Today's Stories

October 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Change That Really Means Something

October 30, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
McCain's Women Problems

Vijay Prashad
Smearing Rashid Khalidi

Paul Craig Roberts
World Tires of Rule by Dollar

Glen Ford
Turning the Tide of Ethnic Cleansing in America's Cities

Stanley Heller
Wall Street Bonus Madness

William Loren Katz
"Kill Him!:" a Political Chronicle

Joshua Frank
Memo to Progressives for Obama: What Happens After the Election?

James McEnteer
The Year of Unreliable Witnesses

Felice Pace
The Big Change: Can "Civic Unreasonableness" Save the Earth?

Jonathan Cook
The Executions at Kafr Qassem

Reza Fiyouzat
Boycott the Elections!

Website of the Day
An Open Letter to Whole Foods

October 29, 2008

Arno J. Mayer
The US Empire will Survive Bush

Eric Toussaint
How the Food and Financial Crises are Interconnected

Matt Gonzalez
What Do They Have to Do to Lose Your Vote?

Steven Conn
Obama and the Camp Followers

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Visit to a Father's Grave

Patrick Bond
Strauss-Kahn Strikes Again!

Ramzi Kysia
A Freedom Rider in Gaza City

Douglas Valentine
A Glimpse Inside the Head of Joe the Plumber

Stephen Martin
What America is Owed

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli
Alternatives to Incarceration

Amee Chew
Support Obama, Vote McKinney?

Website of the Day
N-Word Chant Doesn't Phase Palin

October 28, 2008

James G. Abourezk
How to Bail Out the Taxpayers

Andy Worthington
The Empty Chair at Guantánamo

Gary Leupp
The Specter of the Sixties: Palin v. Ayers

Paul Craig Roberts
The End of the American Road

Mike Whitney
Meet the World's New Currency

Gregory V. Button
What the Next President Must Do to Save FEMA

Ralph Nader
Share the Sacrifices, Share the Benefits

P. Sainath
Haunted by Socialism

Martha Rosenberg
Melting Pot in Hell

Charles R. Larson
Palin/Wurzelbacher 2012!

Website of the Day
Why You Can't See Across the Grand Canyon

October 27, 2008

Michael Hudson
Scenes From the Global Class War

Barbara Rose Johnston
The Clean, Green Nuclear Machine?

John Dinges
Palling Around with Dictators: McCain and Pinochet

Mike Whitney
Chickenhawks and the Horrors of War

Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power

Alan Farago
Origins of the Fall

David Michael Green
Remind Me Again: Who Won the Cold War?

Andy Worthington
The Collapse of Omar Khadr's Guantánamo Trial

George Wuerthner
Is Ranching Sustainable? The Story of Bob the Rancher

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Obamanations of Barack

Website of the Day
Heartland of Darkness

October 24 / 26, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Waiting for the Curtain to Rise

Ishmael Reed
Boogiemen: How Lee Atwater Perfected the G.O.P.'s Appeal to Racism

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

Don Santina
How Maria Fell: Death in the Central Valley

Scott Boehm
Manufacturing Sympathy: Palin, Special Needs and Identity Politics

Saul Landau
Faith-Based Surge: Whining About Winning in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
Iraq and the Arrogance of Washington

Binoy Kampmark
Afghanistan the Un-Winnable

Linn Washington Jr.
The Great Vote Fraud Hoax

Nicole Colson
Mocking Our Rights: McCain's Disdain for Women's Health

Bernard Chazelle
The Humorology of Power

Brian Jones
Campaign by Codeword

Christopher Brauchli
Down the Drain with McCain's Vetters

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Rejects Neoliberalism

Val Strange
The Fraternity of John McCain: Scenes from North Carolina

Joe Mowrey
Name That Candidate: He Supports Petraeus, the Death Penalty, the Bailout, Nuclear Power, the Occupation...

Steve Early
SEIU Learns the Meaning of "No"

David Macaray
Patriotism and the Labor Movement

Allison Kilkenny
You Have the Right to Airport Harassment

Richard Rhames
Open Season

Jim Bell
Nuclear Power's Big Con

Kris De Welde
Domestic Violence and Financial Stress

Barry Clemson
John Wayne Syndrome

Adam Engel
Last Exit to Disneyland

Mark Scaramella
The World's Weirdest Pipe Organ?

Tuli Kupferberg
Nobody for President: the Original Version (Annotated)

Lorenzo Wolff
A Frustrated, Broken-Hearted Joy from Kidnapkin

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Swartzfager and Payne

Website of the Weekend
Patrick Cockburn Dismantles the Surge

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 31, 2008

Max Payne and the Evil Pharma Empire

Vigilante Violence as Sex Story

By KIM NICOLINI

Max Payne isn’t a great movie. In fact, by most standards, it’s probably not a very good movie, but it gets the job done in being a diversion. As a vigilante narrative, mostly the movie exists as something for us to dump our anger and frustration in while watching a lot of cool visuals, hallucinatory effects and some pretty stellar explosions. Like Wanted, another revenge narrative based on a graphic novel, Max Payne wears its politics on its sleeve and makes no attempt to create believable characters with depth. It’s all about types of people, but not about real people. It’s a good guy goes after bad guys story with a high body count and a lot of cool visuals. In this case, the good guy is the cop whose wife and infant child have been murdered, and the bad guys are those bad guys we all know in today’s socio-political climate – the government, the military, and big pharma.

But Max isn’t just any good guy who’s been wronged. He’s also the downsized good guy. Once a tough street cop, Max has been demoted to filing unsolved cases in the police department basement. In the meanwhile, while Max has been downsized to a subterranean level of employment, the giant towering menace of Aesir Pharmaceuticals looms over the city with its evil CEO, BB Hensley (Beau Bridges) who takes megalomaniacal and sadistic delight in controlling the masses from his penthouse office. Because this movie is totally transparent, we know from the onset that the evil corporation killed Payne’s wife, that BB is the bad guy, and that the government, the military and the pharmaceutical company are in collusion to control the peons of society. No spoilers here. We’ve seen this movie before. And given that this is 2008, the Iraq War is the platform for all the evil that is being wrought on the masses.

In the meanwhile, Max has his own war to fight. He needs to avenge the murder of his family, so he takes matters into his own hands. Even though all the characters in this movie are completely flat and lacking in any real human depth, Mark Wahlberg has a particular talent for playing flat well. He’s good at flat, so it’s really not too bad watching him go out there and kick some Evil Pharma Ass. In fact, in a way, the movie functions like soft core porn. Its bare bones plot exists solely so we can get our rocks off watching Max shoot his gun. The best scene in the movie involves Spicy Handed Max (e.g. a gun in each hand) bulging with hallucinatory drug power and shooting his way through the corporate headquarters of the Evil Pharma Empire. The body count is massive as Max shoots his load from both hands. It’s like having two hundred money shots delivered in ten minutes. Talk about a rush. And just when we think we’re finally done getting our rocks off, shit starts exploding, I mean really exploding – the whole giant phallus of Aesir Pharmaceuticals blows up in a beautiful massive eruption of flames, steel, and glass. Talk about a fucking climax. Holy shit, destruction can be hot.

If watching Max shoot his load doesn’t get your rocks off, don’t worry. There are ample opportunities to ogle some seriously hot female Urban Guerillas in Fetish Wear. You’ve got Natasha slinking across the screen in boots up to her ass crack and lingerie as evening wear. And if seeing her ass cheeks peeking out from under her silky negligee isn’t enough for you, you actually have her lying on the bed naked (except for the fetish boots of course) practically begging Max to fuck her. But of course Max doesn’t get off by fucking Russian sex kittens. He gets off shooting his guns and killing the bad guys. So he kicks Natasha out of his bedroom, and she, ahem, gets disposed of. But don’t worry, once Natasha has evacuated the premises, we have Mona to ogle. I mean, Mona? Come on. Talk about a porn name. Mona sports an open leather trench coat that exposes her black leather boots, uber short mini skirt and tit-clinging tank top. (Note that even though it is perpetually freezing and snowing, Mona always wears a tank top.) Mona never gets naked and begs Max to fuck her. In fact, Mona, like Max, also gets off by shooting a really big gun. Quite effectively. So, she gets to live.

All of this Urban Guerilla Porn is packaged in a dark wet package sporting the graphic novel aesthetic. It’s always night. Women are clad in sexy fetish wear. Men wear tattoos and/or leather jackets. The landscape seethes with urban decay. If it’s not raining, it’s snowing. In fact, everything about the movie is wet – the snow, the rain, the river, the exploding viles of liquid drugs. And of course everything is wet because the whole movie is a dark masturbatory wet dream. However, it is an impotent wet dream because, like I said, Max Payne would rather shoot a gun than shoot his load up the Hot Twat of the thigh-high boot wearing Natasha. And I think that’s part of the point (if you could call it that) of the movie. The new sex is vigilante violence. Fuck fucking. Let’s take revenge on all the assholes who have wronged us and blow the heads off of some evil motherfuckers.

And Max does blow some heads off. There is nothing downsized about the number of bodies Max drops with his flying bullets. In fact, Max kills so many people that I was wondering how the movie was going to end. How can Hollywood allow its “hero” to engage in vengeance-fueled mass murder (because the body count really is massive) and get away with it? That goes against the Hollywood Ethics Contract. You can’t just blow a bunch of people’s heads off and walk away avenged. Or can you? Well the movie doesn’t tell us what happens. It leaves us to write the ending of our choice. Some of those choices include: 1) Max spends the rest of his days in prison licking his wounds and deteriorating into some kind of pathetic Renfield character bidding to BB’s evil ways (see Dracula); 2) Max becomes a guinea pig for the corrupt efforts of Big Pharma and the US military and he becomes some kind of new pharmabiological human weapon; 3) Max dives off the building in a splendid suicide in which he joins hands with his demonic hallucinatory tormentors and his lovely racially ambiguous wife. What ending would you give the movie?

Speaking of demonic tormentors, I forgot to mention that the entire plot hinges on the development of an evil drug designed to make American soldiers feel invincible. Unfortunately the drug also causes massive hallucinations in which flying black valkyrie-like creatures swoop down from the sky and torment the drugged-out human guinea pigs. And I gotta tell you, these monsters are really . . . . dumb. When the first one appeared on the screen, I was like, “What the fuck are those stupid monsters? This movie is totally dorky.” But then I learned that the monsters aren’t real (whew) and are just some kind of chemically triggered hallucination, so they became a little more acceptable, emphasis on “little.” So I decided I’m not going to write about the monsters. I’m writing about how Max Payne is yet another Vigilante Violence as Sex narrative, and if you watch it like soft core porn instead of “serious cinema,” you might just get your rocks off. I did. A little bit.

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 being a teenage runaway 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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