CounterPunch's
Scorching New Book on a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
March 27 / 28, 2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
A Journey to Rafah
March 26, 2004
Christopher Brauchli
There's
a Chill Over the Country
Robert Fisk
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Ordeal
of Mordechai Vanunu
Joe DeRaymond
Democracy in El Salvador? Think Again
Mike Whitney
Lessons on Apartheid from Ariel Sharon
Mickey Z.
Somalia and Iraq: Looking Back and Ahead
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
CounterPunch Photo Wire
Cheney's Close Shave?
John Breneman
Bush's Comic Bomb
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
March 27 / 28, 2004
This Empire Shall Not Stand
Empire
of the Locusts
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
This essay was originally published
as the introduction to Kurt Nimmo's great new book, Another
Day in the Empire.
These days I've taken to re-reading Suetonius,
the droll muckraker of the Roman Empire. Suetonius was a republican
in an age of flagitious autocrats and rampaging militarists.
He wrote his masterpiece, the Twelve Caesars, around 100 AD,
when Imperial Rome was kicking into overdrive.
Suetonius was employed in the position
of librarian, a seditious profession even in antiquity. He was
apparently in charge of collating and preserving the imperial
correspondence. During breaks from catering to the epistolary
whims of Trajan, he rummaged through the imperial vaults for
material for his writing. Suetonius unearthed a juicy trove of
scandal from the lives of the Julian and Claudian emperors. His
scathing biographies of demented Caesars and scheming courtiers
chart how the expansion of that ancient empire paralleled the rise
of a totalitarian regime at home that plundered the provinces
to bankroll the invidious habits of a degenerate ruling elite.
Today, his Twelve Caesars reads with an unnerving immediacy.
It doesn't feel like history, but a kind of long-distance journalism.
The old stories of corruption and blood
lust told by Suetonius strike such a familiar chord because we
too find ourselves inmates in an age of empire, an empire careening
on a downward and dangerous course. The government is increasingly
remote and paternalistic, the people frightened by their own
rulers.
The American Empire is in the grip of
the idiot prince. But Bush the Younger doesn't have the heart
of Claudius. He is a smirking and vindictive man, running on
very bitter juices indeed. A sour little man of limited intellect
and unbound ambition, primed with the pious rage of a dry drunk.
Pretzel Boy.
Bush was whisked into power in an electoral
coup, the way cleared by his more capable brother, a cadre of
media handlers and pitbull lawyers, and a corrupted Supreme Court.
Bush merely watched things break his way like a dazed automaton.
The American people, by and large, mulled
around like somnambulants, as the remnants of their Republic
dissolved without so much as a murmur. They were mired in a pathology
of submission. Even the baleful Gore didn't stand up for himself,
as if to say that if he had to win the election by fighting for
thousands of disenfranchised black voters in Florida it wasn't
worth winning.
This is a dangerous mix in a putative
democracy. The nation is ruled by corporate gangsters and the
people who might do something about it are too dulled, overworked
and panic-stricken to make a move to defend their rights. It's
evidence that an extreme political degeneracy has set in, eating
away at the great promise of this wrecked republic. The glory
days are gone. Now the nation finds itself enshrouded in a kind
of terminal entropy.
Like Caligula or Nero, George W. Bush
is hardly competent to rule a global empire. The man proved incapable
of being a figurehead for a dreadful baseball team or a minor
league oil company, even when backed by his father's brawny political
influence. As a micro-tycoon, everything Bush Jr. touched he
bankrupted. It didn't take him long to A Midas in reverse. Others
paid the bills and cleaned up the messes. Just as they did when
he was a cheerleader at Andover and a coke-head at Yale.
Of course, all that was just so much
warming up in the bullpen compared to what Bush did to the US
economy he and Cheney got their grips on the helm. When Bush
entered office, he inherited a budget surplus of $650 billion.
Two years, three tax cuts for the hyper-rich and two wars against
the poorest of the poor later, he saddled the nation with a deficit
of more than $350 billion. That's a trillion dollar swing. Don't
worry, others will pay the price.
As governor, Pretzel Boy ran Texas with
the same brand of manic frathouse carelessness that marked his
misadventures in capitalism. Of course, he diverted the attention
from the mutilation of the Lone Star state's infrastructure by
executing as many people as possible during his tenure. Bush
even chuckled about executing Karla Faye Tucker. What kind of
a man jokes about ordering the death of a woman? The precedent
here is Tiberius, who ordered the condemned pitched from the
cliff near his palace on Capri.
"In Capri, they still show the place
at the cliff top where Tiberius used to watch his victims being
thrown into the sea after prolonged and exquisite tortures,"
Suetonius wrote. "A party of marines were stationed below,
and when the bodies came hurtling down they whacked at them with
oars and boathooks, to make sure that they were completely dead.
An ingenious torture of Tiberius's devising was to trick men
into drinking huge draughts of wine, and then suddenly to knot
a cord tightly around their genitals, which not only cut into
the flesh but prevented them from urinating."
During his governorship not much bread
trickled down to the new ghettos of Houston or the destitute
border barrios, but Pretzel Boy sure doled out a regular dose
of bloody circuses. Bush supervised 152 executions as governor
of Texas and never once used his power to grant clemency. A fine
Christian man.
Even Nero proved a more forgiving despot
than Bush. Here's Suetonius on the deranged emperor: "According
to my informants, Nero was convinced that nobody could remain
chaste or pure in any part of his body, but that most people
concealed their secret vices; hence, if anyone confessed to obscene
practices, Nero forgave him all his other crimes."
In contrast, Bush, a former drug dilettante
and alcoholic, pursues private and consensual conduct with the
rabid spite of an uptight bully. He has attacked the right to
die with dignity and zealously pursued the prosecution of those
who want to alleviate their suffering by smoking a little pot,
even when such federal prosecutions trample state laws, which
he once deemed as sacrosanct. His Attorney General, John Ashcroft,
a psalm-spouting, prosecutorial puritan. He views the Bill of
Rights with the same acidic disdain that J. Edgar Hoover once
reserved for the Communist Manifesto. John Ashcroft is our Torquemada,
has turned America against itself, seeding the country with snitches,
snoops and informants. Diversity was once the calling card of
this nation, now it can land you a subpoena or a one-way ticket
to an internment camp: address unknown.
These things happen every day in the
empire of the locusts.
Economists would call Bush a walking
externality, leaving ruin in his in wake, as he prances away
from one pile-up after another. His pampered psyche, pumping
with narcissism and insecurity, would be all too familiar to
both Freud and Suetonius. He fits an old and dangerous profile.
The princeling reared by a remote and icy father and a overbearing
mother, the grotesque Barbara Bush: our Livia Drusilla, the murderous
harridan of the Roman Imperium. Bush can seem like a clown, but
you laugh at his antics at your own peril. He is no Dan Quayle,
an affable imbecile. This thin-skinned president holds grudges,
settles scores. You're either with me or against me. Welcome
to Bush's bifurcated world. And god help you if you fall on the
other side.
Like a white wannabe gansta rapper, Bush
doesn't venture far without his posse of suited thugs-the neo-con
Praetorians. His flock of handlers circle the White House like
vultures in a thermal, intoxicated by the ripe scent of roadkill.
Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld can scarcely keep track of
all the opportunities for plunder and secret enrichment. The
scandals of Tea Pot Dome seem like petty larceny next to epic
self-dealing and looting of the federal treasury by this gang
of putative fiscal conservatives. Cheney's former company, Halliburton,
reaps billions in no bid contracts to rebuild Iraq from a war
that Cheney, the administration's chief mesmerist, promoted through
a shifting skein of lies, threats and deceptions. Looting the
dead for private profit.
A similar plunder is going on back in
the homeland, where Bush cronies are feasting at the public trough.
Take Steven Griles, the number two man at the Department of Interior.
He overruled the warnings of his own biologists and awarded
oil and gas leases on public lands worth billions to his former
clients. The EPA lied to the people of New York by telling them
the post-9/11 air was safe to breathe when they knew it was saturated
with a foul brew of toxins. By imperial fiat, the filthiest power
plants and factories in the nation were given a pass to violate
the Clean Air Act, pumping into the air a host of poisons far
more lethal than anything in Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons.
On and on it goes.
Just another day in the empire.
We've entered a new era where corruption
is a game of state and the mainstream media tags dutifully along
because if they play it right they can make out in the great
game, too.
The game is rigged, of course. The house
always wins. But the foundation of the house is cracking. Soon
it may all come down like Poe's House of Usher.
Our times call out for a new Poe. Someone
to put the everyday horrors in a historical context. Someone
to write it all up with a kind of savage grace that cuts through
the narcotized fog that enshrouds most Americans. Someone to
scare the shit out of us.
Kurt Nimmo writes factual polemics from
the dusty outback of America. He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico,
hemmed in by the militarized border with Mexico and the looming
shadow of the Republic of Texas, which has lately inflicted so
much misery on the rest of the planet. You might be surprised
to discover that time moves just as quickly in the New Mexican
desert as it does in Manhattan.
But perhaps there's a certain clarity
to the vantage. After DH Lawrence visited New Mexico, he wrote
his great book on the literature of the continent and summed
up our character this way: "The American is a killer."
Nimmo, I take it, wouldn't disagree with
Lawrence's sanguineous assessment. At home and abroad, the American
imprint is a bloodstain. No DNA testing required.
This is more a characterization of the
American state, and the corrupt claque that runs the show, than
the American people, per se, who, though cluster bombed by propaganda
and spin still harbor a rebellious spirit and engrained skepticism
of a distant and bloated government.
Nimmo doesn't turn away from the tough
calls; he savors them. He exposes what has long been considered
the fatal third rail of American politics, the insidious ties
between official Washington and Israel, the new South Africawith
nukes. Israel operates as a fanatically religious state propped
up by US money, as it pursues a policy of apartheid, assassination
and daily repression that repulses most of the civilized world
outside of America, which seems immunized to any Israeli atrocity.
It's time for America to take a good
look at itself, at what's it's become over the last 50 years,
a brittle and flailing giant, despised abroad and breeding paranoids
at home.
Empires demand conformity and obedience.
Under the cloak of undeclared war, Ashcroft and his minions prowl
the country taking names, harassing dissidents, jailing citizens
for their political and religious beliefs. Few have spoken up,
because to speak up is to risk becoming a target. But to stand
silent is to become a willing victim of the jackboots.
Nimmo has spoken out. His essays flow
in a great American tradition of radical dissent, for this was
once a nation of radical dissidents: Sam Adams, Frederick Douglass,
Ida Tarbell, Mark Twain, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin and Gore
Vidal.
It takes tremendous courage to write
truthfully about the rampages of an Empire, especially from within
the belly of the beast. See the life and times of Tom Paine.
Even Suetonius paid a price. Hadrian took offense at something
the historian wrote about the Empress Sabina, stripped him of
his position, burned the offensive text and exiled him to Asia
Minor.
Like all great polemics, Another Day
in the Empire is a dangerous read precisely because it tells
the bitter truth. More dangerous still, because this isn't dusty
history or arid political theory, but a vivid and lucid account
about what's going down right now. The stakes are as high as
they get. You may want to avert your eyes from these pages. Don't.
Read Nimmo's book with half as much courage as went into the
writing of it. Heed its call. Then spread the word: This empire
shall not stand.
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch and author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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