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Today's Stories November 26 - 28, 2010 Ramzy Baroud November 25, 2010 Michael Hudson Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Sarah Anderson Karl Grossman David Ker Thomson Rajesh Makwana / Adam Parsons Charles R. Larson Website of the Day
November 24, 2010 Jeffrey St. Clair Paul Craig Roberts James Ridgeway Invasion of the Body Scanners: Is TSA Spreading Cancer? Michael Scott Nick Dearden Russell Mokhiber Daniel Moss Farzana Versey Yasin Gaber Dan Beaton Website of the Day November 23, 2010 Pam Martens Patrick Cockburn Ben Rosenfeld / Franklin C. Spinney Dean Baker Ralph Nader Ray McGovern George Wuerthner Don Monkerud Clare Bayard Website of the Day
November 22, 2010 Michael Hudson James Abourezk Paul Craig Roberts Sasan Fayazmanesh Richard Forno Gary Leupp Martha Rosenberg Lawrence Davidson Patrick Bond Michael Dickinson Website of the Day November 19 - 21, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Mike Whitney Joanne Mariner Gareth Porter Karen Greenberg Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Franklin Spinney et al. Rannie Amiri Dr. Jim Morgan Haiti's New Normal: Dispatch from Cite Soleil Lawrence Swaim Ramzy Baroud Ron Jacobs Robert Alvarez Russell Mokhiber P. Sainath David Macaray Carl Finamore Brian Tierney Franklin Lamb Gerald E. Scorse Joshua Brollier Missy Beattie Stewart J. Lawrence Brenda Norrell Christopher Brauchli Carol Polsgrove David Ker Thomson Dave Lindorff Jeff Deasy Bill Manson Clifton Ross Charles R. Larson Twain: the Last Word, One Hundred Years Later Richard Estes David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend November 18, 2010 Diana Johnstone Mike Whitney Behzad Yaghmaian Kenneth E. Hartman Norman Solomon Michael Winship Patrick Bond Joel S. Hirschhorn Website of the Day November 17, 2010 Vicente Navarro James Bovard Jonathan Cook Dean Baker Ralph Nader Nick Turse Sherry Wolf Alienation 101: the Online Learning Rip Off Judith Scherr Peter Certo Website of the Day
November 16, 2010 Pam Martens Richard Forno Gareth Porter Harry Browne Peter Lee Alan Farago Franklin Lamb Frank Green Sheldon Richman Thomas H. Naylor Website of the Day November 15, 2010 Michael Hudson Steve Hendricks Paul Craig Roberts Harvey Wasserman Lawrence Davidson Clancy Sigal David Macaray Tom Engelhardt Steven Fake Website of the Day November 12 - 14, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Dean Baker Gareth Porter William E. Alberts Bill Hatch Jonathan Cook Patrick Madden Mystifying the Crisis: Deadlock at the G20 Ramzy Baroud Rannie Amiri James Zogby Ron Jacobs Mark Weisbrot Tanya Golash-Boza Paul Wright Steve Early Martha Rosenberg Celia McAteer Larry Portis Michael Winship Brian McKenna Gerald E. Scorse Christopher Brauchli Roberto Rodriguez Dr. Susan Block J. T. Cassidy Linh Dinh Farzana Versey David Ker Thomson Phil Rockstroh Charles R. Larson David Swanson Saul Landau Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Day
November 11, 2010 Peter Linebaugh Paul Craig Roberts Licensed to Kill Bill Quigley David Macaray Dissing the Boss: the NLRB Files a Landmark Complaint on Free Expression in the Workplace Liaquat Ali Khan / Jasmine Abou-Kassem Dedrick Muhammad Robert Bryce Alan Farago Website of the Day November 10, 2010 Allan Nairn Dean Baker Nicola Nasser Missy Beattie Sergio Ferrari Patrick Cockburn Dave Lindorff Mumia: New Lawyer, New Round Sherwood Ross Joshua Frank Website of the Day November 9, 2010 Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Jordan Flaherty Afshin Rattansi Annie Gell Dean Baker Dave Lindorff Stewart J. Lawrence Walter Brasch Website of the Day November 8, 2010 Paul Craig Roberts Thomas Healy David Swanson David Smith-Ferri Ralph Nader Ray McGovern Torture Sans Regrets: Bush's Confessions John Feffer Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day November 5 - 7, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Vijay Prashad Patrick Cockburn Darwin Bond-Graham
Mike Whitney Linn Washington, Jr. Rannie Amiri Ramzy Baroud Larry Portis Gary Leupp William Loren Katz Brian Cloughley Mark Weisbrot Rubén M. Lo Vuolo, Daniel Raventós / Pablo Yanes Joseph Nevins Neve Gordon Alan Farago Stewart J. Lawrence James R. King Ron Jacobs Franklin Lamb James McEnteer Richard Phelps Saul Landau David Ker Thomson The Long Argument Evelyn Pringle Joseph G. Ramsey Until Pigs Fly: the Morning After With Michael Moore Stanley Heller Missy Beattie Harvey Wasserman Billy Wharton Shamus Cooke Linh Dinh Windy Cooler Charles R. Larson Phyllis Pollack David Yearsley Website of the Weekend November 4, 2010 Doug Peacock Andrew Cockburn Iain Boal Paul Craig Roberts Chase Madar Dave Lindorff Russell Mokhiber Laura Flanders Website of the Day November 3, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Franklin C. Spinney Chris Floyd Dissatisfied Mind: Flickers of Hope in a Deadly Political Cycle William Blum Sheldon Richman Stephen Soldz Mark Weisbrot Stewart J. Lawrence Manuel Garcia, Jr. Election Night in Oakland Norman Solomon Website of the Day November 2, 2010 Vincent Navarro Ishmael Reed Uri Avnery Mark Driscoll Mike Whitney Linh Dinh David Macaray Randall Amster Wikilessons: War is a Joke, But It Isn't Funny Betsy Ross Yves Engler Website of the Day
November 1, 2010 Ted Honderich Steven Higgs John Ross Dean Baker Ralph Nader Justin E. H. Smith Marjorie Cohn Scott Boehm Brian Tierney Trish Kahle Martha Rosenberg Bathrobe Erectus: Feting Hugh Hefner Website of the Day
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Weekend Edition The Chains of Capital are Only as Strong as the Weakest LinkIreland and the House of CardsBy HARRY BROWNE Around here lately there’s been much talk about the Easter Rising. It’s nothing particularly interesting: just the “Men of 1916” turning up as the stars of a series of rhetorical questions that boil down to: “Was it for this that they gave their lives?” The Irish Times, bitter enemy of those rebels 94 years ago and rarely friendly toward them since, bundled the refrain into an editorial last week, and has since featured extra letters pages under the “Was it for this?” heading. It’s not surprising that the struggle for national independence might come to mind as this state begs/negotiates a loan from foreign bankers so that it can pay off foreign bondholders. Just today Sinn Fein – the party that most loudly proclaims its inheritance from the freedom fighters of 1916 and subsequent War of Independence -- has scored a stunning victory in a by-election on the rocky terrain of Donegal South West. But the mood of despair and anger here feels like something far beyond nationalism. Sinn Fein won in Donegal because (1) its candidate, Pearse (there’s 1916 again) Doherty took a court-case to force a long-overdue by-election against the wishes of a government desperately clinging to a narrow parliamentary majority; and (2) as a party it has found the guts to oppose the austerity consensus that governs the other major parties, and also guides the current bailout talks with the IMF, EU and European Central Bank. It is in that sort of stance, and in the growing popular mood here to “burn the bondholders” – the global creditors of the Irish banks that imploded when the property bubble burst – that we can begin to discern the real potential significance of this moment, and of Ireland’s role in it. In 1916, after all, Ireland did not merely fight for its own self-determination. It stabbed the British Empire in the back while it was fighting its own ‘Great War’. By the time independence for 26 of the island’s 32 counties was conceded by the British in 1921, the reverberations were being felt around the world. Anti-imperialists from Gandhi to Ho Chi Minh would later cite the seminal importance of the Irish struggle, and its victory, so close to the heart of the Empire. The global colonial edifice proved to be a house of cards, and when Ireland whipped one away the whole structure wobbled and began to collapse. Today Ireland is paying for its dangerous and vulnerable place in the global empire of capital. For the last 20 years, with the encouragement of its multinational partners, this state has been a haven not merely for big companies looking for a European base with low corporate tax rates – at one time the Irish state, excluding the British-controlled North, had more than a quarter of US foreign direct investment in the EU, at a time when we had barely over 1 per cent of the EU’s population – but for financial players looking for a barely-regulated bolthole for the most questionable parts of their business. Dublin became one of the world’s hedge-fund capitals. Those famously prudent German bankers did things here that they could never have done at home. But for this very reason Ireland is well placed to strike a blow against that empire. Our global masters know it: it is surely one of the reasons that in September 2008, as Lehman fell, the EU encouraged Ireland’s novice finance minister, Brian Lenihan, to issue in a blanket guarantee to protect the investors in all of Ireland’s banks – including, notoriously, Anglo Irish Bank. Anglo was a nouveau riche institution that had essentially become a casino for the country’s property developers as the bubble inflated. The more established banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, followed its example; but they at least also had functioned as conduits of credit for other parts of the economy. Anglo was more like a private club with no systemic importance. Nonetheless, Lenihan guaranteed it, at a cost to the Irish state that we now expect will top €30 billion. We now know too that Anglo’s list of bondholders is a who’s who of European capital. By guaranteeing those banks, the Irish state turned its ‘sovereign debt’ – the much-used word ‘sovereign’ has triggered some of the same emotions as the 1916 references – into an extension of the banks’ debt. And that’s the main reason that the bond markets don’t want to touch us. It is also true that the state, after years in the black, is suddenly running big deficits: this is a simple consequence of the neoliberalism that guided us toward low income-tax and high reliance on transaction taxes for property and other goods and services. Those latter taxes meant the state was awash in money during the buying frenzy of the early 2000s; in the absence of frenzy, the coffers are empty. And of course neoliberalism continues to dictate that there can be no solution that involves much higher taxes for the rich, nor has the state the ideological inclination to ‘stimulate’ in an economy where significant domestic capitalists play a relatively small role. Exports continue to be strong – the main reason why Ireland’s GDP doesn’t look as bad as you’d expect from looking around the place – but the last three years have shown definitively that exports can only do so much for the ‘real economy’. The government’s new four-year plan for austerity shows how little the domestic economy matters to those making decisions for our future. Those decision makers now officially include the IMF, EU Commission and European Central Bank, and much as they try to be polite, the mask sometimes slips – like when the Finnish-born EU commissioner for economic affairs Olli Rehn warned us that our government really had to present a national budget before a general election could be called. At the moment they must deal with a genuine groundswell from across the political spectrum calling for Ireland to default. An article from no less than Bloomberg offering that very advice (‘Bust is Better than a Bailout for Irish Patient’) has exploded across the Irish parts of the internet over the last three days. It seems more likely than not at this stage that some small concession will have to be made, if only to set a precedent for the next wave of bailouts across the EU and make the pretense of ‘shared pain’ more plausible. Bank senior boldholders could perhaps be offered a deal involving swapping debt for equity, though God knows who would want to hold shares in Irish banks. It’s obvious by now that Ireland, like Lehmann two years ago, has exposed the fragility (aka criminal recklessness) that still underlies the world’s financial arrangements. Politically, it’s crucial that Ireland uses its pivotal position at this moment of crisis to ensure not merely its own survival, but an end to the drip-drip of immiseration that is sure to keep sweeping Europe and the world if this sort of ‘bailout’ – in reality another wealth transfer to the already rich – is allowed to be the norm. We can’t be satisfied by some face-saving bit of pain-sharing with the bondholders who bet on our banks, or rather who calculated that this was a ‘bet’ that their political partners in crime would never let them actually lose in any significant way. And if Ireland saying “no deal!” causes the house of cards to collapse, well, so be it. The balance of forces politically in Ireland makes that unlikely. The main centre-right parties, Fianna Fail (in government) and Fine Gael (in opposition) are basically on board with austerity and serving financial masters. So too are the Green party – Mike Whitney’s otherwise excellent article yesterday may have given the impression that they’ve tried to pull the plug on the government they’ve supported for the last three-and-a-half years, but in fact the Greens said they’d go only after they finish doing the damage over the next few weeks. However, the resurgence of a newly tough-talking Sinn Fein (party leader Gerry Adams is moving his own political base south of the Border to run in the next parliamentary election here) and the birth of a new formation, the United Left Alliance, to the left of our hopelessly pipsqueaking Labour party, give some genuine cause for optimism. The best hope for real change in reality, however, is for us to internationalize the resistance in the same way that ‘the markets’ have internationalized the crisis. We’re hearing a lot in recent days about the ever-upward movements in Portugal’s bond yield, but very little about that country’s general strike on Wednesday. This weekend the Irish trade-union movement attempts to emerge blinkingly from the decades-long darkness of its ‘social partnership’ with governments and employers, by staging what is likely to be an enormous demonstration in Dublin on Saturday afternoon. Also this weekend the government is likely to announce the terms of its deal with the IMF & Co. (It is a measure of the country’s confusion and self-abasing self-absorption that even a week ago many people were likely to welcome the IMF as more competent than any Irish institution to resolve this crisis. IMF spokespeople are highly plausible, and its supporters are on standby to assure us that the fund is not nearly so extortionate to countries that come to it for help as it used to be.) By Monday we will know much more about the levels of resistance and quiescence, as well the levels of poverty and peonage, that will determine the future direction of this crisis. Harry Browne lectures in the School of Media at Dublin Institute of Technology and is author of CounterPunch’s Hammered by the Irish. Contact harry.browne@gmail.com
CounterPunch Print Edition Exclusive! The Best Tea Partier Corporate Money Could Buy Pam Martens on the rise of the Tea Party’s Rand Paul. What was wrong with Prop 19? Fred Gardner on California’s failed bid to legalize pot. John Sugg on the rise and fall of Steve Emerson, “terror expert.” Daniel Wolff on the framing of Ernest Withers” – was he an FBI informant? Subscribe now! If you find our site useful please: Click here to make a donation. CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents. Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year!
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