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Today's
Stories
October
30, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October
29, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence
Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine
Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October
28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane
Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert
Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason
Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris
White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27, 2003
William
A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David
Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine
Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert
Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
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
30, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Enter the world of Paul Krugman,
a world either dark (the eras of Bush One and Bush Two), or bathed
in light (when Bill was king). "What do you think of the
French revolution?" someone is supposed to have asked Chou
En Lai. "Too soon to tell", Chou laconically riposted.
Krugman entertains no such prudence. Near the beginning of his
collection of columns, The
Great Unravelling,
Krugman looks back on Clinton-time. A throb enters his voice.
He becomes a Hesiod, basking in the golden age.
"At the beginning
of the new millennium, then, it seemed that the United States
was blessed with mature, skillful economic leaders, who in a
pinch would do what had to be done. They would insist on responsible
fiscal policies; they would act quickly and effectively to prevent
a repeat of the jobless recovery of the early 90s, let alone
a slide into Japanese-style stagnation. Even those of us who
considered ourselves pessimists were basically optimists: we
thought that bullish investors might face a rude awakening, but
that it would all have a happy ending." A few lines later:
"What happened to the good years?" A couple of hundred
pages later: "How did we get here? How did the American
political system, which produced such reasonable economic leadership
during the 1990s, lead us into our current morass of dishonesty
and irresponsibility?"
Across the past three
years Krugman has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple
of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times op-ed in
his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and
whacks the bad guys. For an economist he writes pretty good basic
English. He lays about him with simple words like "liar",
as applied to the Bush crowd, from the president on down. He
makes liberals feel good, the way William Safire returned right-wingers
their sense of self-esteem after Watergate.
Krugman paints himself
as a homely Will Rogers type, speakin' truth to the power elite
from his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: "Why did
I see what others failed to see?" he asks, apropos his swiftness
in pinning the Liars label on the Bush administration. "I'm
not part of the gang," he answers. "I work from central
New Jersey, and continue to live the life of a college professor--so
I never bought into the shared assumptions. I don't need to be
in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to
display the deference that characterizes many journalists."
All of which is self-serving
hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no
serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neo-liberal
creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist
system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper,
ever deeper into extreme distress. The unseemly deference he
shows Clinton's top officials could be simply, if maliciously
explained by his probable hope that one day, perhaps not to long
delayed in the event of a Democratic administration taking over
in 2005, he may be driving his buggy south down the New Jersey
turnpike towards a powerful position of the sort he has certainly
entertained hopes of in the past.
Faintly, though not frequently,
a riffle of doubt perturbs Krugman's chipmunk paeans to the Clinton
Age. "In an era of ever rising stock prices hardly any one
noticed, but in the clear light of the morning after we can see
that by the turn of the millennium something was very rotten
in the state of American capitalism." It turns out he means
only book-cooking of the Enron type, an outfit on whose advisory
board the hermit of Princeton once sat with an annual stipend
of $50,000 and which he hailed in Fortune magazine in 1999 (cited
by Robin Blackburn in a good piece on Enron in New Left Review)
as the prime emblem of neoliberal corporate strategy.
"What we have",
Krugman gurgled ecstatically in Fortune as he described the Enron
trading room, (stuffed as we now know with shysters faking and
lying their way through the working day) " in a growing
number of markets--phones, gas, electricity today--is a combination
of deregulation that lets new companies enter and 'common carrier'
regulation that prevents middlemen playing favorites, making
freewheeling markets possible." Dr Pangloss couldn't have
put it better.
As a neo-liberal Krugman
makes sure to advertise he has enemies to his left. He carefully
reprints at the end of his collection a 1999 paean to the WTO
from Slate (where he had plenty of room to burst through the
straitjacket of 720 op-ed words) stuffed with vainglorious claims
for the virtues of globalization. But has "every successful
example of economic development this past century--every case
of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent,
or at least dramatically better, standard of living taken place
via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market"?
The fact that he skirts
Cuba, can't be bothered even to address the consequences, or
even contours, of the shift in Third World economic strategies
in the post-war period tells us how little Krugman is prepared
to look with any honesty at his own economic ideas in the mirror.
What of Argentina, a devastating advertisement for neo-liberal
failure? Amid the rubble Krugman has this to mumble from within
the 750 word straitjacket: "I could explain at length the
causes of Argentina's slump: it had more to do with monetary
policy than free markets." A page or two later, brooding
comfortably in a column titled "The Lost Continent"
(of Latin America) , Krugman asks, "Why hasn't reform worked
as promised? That's a difficult and disturbing question."
But not one that he's prepared to address.
In the concluding pages
of a 426 book where Krugman might have disturbed himself and
his audience with difficult questions about the widening gap,
right through Clinton time, between rich and poor across the
world and here in the US, about the reasons why Clinton's bubble
economy collapsed so abruptly , Krugman prefers to indulge himself
in playing to the gallery, Thomas Friedman-style, with some Nader-bashing.
He reprints a column written in July 2000, when Nader had decided
that a Third Party candidacy was the only way he could forcefully
raise just those "difficult and disturbing" questions
the respectable and conventional Krugman shirks : "And was
I the only person who shuddered when Mr Nader declared that if
he were president, he wouldn't reappoint Alan Greenspan--he would
're-educate' him?"
Now suppose someone like
Ralph Nader had re-educated Alan Greenspan prior to 1996, when
the Fed chairman refused to impose the margin requirements on
stock market speculators that would have punctured the bubble.
It would have been a useful piece of schooling. But reeducation
classes weren't on the agenda them any more than they are now,
at least in Krugman's pages, so deferential to his heroes, like
Robert Rubin, (Krugman reverently invokes "Rubinomics")
who kicked aside regulatory impedimenta like Glass-Steagall and
then sprinted out of his Treasury job to cash in on the fruits
of his deregulatory labors as co-director of the Citigroup conglomerate.
Krugman is a press agent,
a busker, for Clintonomics. For him as for so many others on
the liberal side, the world only went bad in January, 2001. If
a Democrat, pretty much any Democrat conventional enough to win
Wall Street's approval, takes over again, maybe in 2005, the
world will get better again. Who wants to read a 426-page press
release?
Fortunately we don't
have to, particularly as we have to hand a new, serious, radical
scrutiny of Clintonomics and neoliberalism, by Robert Pollin,
and it is to his Contours
of Descent that
I propose to turn in a week or two.
Tomasky:
"I'm No Mad Dog"
To Counterpunch readers:
I won't try to answer
every point in Mark Hand's article about me and other liberals
of my sort, but I do want Counterpunch readers to know that I
was against the Iraq war. I may well have supported a war to
oust Saddam Hussein provided a) the rationale offered was a humanitarian
one, and not one that sought disingenuously to terrify the public
about his destructive capabilities, b) it was done multilaterally,
and c) it was done with real forethought about what to do after.
Obviously, none of those criteria were met in the current case.
Finally, I'd just add that the people running this country, and
their intellectual cheerleaders, are dangerous and quite mad.
Thank you.
Michael Tomasky
The American Prospect
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 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
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