Today's Stories

July 3-5, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Wall Street White House

Nikolas Kozloff
Spinning the Honduran Coup

Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
Lost in Patagonia

Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

Brian Tokar
Climate Bill: Cap(italize) and Trade(Off)

Dan Bacher
Panama Canal North?

Website of the Day
Scheuer on Immigration: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

July 1, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Iran and Us

Alberto Vallente Thorensen
Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal

Paul Craig Roberts
Pirates of the Mediterranean

Robert Weissman
150 Years

Manuel García, Jr.
The New Crisis in Aviation

Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
Honduras, a Coup With No Future

Norman Solomon
The NYT and Troop Deaths: Abstract Quality Journalism

Franklin Lamb
Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk

Martha Rosenberg
When Doctors Boo

Diane Rejman
Mothers and Military Lies

Website of the Day
The Color of the Race Problem is White

June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Debt Deflation Arrives

Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

Benjamin Dangl
Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

Todd Gordon
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

Kenneth Libby
Conditions for Citizenship

Julian Vigo
Feeling Michael Jackson

Website of the Day
Inside the Mega-Churches

June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

James G. Abourezk
Where the Money Isn't Going

Ralph Nader
The Holes in Obama's Financial Regulation Plan

Carol Miller
Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Greg Moses
Jobs First

Website of the Day
Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

Nadia Hijab
The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
Nothing

Farzana Versey
The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
You Provide the Tweets, We'll Provide the Info War: the Media and the Iranian Protests

Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
Bill Quigley
"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
Haiti's Elections: "Beat the Dog Too Hard"

Website of the Day
Worst Slide Story

June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

Dean Baker
Making Financial Regulation Work

Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
Ray McGovern
Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
Jean Casella
Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

Gary Leupp
Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

Website of the Day
The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

Website of the Day
The Most Spied Upon Town in America?

June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

Website of the Weekend
Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

June 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Case of Netanyahu and the Curious Incident

Robert Sandels /
Nelson P. Valdes
U.S. Cuba Policy: a Case of Post-Diplomatic Strees Disorder

Anthony DiMaggio
The Iranian Elections and the Faith-Based Media

Robert Weissman
Obama's Financial Sector Reform Plan: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Joshua Frank
These Are Obama's Wars Now

Jonathan Cook
Canadian Ambassador Honored in Illegal Park Built on Razed Palestinian Homes

Reza Fiyouzat
Iranians in the Streets

Norman Solomon
Obama and the Antiwar Democrats

Ali Jawad
Reformists are Islamists, Too

James Ridgeway
Am I on Crack When It Comes to Flight 447?

Website of the Day
The Death of the Ghost Prisoner

June 17, 2009

Carl Boggs
Torture: an American Legacy

Dr. Bryant Welch
Torture, Psychology and Sen. Daniel Inouye: the True Story Behind Psychology's Role in Torture?

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Obama Will Outspend Reagan on Defense

Liaquat Ali Khan
Obama's Gift to Pakistan: a Civil War

Jonathan Cook
Beating and Torturing Children

Binoy Kampmark
Gordon Brown's War Inquiry

Karim Makdisi
The Lebanese Elections: a Box Office Success?

Dave Lindorff
Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black

David Swanson
In Congress: 32 Heroes, 21 Frauds

Gene Marx
How Fox News is Helping to Nationalize the GI Sanctuary Movement

Website of the Day
The Diamond Mine That Ate Mirny

June 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Looming Peril: a Plague of Snakes

John Ross
Undermining Mexico

Afshin Rattansi
Guarding the Revolution

Marc Levy
How I Nearly Won the War

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Behzad Yaghmaian
Iranian Youth Make History

Brian M. Downing
Democracy in Iran

Merle Lefkoff
Israel's Angels in America

David Macaray
Charles Manson and Me

Robert Jensen
Finding a Stubborn Hope to Live in a Dead Culture

David Swanson
An Exit Strategy That Keeps Wars Going

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament Fundraiser

June 15, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iranian Elections: Sure They Stole It...Up Front and Honestly

Patrick Cockburn
A Whole New Ballgame in Iraq

James Ridgeway
Did Composite Parts Bring Down Air France Flight 447?

Marjorie Cohn
Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam

Rannie Amiri
Iran and the End of the "Obama Effect" Myth

Dave Lindorff
How Obama is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Elections and the Hysterical Media

Leonard Schwartz
The Angel of History and the Ghetto of Gaza

Martha Rosenberg
Start Your Engines, Drug Reps!

Website of the Day
Single-Payer v. Public Option

June 12-14, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?

Gareth Porter
The CIA's Drone Wars

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Parlor Trick

Mark Ames
Elmer Fudd Nation

Esam Al-Amin
What Really Happened in the Lebanese Elections?

Franklin Lamb
Carter in Lebanon

Patrick Cockburn
Prisoner Swap in Iraq

Andy Worthington
The Long Ordeal of Mohammed El-Gharani

Heather Gray
A New Perspective on the Confederacy: Southern Greed During the Civil War

Felice Pace
Why NPR Refuses to Report on the Single Payer Movement

Ron Jacobs
Flashback to the End of a War That Really Did End

George Wuerthner
Burning Questions: Why the National Fire Plan is a Trojan Horse for Logging

Jeffrey Buchanan /
Trinh Le
Biloxi Trailer Blues

David Ker Thomson
Americana

Renaud Lambert
Brazil: More Dependent Than Ever

Kevin Zeese
Congress and the Health Business Lobby

David Macaray
SAG Vote: A Lesson in Solidarity ... Not

Evelyn Pringle
FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers

Chris Genovali
Blood Sport Auction: Why eBay Should Stop Selling Guided Hunts for Bears, Wolves and Cougar

David Michael Green
The Rhetorical President

Brian J. Foley
Our Solar System is Not a Suicide Pact!

Charles R. Larson
No Safe Return

Kim Nicolini
Foreclosure is Hell: Sam Raimi's Frightfest

David Yearsley
Bach on Torture: Mr. Cheney, They're Playing Your Song

Lorenzo Wolff
Intent to Discord

Poets' Basement
Chris Jordan

Website of the Weekend
The Red Room

June 11, 2009

Kathy Kelly /
Dan Pearson
Down and Out in Shah Mansoor: With the Swat Refugees

James Bovard
The Latest Torture Cover-Up Scam

Tristan de Bourbon
The Toy Makers of Chenghai: the Financial Crisis Seen From China

Dave Lindorff
The Wheels are Coming Off the Recovery Program

Kevin Zeese
The Case for Disbarment of the Torture Lawyers

Ralph Nader
The Craft of Sam Maloof: a Visionary Woodworker

Harvey Wasserman
The GOP's Trillion Dollar Reactor Plan Goes Radioactive

Nicole Colson
The Anti-Abortion Movement's Climate of Violence

Mark Weisbrot
Showdown Over the IMF

Dan Bacher
Big Water's Big Lie Unravels

Website of the Day
Top 10 Most Absurd TIME Covers

June 10, 2009

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Obama's Doublespeak on Iran

Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine
The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib

Kathy Kelly
Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Fear Rules

Rev. William E. Alberts
First the Torture of Truth ...

Peter Lee
Obama and North Korea: a Warm-Up in the Offing?

Carol Miller
Why We Need a Holistic, Cradle-to-the-Grave National Health Care System

Emily Ratner
Dreams of Flight in Gaza

Robert Weissman
The IMF's Accountability Moment

Dave Lindorff
The Sutra of the Crushed Volvo

Website of the Day
Starving in Gitmo

June 9, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Back From the Dead: Pentagon Pork!

Mike Whitney
Is Hyper-Inflation Around the Corner?

Stan Cox
Biofuel's Drug Problem

Sibel Edmonds
The Battle Against the State Secrets Privilege

Jonathan Cook
Where the Victim is the Guilty Party

David Macaray
A Bad Time for Unions

Robert Jensen
In South Africa, Apartheid is Dead, But White Supremacy Lingers On

Nadia Hijab
The Obama Difference

Mark Weisbrot
Vulture Funds Descend on Argentina

Website of the Day
Waging Non-Violence

June 8, 2009

John Ross
Mexico: Politics as Drugs / Drugs as Politics

Paul Wright
Deconstructing Gus: How a Former Prisoner Took On and Took Down Corrections Corporation of America's Top Lawyer (and Cheney Pal)

Paul Craig Roberts
Long-Term Economic Memory Loss

Franklin C. Spinney
"Natural Growth:" Israel's Demographic Hogwash

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon's Elections: Return to the Status Quo

Uri Avnery
The Tone and the Music

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Loyalty Oaths

Eric Toussaint
/ Damien Millet
The Partisans of Capitalism Have Lost All Credibility

Jim Goodman
The Dairy Oligarchy

Norman Solomon
Words and War

Reza Fiyouzat
When Accusations Fly: the Spectacle of the Iranian Elections

Website of the Day
Latino Jobless Rate Soars

June 5 -7, 200

Alexander Cockburn
High Words, Low Truths

George Galloway
Our Convoy to Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama in Cairo

Jennifer Loewenstein
How Much Really Separates Obama and Netanyahu?

Franklin Lamb
Watching Obama's Speech in Lebanon

Mike Whitney
The Biggest Rip Off Ever?

Andy Worthington
Death at Guantánamo

Missy Comley Beattie
Peace Be Upon You?

Farzana Versey
Walk Like an Egyptian: the Oprahfication of Obama

Stanley Heller
Obama's Non-Starter

John V. Whitbeck
Nothing Comes From Nothing

Robert Weissman
GM: the Path Not Taken

Lee Sustar
The Fall of GM: Why Workers Will Pay the Price

Dave Lindorff
What a State-Run GM Could Do

William Blum
The Great, International, Truly Demonic Iran Threat

Ernest Callenbach /
Harvey Wasserman
A Green-Powered Trip Through Ecotopia

Greg Moses
By George! Austin Leads the National Recovery

Ron Jacobs
The Meaning of Yasser Arafat

David Yearsley
Art Set in Concrete:
the Desolate Urban Landscape of High Culture

Tim Stelloh
Pot Home Invasions: Bud and Blow Torches

Belén Fernández
The Joksters: Obama and Thomas Friedman

David Ker Thomson
The Academics

Karyn Strickler
Clean Coal: a Dirty Joke

Christopher Brauchli
Judicial Amnesia and the Federalist Society

Charles R. Larson
Leaving Tangier: Exile and Exploitation

Kim Nicolini
"Hunger:" Art With a Punch

Lorenzo Wolff
Good Head (Or Why the End of Hand-Crafted Music Isn't (Necessarily) the End of Music)

Poets' Basement
Jenkins, Orloski and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Tankman

Weekend Edition
July 3-5, 2009

Tony Scott's "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3"

The System That Hijacked New York

By KIM NICOLINI

I really wanted to see Tony Scott’s take on The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 not because I had any expectations of it being a great movie but because his movies are so interesting visually. I wanted to see the spectacle of Scott’s vision in relation to the hijacking of a subway train in Post 9-11 New York. Scott’s movies tend to be visually excessive and totally frenetic, and Taking of Pelham exploits Scott’s excessive tendencies to maximum effect. Sure, the movie is no masterpiece. It’s a mega Hollywood production which stars two big Hollywood honchos – Denzel Washington as a New York subway dispatcher and John Travolta as the bad guy hijacker. Interestingly, though it features superstars Washington and Travolta, the individual characters in this film are largely subverted by the visual insanity which dominates the screen. Systems of information, technology, communication, and emergency response splatter the the movie in all their colorful, frenetic, urgent glory while a handful of characters battle out the crisis situation at hand. Because the movie is dominated by visuals and the characters are reduced to minimalist caricatures, I had to work especially hard to excavate meaning from this film. Nothing is on the surface other than the hysterics of the moment of crisis. Indeed, that is what ends up being the point of the film to a large degree. In a Post 9-11 culture of paranoia and Emergency Response, individual humanity is forfeited, and people are reduced to ideologies. The individual has been subverted to the system (e.g. the “war on terror”), and to try to get back to the individual, you have to dig through the layers of ideology that have been dumped on this country. People are “blue” or “red.” They’re “pro-life” or “fetus murderers.” They’re “gay” or they uphold “God’s contract of marriage.” They are patriots or terrorists. They are NRA gun-toting conservatives or tree-hugging liberals. But where are the individual people? I’ll tell you where they are. Hijacked on a subway in New York!

Systems are what dominate Scott’s film because systems are what dominate our culture. Well over half the film is focused on systems in response. One of the major stars of the film is the vast control room of the Municipal Transit Authority with its banks and banks of computerized grids mapping the trains networking their way through New York. The movie screen is filled with computer screens with its digital grids, red and blue and green lines, its arrows and matrixes. Systems of communication are delivered via green and blue buttons and laptop computer screens. Even on the hijacked subway, Ryder, the hijacker, hacks into a wireless network, and images of the Dow and news coverage of the hijacked train dominate the control car of the train. Swat teams and police cars swarm across the screen like a seething singular apparatus divorced from any relation to humanity. Sirens, orange vests, and caution tape weave their way through the screen entangling everything in the frenetic urgency of systems in emergency response. In between, a few characters navigate their way through the crisis.

Because Tony Scott’s vision is so frenetic and so saturated with mind-boggling images that are not human, he forces us to excavate meaning from the few human glimpses we are given. The humans are basically the dispatcher Garber, the hijacker Ryder, the hostage negotiator Camonetti, the mayor (no name), and ultimately the people who ride the subway. Garber is the central focus and ultimately the “hero” of the film, but we are only really able to understand him through Ryder, the bad guy hijacker. Garber is a dispatcher who we learn has been demoted from a more prestigious position within the Transit Authority because he was accused of taking a bribe. In other words, he is accused of being corrupt. Garber does ultimately end up being the hero of the film, but why he is a hero can only be defined in relation to Ryder, the hijacker. Through their negotiations, Ryder actually forces Garber to confess to his crime of accepting the bribe and therefore to become more human and accessible. Through Ryder’s interrogation of Garber, we learn that he accepted the bribe, that he used it to pay his kids’ college tuition, and that his wife reluctantly accepted the crime. As Garber confesses to us the audience and to Ryder, we feel his human spirit freed in almost a religious epiphany (playing on the Catholic trope in the film). But, in the end, it is not God that needs to be embraced in this tale of redemption. Instead, it is the evil of the market that needs to be renounced. Indeed, it is through Ryder that Garber “comes clean,” and the final act of redemption is most meaningful in how it relates to Ryder’s crime, which I will explain shortly.

While Ryder brings out the human side of Garber, Garber fails to bring out the human side of Ryder. Garber and Camonetti try to reach Ryder’s human conscience and negotiate with him to free the hostages, or at least not kill them. As our focus shifts to Ryder, we want to understand him as a human; we want to understand his human motive for the crime. But Ryder confuses us. He’s difficult to place demographically. He is tattooed and Catholic, but we are unable to place him on the continuum of humanity or of class. Something about him rings false. His exterior presence and his interior affect don’t mix. When Garber and Camonetti try to reach Ryder’s human conscience and negotiate with him, it doesn’t work. Ryder cold-bloodedly kills passengers on the train. We eventually learn that Ryder represents the corrupt forces of the market in which individual lives are disposable for the profit of the few in control of the market. We learn that Ryder owned an equity firm in New York that was responsible for robbing the pension fund of city workers (e.g. cannibalizing the working class), and his entire motivation for hijacking the train is to manipulate the market so he can make a mind-boggling profit (turning $2 million into $300 million). In other words, Ryder is a symbol of the market and how it preys upon working class people. Ryder cannot be placed on the human continuum, and his conscience cannot be reached because he is not human. He is the corrupt forces of the market, and the market has no conscience. Camonetti’s character represents the system of communicating through emotional response, but that system fails with Ryder because the market doesn’t have emotion, just greed. Garber’s heroic deed of killing Ryder is also an act of killing the greed and corruption within himself. Ultimately, Garber has to kill the market to redeem himself and reconcile with the part of himself that became economically corrupt. That is his true act of heroism.

In regards to the subway setting, the subway is the system that moves workers; it is the commute system, and it employs people in working class jobs. Also, the subway shows people in motion and existing with lives and destinations below the insane grid of Emergency Response Culture that dominates the surface of Post 9-11 New York (and subsequently America). The fact that the subway is below ground reveals humanity in existence below the surface of all the systems of ideology that dominate our existence in the culture of fear and control. The people on the subway are actual individuals – a young man communicating with his girlfriend, a business man who needs to urinate (a basic bodily function), a mother and her child, a war veteran. Also, the movie was actually filmed on location in the New York City subway system. Even the stage sets were constructed in Queens, so Scott actually kept jobs in New York rather than outsourcing labor to Canada like so many Hollywood movies. In other words, the production of his film honors its political sentiments.

In regards to the glimpses of real human individuals in this film, that is one of the beautifully executed undercurrents. The film shows how individuals have been subverted by the system and have themselves become cogs in the system, but then it also shows how the cogs are still human and how desperately we need to free ourselves from that homogenous system of fear that wants to strip us of our individual identities. As we watch the frenetic insanity of the film unfold, we ache for those little human moments in the vast suffocating network of Emergency Response Culture. There is one particularly moving scene when Garber and his wife talk on the phone, and she tells him to bring home some milk when he’s done with his work (e.g. freeing hostages). The scene is moving because we are able to see that, regardless of all this insane superstructure of emergency response, underneath there are real human beings who still need a gallon of milk brought home.

All these human elements are done very minimally. The large majority of the movie is visually frenetic and absent of individual humans. Whether cop cars rushing through the city, guys in riot gear storming through the subway tunnels, or the vast communication network dominating the control tower of the subway, individual humans are largely subverted by systems. Inside all of this insanity, the American flag is emblazoned everywhere. On vehicles, buildings, suit lapels, shields, and windows, the symbol of the flag is an ever present reminder that this is Post 9-11 Crisis Culture. When individuals do rise out of this fray, we grab onto them like lifeboats keeping us afloat before the system swallows us. In one scene on the train, the mother of the boy asks a young black man if he has a plan to get the hostages out of there. He asks, “Why? Because I’m a black man?” She points to a ring on his finger that says “airborne” and says that it’s because of her ring and that her husband had one of those. In this small exchange, we are reminded of the human loss (the invisible soldiers and men who die) in the culture of the War on Terror. In another small moment that is ultimately huge, one of the S.W.AT. soldiers crouches in the tunnel with his gun trained on one of the hijackers. He is part of the enforcement system and as such is beholden to its laws and orders. He is instructed not to shoot the hijacker; however, when a rat crawls up his pant leg, he startles, accidentally fires, and kills the hijacker. In that one brief moment, his individual identity as a human (a man who is startled by a rat) rises to the surface of the system (the S.W.A.T. unit) and all hell breaks loose. Both these scenes show people who have become systems (military, police) but whose individual identity still exists below the surface of the Ideology of Terror. The individual doesn’t always rise from the system, however. Another example of how the individual becomes the system is in an insanely frenetic scene when cops in cars and on motorcycles speed across the city attempting to deliver the ransom money. Humans and vehicles become one, all part of the same mechanized response system. Cars crash and are left by the wayside. In one scene, a car drives off a bridge, crashes to the ground, rolls and crushes the drivers. Two motorcycle cops force open the door and grab the suitcases of money leaving the bloody injured cops to die. They are no longer humans. They are just cogs in the wheel of the Emergency Response system.

What is Scott telling us with this movie? Perhaps he is showing us how New York, and ultimately America, has been hijacked from the everyday people who ride the trains by a system that breeds paranoia and promotes the corrupt market. Underneath the spectacle of terror and the devastation of market corruption, there are still everyday people who need to get from Point A to Point B and who rely on the subway to reach their destination. Maybe it’s time to put the train back into our own control? Whatever Scott is saying, the film certainly is timely and has enough meat to make it worth thinking about. Also, Tony Scott's visually frenetic systems sure look gorgeous on the big screen.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her daughter and a menagerie of beasts. She works a day job to support her art and culture habits. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont