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Today's
Stories
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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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Weekend
Edition
March 20 / 21, 2004
"If Voting Changed Anything, They'd
Make It Illegal"
Emma
Goldman for President
By KURT NIMMO
I don't know if the Diebold computer voting machines
in my town will let me to write-in a presidential candidate come
November. But if it is possible I'm voting for Emma Goldman.
It will be a symbolic vote, of course.
Emma died in 1940.
Emma, the most important anarchist of
the 20th century, has been my hero now for more than three decades.
She was against mandatory conscription. She was an advocate of
free speech, birth control, feminism, and union organization.
In 1919, Emma was deported after a raid
conducted by the John Ashcroft of the day, A. Mitchell Palmer.
As rumor had it, J. Edgar Hoover used her confiscated library
and manuscripts to bone up on the radical Left. Goldman and her
partner, anarchist Alexander Berkman, according to Hoover, were
"beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this
country." So anxious was Hoover to get rid of Goldman and
Berkman, he stood on the dock at 5 AM on the morning of December
21, 1919, to watch the Buford set sail for Russia carrying Goldman,
Berkman, and 247 other foreign-born radicals. In short order
Goldman took Lenin and his version of authoritarianism to task,
especially after the massacre of the Kronstadt rebels in 1921.
In the last 20 years of her life, Goldman lived in Russia, Sweden,
Germany, France, England, and Canada. She never returned to America,
except for a short lecture tour in 1934.
Emma didn't believe in voting. "If
voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal," she observed.
In her famous essay, "Anarchism:
what it really stands for," Emma quotes Thoreau, who said,
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon,
a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds
that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing
nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy
of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority."
Elections, Goldman knew, consist primarily
of "wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating;
in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political
aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization
of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would
make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and
time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe,
and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only
to find themselves betrayed and cheated."
Both Bush and Kerry are human derelicts
of the sort Emma described. Both represent more of the same --
more invasions, more occupations and brutality, more economic
inequality, more frontal assaults against workers and the environment,
more authoritarian government.
In this election season, Kerry wants
to out-Bush Bush by sending more troops to Iraq. Kerry is Clinton
redux. He voted for NAFTA, the Patriot Act, and Bush's invasion.
Bush, if elected or once again appointed,
will simply continue his agenda -- war, all over the place, an
obscene increase in military expenditures, the dismantlement
of social programs, and frenetic privatization (i.e., theft)
of everything not nailed down. Say good-bye to old growth forests
and the pristine Alaskan wilds (and Otero Mesa here in New Mexico,
slotted for oil and gas development).
A second Bush term will ensure the destruction
of more international treaties, more coups and CIA plots, and
more concentration camps for an ever increasing number of "enemy
combatants" (while Osama roams free). Four more years of
Bush will guarantee a swift erosion of constitutional liberties
in America (hello Patriot Act 2), more radical Christian Zionist
madness in search of apocalyptic rapture, and continued denial
of climate change and greenhouse gas asphyxiation, something
even the Pentagon admits is real and catastrophic.
Tapping the Diebold touchscreen this
November for either Kerry or Bush will be a vote for more mindless,
arrogant, and fearsomely destructive patriotism.
"Patriotism requires allegiance
to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father,
mother, brother, sister," Emma wrote in 1910. "Patriotism
assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one
surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of
being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better,
nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting
any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living
on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to
impose his superiority upon all the others."
In Emma's day that "superiority"
was imposed on Latin America and the Philippines. In our day
it is imposed with technological efficiency on Iraq and Afghanistan.
As for Ralph Nader... forget about it.
Sure, Ralph takes on corporations, but
has said little about American foreign policy. Instead of outlawing
and scattering the IMF and World Bank loan shark criminals, Nader
has proposed "a more enlightened policy" toward these
mobsters.
"The US should rein in the IMF and
World Bank, and demand that loans be conditional on human rights
and labor rights records, social and environmental impact statements,
and the providing of basic health and education," declared
the Green Party in 2000, a platform Nader endorsed. Obviously,
the Green Party and Nader are seriously deluded. Reform the IMF
and World Bank? Not.
The Managing Director of the IMF, Horst
Köhler, and James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank,
should be prosecuted, not reformed. A small, uninhabited island
somewhere in the Pacific is in order for these guys and their
Wall Street co-conspirators, lest they be allowed to victimize
more people in the third world.
As Emma knew, only direct action is effective
against authoritarianism, not elections.
"Anarchism," Goldman wrote,
"stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance
to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But
defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation
of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance,
and courage... Direct action against the authority in the shop,
direct action against the authority of the law, direct action
against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code,
is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism."
Granted, writing Emma Goldman's name
on the ballot -- electronic or otherwise -- is a sorry excuse
for direct action.
But somewhere on a government computer
my name and Emma's will be linked together. Maybe it will be
coalesced with my Red Squad file, compiled around 1970 by the
Michigan State Police for speaking and acting out against Richard
Nixon's war against the people of Southeast Asia.
It seems to make more sense than voting
for Ralph Nader.
Or not voting at all.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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