to their benefits and to the new educational, occupational, and residential opportunities,” writes author and scholar Karen Brodkin Sacks. As a result of this institutional racism, blacks’ equality has suffered. This blight on the nation continues in 2005. Despite the current and sustained employment distress for black youth, the U.S. labor market is the so-called global model for other nations to follow. Under American capitalism, enhanced employment and investment opportunities are supposed to grow when the private sector is freed from government regulation that provides market protection to the working population. It is worth noting that the Bush White House has applied this “free” market theory to the rebuilding of Iraq. In his September 15 speech, the president outlined a similar recovery plan that privileges the private sector for Katrina victims in the Gulf Coast states. Crucially, this ideal of market economics prevails in U.S. academia. It is a place for “tenured radicals” only in the minds of right-wing media and corporate-funded think tanks. Examples include the American Enterprise Institute, CATO Institute and Heritage Foundation. Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago is perhaps the leading exponent of “free” market economics. In sum, he equates capitalism with freedom. Similarly, President Bush equates “free” markets with democracy, most notably in Iraq, occupied by the invading U.S. military and mercenaries since March 2003. In the meantime, the reality of the job market as a site of opportunity is another matter entirely for America’s black teens. Nevertheless, their bitter employment plight is hardly newsworthy in the corporate press’ coverage of the August jobs report. That is a failure of American journalism. It is unable to report the structural lack of equality for black teens across the U.S. They are experiencing joblessness as rates comparable to the over-all adult labor force during the Great Depression of the 1930s. If that is not front-page news, we need a new definition of the term. As my late father told me, folks in the depression era had greetings that fit the hard times they lived. One example was "Are you working?" Some seven decades ago, he lived in New York City and gained employment that paid him wages. He worked in rural areas for the Civilian Conservation Corps when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the U.S. Then, the American people’s organized resistance to the hardships they faced in an era of economic contraction forced the federal government to respond when the private sector failed to create jobs. Then, grass-roots political pressure sparked some labor unions to have a broader social vision of the common good than is the current case for America’s union movement. Struggles between employees and employers over the working day in the 1930s and before helped to pave the way for the landmark social legislation known as the New Deal under FDR. Since being enacted, these welfare-state policies for working people have been under constant attack by capital and its apologists inside and outside of the government. Consider Social Security, 70 years old. It is in fine financial shape through the mid-century. “All projections show that Social Security will always be able to pay a higher benefit to future retirees than it does to current retires,” writes economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. In contrast, Friedrich Hayek opposed the program from the start. He has a section on "The Crisis of Social Security" in a book titled The Constitution of Liberty (1960). It lays out the privatization program (health care, prisons and schools) that the U.S. working class faces in 2005, explains author John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Currently, the American economy is growing. New jobs are being created in many sectors, including construction, education, health services, real estate, restaurant and retail. It is worth noting that the bubble in housing prices has kindled consumption spending and partly led to such employment growth. Significantly, that job creation has not increased hiring for black teens. Such a trend cries out for progressive policy solutions, with employment rights for all at the top of the list. Such solutions, however, are muted in the right-wing culture of capitalist triumph and U.S.-led wars underway since the fall of the former Soviet Union. In the meantime, recent U.S. job expansion has spurred some growth of real wages, what people can actually buy with their pay. Main Street’s gain is Wall Street’s pain, as this rise in real wages could, along with the rising costs of crude oil and natural gas, cause inflation (the rise in the prices of goods and services). This scenario would boost the cost of borrowed money and reduce the rates of return on bonds. That rise in the cost of credit could well deflate the boom in housing prices, contracting the sectors of the economy that have grown in response, namely construction and real estate. At the same time, there is a festering jobs crisis for America’s black youth that precedes the real estate bubble, much as pre-Katrina poverty was a daily fact of life in the Gulf Coast states. Crucially, African American youth across the U.S. are living in depression-like times concerning employment opportunities, with their absence from payrolls being overlooked in corporate news, and by President Bush. In closing, the racial gap in hiring for black teens is outrageous. It is the latest chapter in the economics of America’s color line. Americans of all backgrounds who are outraged at this gap and the indifference paid to it by Congress, and state and local governments should let them know. Seth Sandronsky, a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and a co-editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive paper. He can be reached at: ssandron@hotmail.com References Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America. Rutgers University Press. 1998. Yates, Michael D. Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. Monthly Review Press. 2003.

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Coming This Fall Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair