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The Trial of Milosevic: What Does It Portend for Saddam? by Tiphaine Dickson; Dr. Dean Wraps It Up...or Does He? by Alexander Cockburn; Bush Oil Grab in Alaska: How Clinton Opened the Door by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Magnificient 9: CounterPunch's Annual List of Groups That Make a Difference; The Sabotage of Matt Gonzalez by Ben Terrall; Arnold and Parole: Already Better than Gray Davis! by Scott Handleman. CounterPunch Online is read by 70,000 visitors each day, but we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

December 26, 2003

Gary Leupp
Bush Doings: Doing the Language

December 25, 2003

Diane Christian
The Christmas Story

Elaine Cassel
This Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us

Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock

Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead

Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem

Alexander Cockburn
The Magnificient 9

Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season

 

December 24, 2003

M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics of Empire

William S. Lind
Marley's List for Santa in Wartime

Josh Frank
Iraqi Oil: First Come, First Serve

Cpt. Paul Watson
The Mad Cowboy Was Right

Robert Lopez
Nuance and Innuendo in the War on Iraq


December 23, 2003

Brian J. Foley
Duck and Cover-up

Will Youmans
Sharon's Ultimatum

Michael Donnelly
Here They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco

Uri Avnery
Sharon's Speech: the Decoded Version

December 22, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks

Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?

Marjorie Cohn
How to Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue

Kathy Kelly
The Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"

 

December 20 / 21, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
How to Kill Saddam

Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy

Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali

David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis

Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the Islamic World

Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee

Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush

Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared

Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression

Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN

Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and Latino Prisoners

Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane

Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful

Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis

Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race

Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie


December 19, 2003

Elaine Cassel
Courts Rebuke Bush for Trampling the Constitution

Robert Fisk
Raid on Fantasyville: Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back

Zoltan Grossman
The Occupation Has Failed to "Capture" the Loyalty of Iraqis

Mike Whitney
Bush's Afghan Highway to Nowhere

Harold Gould
Has the Radical Arab Strategy Really Worked?

Gary Leupp
The Neocon's Dream Memo

 

 

December 18, 2003

Ann Harrison
A Landmark Victory for Medical Pot

John L. Hess
Catfish Blues: The SOB's from Out of Town

Karyn Strickler
Ebola is Good for You!

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Duryodhana Dies

Harry Browne
Hail Jim Hickey, the "Irish Hero" of the Colonial Occupation of Iraq

Hammond Guthrie
Captured in Abasement

December 17, 2003

Robert Fisk
Saddam's Cold Comforts

Gideon Levy
"Don't Even Think About the Children"

Marjorie Cohn
The Fortuitous Arrest of Saddam: a Pyrrhic Victory?

Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's Last Act


December 16, 2003

Robert Fisk
Getting Saddam...15 Years Too Late

Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain

John Halle
Matt Gonzalez and Me

Josh Frank
The Democrats and Saddam

Tariq Ali
Saddam on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism


December 15, 2003

Robert Fisk
The Capture of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War

Dave Lindorff
The Saddam Dilemma

Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein

Norman Solomon
For Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun

Patrick Cockburn
The Capture of Saddam

Stew Albert
Joy to the World

 

December 13 / 14, 2003

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli Connection

Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural

Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory

Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet

Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry

Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to Gov. Mitt Romney

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD

Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand

William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War

Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency

Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy

Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East

Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman

Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised

Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed

Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review

Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee

Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians

Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race

 

 

December 12, 2003

Josh Frank
Halliburton, Timber and Dean

Chris Floyd
The Inhuman Stain

Dave Lindorff
Infanticide as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies

Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?

Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva Accords

David Vest
Bush Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton

 


December 11, 2003

Siegfried Sassoon
A Soldier's Declaration Against War

Douglas Valentine
Preemptive Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program

John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra

Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride

James M. Carter
The Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq


December 10, 2003

Kurt Nimmo
The War According to Newt Gingrich

Pat Youngblood / Robert Jensen
Workers Rights are Human Rights

Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children

CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart Case

Dave Lindorff
Gore's Judas Kiss


December 9, 2003

Michael Donnelly
A Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder

Chris White
A Glitch in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?

Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style

Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus

Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now

Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens

Ron Jacobs
Remembering John Lennon

 

December 8, 2003

Newton Garver
Bolivia at a Crossroads

John Borowski
The Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville

William Blum
Anti-Empire Report: Revised Inspirations for War

Tess Harper
When Christians Kill

Thom Rutledge
My Next Step

Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear Terror and Psychic Numbing

Michael Neumann
Ignatieff: Apostle of He-manitariansim

Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak

 

December 6 / 7, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
The UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great

CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of Anti-Semitism"

Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist

Saul Landau
"Reality Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq

Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win

Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer

Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?

Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire

Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami

Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia

Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia and Dominican Republic

Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank

Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race

Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN

Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise

Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley

Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday

Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean"

Jeffrey St. Clair
A Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston

Mickey Z.
Press Box Red

Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert

T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?

 

 

December 5, 2003

Jeremy Scahill
Bremer of the Tigris

Jeremy Brecher
Amistad Revisited at Guantanamo?

Norman Solomon
Dean and the Corp Media Machine

Norman Madarasz
France Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination

Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan: the Road Back


December 4, 2003

M. Junaid Alam
Image and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein

Adam Engel
Republican

Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI

Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia

Gary Leupp
The Fall of Shevardnadze

Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr

December 3, 2003

Stan Goff
Feeling More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money

Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates

George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?

Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart

John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario

Harry Browne
Shannon Warport: "No More Business as Usual"

 

December 2, 2003

Matt Vidal
Denial and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom

Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas

Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?

Norman Solomon
That Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test

Josh Frank
Trade War Fears

Andrew Cockburn
Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy


December 1, 2003

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam

Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland

Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media

Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?

Gilad Atzmon
About "World Peace"

Bill Christison
US Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes


November 29 / 30, 2003

Peter Linebaugh
On the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone

Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos

Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math

Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative

Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview with John Pilger

Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam

Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream

Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia

Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser

Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali

Standard Schaefer
Unions are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes

Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay Bridge

Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again

Adam Engel
The System Really Works

Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool

Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans

Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace

Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy

Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith

 

 

November 28, 2003

William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes

David Vest
Turkey Potemkin

Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks

Wayne Madsen
Wag the Turkey

Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited

Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?

South Asia Tribune
The Story of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words

Website of the Day
Bush Draft


November 27, 2003

Mitchel Cohen
Why I Hate Thanksgiving

Jack Wilson
An Account of One Soldier's War

Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas

Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD

Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer

Neve Gordon
Gays Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa

 


November 26, 2003

Paul de Rooij
Amnesty International: the Case of a Rape Foretold

Bruce Jackson
Media and War: Bringing It All Back Home

Stew Albert
Perle's Confession: That's Entertainment

Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities

David Orr
Miami Heat

Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists on the Beach

Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami

Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates

Kathy Kelly
Hogtied and Abused at Ft. Benning

Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement

 


November 25, 2003

Linda S. Heard
We, the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy

Diane Christian
Hocus Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators

Mark Engler
Miami's Trade Troubles

David Lindorff
Ashcroft's Cointelpro

Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas


November 24, 2003

Jeremy Scahill
The Miami Model

Elaine Cassel
Gulag Americana: You Can't Come Home Again

Ron Jacobs
Iraq Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?

Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant

 

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Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

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Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians

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Weekend Edition
December 27 / 28, 2003

Feedlot Sweatshops

Mad Cows and the Market

By SETH SANDRONSKY

The recent news of mad cow disease in the U.S. was first reported in the nation's mass media as a business story. Such coverage led with the countries that had refused imports of American beef.

Stories also detailed how these import restrictions sank the stock prices of some U.S. corporations. The business growth of certain fast food outlets and restaurants was at-risk.

There are also unclear health risks to people. On that note, cows are moved to the America market from foreign markets without controls, then mixed in with other cows.

As a result, slaughtered cows infected with the brain-destroying disease can show up in an unclear number of hamburger patties. What is clear is that no cure for MCD exists.

Humans do not recover from MCD. Frightening.

There is, perhaps, a silver cloud to this unfolding story. As I see it, the case of MCD at a dairy farm in rural Washington state could pave the way for working people to re-think the official view of the market.

You find that in media attention to the falling stock prices of agribusiness giants, profits of beef and diary producers, and so forth. But where is the view of the social relations that make markets what they are?

For example, consider the role of agricultural workers. They are nearly invisible in MCD reports.

Big problem. Without such regular folks on the job, day in and day out, there are no markets for dairy and beef.

In the conventional wisdom on markets, they are, by and large, things that exist apart from working people. How many times have you heard/read/seen such news about the market moving this way or that way?

The market and its movements have an almost magic-like status, one untouched by human hands. So goes the market ideology.

Want market reality? Then you should begin to look elsewhere.

Take the workers at the dairy farm where MCD has appeared in rural Washington. They, as part of the market, were no doubt following an order from their boss to give feed infected with MCD to live cows.

This is an evident fact not at first evident in the U.S. press. I mean the relations between employees and employers in the MCD story.

The heart of that relationship is obedience. No obedience equals no job for most working people most of the time.

As millions of you know, the boss does not have to be right. S/he just has to be the boss.

Thus the agribusiness market is no different then the markets for apparel, durable goods and energy. Markets by definition generate unequal relations between employees and employers.

Coercion rules the roost. Yet that does not eliminate market cooperation.

In fact, no human being in the agribusiness market or others is independent of other people. They are all market-dependent, writes author and scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood.

To survive in a capitalist economy, people are linked to each other and to the market as consumers and producers. At one point, sellers are buyers; later, these same buyers are sellers.

What market ideology fogs is the social relations at and away from the workplace that prop up the market, while focusing on the prices of what people grow and make for sale. A dead German termed this process "commodity fetishism."

In his view, the focus on the market exchange of commodities blurs the human energy that created them in the first place. Despite humans creating the commodity form, the former is hidden beneath the surface of the latter due to the nature of the market.

Thus we know about the exports of U.S. beef threatened by MCD. But we know little about immigrant Mexican workers inside America.

They, for example, labor in the Midwest meatpacking industry for non-union wages. There, "undocumented laborers, kept compliant by INS raids and surveillance, are increasingly the preferred employees," author Christian Parenti writes in his book Lockdown America.

In the meantime, the MCD story is unfolding, far from over. As this history happens, a re-thinking of markets may also occur.

Such a social process should partly focus on the role played by human beings in shaping their world. After all, markets are institutions that working people sustain every day they go to work in agribusiness and other businesses.

Accordingly, the market can be changed so that working people control it instead of being controlled by it. With that consciousness emerging, they can, slowly, begin the necessary work to bury MCD and other products of the market.

Seth Sandronsky, a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action, is co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper. He can be reached at: ssandron@hotmail.com

 

Weekend Edition Features for Dec. 20 / 21, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
How to Kill Saddam

Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy

Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali

David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis

Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the Islamic World

Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee

Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush

Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared

Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression

Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN

Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and Latino Prisoners

Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane

Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful

Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis

Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race

Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie


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