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Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch
The Sex Smears Against Julian Assange
What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen really claim he did? Read Guy Rundle’s dissection of how the Guardian stitched up the man who gave them Wikileaks. PLUS Israel Shamir on Russia’s real political divisions, beyond the Putin/Medvedev burlesque peddled by the western press PLUS Larry Portis on the rise of Marine Le Pen. Is fascism looming in France?
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Today's Stories April 29 - May 1, 2011 Alexander Cockburn Ray McGovern Mike Whitney Peter Lee G. I. Wilson, USMC Ret. Jeffrey St. Clair Saul Landau Robert Alvarez Iris Cheng Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Patrick Cockburn Ramzy Baroud Devin Burghard Norman Solomon Fidel Castro Mark Weisbrot Lynda Burstein Brayer Brendan McQuade Rev. William E. Alberts John Sinclair Sam Husseini Paul Krassner Missy Beattie David Ker Thomson Bruce Levine Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
April 28, 2011 Shafqat Hussain Nick Turse David Macaray Richard Javad Heydarian Charles Davis David Swanson Robert Weissman Rich Broderick Murray Dobbin Layton's Surge: Turning Shoppers Into Intentional Citizens Farzana Versey Michael Dickinson Website of the Day April 27, 2011 Gareth Porter Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Ralph Nader Rev. Jesse Jackson Patrick Bond Tanya Golash-Boza Conn Hallinan Linn Washington, Jr. Ron Jacobs Jen Marlowe Website of the Day April 26, 2011 Anthony DiMaggio Laura Carlsen Dean Baker Alfred W. McCoy / John Sinclair Henry Herskovitz / Michael True Carl Finamore Andrew J. Schatkin Gail Dines Website of the Day April 25, 2011 Hirose Takashi Henry A. Giroux Karl Grossman Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn James Abourezk Dave Lindorff Patrick Bond University of Michigan News Service Farzana Versey Robin Philpot Walter Brasch Website of the Day
April 22 - 24, 2011 Alexander Cockburn Franklin C. Spinney Noam Chomsky Gavan McCormack Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Mya Guarnieri Ralph Nader Jeffrey St. Clair Saul Landau / Russell D. Hoffman Josh Ruebner Raúl Zibechi Tricia Redeker Hepner Eric Walberg James Ridgeway Farzana Versey David Ker Thomson Missy Beattie Alfredo Acedo David Zlutnick Lee Sustar Shamus Cooke Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend April 21, 2011 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Gregoire Lalieu Peter Lee John Clark George Wuerthner P. Sainath Russell D. Hoffman Laura Flanders Charles R. Larson Jessica Mack Website of the Day April 20, 2011 Dave Lindorff Dean Baker Ralph Nader Patrick Cockburn David Macaray Lawrence Reichard Ramzy Baroud John Blair Kourosh Ziabari Adam Federman Website of the Day
April 19, 2011 Esam Al-Amin Uri Avnery Mark Weisbrot Ron Ridenour Patrick Cockburn Binoy Kampmark Maura Stephens Thomas H. Naylor Lawrence Davidson Sherwood Ross William Manson Website of the Day April 18, 2011 Robin Blackburn Vijay Prashad Mike Whitney Dean Baker Russell D. Hoffman Eric Toussaint Brian Tierney Patrick Bond Murray Dobbin Martha Rosenberg David Yearsley Website of the Day April 15 - 17, 2011 Alexander Cockburn Peter Lee Heather Gray John Grant Mike Whitney William Pfaff Jeffrey St. Clair Brian Awehali David Rosen Saul Landau / Ramzy Baroud Michael Brenner Franklin Lamb Jeff Howison Nick Dearden Ron Jacobs Ronnie Cummins Kevin Carson Laura Flanders Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero Christopher Brauchli Thomas C. Mountain Lawrence Swaim Murray Dobbin David Ker Thomson Farzana Versey Charles R. Larson Poets' Basement April 14, 2011 James Bovard America's Know-Nothing Policymakers Jonathan Cook Gareth Porter Robert Naiman Dean Baker Russell D. Hoffman Michael Winship Tom Turnipseed Medea Benjamin / Charles M. Young Website of the Day April 13, 2011 Alan Nasser Andrew Levine Mike Whitney Japan's Nuclear Volcano Erupts Andrew J. Bacevich Ralph Nader Linh Dinh Rodolfo Pastor Campos Russell Mokhiber Richard Wilcox Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
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Weekend Edition CounterPunch DiaryPlanet Clarion CallingBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN Americans were offered closure Wednesday to one of among the multifarious strands of our national dementias. It took the drab guise of the “long-form” birth certificate, signed and filed in Hawaii on August 8, 1961, indicating that the president is a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. But will the White House’s release of the certificate finish off the “birther” movement? Certainly not. We’re dealing here with cognitive dissonance. Harold Camping, president of Family Stations Ministry, has been preaching for some time now to a vast and devoted national audience that God’s plan is to inaugurate the Second Coming and end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011 (thus achieving a Judeo-Christian planetary closure before the prime current pagan rival, the end of the Mayan calendar, scheduled for December 21, 2012.) It’s a safe bet that Camping and his disciples will be saying on May 22 that his math was merely a year or two off, and the end is still nigh. His congregation will have its faith fortified. Membership will probably increase, as it did after the failure of Camping’s last prediction of the Second Coming, which he scheduled for September 6, 1994. Sociologists call the phenomenon of increased commitment to a batty theory, at the very hour of its destruction by external evidence, “cognitive dissonance.” The theory was developed by three sociologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, who infiltrated a group headed by Dorothy Martin of Chicago who had received messages from the Planet Clarion that the world was scheduled for destruction by flood in the predawn hours of December 21, 1954. A flying saucer would save the group, whose members had abandoned, often at considerable expense and upheaval, all terrestrial commitments, pending transfer to Clarion. The sociologists theorized that, when neither spaceship nor flood materialized, the group’s best strategy to avoid public humiliation would be to dismiss the failure of the prophesied events as due to minor miscalculations and then to proselytize vigorously, advertising a re-dated flood and interplanetary rescue. Dissonance between nutty theory and reality would be diminished amid growing popularity of the nutty theory. Anyone following the growth of the Christian religion in its early decades, or the Lesser of Two Evils crowd advocating support of a Democratic candidate, will recognize the dynamics. The three sociologists, who later faced some ethical censure for failing to disclose their motivations or true identities to Martin (whom they renamed Keech) and the group, wrote up the saga and the theory in When Prophecy Fails: a Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, published in 1956. Perhaps aiming to subvert the imminent publication of Jerry Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President,Obama released the oft-demanded long certificate at a press conference, where he declined questions but said the birther movement was becoming a distraction from serious political issues, fanned by “carnival barkers,” by which he evidently meant Donald Trump who’s been campaigning for the presidency on the issue. The words were scarcely out of Obama’s mouth and the document hardly lofted onto the White House website before leading birthers were expressing skepticism about the certificate as allegedly photo-shopped, also insisting that, anyway, it was a “side issue” and distraction from the serious matter of Obama’s qualifications as a “natural born citizen” as opposed to an ineligible Third World foundling from Kenya or Indonesia, as around 25 per cent of all Americans and 50 per cent of all Republicans have come to believe. Trump immediately claimed victory and vindication as the man who had forced the birthers’ cause into the headlights. Cognitive dissonance has become standard equipment for political scientists and reporters across America. They advance on a daily basis the premise that the Republican Party is guided by cunning and sophisticated manipulators of public opinion. They simultaneously report that the stated aim of these manipulators is to destroy two of the most popular government programs, Medicare and Social Security. Medicare is essentially socialized medicine for the elderly and Social Security keeps millions from homelessness and starvation in their sunset years. Yet for months now the national press has been lauding as a principled and effective Republican crusader for budgetary discipline U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who wants to end Medicare, handing it over to management by the “private sector,” with similar brutal attacks on Social Security. The bloc most likely to vote in any election are the older crowd, with Medicare Health Insurance cards in their wallets and receiving their Social Security checks on the second Wednesday of every month. So it’s a no-brainer to say that the Republicans today are politically insane, just as George Bush was in 2005, when he proclaimed that “reforming” Social Security was to be the prime cause of his second term. Three months later, battered by furious protests by the elderly plus those younger folk with ambitions to slide into their 70s on a diet better than scraps from trash bins and under a roof more durable than cardboard, Bush dropped the issue of reform for Social Security forever. The Republicans are politically insane because the only way to “reform” – i.e., cut back these programs – is to swear you’re doing the opposite, the tactic of Bill Clinton and, prospectively, of Obama. But the Republicans, lapping up the plaudits of the elite press – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal – doling out measured praise for Rep. Ryan’s responsible commitment to fiscal prudence, forgot the need for dissimulation, and now Ryan and his fellow Republicans have gone back to their districts, and are discovering to their amazement that the voters have scant confidence in Obama’s handling of the economy but even less in the Republicans’ proposals. In a news story Wednesday headlined “House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget,” certain to be read with deep alarm by those few Republicans still endowed with powers of rational analysis, New York Times correspondents reported bluntly that “after 10 days of trying to sell constituents on their plan to overhaul Medicare, House Republicans in multiple districts appear to be increasingly on the defensive, facing worried and angry questions from voters and a barrage of new attacks from Democrats and their allies.” In Florida, filled with retirees, the NYT story continued, “a Congressional town meeting erupted into near chaos on Tuesday as attendees accused a Republican lawmaker of trying to dismantle Medicare while providing tax cuts to corporations and affluent Americans. At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Representative Paul D Ryan, the architect of the Republican budget proposal, faced a packed town meeting, occasional boos and a skeptical audience as he tried to lay out his party’s rationale for overhauling the health insurance program for retirees.” Earlier this week, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, announced he was folding his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. He said he realized that” he didn’t really have the stomach for a prolonged and costly campaign. Barbour is a good old boy Southerner, ample in girth and prone to dropping clangers on the race issue. He’s also a pretty smart Washington insider who, no doubt, realized that only five months after the great Republican triumph in the midterm polls last November, the party has plummeted swiftly in public esteem, regarded as plain nutty by millions. Obama isn’t popular. Sixty-seven per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. His job disapproval rating stands at 49 per cent. The job “disapproval” rating for Congress, with a House newly led by Republicans, stands at 71 per cent. Current Republican presidential candidates are, in order of popular esteem for their candidacies: Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee, who leads this field with a 17 per cent showing; circus barker Donald Trump; Mormon and failed aspirant in 2008 Mitt Romney; faded star Sarah Palin; adulterer Newt Gingrich; foe of Social Security and Medicare Ron Paul; nutball Michele Bachmann; and a trio of two-percenters: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels and Rick Santorum, of whom former Senator Bob Kerrey once memorably said, “Santorum? Is that the Latin for asshole?” These are not impressive or even endearing candidates, except for Paul on account of his anti-war/anti-Fed stance.) It’s hard to imagine any of them offering a credible challenge to as adaptable and opportunistic a candidate as Obama, who has just assigned the man once regarded as a credible Republican presidential candidate, General David Petraeus, as head of the CIA, thus taking him off the political chessboard, at least so far as 2012 is concerned. It seems the man on the Fox Biz Channel auditioning to take Beck’s place spent an hour on Wednesday going over the flaws in the birth certificate. Gingrich said Thursday the whole thing remains fishy. They can’t let go – at least until cognitive dissonance blows a tire in the early primaries. Our Latest Newsletter In the latest edition of our newsletter Guy Rundle lays out in fascinating detail exactly how Julian Assange got trashed by the newspaper he propelled to world fame and fortune with the Wikileaks files – the Guardian. It was the Guardian that took the file on the sex investigations by the Swedish police against Assange and gave to the English-speaking world a version that was prejudicial to Assange and deeply damaging. What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen actually allege? Read the specifics and the distortions. The western press endlessly touts the rivalry between Putin and Medvedev. It’s a running burlesque. But what is really going on in Russia? What forces are really in contention? In a highly informed report, Israel Shamir lays out the basic conflicts, in which Russia’s president and prime minister are effectively on one side, against the real Russian opposition. Finally, Larry Portis reports from France on the rise of Marine Le Pen and traces the evolution of the French right and the collapse of the French left, pending the upcoming elections in 2012. Is a form of fascism looming? Or a more complex evolution of populism amid the discrediting of the traditional right and left? Three brilliant reports. Where else but in our subscriber-only newsletter? And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate, I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St. Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA), and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.” Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.
Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch The Sex Smears Against Julian Assange What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen really claim he did? Read Guy Rundle’s dissection of how the Guardian stitched up the man who gave them Wikileaks. PLUS Israel Shamir on Russia’s real political divisions, beyond the Putin/Medvedev burlesque peddled by the western press PLUS Larry Portis on the rise of Marine Le Pen. Is fascism looming in France? 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!
Recent Print Issues, Still Available for Purchase "Follow the Money" A brilliant, extended account by Andrew Cockburn of what, in terms of Pentagon spending, the Cold War was really about, and what has happened to military spending between the end of the Cold War and today. ALSO a marvelous report from Andrea Peacock on the battle over Badger-Two Medicine in Montana, sacred to the Blackfeet Indians and the target of oil companies.
Why the Entire Nuclear Industry is Insane, Will Parrish on Obama’s boost for nukes WHILE Fukushima was in meltdown, and how US “Atoms for Peace” helped birth Japan’s nuke program; while back in US homeland “let them eat plutonium” mindset has maimed and killed for 70 years and will go on doing so till it’s stopped dead in its tracks PLUS Shaukat Qadir on why Davis was in Pakistan in the first place PLUS Larry Portis on how much the French loathe Sarkozy.
The Great Upsurge Esam al-Amin and Vijay Prashad on the rebellions that have already changed the world. PLUS Shaukat Qadir on how the US hopes to quit Afghanistan. PLUS Andrew Levine on labor’s stand in Madison Wisconsin. 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!
The Empire Trips Up How “putting Israel first” led US into blindness about Egypt. Kathy Christison reviews Wiki-cables exclusive to CounterPunch PLUS Stan Cox on mass death on the high seas as shipping owners send seamen to their deaths in floating coffins PLUS Larry Portis on sociocide – a better term than genocide. 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!
Wikileaks on Gaza Read US State Department cables from the Wikileak trove, previously unpublished anywhere! They concern Israel’s onslaught on Gaza a year ago and the advice the US was giving Israelis on how to justify their war crimes. Kathy Christison guides us through these nauseating secret dispatches. Tunisia …Egypt … Alexander Cockburn on Tremors in the Empire; Carl Ginsburg on record U.S. corporate profits; Larry Portis on how a 93-year old Frenchman is rekindling the spirit of ’68. 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!
"Ending US-Sponsored Torture Forever" Joann Wypijewski reports on the growth of the U.S. torture archipelago and on the church-led campaign led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) which is striking a spark amid the darkness. Also in this latest newsletter, Diana Johnstone explores the one of the sinister monuments of the Clinton years: Kosovo, whose gangster premier runs a criminal enterprise which has murdered Serbian prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market. 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!
Recent Print Issues, Still Available for Purchase
Is the Next Great Awakening at Hand? The First Great Awakening led after many years to the American and Jeffersonian Revolutions. The Second Great Awakening led, after many years, to the Civil War and Abolition. The Third Great Awakening led, after setbacks, to the Populist and then Progressive Movements. The Fourth Great Awakening led to the New Deal The Fifth Great Awakening led to the second Reconstruction, the Great Society, Feminism, and social upheavals. Is The Sixth Great Awakening now due? What quarter will it come from? Read Mason Gaffney’s extraordinary history and predictions. Order Past Editions of CounterPunch in "Sample Issues"
The Hidden History of Animal Resistance Don’t miss Jeffrey St Clair’s riveting account of how animals fight back against cruelty and exploitation. This is history written from the end of the bear’s chain, from inside the tiger’s cage, from the depths of the orca tank. Read too the forgotten sagas of medieval animal trials, where non-human species were given rights, their consciousness acknowledged. Also in this exciting new newsletter, Larry Portis on why Sarkozy is getting away with it. Order Past Editions of CounterPunch in "Sample Issues"
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! By Andrea Peacock
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Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Click Here to Buy! RED STATE REBELS: Edited by Buy End Times Now! of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy AMERICAN BOOK AWARD! The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Grand Theft Pentagon Spell Albuquerque:
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Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed |