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Today's Stories February 6, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Super Tuesday's Vote for Chaos February 5, 2008 Winslow T. Wheeler The Chaos in America's Vast Security Budget Tariq Ali Why I Will Not Participate in the Turin Book Fair Stephen Soldz The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq: Did Rumsfeld Authorize War Crimes? Chris Floyd Strange Fruit: America's Gulag and the Good War William S. Lind Saddam's Secret War Strategy: Die and Win Martha Rosenberg Live From the Killing Floor Heather Gray Conversations with Georgia Voters Ayesha Ijaz Khan Obama, Bhagwandas and the Battle for a Secular Politics David Macaray Unions Need to Stop Being So Nice Eliza Ernshire Making Music and Laughing Till the Tears Run Brenda Norrell Hated Nation Website of the Day The Things I Used to Do     February 4, 2008 Marc Levy Winter in America Patrick Cockburn The Bird Market Bombings Saree Makdisi Strangling Gaza Uri Avnery From Stalingrad to Winograd Alan Farago Let's Get Bambi! Someone is Slaughtering Florida's Key Deer Ben Tripp Spare Change: the Whine of the Progressive Voter Paul Wolf Civil Wars North and South Paul Craig Roberts Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed? Joshua Frank MoveOn's Obama Endorsement: Why There's No Hope for Change John Halle Whither Progressive Democrats? Website of the Day How to Cheat in School   February 2 / 3, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Hot Democratic Properties Pam Martens Bankers Gone Bonkers: Global Finance and the Insanity Defense Ralph Nader The Great Clinton-Obama Debate: Questions They Weren't Asked John Ross Hilaria vs. "El Moreno" Wajahat Ali Hillary, Obama and the Clash of Civilizations: an Interview with Imam Zaid Shakir Robert Fantina A Colony by Any Other Name: Iraq as Stepchild of the American Empire B. R. Gowani Not All Veils and Guns James L. Secor China in Winter: On the Western Edge of the Great Snow John V. Walsh The Invisible Green Primary Niranjan Ramakrishnan Barack's Bubble, Bubba's Trouble Dave Zirin Who Stole the Super Bowl's Soul? Jeremy Scahill Blackwater and Blood Fidel Castro Reflections on Lula Joe Allen Tet Reconsidered: the Turning Point in the Vietnam War Stephen Lendman Life in Occupied Gaza Patrick Irelan What Happened to the Streetcars? Andrej Grubacic Ziga Vodovnik Caligula's Horse: the USA, New Europe and Kosovo Josh Karpoff Dead Soldiers and the Antiwar Movement Ron Jacobs Carl Oglesby's War Paul Krassner Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel Website of the Weekend Company Woman: Hillary and Wal-Mart   February 1, 2008 Ray McGovern The Iniquities and Inequalities of War Diane Farsetta The Wild Career of James "Dow 36,000" Glassman Patrick Cockburn The Most Dangerous Country in the World for Journalists Tariq Ali Et Tu, New York Times? Allan Nairn Eating Dirt for Lunch in Haiti Rannie Amiri Collective Punishment in Beirut Ramzy Baroud People Power in Gaza: They Simply Did It Kenneth Couesbouc The Mother of All Snowballs Peter Morici Recession Looms Mumia Abu-Jamal Witha "Brutha" Like This: Bill Clinton as White Negro Rosemary Jackowski 27 Reasons Nader Should Run for President Scott Campbell Direct Action to Stop the War Re-emerges Website of the Day Betes et Hommes   January 31, 2008 Saul Landau Return to Afghanistan Andy Worthington Horror at Guantánamo Mike Whitney Rate Cut as Dagger: America's Teetering Banking System Jeff Ballinger Sustainability for Dictators Initiative? Clinton Praises the "Suharto of the Steppe" Tiffany Ten Eyck The Saga of the Freightliner Five William Loren Katz Waterboarding: Torure or Mystery? Alan Farago Why the Republicans are in Deep Trouble Col. Dan Smith Oh Say Can You See the 2009 Budget? China Hand Slouching Toward Islamabad Dave Lindorff The Usual Suspects Once Again Wadner Pierre Fake Democracy in Haiti Website of the Day One Big Union   January 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair McCain vs. Clinton? Christopher Ketcham The Genius of the Development Industrial-Complex Robert Weissman America By the Numbers: The Shameful State of the Union Neve Gordon An Experiment in Famine Paul Craig Roberts Regulation or Deregulation, Which is Worse? Joanne Mariner How Anti-Terror Laws Threaten Free Speech David Macaray Labor's Only Real Weapon Liaquat Ali Khan Is NATO Committing Genocide in Afghanistan? Raymond J. Lawrence Prankster-in-Chief: Bush's Troubling Non-Verbal Communication Dan Bacher The Collapse of the Central Valley Salmon Website of the Day Onward Through the Fog   January 29, 2008 Franklin C. Spinney Bush's New War Budget: the $70 Billion Hand-Off Mike Whitney The Great Credit Unwind of 2008 Alan Farago Buyer Beware: Florida, the Candidates and the Latin Builders Association Patrick Cockburn "The Americans Bring Us Only Destruction" Gary Leupp "We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans:" a Sibel Edmonds Timeline R. F. Blader A World Without Abortion: USA v. Romania Ahmad Faruqui Musharraf's Post-Electoral Prospect Fran Shor Obama, the Kennedys and "Change We Can Believe In" Jeremy Scahill Secret Trials and Criminal Convictions: the Ordeal of the Blackwater Protesters Allan Nairn Bush's SOTU: Entitlement, Justice and the War of All Against All Website of the Day The Ghost of Rambo   January 28, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Return to Fallujah Paul Craig Roberts The End of American Liberty Allan Nairn The Breaking of the Gaza Wall Eyad al-Sarraj / Sara Roy Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza Martha Rosenberg Obit for the "Front Page" City Corporate Crime Reporter How They Rip Us Off David Michael Green Kristolizing Iraq: What a Great Freakin' War Jennifer Van Bergen What's Left? Nancy Oden Survival Tips for Hard Times Divya Karnad Saving India's Sea Turtles James L. Secor Pissed About Pistorious: Why the Olympics Needs a Gimp Website of the Day Yellow Journalism?   January 26 / 27, 2008 Uri Avnery Worse Than a Crime JoAnn Wypijewski How the Clintons Lost It, Whatever the Outcome in S. Carolina Ralph Nader Ambition, Power and the Clintons Paul Craig Roberts How Bush Destroyed the Dollar Paul Watson I'm Proud to be a Pirate! John Ross Murder and Cover-Up in Mexico Fred Gardner Ross v. Raging Wire: Employer's Right to Fire Workers Held Sacred by California Supreme Court Allan Nairn Little Hands with Fever: Some Consequences of Poverty Death Joshua Frank Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey Binoy Kampmark Société Générale and the Economic Meltdown James T. Phillips America's Sick Comedy: Bringing the War Home Stan Cox The Depressing Truth About Anti-Depressants Eamonn McCann Hillary's Lie: "I Brought Peace to Northern Ireland" Ron Jacobs The Horizons of History: What's at Stake in Bolivia Seth Sandronsky California's Health Care Crisis Ben Terrall The Future is Unwritten Poets' Basement Tripp, Gardner, Gibbons and Davies Website of the Weekend City of Immigrants     January 25, 2008 Douglas Valentine Operation Two-Fold: How the CIA Infiltrated the DEA Patrick Cockburn US Troops Will Be In Iraq for 10 More Years: an Interview with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari JoAnn Wypijewski Down to the Wire in South Carolina Heather Gray Are We Seeing a Racial Shift in the South? Conversations with South Carolina Voters Marjorie Cohn Senate Democrats Poised to Fold to Cheney on FISA Erica Rosenberg Environmentalists Out on a Limb: the Perils of Collaboration Alan Farago Jeb Bush Goes Nuclear Robert Weissman Reclaiming Economic Freedom Laura Carlsen Wild Cards: Mining the Hispanic Vote in Nevada Stephen Lendman Israeli Repression in the Hebron Website of the Day The FIX is In   January 24, 2008 JoAnn Wypijewski Obama as Anthologist of Uplift Paul Craig Roberts President Hillary Alexander Cockburn Hillary Wants to Talk About Dirty Legal Dealings? Remember Her Nursing Home Scam? Kathleen Christison One and Two State Solutions and the Myth of International Consensus Jeff Halper Power to the (Palestinian) People! Stanley Heller The Siege of Gaza is Broken George Wuerthner The Moronic Sport: ORVs on the Public Lands Patrick Cockburn Desperate Iraqi Farmers Turn to Opium Jeff Sher Just How "Good" is Your Health Insurance? Patrick Irelan Musharraf, the Steadfast Ally? Charles Modiano Restoring the Anti-War King Website of the Day An Illustrated History of Trepanation   January 23, 2008 David Rosen The Great Disappearing Act: the Presidential Candidates and the Politics of Sex David Isenberg Is It Really So Hard to Believe That Iran Stopped Its Nuclear Weapons Program? Farzana Versey Hillary's Harem Paul Craig Roberts The Empire That Must Be Obeyed Alan Farago Where Did All the Good Times Go? Allan Nairn Indonesian Intelligence Service Threatens to Kill Human Rights Activist Kenneth Couesbouc Another Turn of the Screw Niranjan Ramakrishnan How the West was Re-Sold Michael Donnelly Obama Strikes Back Norman Solomon The Power of Love Website of the Day Rafah Today   January 22, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Farewell to Old Economic Nostrums JoAnn Wypijewski King Day in Columbia, South Carolina Al Giordano Divide and Conquer Politics: How the Clinton Campaign Armed a Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada Felice Pace Power Politics in the Klamath: Water, Dams and Salmon Paul Wolf Bolívar's Sword Robert Weissman Deregulation and the Financial Crisis Dave Lindorff The Bush Dollar Trap Marjorie Cohn Cheney Impeachment Gains Traction Richard Neville Keeping Shakespeare in a Box Don Fitz / Zaki Baruti St. Louis Mayor Booed Off MLK Platform Ben Terrall Cindy Sheehan and the Virtues of Divisiveness Sam Husseini Stoning Martin Luther King, Jr. Website of the Day Defend the Mapuche!     January 21, 2008 Kevin Alexander Gray Playing the Race Card Linn Washington, Jr. Deferring Dreams, Delusions of Democracy Pam Martens How Wall Street Blew Itself Up David Macaray Labor's Grim Dilemma: Do We Need a Labor Party? Uri Avnery Look Who's Talking Omar Barghouti Europe's Collusion in Israel's Slow Genocide Joe DeRaymond Protest and Trial in D.C. B.R. Gowani Why Islam Should Tolerate Images Shepherd Bliss The False U.S. Economy Jean-Guy Allard Philip Agee Versus the CIA Dan Bacher Leaping Steelhead! Website of the Day Destroyed By a Rising Flood January 19 / 20, 2008 Alexander Cockburn The Campaign in Black and White Saul Landau Good Time Charlie's War China Hand Endgame for Pakistan? Conn Hallinan Desert Mirage: What Was the Bombing of Syria Really About? Ron Jacobs No Retreat Dave Lindorff A Tax Rebate Won't Fix This Mess Andy Worthington Canada's Humiliating Double Standard on Torture Paul Armentano What's the Going Price for a Joint? More Than You Might Think Seth Sandronsky High Crimes and Economics Michael Donnelly Dodging Ecocide Patrick Irelan The Ordeal of Dr. Safdar Sarki Martha Rosenberg The Drug Industry Takes Another Hit Sherwood Ross Making the World Safe for Despots: Bush's Global Arms Trade David Michael Green So You Want to be My President, Eh? James Rothenberg Unimpeachable: Under House Protection Daniel Gross Starbucks Shortchanges Dr. King Peter N. Carroll In Memory of Milton Wolff Susie Day Croakin' on Hudson Paul Krassner Woody Allen Meets Tongue Fu Poets' Basement Wolff, Buknatski and Orloski Website of the Day Rocky Mountain Blues   January 18, 2008 Allan Nairn Killing Civilians, Carefully Ralph Nader When the Big Boys Get in Trouble, Who Pays the Ultimate Bill? Joanne Mariner Terrorism and Preventative Detention Alan Farago The Stimulus and the Meltdown P. Sainath Pity the Brahmins R.F. Blader Beyond Steinem's Feminism Andy Worthington A Letter from Guantánamo John Jonik Private Insurance is Bad for Your Health Brian McKenna Where Even Sharing is Prohibited: Notes from Inside a Michigan Women's Prison Daoud Kuttab This Time Next Year? Website of the Day Those South Carolina Voting Machines   January 17, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Leader and Vassal Christopher Brauchli The FBI's Bills Come Due Robert Fantina Leadership, Bush and the New York Times Patrick Irelan Eternal War Paul A. Moore When the Rich Pay No Taxes Stephen Lendman Institutionalized Spying on Americans Beena Sarwar Bhutto and the "State Within a State" Walter Brasch Buzzwords in the Echo Chamber: Change and the Establishment Brenda Norrell Bush Legacy in Texas Sours Adam Federman End of the Left? Website of the Day Democrats for Romney   January 16, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Return of the Native Franklin Lamb The Bombing at Qarantina Julian Sanchez David Weigel Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? Sharon Smith Ron Paul and the Left: a Slippery Slope? Allan Nairn Economic Indicator: No Free Lunch, No Free Market Ayesha Ijaz Khan How the American Media Enables Bush's Iran Fixation Andy Worthington A Strategic Call to Close Guantánamo Richard Behan Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach! Website of the Day Obama the New JFK? He's Not That Bad!   January 15, 2008 Andrea Peacock Breach of Trust in America's Most Toxic Town: How the EPA is Rubbing Poison Into Libby's Wounds Wajahat Ali An Interview with Seymour Hersh on Iraq, Bush Foreign Policy and the Prospects of War with Iran Joe Bageant Getting Out the Bling Vote Ralph Nader The Candidate Taboos John Ross Zero Hour: NAFTA and Mexico's Agrarian Apocalypse Elaine Cassel Jose Padilla vs. John Yoo: Can a National Disgrace be Rectified? Peter Morici The Fed Needs More Than a New Communications Strategy Beena Sarwar Pakistan's Dirty Tricks Brigade Robert Weissman Big Business is Even More Unpopular Than You Thought Binoy Kampmark Going Tata in India Dave Zirin Dennis Brutus Smacks Down the Hall of Fame Website of the Day David Lynch on the iPhone   January 14, 2008 Ishmael Reed Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man Roger Morris Burials in the Sind Uri Avnery The Hands of Esau Mike Whitney Bush's Voodoo Stimulus Package Allan Nairn General Suharto of Indonesia: One Small Man Leaves a Million Corpses William Blum Oh, By the Way, the Iraqis Don't Really Want Us Alan Farago A Subprime Wake Up Call David Macaray Are Labor Unions Ready for Prime Time? Eva Liddell Getting Drunk with Obama Zoe Blunt Road Kill: New Highway Blocked by Protesting Raccoons Website of the Day Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies   January 12 / 13, 2008 Andrew Cockburn How the New England Journal of Medicine Undercounted Iraqi Civilian Deaths Saul Landau 60 Years of Empire Corey D. B. Walker Barack Obama and the Crisis of the White Intellectual Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Magician of the Tarot Eric Toussaint The US Subprime Crisis Goes Global Ron Jacobs Television, Murder and Vietnam Fred Gardner The People vs. Christopher James Chakos Stan Cox Don't Take That Pill! Jacob G. Hornberger The Warfare State Ramzy Baroud The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Joseph Grosso The Anglosphere: a Special Relationship of Elites David Díaz-Arias Imagining An/Other Latin American Left Stacey Warde Before We Move On ... Dan Bacher Pumped to Extinction: the Decline of the Delta Smelt Michael Dickinson Georgie in Jesusland Website of Weekend CounterPunchers Protest Outside NYT Offices   January 11, 2008 Dave Lindorff Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire? More Questions About Diebold Voting Machines Paul Craig Roberts No Escape from War and Unemployment Andy Worthington Six Years of Guantánamo Kenneth Couesbouc Banking on Thin Ice Jeff Ballinger Inside the Vienna Consensus Christopher Brauchli Lethal Injection, the Supremes and China Manuel Garcia, Jr. Paying No Attention to the Presidential Campaigns Andrew Silverstein Bush's Weepy Visit to Jerasulem Marwan Bishara Bush in the Middle East Robert Weissman The First Amendment Gone Wild Patrick Irelan Damn the Small Boats! Website of the Day Hillary and the Superdelegates: Or Why She Wins Even When She Loses     January 10, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Now Nader Claims He Didn't Endorse Edwards Bob Wing Marqueece Harris-Dawson Race Within the Race: Obama, the NH Vote and the Specter of Tom Bradley Michael Donnelly White Women Gone Wild? David Macaray Three Big Reasons for the Decline of Labor Unions China Hand Bush's Delusional Policy Pushes Pakistan to Brink of Catastrophe Ayesha Ijaz Khan Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: Brotherly, Friendly Countries? Rannie Amiri Obama, Man of Kansas or Kenya? Website of the Day Iranian Video of the Hormuz Incident   January 9, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair The Empire Strikes Back Dave Lindorff The Bad News from New Hampshire: Death By Triangulation John Chuckman Pardon My Laughter: Watching the US Primaries from Canada James Bovard Stomping Freedom: Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006 Alan Farago As Florida Sinks: the View from the Titanic Russell Mokhiber Why Picket the New York Times in DC on Friday? William S. Lind Kicking the Can Down the Road in Iraq Peter Morici Beyond the Sophistry: Why the Trade Deficit Matters Josh Reubner Sudan vs. Israel: Double Standard on Divestment Mike Roselle The Pursuit of Happiness Website of the Day Bottles of Tears on the Wall: Steve Perry on NH   January 8, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts No Jobs for the New Economy (or the Old) Russell Mokhiber The Black Hillary: Obama is Just Another Political Sedative Robert Fantina The Gulf of Tonkin and the Strait of Hormuz Dave Zirin Butts on Parade Shamako Nobel I Am an Emcee: the Politics of Hip Hop John Ross Zapatista Women Encounter Themselves Brenda Norrell Apaches Defend Homeland from Homeland Security Laura Carlsen Why Bolivia Matters Patrick Irelan Remember the Maine! Evelyn J. Pringle The Holes in Bush's FDA Jonathan M. Feldman After Iowa and New Hampshire: a Strategy for Rebuilding the Peace Movement Michael Dickinson Playing Soldier Website of the Day Sean Hannity on the Run!   January 7, 2008 Chris Floyd There Will Be Blood: But No Justice for Iraq Atrocities John Blair Remove That Man! Creeping Fascism in Indiana Uri Avnery The Case of the White Bird Andy Worthington Who Are the Gitmo Saudis? Binoy Kampmark Needling the Convict: Lethal Injection and the Supreme Court David Macaray Women on Strike Ralph Nader Obamarama: the Politics of the Smooth Mood Michael Donnelly It's the War Vote(s), Stupid! Ron Jacobs Ron Paul's Run: Is Being Against the War Enough? Gideon Levy The Hostile President Dave Lindorff A Real 9/11 Cover-Up? Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb Website of the Day Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea   January 5 / 6, 2008 Douglas Valentine Good Guys in Black Hoods Kevin Young The US Occupation and Popular Opinion in Iraq Richard Rhames Saddam Who? Saul Landau Bush Snatches Defeat from Victory Marc Lynch Why Bush's Iran Strategy is Failing Robert Fantina Iowa, Democrats and the Iraq War Donna Volatile Antiwar Soldier: an Interview with Jonathan Hutto, Sr. Jelle Bruinsma Norman Finkelstein in The Netherlands Bob Sutcliffe Remembering Andrew Glyn, Rebel Economist Harvey Wasserman Anti-Nuclear Renaissance Missy Beattie Why Obama Can't Save Us David Swanson Remembering the Separation of Powers Jacob Hornberger The Importance of the Padilla Case Shepherd Bliss Survival Tools from Kokopelli Farms Ron Jacobs Bleeding Kansas Poets' Basement Patti Smith, B.R. Gowani and Peter Buknatski Website of the Weekend Jimmy Dean Sausage Call Complaint   January 4, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair A Good Night in Iowa Jonathan Cook War Crimes Airbrushed from History Paul Craig Roberts Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime Stan Goff Ron Paul's Monkeywrench Dave Lindorff Clinton's Iowa Flop Exposes DLC Myths as Frauds Niranjan Ramakrishnan To Pindi Station Allan Nairn U.S. Elections Over Before They Began Joshua Frank The Failures of Sectarianism Peter Morici Economy on the Skids Mary McInnis Iowa Cocky-Us: How to be a Caucus Tease Website of the Day The Return of Obama Girl   January 3, 2008 Fatima Bhutto Farewell to Wadi Bua Pam Martens The Free Market Myth Dissolves into Chaos Joanne Mariner The Presidential Candidates and Torture Zoltan Grossman Remember the '80s: Social Movements Between Woodstock and the Web David Domke The Echoing Press and Huckabee Norman Solomon Edwards Reconsidered Nikolas Kozloff Return of the Faux Liberal Jacob G. Hornberger The Padilla Case and the Future of Habeas Corpus Martha Rosenberg Quit Picking on Huckabee's Son, Michael Vick Russell Means This Property is Condemned: a Notice to Those Occupying Lakotah Lands Website of the Day WolfQuest       Subscribe Online

February 6, 2008 An Intellectual Hustler Lays It All Out My Roommate By VIJAY PRASHAD I first saw him at an event for new graduate students. The Indian-looking people in the room gravitated to each other. It turned out that three of us lived in the same building, across from the Midway, on the borderlands between the university (the most policed space I have ever lived in) and the ghetto. As you walked with your back to the line of gothic university buildings and headed to our apartment, you saw before you a landscape that resembled London after the blitz. Rizwan, from Britain, was an anthropologist, already conversant in Levi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins, confident and ambitious. I had come to graduate school by accident, or by default. My partner applied and so I followed. Indian history was to be my beat, although I already sounded anachronistic, having been fed a steady diet of Marx and too little postmodernism (one of my advisors bristled with great discomfort when I used phrases like "concrete reality"; where I used the phrase in my dissertation he wrote in the margins, "cement"). Sudhir, our third, was the quiet one. Affable and smart, he came to Chicago from Southern California, where he had been a Deadhead in the last years of that band. He had come to study with William J. Wilson, who would soon become Bill Clinton's advisor on race and poverty. I didn't know who Wilson was. To be honest, I wasn't sure who my own teachers were in the larger scheme of things. Classes went by swiftly. The most disconcerting thing about graduate school was how students in the incoming batch were taught, quickly, to compete with each other. Sudhir, Riz and I would gather in their apartments on the upper floors of our building, trying to gauge our position in each of our departments, taking refuge from the enforced tension of the First Year. Slowly Sudhir found his groove. He began to work for Wilson, doing some survey research. He'd disappear, reappear, silently, only sometimes telling us what he was learning. Riz and I would be mesmerized by his audacity. One of Sudhir's great advantages was that he could do three things simultaneously: attend classes and get schooled in his discipline; absorb the library and draw upon the wisdom congealed there; get out there into the "field" and develop his research agenda. Most of us could only get the first two parts of a graduate education, having to defer the third until later, reading and learning from books and our teachers with a silent sense of what we could contribute to the literature and arguments. Sudhir had the field at his doorstep. That made his learning richer (although this is not a prescription for graduate school, because all we'd study, then, is the environs of the universities). He had an edge over the other sociology students, and he knew it. But Sudhir was too Southern California deadhead to make that knowledge into an offensive gesture. Few cities compare with Chicago, and yet there is something in Chicago that is common to most of our cities today in the United States. High rates of income inequality and the persistence of de facto racial segregation has created pockets of affluence (mostly in the suburbs, but also in closely policed sections of the city itself) and expanses of poverty. The slums of Chicago, whether in the Robert Taylor homes that Sudhir visited or the stretches of homes and abandoned lots south of the University of Chicago, housed people who tried to fashion lives out of circumstances of misery. Sudhir's encounter with these people, largely African Americans, is the subject of his new book, Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin, 2008), although he has made the sociological interventions already in two other books (American Project, 2002; Off the Books, 2006, both from Harvard University Press) and one film (Dislocation, 2005). The new book goes over that terrain in a much more personal way, telling us as much about the lives of those he encounters as how fraught research can be when the student tries to cross the gulf of inequality and race. Those whom he accosts with the naïve questions of his field ("how does it feel to be black and poor?") very quickly show him that they are far beyond this, and that they pose questions to our civilization that the profession is not willing to ask or answer ("what are we to do for our survival and joy when the weight of white supremacy disallows us to follow a morality that we might acknowledge but cannot possible honor?"). Sudhir seems to be playing a game with us. He describes himself walking into the 'hood for the first time in a tie-dye shirt, with a ponytail, with a clipboard and a set of dumb questions. He's ambushed by the Black Kings, the local gang, who are convinced he is either with a rival (Mexican) gang or perhaps an informant. No one so hapless as a researcher would dare to walk in and begin to ask questions. But on the cover of the book we see someone else. A big boned, dark skinned man in a leather jacket, with a combination of sensitivity and anger writ large on his face. He's not your average naïf, who by dint of his persistence becomes a gang leader for a day as part of his experiment. Race is all over this, as is class. The BK's leader, JT, is a college graduate who sees in Sudhir his Virgil, his amanuensis. They bond over what they have in common, the culture of college. Neither white nor black, Sudhir is first mistaken as Mexican, and frequently denounced as an Arab (the small shopkeepers in the area are Palestinian), but not as Indian. There is no discussion of his own people, of his standing or even his stance. Sudhir asks the Taylorites questions, but they don't grill him. This is a surprising silence, which makes the book less a memoir and more of a report from the field. We know him as Sudhir, as the individual protected by J. T., befriended by Mrs. Bailey and Autry, but not fixed as an Indian American, as Other. What they think of him is not part of the frame, although it is this that would give us a better sense of the interactions. In the suffocating Black-White calculus of Chicago, Sudhir is neither fish nor foul, an Other Brother from another planet. When I went into similar areas of Providence as a community organizer just a few years after Chicago, I remember being given access to people's lives precisely because I was not white, nor black, nor Latino, but something exotic or at least unfamiliar. When I went into the homes of those whom we organized at Direct Action for Rights and Equality, they asked me as many if not more questions about myself and my people as I asked them about their lives. The welcome Sudhir gets might just as well be because he breaks the congealed racial binary. Ensconced in the world of the Robert Taylor homes, Sudhir comes to see a major gap between the lived reality of the people and the scholarly-media images of them. Sociological categories such as anomie (even anarchy) and the culture of poverty do not capture the rule-based lives of these cast out Americans. Capital fled the ghetto ­ industrial investment dried up with globalization (and the factories remain as abandoned mausoleums), and retail investment rushed to the suburbs leaving space for small family shops (bodegas) whose economic survival is premised upon the sale of liquor, the lottery and the prevention of petty theft. Humans abhor a social vacuum, and into this wasteland came not only the drug-profit fueled gangs but also "off the books" entrepreneurs and community leaders. They provided a measure of order: the policing is done by the gang soldiers and the women who emerge as building leaders. These gangs became the "de facto administration" of the buildings, and even as the leader "may have been a lawbreaker, he was very much a lawmaker as well." Drug sales funnel jobs into the neighborhood, and to earn the trust of the residents, the drug kingpins become the main social welfare agency (they are assisted by women like Ms. Bailey who, in a patron-client way, distribute goods that they leverage out of local businesses). There are some startling revelations here, when Sudhir reports how families pool their resources to survive: if on one floor, an apartment has a fridge and another has a shower, if one has an air conditioner and another has a working toilet, the families simply use each others' utilities and treat the floor like one big house, with their families as one large joint family. The elements of social solidarity are all over these spaces, and Sudhir is keen to show us this. The vision of social devastation has to be altered or else a sense of futility sets in when policy makers turn their eyes to the ghetto. Bill Cosby's "dirty laundry" rant is just the kind of stance that Sudhir's work challenges. If you want to write from the standpoint of the ghetto, you have to engage empathetically with those who deal drugs, and whose drug business is premised on violence. The ghetto is not a place of peace and harmony, as Sudhir reveals from the very first. Nonetheless, it is not also a place of immorality and devastation. What Sudhir does not do in this book (because it would be out of genre) or even in his more scholarly account (Off the books) is to locate the collapse of the ghetto in the general abandonment of their social development by the US state. When jobs collapsed here, drugs entered. If we don't get the narrative of how drugs entered, we do learn how the character of the neighborhood changed. The entry of drugs produced a shift in the generational and gender characteristics of power in the 'hood. Older African Americans and African American women lost their social power to the younger men, whose access to guns and to money gave them disproportionate leverage over their environment. The young drug dealers and leaders openly hit older men who stand up to them. Cordella Levy, one of the older women in the building, tells Sudhir how it was women like her that used to control the nightlife in the area. She ran Cordella's Place, where you could "come in for a drink, play some cards, make a friend, have a nice time." In the early 1980s, as the drug economy rescued the area it destroyed such institutions. "The tribe of strong women," as Sudhir puts it, once ran things and helped people. "It was a time for women," says Ms. Levy, "a place for women. The men ruined everything." Ms. Levy tells Sudhir that in the old days fifty or so "power women with no shame" would engage with the city to make sure that resources they were entitled to would get to them. The old-time gangsters also look back nostalgically to the era of social protest combined with petty drug dealing. Lester Duster, a Black King member from the 1970s who now runs classes on voter registration for the gang, tells Sudhir about how the gang was once also a political force. Some old men who sit in the park tell him about how the Black Panthers, who always lived alongside the gangs, used to provide social services and political education, not just enforcement of norms that benefited them. The gangs lost this political edge and became "firms" just as the state also transformed its relationship with the ghetto. No longer an ambivalent force, the police, for instance, now operates in these neighborhoods as if they are open-air prisons. One sympathetic policeman, Officer Reggie, takes Sudhir to a meeting with a few cops at a bar, where one of them is openly hostile. Sudhir has seen him rob a gang member earlier (while pretending to do a bust of his apartment). That's how the police operate, says the Boys and Girls Club head Autry Harrison, "the police are also a gang, but they really have the power. Never, never, never piss off the police." When the gang holds a social event, policemen don black clothes and masks to raid the party, making off with jewelry and cash ­ the gang treats this as a tax. Many of the cops are African American, but this seems to make little difference. As Albert Reiss wrote in 1968, "The use of force by police is more readily explained by police culture than it is by the policeman's race." Autry tells Sudhir not to write about the police, but he does. When Sudhir tries to get into the buildings to do research, Ms. Bailey makes him run the gauntlet. Whenever he asks about people's lives in the buildings, she stops him. "You want to understand how black folks live in the projects. Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can't feed our families. Why our kids can't get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?" It takes Sudhir a few meetings to grasp the astuteness of her logic. If one treated the Taylor homes as a closed system, then the only answer to the social problems is that the people are not taking their own lives seriously (which is the Bill Cosby position, shared, it should be said, by American liberalism in general). But if the frame is enlarged to include what structures the ghetto then it would enable a richer picture of what determined people's lives. One doesn't have to go with Method Man, don't blame me, blame society. That's too abstract. But an analysis of the structures that constrain people's lives and of the lives built within those structures is necessary. If people like Autry and Ms. Levy are to reclaim their lives then they have to struggle against the constraints and build a new social life, now liberated from those external determinations. Ms. Bailey tells Sudhir that she looks forward to the day she is out of a job. When her people will be able to take care of themselves, then she'll be freed from her position of patron. Sudhir is dyspeptic: she has probably been saying this for the past thirty years. The enormity of the bad odds for America's off the books class weighs heavily not only in Sudhir's work, but also on most of our shoulders. Liberalism puts its faith on the new post-race leaders, people like Newark's Cory Booker or indeed America's Barack Obama. Sudhir hopes that his work will have some impact on public policy. This is all from above. What might come from below? Could it be the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations, led by people like Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, Patricia Watkins, and Rami Nashashibi? Like Talib Kweli, "I stay readin' the signs." Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

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