Today's Stories

May 1 - 3, 2009

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May Day Weekend Edition
May 1 - 3, 2009

The Promise of Collective Action

The Key to the Bastille

By PETER LINEBAUGH

On May Day, 1790, Tom Paine wrote George Washington.  “Our very good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has intrusted to my care the key of the Bastille, and a drawing handsomely framed representing the demolition of that detestable prison.” 

The Bastille towered over the Faubourg St. Antoine.  Its walls were one hundred feet high, ten feet thick at the top and thirty to forty feet thick at the base.   The monstrous building functioned as an arsenal, a prison, and a fortress guarding the east of Paris from invasion from without and rebellion from within.

“I feel myself happy,” Paine continued, “in being the person through whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe….”  Tom Paine was the pamphleteer and citizen-soldier of the American Revolution fifteen years earlier.  France helped pay for the American victory and in the process nearly bankrupted its own oppressive, super-exploitative regime which was now facing revolution.  This was the ripe fruit Paine referred to. 

What were those principles, those ‘American principles’?  At the time of Paine’s May Day gift France had already passed the Declaration of Man and the Citizen in which popular sovereignty and human equality were leading principles.  At the same time in the U.S.A. the Bill of Rights had been proposed and was being debated prior to ratification.  Here liberty of conscience, freedom of expression, and the right of assembly were recognized, and we see them as sequential steps in the revolutionary actualization of the will of the people: to think, to talk, to listen were the essential accompaniments to action.

“That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not to be doubted; and therefore the key comes to the right place.”  Oh, but we are full of doubt now.  America incarcerates more people than any other nation in the global carceral archipelago.  Bahgram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, these are America’s modern Bastilles cast around the world.  Meanwhile, in the “homeland” the prisons, penitentiaries, and jails of such rapid expansion have been joined by immigrant detention facilities, super-maxes, and correctional facilities. The immigrant detention facilities hidden and widespread make Ellis Island appear commodious. Today the key rests uselessly in a glass enclosed gilded container at Mount Vernon.   They bring democracy and build prisons.  They speak of government of, by, and for the people and then hide behind state secrets.  They practice torture and call it intelligence.  Blood-curdling casuists sit on the Federal Appeals Bench.  John

Berger has written, “The present period of history is one of the Wall….  The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War.”

But, hope has made his appearance.  Optimists see in chink in the wall.  Obama has ordered that Guantánamo be closed.  The CIA director has ordered that extraordinary renditions to prisons elsewhere in the world be ended.  Yet the Wall continues to snake its way against Mexico, to divide nations, to rupture Palestine.  The anti-communists croon with satisfaction because “Mr Gorbachev brought down that wall” and then silently acquiesce in the construction of walls all over.  The prisons are welcomed because they bring jobs.  The prisons rise while the schools fall.  In the schools sport, theatre, and music are shut down first; play, song, and make-believe are banished.   Parents no longer can smile as the little ones in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream romp about as the ‘rude mechanicals’:  Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor, and the immortal Bottom the Weaver making a chink in the Wall for the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe.  (The tragic story of these lovers originated in Babylon, Mesopotamia.)

Tom Paine’s May Day gift to George Washington is on display in the central passageway at the first President’s slave plantation, Mount Vernon on the Potomac River.  Let us demand the release of the political prisoners, the victims of repression from the past, the victims of the Green Scare. Let us renew the discussion: who is a political prisoner?  itself a sign of well-being. I commute to Toledo from Michigan on route 23 I pass daily several prisons, the razor wire glistening in the sun, never a sign of life.  An unpunctuated sign on the highway warns me, “Prison Area Do Not Pick Up Hitchikers.”  Never have I heard of anyone escaping, and never for that matter have I seen a hitchiker, there or anywhere else, along the fifty mile stretch to work.  Yet, the authors of the sign came from an era when both were possible. Who inhabits these lock-ups?  What transpires inside them?

“I have not the least doubt of the final and complete success of the French Revolution.  Little ebbings and flowings, for and against, the natural companions of revolutions, sometimes appear, but the full current of it is, in my opinion, as fixed as the Gulf Stream,” Paine informed Washington.  Indeed, that eastern current conveyed the news of slave risings.

In the spring of 1790 Tom Paine was busy with his invention, a single-spanned iron bridge.  He hoped it would span the Schukyl (Philadelphia), now the Thames (London), later the Seine (Paris).  He lets George Washington know that in the partition in the box containing the key of the Bastille he has placed half a dozen razors “manufactured from cast-steel made at the works where the bridge was constructed.”  Paine, an artisan, was always interested in the materiality of things.  His interest in the substance of things can easily be overlooked as we are generally moved by the force of his ideals.  Just as the gift of razors necessary for that smooth visage of the president of the republic suggests a mundane familiarity, so Tom Paine had once been close to revolutionary power, a whisker away so to speak.

What was the Bastille actually? A gigantic heap of stones. The people of Paris marched upon it particularly in order to obtain gunpowder but of course there were other reasons.  “The stones are saturated with three hundred years of pain,” said Camille Desmoulins one of its assailants.  Voltaire was imprisoned there, and the Marquis de Sade.  “You don’t have a trial.  Just a letter from the king and bang, the doors slam.  Goodbye.” That’s the lettre de cachet in the imaginative paraphrase in Marge Piercy’s novel of the French Revolution. 

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies,” said the Victorian historian, Thomas Carlyle, and to emphasize it he capitalized the spelling of the occupations of its anonymous members.  Women were most active, then and now.  Here is Carlyle, “Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua-makers, assiduous, risen with the dawn, ancient Virginity tripping to matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go.  Rouse ye, O women; the laggard men will not act; they say, we ourselves may act.”  And it seems to have been so.  Jules Michelet offers the story of Madam Legros. described and honored as the poor mercer who lived by her sewing, whose husband was a Latin teacher, and whose dogged tenacity over the years on behalf of a single prisoner in the Bastille prefigured the revolutionary journée we celebrate in July. Ruth Gilmore, Alice Lynd, Angela Davis, play the part of Mme. Legros,

An essential part of Rights of Man is the story of the storming of the Bastille and Edmund Burke’s writing “as if he were sorry it is pulled down, and wished it were built up again.”  This has been the lament of conservatives ever since.  People for whom the solution to social oppression is to incarcerate the oppressed, the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key brigade. 

“The downfall of it included the idea of the downfall of Despotism; and this compounded image has become as figuratively united as Bunyan’s Doubting Castle and giant Despair.”  In Rights of Man Paine explains the compound, how and why the Bastille was united with Despotism.  It is one of his most brilliant insights, and it quickly took fire igniting revolutionary aspirations all over the globe.

John Bunyan wrote an allegory of a ragged poor man, Pilgrim’s Progress, in 1678, at the time of the construction of the fiscal state and the British commercial empire.  Christian was his name and with a companion of the road named Hope they fell asleep exhausted in a field.  Awakened in the morning by the Giant Despair he informed them that they were trespassing on the grounds of Doubting Castle.  He beat them with his cudgel and dragged them to his dungeon.  Bang, the doors slam, goodbye.  It is the story in the U.S.A., certainly at the Big Luke, the Ohio slammer at Lucasville.

Despair’s wife was named Diffidence.  And they advised the pilgrims bereft of food, water, or warmth that it would be best if they put an end to themselves by knife, rope, or poison.  Unable to assist them in this because a ray of sunlight appeared causing Despair to fall into fits, the two pilgrims were left to their misery and discussion of the proposal of Despair.  Hope reminds Christian “that all the law is not in the hand of Giant Despair.” Diffidence says she fears that “they live in hope that some will come to relieve them, or that they have pick-locks about them; by the means of which they hope to escape.”  Despair promises to search them in the morning.  Meanwhile, Christian suddenly remembers something.  He exclaims “I have a Key in my bosom, called Promise that will open any Lock in Doubting Castle.”  So they go about it, opening the doors, and off to the Delectable Mountains.

Bunyan drew on a suppressed popular culture of song, fairy stories, colloquial sayings, and children’s poems.  This dissenting culture has travelled the world too, playing an active role in the anti-imperialist cultures of the third world.  Among the Taiping rebels in China during the 1850s Pilgrim’s Progress was the ‘little red book.’  In Africa Pilgrim’s Progress was adapted to anti-colonial, anti-racist purposes. 

By comparing the Bastille to Doubting Castle and by comparing the Giant Despair to the monarchs of France Paine of course was expanding the freedom that was unlocked from the prison to the promise that overcomes despair. For many readers being homeless and sleeping in a field was widespread then, a time of expropriation, as it is now with the disruptions of war, globalization, and foreclosures.  For others both despair and diffidence can be incapacitating, disabling.  The Protestant moralism of Bunyan can be translated into other terms precisely because he is writing from below describing a reality.  He spent twelve years in prison.  Despair and diffidence are interiorizations of despotism.  The structures of our society produce both: the rebel who ‘goes against’ but meets defeat is offered despair, while diffidence is the survival mode for those who ‘get along and go along’.  Despair is for the unemployed, diffidence is for the employed.  This  is why schools close and prisons expand.  

As for the allegorical interpretation of the Doubting Castle it corresponds to the total ideological infrastructure that denies active historical agency to the exploited and oppressed.   Action, we know, precedes knowledge.  Forms of diffidence and despair flourish in the Ivory Tower where the ideological infrastructures of ignorance are laid down, brick by brick, agnotology as Iain Boal names it, or the science of ignorance.

Tom Paine came out of this dissenting, non-conformist culture of English Protestantism, though he was by no means fixed in it.  Individual progress was not his theme; it was collective or it was nothing.   

“Narrative is linear, Action is solid,” is the dictum from Carlyle, the historian, and Carlyle the admirer of the French revolution.  Surely, here is our key, our promise:  it is collective and it is action.  ¡Si se puede! in deed. 

In the gift shop at Mount Vernon you can buy a key chain with replica of the key that opened the Bastille for $10.95.  It is cheap.  If Paine is right that the principles of the American Revolution opened the doors of the prison and crumbled its walls, then the key and its Promise might still remind us of our work - the abolition of slavery, health care for all, open borders, the abolition of prisons.

SOME BOOKS

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear (2007)

Jamie Bissonette et al, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition (2008)

John Bunyan, Pilgrims Progress (1678)

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837)

Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)

George Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, translated by R.R. Palmer (1947)

Staughton Lynd, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (2004)

Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, translated by Charles Cocks and edited by Gordon Wright (1967)

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part one (1791)

Marge Piercy, City of Darkness, City of Light (1996)

George Rudé, The Crowd in History 1730-1848 (1964)

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com

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