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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
Snoops
R Us
9/11
and Ashcroft's Crackdown
By SETH SANDRONSKY
How many times have you heard people say the events
of 9/11 "changed everything?" Well, yes and no.
Yes to the obvious, the U.S. as the target
of Mideast terrorists who slew thousands of innocent people.
No, however, to America's criminal justice crackdown underway
prior to that fateful day.
Before 9/11, the crackdown was aimed
largely at the nonwhite population. Now this official campaign
of incarceration, intimidation and observation has expanded.
Currently, some anti-war whites are in
the cross-hairs of law enforcement. And with much more publicity,
I might add, than many darker-skinned folks got when confronting
the criminal justice system before 9/11.
The current crackdown to make America
safe and secure after 9/11 was foreshadowed by the U.S. government's
war against drugs and nonwhite immigrants. One result of these
dual, domestic wars is that the U.S. currently has 2.1 million
people living behind bars.
The U.S. also has a total of 6.6 million
humans now in prison, on parole or probation. These marginalized
folks are disproportionately
poor blacks and to a lesser extent poor Latinos.
After 9/11, the Bush White House, led
by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has tried to muzzle political
dissent against its foreign policy of preventive attacks on sovereign
nations. As a result, some white dissidents are getting increased
attention from law enforcement.
The "Man" snooping into their
library reading and traveling habits, for example. In contrast,
black and brown folks have lived with racial profiling from the
authorities as a matter of daily course prior to 9/11, with scant
notoriety.
Before 9/11, such U.S. government repression
was just not on the radar screen of many whites, anti- or pro-war.
Yet during that time, black and brown people in the U.S. were
at-risk from SWAT teams and INS raids, detailed in Lockdown America:
Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti
(Verso Books, 1999).
Why such government repression against
the nonwhite population before 9/11? Here are two reasons.
First is that this policing kept the
unemployed out of sight and mind in the prison industrial complex,
and politically neutered. In this way, they were less likely
to organize and rebel against the status quo in the ways that
groups such as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets did during
the 1960s.
U.S. rulers learned this much from that
era of social unrest. What's the excuse for the rest of us?
Second, real and threatened immigration
raids in America have kept foreign workers desperate. Thus they
are less likely to join unions.
This tendency depressed their wages,
and the wages of other workers. The latter group were perhaps
unaware of how the job market functions, swayed by official myths
about level playing fields created by modern competition freed
from labor unions.
In the meantime, some immigrant workers
hit the road for a job due to U.S. foreign policy that forced
their countries to open up to corporate America. Its food exports,
for example, have driven peasants off the land, into cites, and
across U.S. borders to find work for wages.
America's wars against some drugs, and
Third World immigrants foreshadowed the post-9/11 campaign to
defeat global terrorism. Both U.S. government wars have used
the imagery of a menacing, nonwhite "other."
Right-wing talk radio has also contributed
to this distortion of reality. Such "shock jocks" on
the airwaves have helped to forge a false community of interests
between white elites and workers against the nonwhite hordes,
a stunt of stunning proportions.
In this distorted view, one threat is
foreign, while the other is domestic. The target audience for
such skin color propaganda has been and is some of America's
white population.
Many are alienated and dehumanized. This
dysfunction I blame in big part on the capitalist system that
makes nature and people into commodities for exchange on the
market.
Most white working folks, like millions
of others with slightly more skin melanin, are now dealing with
cascading social crises. One is the jobless recovery.
Some officials have said that relief
is on the way. On Oct. 20, for instance, Treasury Chief John
Snow predicted that the U.S. economy will create two million
new jobs by the next presidential election.
What kind of hourly jobs? Well if the
past is any indication of the future, nine out of every 10 will
be non-union jobs.
The lesson? Workers divided by the economics
of racism are more likely to get non-union wages.
Lower pay means that workers have to
labor longer to make ends meet. Snow did not mention that fact
from government statistics in his rosy prediction for a jobs
boom during the coming year.
All the more reason for the political
strategy of engineering fear of the nonwhite "other."
It can (and does) misdirect attention away from the common struggle
to find hourly work that covers the cost of food, health care
and transport.
The racialized approach to keeping the
majority down and divided seems "natural" in America.
It is, after all, the most imperial of all nations, with its
growing number of police, prisons and wars.
One thing is apparent. The events of
9/11 have changed the official face of "globalzation."
That is some of what the anti-war movement
is voicing in its opposition to the administration's war plans
at home and abroad. Let this political awakening flower.
Let us not forget, however, during this
flowering to unpack the domestic roots of the current attempt
to roll back civil liberties. The past is alive in the present.
Seth Sandronsky
is a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and co-editor of
Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper. He can
be reached at ssandron@hotmail.com
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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