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Today's
Stories
December 16, 2003
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
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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December
16, 2003
A Green View from
New Haven
Matt
Gonzalez and Me
By JOHN HALLE
My first contact with Matt Gonzalez came when
I received congratulations in the form of a hand written note
from him when I won my first election in July of 2001. I'm embarrassed
to say that even though I should have I didn't reply so that
when I met him in person a few months later at the Green Party
convention in Philadelphia in July of 2002, I apologized. Matt
thought nothing of it and responded by scribbling his phone number.
The next time I was in San Francisco, I called him up and had
lunch with him and a couple of the staffers from his office.
He gave me a tour of city hall-and we talked about Ambrose Bierce.
I invited him to a concert of my music in Berkeley the next evening.
I certainly didn't expect him to accept:
this was a major big city official, after all, who I knew even
from my limited experience in local government had almost surely
already received numerous invitations to dinners, charity auctions,
and ribbon cuttings on the same evening. More likely, my experience
with politicians led me to believe that he would accept and then
cancel. But there was Matt the next night, along with a friend,
a striking woman named Meredith, if I remember correctly, at
an obscure "new music" concert with about thirty others
in attendance. He stayed to the end and was charming, warm and
low key, completely comfortable with the mix of relatives, musicians
and eccentric academics who are my old friends in the Bay Area.
On leaving he asked someone for a ride to Bart which he and Meredith
took across the bay.
All this was a surprise, and the evening
left me feeling pleasantly bewildered, but what happened next
shocked me. At the concert, Matt casually mentioned that he was
running for the presidency of the Board of Supervisors. I replied,
even more casually, that that was wonderful and that his winning
would be a major step forward for him and for the Greens. "Let
me know how it turns out." He said he would.
This was on a Monday, I believe. My wife
and I came home to New Haven on Tuesday and we got back into
our normal routine. The following Thursday the phone rang: "John,
this is Matt. I won."
I am not even sure if I remembered who
"Matt" was. A student, a constituent, a relative? My
memory has actually gotten worse since I took office-yet another
reason why people like Matt should be carrying the Green Party
torch, and not me. Anyway, for what it's worth, from that point
on, any time "Matt" is on the phone, my response is
to drop pretty much everything and ask "how high do you
want me to jump." And it appears that there are probably
several thousand others who would respond in pretty much the
same way- but I'm getting ahead of myself.
A nearly insignificant promise being
kept-even to the letter-might seem like a small thing, but it's
much more than that when it comes to politicians. For politics
is all about broken promises and there are invariably so many
in the course of a campaign that we forget what they are. Politicians
seem to have the ability to break promises hard-wired in their
brains and this has been so for as long as I can remember.
Who even remembers Bill Clinton's "putting
people first" which morphed into "putting corporations
first," with the highest levels of wealth inequality in
history emerging during his two terms. Who remembers the plans
for investing in high speed rail and mass transit, in rebuilding
America's decaying cities. Who remembers using "the peace
dividend" to invest in renewable energy technologies, in
the arts, education and housing. And while many of us hope that
Howard Dean will follow through on his promises to reverse the
consolidation of the media, seriously move on national health
insurance, roll back decades of anti-labor legislation, who,
in her heart, really believes that any of this will materialize?
All our experience in politics has taught us that what was on
the table during campaigns immediately comes off once those who
matter, those who paid the bills for the campaign, begin to call
in their chips.
Everyone who was involved with the Gonzalez
campaign knew that Matt was something different. And it wasn't
only his personality. We could have faith that Matt would keep
his promises, not just because of who he was, but because of
the network of friends and allies which formed the backbone of
his support. Matt, unlike almost all politicians, including nominally
"progressive" ones, doesn't spend his downtime on the
golf course with landlords, contracting firm executives, lobbyists,
and white shoe lawyers, nor does he have any desire to. He shares
a two bedroom apartment with two roommates and before taking
office earned essentially poverty level wages as a public defender.
With a Stanford law degree, this was not, you can be sure, a
necessity for him; it was a choice.
And while he wasn't brought up poor by
any means, having made this choice Matt has joined the genteel
poor. Like a lot of us, Matt may have the manners, the education,
and skin color of a a stockbroker, a software engineer, or a
corporate lawyer but our bank accounts and our standard of living
tell a different story. We often have family resources which
can protect us from financial ruin, allow us an occasional vacation,
and a few middle class comforts, but we are increasingly vulnerable
to higher rents, corporate out sourcing, a medieval healthcare
system, cut backs in government services and the erosion of public
education. People like us are increasingly realizing that we
have very little in common with our childhood friends and relatives
who have exchanged submission to corporatized work lives for
SUV's, high priced condos, private schools for their kids and
some level of economic security. Our self-identification is no
longer upward but downward, not with our former classmates and
cousins across town but with our neighbors across the hall who,
like us, are paying half or more of our incomes for housing,
don't have health insurance, are sending kids to increasingly
degraded public schools and are living paycheck to paycheck.
This was the coalition which accounted for Matt's 47.5% showing
and it is one which will need to come together for the politics
of the future.
And, it turns out, I shouldn't have been
surprised by his coming to my event. Matt is a regular at any
number of poetry readings, punk rock shows and theatrical performances
which, like my concert, go on well below the radar screen. From
the standpoint of the free market and the mass media, what we
do is not even worth a second glance but to the small numbers
of us who are involved in these sort of events, they are sometimes
important, even profoundly so.
From spending time with us, Matt understands
the depth of anger shared by artists, poets, musicians and writers
directed towards a society spiritually poisoned and psychologically
addled from its obsession with turning a quick buck. But unlike
many of us, Matt understands that we share something with those
getting gouged by landlords, getting the run-around from HMOs,
those having to wait hours for a bus, those sending kids to schools
without textbooks. We are all reduced to mute despair at the
awareness that the media and government only has time for the
"winners" -those who can afford to buy the fancy cruises
advertised on T.V., the new cars, the suburban homes we see on
the sit-coms. It has no time for the rest of us-we barely exist.
Matt's particular genius, and this was
clear from 3000 miles away, was to have created a community,
an intense, joyful, chaotic community out of all of us-the overwhelming
majority who have been made to feel that our contributions have
no more value than that which the market has assigned to them,
but who know down to the marrow of our bones that the price stamped
on our services and our talents has little or nothing to do with
our worth.
By bringing us together he has created
the best kind of legend for himself and while I hesitate to say
it, he has made himself a leader.
But I shouldn't hesitate. For one of
the defining characteristics of left-wing activism has been a
deep distrust of both electoral politics and of leaders. While
some of this is justifiable, it has a lot to do with where we
are today-at the extreme margins of political life, unable to
exert any appreciable political influence or even mitigate the
most reactionary tendencies of both political parties. There
are signs that a new political maturity is taking over based
on the recognition that power is built on a partisan base from
the bottom up, through organizations and coalitions very similar
to the one which almost succeeded last Tuesday.
If we are going to have a leader, we
could do a lot worse than Matt Gonzalez.
John Halle
lives in New Haven. He is a composer, a music professor at Yale
and a Green Party alderman. He can be reached at: john.halle@yale.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 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
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