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Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils
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Today's
Stories
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| Weekend
Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
The Democrats
and Their Conventions
Part One:
Presidential Elections: Not as Big a Deal as They Say
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Freshets
of creativity and excitement pulsing into the nation’s bloodstream,
improvements in the general quality of life, have nothing to do
with the presidential elections rolling around every four years,
which rouse expectations far in excess of what they actually deserve.
As registers of liberal or conservative political potency, American
presidential elections seldom coincide with shifts in the tempo
of political energy across the country. As vehicles for the ventilation
of popular concerns, they are hopelessly inadequate, and should
be severely downgraded on the entertainment calendars.
Take
a couple of profound changes in the quality of life over the past
thirty years. You can now buy good coffee, shoulder to shoulder
at the coffee stand with a construction worker with hair in a ponytail
and a tactful gold ring in his ear, anywhere in America from Baltimore
to San Pedro, Key West to the Upper Peninsula. No American political
party ever wrote a commitment to better cappuccino into its platform.
From the late 60s on, the hippies, despising the dank tureens of
perked Robusta coffee, roasted Arabica coffee beans. Small roasters
held up the banner of quality.
Then,
when Communism foundered (a collapse that owed nothing to Ronald
Reagan) and Uncle Sam had no longer any incentive to fix the coffee
markets and prices benefiting its prime Latin American cold war
allies, smaller, better producers from New Guinea, Costa Rica, Kenya
and elsewhere where able to send better Arabica beans to our shores.
The quality of life went up markedly. Of course, at the level of
national US “policy”, the World Bank, dominated by the
US, then threw billions at Vietnam a few years ago to grow very
bad coffee, which undercut the quality producers.
The
bread’s got better too and so have the vegetables, thanks
once again to the hippies, organic farms, farmers’ markets
and community-supported agricultural networks. No thanks here to
party platforms, or presidential candidates, or Congress people,
all of whom are in the pay of the big food companies, which have
killed more Americans than the Pentagon by a factor of hundreds,
and which, having failed to outlaw genuinely organic food, have
now captured its name and altered its meaning. Over the past thirty
years the meat’s got worse, as small wholesale butchers have
gone to the wall, bankrupted by the coalition of food regulators
and big food processors, the latter industry now dominated by two
vast meatpacking combines, Tyson and Smithfield.
You
want to see fascism in action in America? Look beyond the Patriot
Act, engendered in the Clinton era with the Counter-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and consummated by bipartisan
agreement after 9/11, 2001. Try your local health department, bearing
down on some small business. Better still, visit family court. No
candidate goes out on the hustings and pledges to reform family
courts so that their actions have some detectable linkage to the
US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. No Republican or Democratic
platform committee has ever devoted a paragraph to family courts.
Yet there, day after day, week after week, relationships are destroyed,
children severed irrevocably from parents and extended kin, fathers
forbidden access to their children, their wages garnished, their
bank accounts looted, staggering fines levied, without the possibility
of challenge. (And no, this is not the defeated whine of a wronged
dad.)
Judicial appointments are often the last frantic argument of a liberal
urging all back in under the Big Democratic Tent. But these days
the decay of liberalism is reflected in the quality of judges installed
in the federal district courts. The Blacks, Douglases, Marshalls
and Brennans were conjured to greatness by historical circumstance
first, and only later by the good fortune of confirmed nomination.
Today’s historical circumstances are not throwing up Blacks,
Douglases, Marshgalls and Brennans, even if a Democratic president
has the opportunity and backbone to nominate them. And at the level
of the US Supreme Court, history is captious. The two best of the
current bunch, Stevens and Souter, were nominated by Republican
presidents, Ford and G.W.H. Bush. You’ll as likely find a
maverick on the conservative as on the liberal end of a judicial
bench.
Every
four years liberals unhitch the cart and put it in front of the
horse, arguing that the only way to a safer, better tomorrow will
be if everyone votes for the Democratic nominee. But unless the
nominee and Congress are shoved forward by social currents too strong
for them to defy or ignore, then nothing except the usual bad things
will transpire. In the American Empire of today, the default path
chosen by the country’s supreme commanders and their respective
parties is never toward the good. Our task is not to dither in distraction
over the lesser of two evil prospects, which turns out to be only
a detour along the same highway.
The
way they are now set up, presidential contests focused well nigh
exclusively on the candidates of the two major parties are worse
than useless in furnishing an opportunity for any useful national
debate. In 2000 Ralph Nader got about five minutes face time on
the national networks.
It
would be an improvement, and certainly more interesting, if the
big four-year debate centered on which definitions of mental complaints
should be added to or subtracted from the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which governs
official interpretations of America’s mental and emotional
condition and which is revised every few years. Recalling one such
revision in the 1970s, Phil Johnson, a gay man from Dallas, said
in the film After Stonewall, “I went to bed one night, I was
sick and depraved, and when I woke up the next morning I discovered
I’d been cured.”. In 2004 Bush could have campaigned
for the removal of ADD, arguing it’s a natural and useful
condition, emblem of presidential greatness.
Monday:
Boston Awaits a Dead Party
This
column is excerpted from CounterPunch's forthcoming book, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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