Today's Stories

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be "Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U.S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N.D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on "Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

June 30, 2008

Peter Lee
Did a Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges?

Jeff Sommers
Burying the Bloody Shirt; A New Age for Latvia Dawns? "Astatu Loskutovu!"

David Macaray
The AFL-CIO Votes to Endorse Obama

Martha Rosenberg
Sex Work is Different from Sex Slavery, aver Carnal Toilers

David Price
Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality

Alexandra Early
Report from El Salvador: Why They All Keep Coming

June 28 / 29, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Guess What "Surprise" Republicans Yearn For

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nike's Bad Air

Joan P. Mencher
The Human Right to Eat

Nikolas Kozloff
Nader, Obama and White Talk

Jason Hribal
Tillie, Elephants and the Zoo

Alan Maass
Obama Swerves Right

Robert Fantina
Iraq and the New York Times

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
It Was Oil, All Along

Mike Whitney
A Glimmer of Light in Television Wasteland

Justin E. H. Smith
Collective Guilt and the Fate of Kosovo

Pham Binh
The Mendacity of Hope

David Yearsley
The Rest is Noise

Christopher Ketcham
19 Aphorisms

Jeremy R. Hammond
Bush and the Press vs. the Constitution

Kathleen M. Barry
An Open Letter to Barney Frank on Israel

Walter Brasch
Politics and Animal Cruelty in Pennsylvania

Brett Drugge
A Field Trip to the Reagan Library

Susie Day
Sex Sans the City

Website of the Day
How to Expose a Hypocritcal Politician

June 27, 2008

Franklin C. Spinney
The Defense Reform Trap

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Encaging of Gaza

Brian Cloughley
Chaos in Afghanistan

Saree Makdisi
Occupation by Bureaucracy

Liliana Segura
Reactionary Change: Obama and the Death Penalty

Paul Krassner
Remembering George Carlin

William S. Lind
The War and the Yellow Press

Candace Cohn
Embracing Big Brother

Ron Jacobs
What's a Voter to Do?

Binoy Kampmark
Beached in Chile

Website of the Day
Zoom Uganda

June 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Who's Actually Winning in Iraq?

Nikolas Kozloff
Kinder and Gentler Assassination Techniques? Obama Waffles on School of the Americas

William P. O'Connor
The Drone of Experts

Saul Landau
McClellan's Mini Mea Culpa

Ashley Smith
Which Way Forward for the Antiwar Movement?

Dave Lindorff
Our Kids and Their Kids: Terrorists or Victims?

David Macaray
A Brief History of Union Negotiations

Binoy Kampmark
Warming Seats at the Hague: John Howard and War Crimes

Matt Reichel
There's No Hope at the Ballot Box

Remi Kenazi
You Don't Mess With the Racism!

Website of the Day
A Movement Afoot in the Heartlands

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Weekend Edition
July 12 / 13, 2008

"Wanted" as Therapy for Surviving 21st Century Global Capitalism

Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

By KIM NICOLINI

I’m sure glad I ignored the critics and went to see Wanted for no other reason other than wanting to see some heads eat some bullets as a little Rage Therapy to purge my various anxieties and stresses from living life under 21st century global capitalism. Indeed, Wanted was everything I wanted it to be. There was absolutely no shortage of bullets penetrating skulls, nor any shortage of ways in which I could Hate the System and vicariously overthrow the powers-that-be by indulging in a little (okay, A LOT) of cinematic violence.

Sure the acting sucks. Angelina Jolie is a skinny freak whose sole acting talent consists of pouting her lips and feigning sultry with her eyes. Yeah she’s an anorexic abomination whose arms are the width of spaghetti, but it was still nice to see a woman wield a gun and kick some ass. I could get over her anorexic non-acting and enjoy watching her wield some automatic weapons.

Morgan Freeman was his usual Morgan Freeman self because Morgan Freeman never plays anyone but Morgan Freeman – the wise old black man sage prophet figure.  Except in this case he proves to be an Evil Old Black Guy, and he says motherfucker once, which is kind of refreshing.

And that other guy? James McAvoy? I understand some people love to hate him, but he’s just filler. He gets the job done in the role he is given and that’s about it. But do you know what? I didn’t give a shit that the acting blows. This is not a movie about stellar acting.

This is a movie about the sentiment (taking some motherfuckers down) and the action (exploding brains, righteous car chases, and crashing trains), and in that regard Wanted delivers the goods. The bad acting washed right over me as I hungrily gobbled up the next sweet action sequence and the next slow motion bullet piercing flesh. And why did I so greedily gobble up the violence in this movie? Because ultimately it is a kind of over-the-top rail against capitalism and in a way (albeit an unrealistic way) a call for violent revolution.

Speaking of “getting the job done,” the job that needs to get done in this movie is freeing ourselves from the yoke of capitalism and the impotence it forces on us. Funny that not a single review I read of this movie refers to the Big C Word, but dang if this movie isn’t about the poor worker bee labor slaves needing to break free from the stranglehold Capitalism has on their lives. It’s all about rising up to take the motherfuckers down with guns and exploding rats.

The movie opens with the worker drone Wesley Gibson sitting in his all-too-realistic cubicle surrounded by stacks of paperwork and drowning in his lowly position of “accounts manager” for some generic suffocating employer. Wesley is the Everyman of the Contemporary Worker touting his motto: “Like everybody else, I just keep waiting for a lotto ticket out of my boring existence and into a life that means something.” Wesley downs his anti-depressants, pushes paper, and feels himself being erased by the system. Wesley speaks to the hordes of worker bees (myself included) who will flock to the multiplex to watch this movie and find, if not solace, at least temporary relief watching Wesley bust out of his pathetic life and take revenge on the very system that is strangling him. By allowing us to identify with Wesley as he assaults the system with bullets and rage, Wanted is a kind of call to revolt. It is a plea to rise up, become an assassin, kick ass and bring the fuckers down, or at least it is a plea to spend two hours of our lives indulging ourselves in what it would feel like to engage in violent revolution. Not that we are all going to pick up a gun and start assassinating greedy evil fuckers in boardrooms, but the movie sure gives us an outlet to live the fantasy. It’s a kind of Rage Relief Program, and participating in the fantasy for a short window of time feels pretty good.

The movie provides us with a kind of Cliff Notes tour through capitalism. It opens in the workplace (the invisible labor of capitalism), then moves to the supermarket (the distributor of goods and mechanism of commerce), and then finally to the industrial factory (the very roots of the capitalist machine). When we discover that the fraternity of assassins (supposedly the good guys) is located within a textile factory, I was a little bothered by this revelation, wondering how this would fit into my Anti-Capitalism read of the movie. How can the very source of capitalist production of labor be the central housing of the “good guys”? Thankfully, the movie does stick with its ideological stance, and the textile factory turns out to be the source of the problem and not the solution. Whew, so my theory held. Indeed, the industrial factory, with human labor woven into its very structure, is where the problem was born, grew out of control, and wrought havoc and murder! Go figure. We won’t talk about how the movie itself is driven and distributed by the very system it critiques or how it is utterly absurd to think that a movie based on a comic book could be a call to revolt.  We work within the confines of the system that binds us, and those confines delivered a movie like Wanted to the big screen.

This is not to say that the movie is overly subversive or revolutionary. It’s more like Therapy for Surviving Capitalism. We watch a movie like this to feel better for a couple of hours, to dump our anxieties, stress, and rage into the action on the screen. I, for one, identified more than I’d like to acknowledge with Wesley’s cubicle and his deficit bank account. When he kicked his work prison in the face and literally told the boss to “go fuck herself,” I was right there with him as was every other “worker bee” in the audience. This movie is a call to bring down all the “bosses” and take control of our own lives. I was right there with every single punch that was thrown, knife stuck in a gut, bullet flying from a gun, and every insane car stunt and train crash. Every act of violence in this movie feels like a straight shot of vicarious freedom, which is a good thing since the entire movie is nothing more than a tapestry of stylized violence. Bullets flying through skulls, rats strapped with explosives, violent Russians swinging dead meat, fists and feet pummeling flesh, hands shredded by factory equipment – the movie slams us scene by scene with a relentless barrage of explosive violence that leaves us feeling orgasmic and invigorated. I say orgasmic because in this movie the violent act is the sexual act. There is not one single sex scene in this movie (thank goodness because I hate Hollywood sex scenes) because this is not a movie about needing intercourse to get our rocks off. It’s about the orgasm of exploding heads. Every time a bullet slowly travels across the screen, enters a skull, and explodes in a spurt of blood and brains, we experience a sweet little death with it. This movie is about getting our jollies in taking revenge on every motherfucker who is pulling our strings, and it feels good.

It feels good because it delivers a tightly orchestrated frenzy of action, violence, special effects and swift editing. Sure, if you can’t see any value in a pure action (with shitty acting), then this isn’t the movie for you. But if you can imagine action itself as being a “living presence” and the star of a film, then Wanted is spectacular. Seriously, this movie has some of the best vehicle crash and chase scenes I’ve seen. The car chase scenes are glorious. When the cars penetrate buildings and trains and each other, we feel the thrust of their vehicular power and gasp with pleasure. And the train crash scene? I don’t care if it’s computer generated. It is awesome, and watching this giant massive transportation vehicle plunge car by creaking car down vastly deep and scary canyon is a sweet experience. So who cares about shitty acting? The cars, the trains, the rats, the guns, the knives, and blood spurting from bodies are the real stars in this movie.

Speaking of sex and trains, I should mention that Wesley’s motivation ultimately is from his desire to combat his impotence – an impotence that has been imposed on him by Capitalism, mind you! In its own way, Wanted is the perfect cinematic marriage of Freud and Marx. Wesley’s dad is supposedly dead, and his new father is “the system” which has emasculated him. He does not need a “human father” when his life is governed by the Capitalist Empire which has rendered him completely impotent. Wesley has no sex in the movie at all because he has no penis. His penis has been replaced by a “job.” He can’t fuck because he’s on anti-depressants, which he takes to alleviate his anxiety about being just another invisible cog in the wheel. He spends the duration of the movie trying to reclaim his penis by a) quitting his job and telling the system to go fuck itself; b) replacing his penis with a gun; c) avenging his father’s death; d) killing his father, and e) becoming his father. The Great Oedipal Moment of the film is the giant showdown when he inadvertently kills his own father in the giant train crash scene. He and his father are literally joined inside this Giant Phallus as it fails to penetrate the hole of the vagina (the tunnel). The out-of-control phallus comes undone, derails, splinters and crashes before it is allowed to successfully penetrate the cave. Wesley begins to take ownership of his phallus by killing his father, but before he can become truly virile he has to kill the Big Boss of the Industrial Factory (Sloan), the evil motherfucker (to use his own words) who exploits his laborers (the assassins) for his own profit and power. So it is a combination of killing the Father Figure and killing the Capitalist Prick that liberates Wesley. It’s important to note also that in the end, Wesley is stripped of his financial assets but maintains power outside of the economic system. Likewise, he ends the movie alone –without the threat of the vagina or the competing phallus. In the final assassination scene, he uses Post-Its (the very tools of the system that has castrated him!) to nail his enemy. Brilliant! So really Wanted is a sweet marriage of Freud and Marx with a lot of gorgeous violence and vehicular madness.

Is Wanted a call to arms? Of course not. The movie is too silly for that. I am not going to propose that some mass-produced multi-million dollar Hollywood Summer Blockbuster is a call to revolution, but I will say that it great Rage Therapy for Life Under Capitalism. For two hours, the movie gives us a place to dump all our stresses and anxieties over the system that is fucking us over. For a brief window of time, we can fantasize about the rush we'd get by taking down the motherfuckers who are strangling us with their corporate interests. Violent revolution is a nice fantasy, and when it comes with great car crashes and lots of exploding heads it's even sweeter. Sure it's totally unbelievable and over-the-top, but it was fun and gave me a little boost to get through another week or two of living under the fist of the system.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her partner, 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 growing up as a punk sex worker in 1970s San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Bullhorn and Berkeley Review. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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