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Today's
Stories
October
27, 2003
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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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October
27, 2003
An Empire of Widows
and Orphans
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
By BILL KAUFFMAN
Behold the perverse and heart-wrenchingly anti-family
policies of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney: Women reservists, young
mothers of infants and small children, leave their families to
go halfway 'round the world to act as cogs, expendable parts,
in the machinery of the deeply anti-American Empire. And hearken
to the silence of the courtiers and grant-grubbers of Establishment
Conservatism, whose mingled nescience and cowardice testify to
the gutlessness and wicked stupidity of what passes for the Right.
As a radical AND a reactionary--a patriot
of the old America--I am appalled by the violence done by the
military-industrial complex at home as well as abroad. The images
of families cleaved by the Iraqi War and occupation should outrage
family-values conservatives--many of whom, especially at the
grass roots, are sincere and decent, no matter how weasely the
Bennetts and Bauers are. Here is yet another issue on which good
people of the Greenish left and anti-imperialist right ought
to unite: the first casualty of the militarized U.S. state is
the family.
I once asked former Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger if the U.S. military wasn't "a government-subsidized
uprooting of the population." He replied, shall we say,
in the negative; I may as well have asked Caspar the unfriendly
ghost if he preferred the Clash or the Sex Pistols. But I was
dead serious: the single greatest cause of rootlessness--the
great undiagnosed sickness afflicting America--has been our standing
army. (If it really were standing it wouldn't be so bad; alas,
it never stops moving.)
Benjamin Rush proposed in 1792 that two
mottoes be painted "over the portals of the Department of
War": "An office for butchering the human species"
and "A Widow and Orphan making office." Rush was right.
He might have added, "The Greatest Cuckold-Maker,"
for no government agency separates husbands from wives quite
like the mendaciously renamed Department of Defense.
Absence may make the heart grow fonder,
but love requires presence above all. The divorce rate more than
doubled between 1940 and 1946. The Second World War, by removing
men from households and removing many of those households from
the rural South into the unwelcoming urban North, waged its own
mini-war upon the American family. Rosie the Riveter  propaganda aside, the domestic
face of the warfare state was sketched by an Arkansas social
worker: "children's fathers go off to war and their mothers
go to work, and thus the interests of parents is diverted from
the home and the children."
Government-subsidized daycare was one
offspring of the Second World War; thanks to the Lanham Act,
over half a million children were cared for by strangers in these
cold institutions. Today, Hillary Clinton and the corporate feminists
point to the U.S. Army as the model daycare provider. And yet
conservatives, who froth at the merest hint of the carpetbagger's
name, are quiet, struck dumb by their worship of the widow-making
bureaucracy. (The Middle American left should be anti-daycare.
As Mother Jones said, "The human being is the only animal
which is neglected in its babyhood. The brute mother suckles
and preserves her young at the cost of her own life, if need
be. The human mother hires another, poorer woman for the job."
And: "The rich woman who has a maid to raise her child can't
expect to get the right viewpoint of life. If they would raise
their own babies, their hearts would open and their feelings
would become human. And the effect on the child is just as bad.
A nurse can't give her mother's love to somebody else's child.")
Authentic conservatives--those who defended
the near and dear things against remote and abstract powers--used
to understand the iniquity of militarism. In 1945, Mrs. Cecil
Norton Broy, representing a ladies' study club in Arlington,
Virginia, told a roomful of snickering U.S. senators that an
interventionist foreign policy would lead to "the further
disruption of normal American family life...Our men would be
like hired mercenary soldiers going forth to protect the commercial
interests of greed and power. Our men thus forced into foreign
service would see little if any of their native soil again. We
would be working on the principle of scattering the most virile
of our men over the face of the globe."
Tens of thousands of abandoned Amerasians
who grew up without fathers shake their heads in assent. Yet
in the unlikely event that a contemporary Mrs. Broy made it past
the thought-crime detectors and into a Senate hearing room today,
I expect that she'd be given a stern lecture by a GOP family-values
fraud and be sent on her way with a minatory copy of the Patriot
Act.
I could go on and on about the ways in
which post-World War II militarism has eroded American family
life. (I do go on and on elsewhere; see the chapter on the military
vs. the family in my WITH GOOD INTENTIONS? REFLECTIONS ON THE
MYTH OF PROGRESS IN AMERICA.) Divorce, dispersal, disruption
of courtship patterns: ye shall know the warfare state by its
rotten fruits. These include even the people-scattering Interstate
Highway System, which was conceived during World War II by the
top-down planner extraordinaire Rexford G. Tugwell and made concrete
by a deracinated general named Dwight Eisenhower, who had admired
Hitler's autobahn and got one of his own: the tellingly titled
National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Cohesive
working-class neighborhoods in countless American cities were
sacrificed to the Road Warriors.
The leadership of the family values Right
is hopelessly compromised by its long-term adulterous affair
with the Republican Party. But plenty of good folks who call
themselves "conservatives" mean by that now-useless
term that they believe in the integrity of families and small
communities and detest the vulgar, home-wrecking, and even murderous
intrusions of corporate capitalism and Big Government. As they
watch this latest American diaspora, as young husbands and wives
tearfully leave spouses and children and extended families to
serve the Empire, we should remind them that the only foreign
policy compatible with healthy family life is one of peace and
non-intervention.
Come home, America. Come HOME.
Bill Kauffman's
"Dispatches
from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a
Small Town's Fight to Survive" has just been published
by Henry Holt. He can be reached at: kauffman@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
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