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CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
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CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
Please Read This, Then ActAll last week, assuming that you are among the tens of thousands of people around the world who check in at this CounterPunch site every day or two, we’ve been featuring our annual appeal for donations and saying that without the necessary $75,00 to be raised in these weeks, we’ll have to cut back drastically on what we do and what all you site readers who don’t subscribe to our newsletter, get every day for free.
We are completely serious about this. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next
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We know you’re out there. Our website receives millions of hits and nearly 100,000 readers each day. Why? Because CounterPunch doesn’t play the politics of make-believe. Barack Obama came into office preaching hope and promising change. Change has yet to arrive. From the bailouts for bankers to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretaps to a fatally compromised health care plan, from jobless millions here to rendition flights around the world, this new administration governs a lot like the old. In spite of this, many progressive outlets have gone soft on Obama. We haven't. That's why so many of you make us your homepage
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Today's Stories November 6-8, 2009 Mark Greuter November 5, 2009 Pam Martens Vijay Prashad Brian Gallagher Norman Solomon Nadia Hijab Joseph Shanksy Andy Thayer Tracy Rosenberg Website of the Day November 4, 2009 Stan Cox Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs? Robert Weissman Susan Galleymore Ralph Nader Michael Leonardi Bitta Mistofi Robert Bryce Martha Rosenberg Dave Lindorff Website of the Day November 3, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Franklin C. Spinney Laura Carlsen Serge Halimi John Stanton Sophia Weeks Dave Lindorff November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition CounterPunch DiaryToo Fat to FightBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN If Jonathan Swift traveled to the United States today, he would surely ditch the little guys, the big guys and the horses and just feature Gulliver being squashed flat by enormously fat people. I drive across the US every year and I can report that there’s been a significant upswing in the blubbergraph. In early October (in a 1990 Dodge 250 with five-speed and a Cummins engine) I drove east to west across America along Interstate 40 – much of the western portion is the old Route 66, famed in song and story -- which runs from Asheville, NC, to Nashville, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque and on through Arizona into California. Every truck stop, every diner, every mall offered its tumid diorama of human hippos. We’re talking every age group here – starting with humpty-dumpty adolescents and ascending through the decades to 50-year olds, gigantic, stertorous and grey of countenance. My friend Wilbur who runs a trailer park in South Carolina told me there’s a woman in one of his double-wides who’s up around 400 pounds and can’t get through the door even if she wanted to. She sits and watches tv all day and when she passes, Wilbur will have to get a giant can opener to rip open the side of the trailer to winch out her remains. In Eureka, my local town here in northern California, a couple of years ago they had to get new scales in the clinics and bigger MRI tubes. The Pentagon could probably make a buck or two for the taxpayer, selling torpedo launchers from decommissioned submarines for MRI conversion. It’s not quite what the swords-into-plowshares movement had in mind, but that’s America for you. And it is America. I was just in Paris and in the course of a week Alya and I saw precisely one person – a young woman – who could be classed by a European as very plump. In America she’d be still dreaming of going to ballet school. Of course there’s a lobby that says it’s all prejudice by the slim crowd, and fat people are perfectly normal – just a bit heftier. Websites devoted to this posture prate on unpersuasively about natural heftiness and the vile slurs of the diet industry. You read a lot about fat women being sexy, though not much about the kindred allurements of fat men – a discrimination Titian and Rubens divined centuries ago. I remember picking up a magazine in the lefty book store in Pike Place, Seattle, a few years back called Fat Dykes and the Women Who Love Them and it’s true, on my observation, that a very fat Lesbian will not pine away for lack of slim young baby-dyke admirers of her inviting corpulence. In this lobby’s tactful thesaurus, “fat” is the unusable f-word, and the last-resort term, “heavy”. But the fat people I see across America don’t seem happy. Mostly they look beleaguered and sad as they chug on their carts down supermarket aisles pulling fat-enhancers off the shelves. An 18-year old young woman waddling along, soda in one hand and a bag of cheetos in the other, would be cheerier if she was downsized by 50 per cent. The diabetics on their go-karts look absolutely wretched. How did it happen? Blame the obvious suspects: the fast food chains and the food industry whose chemists figure out the precise mixes of sugar and salt which will addict their customers. Blame the decline of physical education in schools. Blame couches and tv sets. Blame the shriveled vistas of opportunity, the shrunken possibilities of political change, well understood by poor people, particularly the young. Blame restaurants for serving monster portions. In Seligman, Arizona, I had breakfast in Westside Lilo’s Café and the huge elk-hunter draped in camo next to me at the counter devoured a breakfast that entirely covered a large dinner plate to a height of about four inches. Outside was his mighty one-ton truck with chromed shock absorbers gleaming in the morning sun, in which he would spend the next eight hours wolfing down chips and swigging diet Cokes. Ten years ago you could go to a national park and encounter plenty of people hiking in the more remote portions. These days you’ll see no one off the major trails and most of the visitors having a brief amble near the parking lots. The black bears in Yosemite recently voted – we’re talking statistical levels of bear-break-ins here -- the minivan their car of the year to break into because it’s what many Americans haul their kids around in, and the vehicles are full potato chips and kindred snacks the bears have learned to enjoy. The Pentagon is getting alarmed. The good news for the Armed Forces has been the surge in unemployment. In her piece on this site last week, Susan Galleymore quoted Curtis Gilroy, a senior Pentagon official, as saying recently that a 10 percent increase in the national unemployment rate generally translates into a 4 per cent to 6 per cent “improvement in high-quality Army enlistments.” For the first time since the creation of all-volunteer armed forces in 1973, according to Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary for defense for military personnel policy, “all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals.” In other words, the lack of jobs in the civilian sector, means no option for many young Americans other than enlistment. The bad news for the Pentagon is that many would be enlistees are not “high quality” and have to be turned down because they are too fat. The Army Times ran an article this last week by William McMichael citing the latest government stats on America’s fat crisis. One third of the 31 million Americans between 17 and 24 are unqualified for military service because of “physical and medical issues”. Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon’s director of accessions, told the Army Times that “the major component of this is obesity. We have an obesity crisis in the country. There’s no question about it.” The Pentagon gets its data from the US government’s Centers for Disease Control. The CDC says that 22 years ago 6 per cent of all 18-34 year olds were obese. By 2008 that number had swelled to 23 per cent – one out of four. In 1987, according to the CDC, about 1 out of 20 18-to 34-year-olds, were obese. In 2008, 22 years later, almost 1 out of 4 — was considered to be obese. “Kids are just not able to do push-ups,” says Gilroy. “And they can’t do pull-ups. And they can’t run.” Increasingly, young Americans are getting too fat to fight, which is just as well – because the antiwar movement is in terrible shape, probably because yesterday’s peace marchers are all too busy on weekends jogging, careening along on their bikes or going to yoga classes. The Pentagon now issues waivers for at least the semi-obese, no doubt reckoning that Spartan training will slim them down enough to be capable of some sort of useful military activity, though not running up and down mountains in the Hindu Kush. Michele and Barack Obama have been making rather sotto voce remarks about America’s appalling diet and ensuing weight problems, albeit tactfully since the Fat Vote is in the millions and the Food Industry’s political purse is bulky too. But how does Michele’s organic vegetable garden weigh against Obama’s pick as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack – a wholly-owned property of the food corporations? Hence we get the tragic comic spectacle of a political battle over a health “reform” bill which may make it easier for poor Americans to cover the costs of treatment for Type 2 diabetes and the health consequences of consuming prodigious amounts of high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile there is no effective political opposition to federal subsidies for the farm policies which have fattened America into macabre absurdity. Cigarettes and booze – both the targets of ferocious public service campaigns -- lag far behind obesity in economic consequence: Roland Storm in one study reported that obesity is “associated with 36 per cent increase in inpatient and outpatient spending and a 77 percent increase in medications, compared with a 21 per cent increase in inpatient and outpatient spending and a 28 per cent increase in medications for current smokers and smaller effects for problem drinkers. Though the theory has been downgraded, we used to learn in school that the Roman Empire collapsed because of lead pipes. (Actually the lead-pipe menace was well known by the time of Augustus, though lead lined cook pots probably did wreak a dire toll.) Half a millennium after the final overthrow of the Roman Empire by the diet-conscious Ottomans, the American Empire is distended in a vast acreage of fatty tissue, its recruits too vast to fit into the most forgiving uniforms, the job of fighting given perforce to drones dispatched by chair-bound warriors 7,000 miles from the battlefield, but half a block from McDonalds, Carls Jr and the other Enemies Within. Footnote:. From the UK, Peter Simmons comments: “But it's really not such a recent development; in the sixties I bought a consignment of used denim jeans from the US, planning to repair and recycle them (this was before the days when jeans came pre-stressed and pre-faded) but when I investigated I found that they were all massive, typically, two Brits could get into one pair of American jeans, some were so large we thought they had to be joke clothing for a circus or something. We used the massive expanses of denim to make lots of different items; bags, floor cushions, sofa covers... I guess what's new is that it's spread to the majority of the population now. Cheech and Chong had a word for them, lardasses. Better, But Still Far From Our Goal As you know, assuming that you are among the tens of thousands of people around the world who check in at this CounterPunch site every day or two, these past two weeks we’ve been featuring our annual appeal for donations and saying that without the necessary $75,00 to be raised in these weeks, we’ll have to cut back drastically on what we do and what all you site readers who don’t subscribe to our newsletter, get every day for free. Following my observation here at the end of our first week’s fundraiser that too many of you had been too prudent in keeping your hands in your pockets, there has been a measurable up-tick in donations, for which we thank all these supporters. But we are still far short of our target. To those who have not yet rallied to our call we say this: Please DO believe our forecasts that times will be grim indeed for CounterPunch and CounterPunchers if you don’t reconsider seriously and click on the donation link. Kevin Gray, Mark Rudd, Bruce Franklin…The Gang’s All Here! New to CounterPunch, Mark Rudd contributes an important piece on movement-building – task number one for the left today. He counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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