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Today's
Stories
September
29, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
29, 2003
The Times's Paul Krugman
The
Last Liberal?
By LEE SUSTAR
Has the "newspaper of record" unleashed
a leftist? That's the claim of the Paul Krugman-haters at the
conservative National Review Online, where a fanatical "truth
squad" attempts to refute the Princeton economist's columns
in the New York Times .
It isn't hard to see why Krugman infuriates
the Republican right. Virtually alone in the mainstream media,
Krugman defied the post-September 11 lockstep patriotism to expose
George W. Bush's repeated deceptions--on tax cuts, the Iraq war,
the environment and much more. In an introduction to his new
book, The
Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century,
Krugman goes even further, likening the Bush administration to
a "revolutionary power" willing to do and say anything
to carry out a "radical challenge to our social and political
system."
A collection of columns and a few previously
published articles, The Great Unraveling is arranged thematically.
Sections include the economy and corporate crime wave ("something
was very rotten in the state of American capitalism"); the
tax cuts ("Bush has pulled the largest bait-and-switch operation
in history"); and inequality ("a form of class warfare--driven
not by attempts of the poor to soak the rich, but the efforts
of an economic elite to expand its privileges").
Some of Krugman's most controversial
columns, grouped under the heading "Exploiting September
11," denounce Bush for using the crisis to round up Arab
and Muslim immigrants and push legislation benefiting oil companies
tied to the administration. Polemical, clever and well written,
these columns are worth a second read, even by those who follow
Krugman regularly.
* * *
HOW DOES Krugman get away with it, when
a previous Times columnist--the veteran war correspondent Sidney
Schanberg --was fired, apparently for straying too far to the
left? The key is that Krugman's career is secure with or without
the Times. He's considered one of the world's top economists
specializing in international currency crises--and, at 50, he's
younger than most leaders in his field.
Moreover, Krugman has established himself
as a writer for popular audiences through numerous articles and
books such as The
Age of Diminished Expectations, Peddling
Prosperity, Pop
Internationalism and The
Accidental Theorist. In these writings, Krugman aims to expose
Reagan-era free-market dogma, which claimed that tax cuts for
businesses and the wealthy would stimulate the "supply side"
of the economy so much
that the overall growth would eventually make up for government
budget deficits created by the lost tax revenues.
In reality, "supply-side economics
is a feel-good cover story for a movement with a much harder-nosed
agenda," Krugman wrote in the September 13 New York Times
Magazine. The conservatives' real plan, Krugman argues, is to
"more or less deliberately, set the U.S. up for a fiscal
crisis" to justify huge cuts in Social Security, Medicaid
and Medicare.
"The middle class America of my
youth was another country," he wrote last year in another
New York Times Magazine article not included in the book."...You
can't understand what's happening in America today without understanding
the extent, causes and consequences of the vast increase in inequality
that has taken place over the last three decades, and in particular
the concentration of income and wealth in just a few hands."
* * *
KRUGMAN'S CRITICISMS of mainstream economic
policy have another aim-- to rehabilitate and popularize the
ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In the 1930s,
Keynes theorized that economic depressions could be ended--and
prevented--by increasing government spending to boost demand.
Ultimately, spending during the Second
World War proved that point--and in the following decades, Keynesian
policies were common in advanced countries until the rise of
the free-market economists in the 1980s. Today, Krugman argues,
that there's no recession that can't be cured by an injection
of government spending and stimulative economic policy.
In his 1999 book on the East Asian economic
crisis, The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman showed how
the International Monetary Fund--acting as enforcers for the
U.S. Treasury and State departments--compelled countries like
Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea to replay the same disastrous
policies carried out by President Herbert Hoover in the Great
Depression--slash government spending and jack up interest rates.
The result was a catastrophic economic
contraction at enormous social cost--all to restore what policymakers
called "market confidence."
But skewering free-market fundamentalists--and,
for that matter, bashing Bush--doesn't make Krugman a man of
the left. Consider Krugman's hostile review of progressive journalist
William Greider's 1996 book on corporate globalization, One World,
Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.
Krugman sneered at Greider's claim that
the world was heading for a crisis of overproduction --too many
goods produced to be sold at a profit. But when the East Asian
crisis vindicated Greider soon afterward, Krugman shrugged it
off as a case of a chronic economic "doomsayer" finally
turning out to be correct.
Moreover, on the 100th anniversary of
the Communist Manifesto, Krugman wrote that "by my reckoning,
Karl Marx made about as much contribution to economics as Zeppo
Marx made to comedy," arguing that "it was Keynes,
not Marx, who cracked the code of crisis economics --who explained
how recessions and depressions can happen." Keynes claimed
never to have read Marx, and perhaps Krugman hasn't either.
The fact is, Marx--some 60 years before
Keynes--showed how investment by competing capitalists periodically
leads to too much productive capacity to sell goods at an adequate
profit, leading to a pullback in investment and a slump. Marx
also demonstrated how individual capitalists' attempts to boost
profits by investing in machinery to replace labor creates a
tendency in the rate of profit to fall in the system as a whole--a
theoretical framework that explains today's stagnant economy.
In any case, Krugman considers capitalism
the final stop on the path of human progress. "Who can now
use the words of socialism with a straight face?" he wrote
in The Return of Depression Economics. Krugman's alternative--
"My Economic Plan," a column reprinted in The Great
Unraveling, does diverge sharply from current policy.
He calls for cutting payroll taxes, extend
unemployment insurance and bail out state budget deficits with
federal money--all needed steps to help create jobs. Such measures,
however, were standard procedure for even Republican administrations
in the 1970s--and wouldn't be enough to reverse the loss of jobs
in the Bush era and solve the problem of a glut of goods.
Moreover, Krugman declares in his book
that "in general I am pro-globalization--much more so than
many people I agree with when it comes to current U.S. politics"--and
includes a nasty column attacking Ralph Nader to emphasize the
point. One of his worst columns--thankfully, not reprinted in
the new book--slammed the protesters against the Free Trade Area
of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001.
Defending the use of child labor in the
Third World, Krugman wrote that the activists, "whatever
their intentions, are doing their best to make the poor even
poorer." A leftist? Not at all. Rather, Krugman is one of
a species rarely encountered in recent years--a liberal willing
to be highly aggressive against the right.
Yet although Krugman makes it clear that
the massive shift in wealth to a wealthy few has happened during
Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Bill Clinton
gets off easy in The Great Unraveling. In the main, it's an anti-Bush
tract with an unstated but unmistakable, and acceptably mainstream,
conclusion: vote Democratic to oust Bush in 2004.
Nevertheless, unlike the status-quo commentators
of the op-ed pages, Krugman has sometimes reconsidered his opinions
in light of new evidence. The book includes his column titled,
"The Lost Continent," in which Krugman admits that
the economic collapse in Argentina forced him to rethink his
free-trade views: "One has to sympathize with Latin political
leaders who want to temper enthusiasm for the free market with
more efforts to protect workers and the poor." That willingness
to face the facts makes Krugman unusual in the mainstream media--and
well worth reading.
Lee Sustar
writes for the Socialist
Worker. He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
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