Today's Stories

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

November 11, 2008

James G. Abourezk
How to Vote Against Your Own Interests

Allan J. Lichtman
What Obama Can Learn From FDR

Eric Toussaint
Financing the Bailout: a Holy Union for a Deuce of a Swindle

Ron Jacobs
Moving Beyond Hope: a Leftist Looks at the Near Future

Peter Montague
Green Coal?

Corporate Crime Reporter
BP's Big Spill on the North Slope

Laura Carlsen
Latin America Sends Obama a Piece of Its Mind

Col. Dan Smith
A New Unifying Paradigm?

Morton Skorodin
The Machine Grinds On

David Michael Green
My Michelle Moment

Charles R. Larson
Ask Your Doctor for a Free Sample

Website of the Day
Will Old Faithful Be Sucked Dry?

November 10, 2008

David Roediger
Obama's Victory and the Future of Race in the United States

Paul Craig Roberts
Conned Again?

Peter Lee
Obama's Man in Afghanistan

Corey D. B. Walker
And We Are Not Saved

Jeff Halper
A Bone in America's Throat

Bill Hatch
Look on the Bright Side, Dammit!

Andy Worthington
Guilty By Torture

Bill Quigley
Anger and Hope: Haitian Families Furious Over School Collapse

Peter Morici
Paulson's Folly

Anthony Olszewski
The Advent of a New Black Politician

Kim Nicolini
Exile and Displacement on Bunker Hill

Cpt. Paul Watson
Farley Mowat's Last Book? Maybe Not

Website of the Day
Boondocks, Another Banned Episode

November 7 / 9, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief of Staff

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Fire

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Indian: the Many Faces of Sonal Shah

Tariq Ali
Great Expectations

Jean Bricmont
Our Obama Problem

John V. Whitbeck
Obama, Emanuel and Israel

Saul Landau
Politics Among the Ruins: Obama Faces an Economic Disaster

Peter Morici
Gone, Baby, Gone: Another 240,000 Jobs Lost

Lawrence Velvel
Obama and Afghanistan: the Return of Clintonia?

Karyn Strickler
Don't Govern From the Middle

Nativo V. Lopez
Banking on Obama with Open Eyes: Latinos and Obama

Christopher Fons
A Generational Moment: From Jackson to Obama

Alan Farago
Sarah Palin's Limited Engagement

David Yearsley
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Christopher Brauchli
Pardoning Industry: Bush's Latest Executive Orders

Samah Sabawi
Gaza's New Cemetery

Dave Lindorff
Getting the Change We've Earned

Deepak Tripathi
A Revolution to Remember

Beth Sherouse
In the Wake of Lost Initiatives: the Gay Glass is Half Empty

Patrick Irelan
La Belle Dame Sans Regrets: Back to Alaska

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Temple

Richard Rhames
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

J. Murray
White Cherokee Mythology

Lorenzo Wolff
Anthems for the Average Kid

Kim Nicolini
Exile and Displacement on Bunker Hill: Art Meets Realism in "The Exiles"

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Fleming and Browne

Website of the Day
Take Who Takes You (For the New Big O)

November 6, 2008

Frank J. Menetrez
Now What?

John Chuckman
The Big Leap: From Hope to Change

P. Sainath
A Magic Moment (But Still Behind the Global Curve)

Joshua Frank
A Look Under the Hood of an Obama Administration

Edna Canetti
Come, Obama, Change My Life: a Plea from Israel

John Ross
Brad Will is Still Dead

Norman Solomon
Sorry Joe: a Mandate for Spreading the Wealth

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Morning After: Pakistan and Its New Bedfellow

Robert Weissman
Mordor Brightens: Obama's Challenge--and Our Own

Harvey Wasserman
A Blow to Nuclear Power in Chicago

Website of the Day
Pot Wins Big

November 5, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Why McCain Lost

Chuck Spinney
How Obama Won

Ishmael Reed
Morning in Obamerica: the Promised Land?

Chris Floyd
A Prism for the New Paradigm: "What If Bush Did It?"

Binoy Kampmark
Obama's Victory: a Nation Divided

Michael Donnelly
The Rebooting of America, 2008

David Macaray
Who Should be Secretary of Labor?

Peter Morici
Obama's First Moves on the Economy

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
What Real Change Should Bring

William Willers
Will We be Forced to Sell Off the Public Lands?

Website of the Day
The Killing Fields of South Africa

November 4, 2008

Kathleen Christison
McCain, Obama and Khalidi

James Ridgeway
A New World?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Cleaning Out the Pentagon Pig Sty

Mike Whitney
Obama's Little Red Book

Conn Hallinan
A New Foreign Policy

Holly M. Barker
The Inequities of Climate Change and the Small Island Experience

Ashley Smith
Where is the Occupation of Iraq Heading?

Andy Worthington
Guilty Verdict Fails to Justify Gitmo Trials

Martha Rosenberg
AIG: Too Big to Play Fair

Stephen Martin
Breakdown of the Globalisation Agenda

Doug Lummis
Full Moon Over Okinawa

Carlos Fierro
An Anarchist View of Elections

Website of the Day
La Pequeña as Sarah Palin

November 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Friends Like These

John Kennedy O'Hara
Voter Lockdown: Prosecuting Voters

Peter Montague
Is Nuclear Power Green?

Steve Conn
Nader and the Youth Vote

Andrew Gebhardt
How Much Do the Differences Between Obama, McCain and Bush Really Matter?

Ron Jacobs
Bombing Syria: Borders are for Sissies

Ralph Nader
Between Hope and Reality: an Open Letter to Senator Obama

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Cleaning Up After Bush

Uri Avnery
Obama and the Order of the Optimists

Dave Lindorff
Studs and Me

Fred Gardner
Adieu, Rimonabant

DC Larson
You Are How You Vote

David Michael Green
McCain Finally Gets Tough

Val Strange
Hopeless Hoi Polloi or Step in the Right Direction?

Tuli Kupferberg /
Jeffrey Lewis
Wailing Wall Street:
Bring Spare Money!

Website of the Day
Pranking Palin (the Uncut Version)

October 31 , 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Change You Can See

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Leroy Jackson: the Indian Wars Have Never Ended

Douglas Valentine
Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: McCain's 14th Amendment Problem

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Great Bailout Fraud: Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis

Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski
Is the Global Economy a Mistake? an Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

Alan Maass
What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Spreading the Wealth?

William P. O’Connor
Reflections of an Average Joe

Patrick Irelan
Johnny's Tantrums: McCain the "Gook Hater"

Brian Cloughley
Out of Control: Memo From Islamabad

Mats Svensson
The Last Dance in Ramallah

Binoy Kampmark
Into Syria We Went

Steve Conn
The Future of Ted and Sarah

Alan Farago
The Division of Florida: the Politics of Growth

Morton Skorodin
The Bush-Obama-McCain Administration

Robert Bryce
Not McCain

Wajahat Ali
Dear John McCain, Please Stop...

David Yearsley
Palin's Flute, Obama's Voice

Dennis Loo
What to Do with Bush and Cheney?

Pam Martens
Why 2008 Feels Like 1932

Stephen Martin
Defense Strategies in Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Nothing for Something: the Doomed Rustic's Lament

Ramzy Baroud
A Third Palestinian Intifada

Missy Beattie
I'm Sick of Their Voices

Howard Lisnoff
Burning Reason: More From the Religious Right

Richard Neville
Pickled Heads: First the Revelation, Then the Revolution

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassan
Bush Ultra Lite: Oliver Stone's Oedipal Problem

Kim Nicolini
Max Payne: Vigilante Violence as Sex Story

Lorenzo Wolff
Dance to the Music--or Else!

Poets' Basement
Four Poems from the Japanese Trans. by Rexroth

Website of the Weekend
Art Against Empire

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?

November 24, 2008

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

American Friends

By DAVID KER THOMSON

A friend sticketh closer than a brother, or could, is how I recall the good book summarizing our duty.  Oh my friends, there is no friend.  That’s from Aristotle, or at least that’s what several Frenchmen have told me.  More on that soon, but first—because you can never get enough, right?—some musings on Obama, this time from an expat (a person who used to have pat answers but has sworn off the habit).

Comparisons of Obama and Hitler are at least as odious as the ones so often made between Bush and Hitler or between Bush and the various dictators with which he or his father set up shop.  These comparisons are misguided because the body count for twentieth-century fascism, with which we love to believe our side had no part, was rendered in tens of millions.  This will seem paltry compared to the big die-offs in store for the industrialized world at the end of our century, when it will have been clear for a long time that the environment wasn’t an “issue” for the executive branches of the west to play with but, quite literally, all that there is or has ever been.  Thinking of the environment as an “issue” is a category mistake, a bit like mistaking homology and analogy.  The world isn’t like a vehicle (rowboat, spaceship) but is one. 

Indeed, the big die-off has already been happening in poor countries, with 40,000 children winking quietly out per day.  I say quietly because there hasn’t been any kafuffle about the dying children in, say, my own “progressive” neighborhood, but there is joy everywhere here in the fifty-first state that we now have a black man to whom we can surrender the executive function of our own brains. 

Fetishize the complexion of the new boss up in the big white house all you want, but the fact is that his commitment (i.e. your commitment, oh my friends) not only to keeping black males in the increasingly profitable prison complex but to keeping the embers of empire stoked—bigger war in Afghanistan, permanent occupation in Iraq, more troops all round so that business can keep killing the world’s children as usual, is murder that is systemic but not generally systematic, as there is little incentive to keep incriminating records about the slaughter.  What isn’t quite understood yet is the scale of the attack, including here at home.  Our intuition tells us that if we’ve ever known someone who had cancer we might begin to see how this is hitting home, but the science will necessarily lag far behind our intuition on this one, and our nuts and nipples, as Joe Bageant likes to put it, will be toast long before there’s any substantive admission from corporate science and corporate democratists that dumping poison into our environment might actually, uh, poison us.

It’s true that it gives me pause when I find my best allies in the struggle for gentle, food-rich big-tree’d car-free culturally diverse urban neighborhoods (politics without politicians, without politics altogether) all have names like ambi and feral faun, spelled without caps, and that every tenth one of them, like some sort of sick tithe, is a federal agent posing as Bambi.  For backup, these decimating federally fawning infiltraitors are ready to invoke (in case you say something interesting like, “that ski lift actually looks better after it was burned than before”) the full lock-and-load armoire, excuse my French, of the free world.  Excuse some more French: the word enfranchise is from Old French, en franc, to make frank, i.e., to make you into a French land-owning male, i.e., to make you free.  Frank = free.  Frankly, this puts the liberté back into the liberty fries at your local McDonald’s franchise the way Walmart puts the egalité into Chinese labor practice.  Bon appetite.   

Now where was I?, as the French philosopher said.  Oh yeah, I was talking about fraternité, and how my best friends love Ugg boots, as the poet Sylvia Plath almost put it.  My best friends having decamped for the big house, this leaves me back with my old best friends, whom I might have glimpsed lurking on the next ridge back in the day and who are now the fauna occasionally to be glimpsed with some nicely poised cyberflora covering their private parts.  It sucks.  All ee all ee in come free, as we used to call to each other at the end of hide-and-seek.  Come be French, all you disenfranchised.  House red all round, take a load off.  Can’t we all just get along?

Not with you lot around, apparently.  Yeah, you, my boot-loving friends. 

My best friend, a Seattle midwife Buddhist wisewoman from whom I’ve learned to be me (admittedly an odd selection) has told me she won’t read my articles in CounterPunch (hence a certain liberté in this article) because she doesn’t like the “layout,” which I guess she thinks is strident or something.  She gets her information from comic books instead, I suppose, or TV. 

So, anyhoo, I’m sitting in the really cheap Ethiopan hole-in-the-wall here at the corner of Bloor and Oz with the family the other day, thinking, this is some seriously good food for eight bucks, I could almost spring for a beer.  So I’m enjoying the view, which is one of those new high-rez TV images funneled along the two mirrored walls of this little joint, and all you get is this sincere and honest-looking broadcaster’s head in mirrored triplicate against the romper-room colors of the American flag.  “I like the layout,” I say to Eva-Lynn, and I’m not joking.  I feel the pleasure of being stroked by the big box.  The medium being the massage and all. 

I’ve never seen this Obama guy in real life (i.e. on TV) but I bet if he’d come onto the screen then I’d have adored him.  I can see why my best friend would rather spend time with him than reading my stuff.  Obama and me, we both have white moms, so I feel like he can dig the white experience.  Sebastian (12) runs the specs on the TV past me, so many pixels per inch and so on, and I’m nodding my head agreeing.  Screw the content.  “Form is everything,” I say.  There are these two chicks in the corner, and I’m married, sure, but still, you can see the nipples through the tight t-shirt of the brunette.  I didn’t do it, but I dug it, if you know what I mean.  Suddenly one of the chicks kisses the other and I realize what I’m looking at with those nipples and I say to my wife, “oh, that’s disgusting.”

“What?” Eva-Lynn says.  All she can see is a few other customers, some chicks in the corner kissing, the TV.  Liam (8) is reading or boning up on his Latin or whatever mini-geeks do.  The kid failed his official “gifted” exam today on the question, “why do policemen wear uniforms?” What else are they supposed to do with them?  No, I know:  To get to the other side?  To hang their tasers on?  So the drug lords will know who to give the cash to?  “Is this something about donuts?” Liam said to me after.

“What?” Eva-Lynn repeats.

“That girl,” I say, “look what she has on her chest.”

And sure enough there’s a full spread of Obama on her T-shirt with the eyes kind of bulging out staring at me.

When I recover I say to Eva-Lynn, “I’m going to get me one of them Hitler t-shirts.  I got rights.”  Like she doesn’t know I’m thinking, why do girls wear T-shirts?  As opposed to what?

“Oh shut up,” Eva-Lynn says, so I’ll know she still loves me.

So anyhoo, as my sister-in-law says in lieu of logical paragraph transitions, or when things start getting a little personal, how ’bout that Aristotle quote at the beginning of this article?  Oh my friends, there is no friend.  And before that, the first sentence, about the friend sticking closer than a brother, an unverified citation from the Bible?  One thing you have to be sure of when someone writes about politics, especially if they start throwing the Hitler word around, is that the person who is speaking is responsible, which is to say, that you know who they are, and that they’re saying what they mean.  I really am David Ker Thomson, as it turns out, not feral faun, and for a second after you see “David” you think, hmm, maybe Jewish, but the middle name is pretty waspy, and so on, so he’s on his own with the Hitler word.  I am responsible.  And then the first thing I write after the Bible verse, in an italics which hardly prove anything about authorship, is a quotation of Derrida citing Montaigne repeating a line attributed to Aristotle.  Am I responsible for that?

And not just any quotation, but an impossibility.  An address to non-existent friends.  Oh my friends, there is no friend.  How can you talk to friends who aren’t there?  Said the guy on email.  Am I responsible for this clever line in italics?  What about the two Frenchmen mediating between me and Aristotle?

In the few seconds I have left after my readers, expecting politics, realize they’re being duped and given philosophy, I’d like to give you this one image I picked up online somewhere, I forget where, from someone incognito, probably: voting is like whispering into the ear of a statue.

* * *

Okay, I’m letting all the political folks go now.  They’ll be busy keeping up on all those politicians.  Thumping that statue, seeing if they can get something out of it.  If anyone else wants to stick around for five minutes of philosophy, go to the next paragraph.

Friends—can I call you friends, you know, provisionally, like the way the guy at Los Burritos calls you amigo?  Doesn’t mean we’re best friends, or going out or anything, though I’ll permit myself one group kiss sent out to all of you 279,000 potential monthly readers worldwide.

Let us move fast here.  Quick schematic.  Me, in Canada, mourning, sick at heart, forgotten by my friends, feeling the sting of their contempt, their joy in the new face of their statue, which is a dead thing, but in the Real of pixilation quickened to life.  My favorite philosopher, the Jew, Derrida.  The middle-distance topic for me, for Derrida: 20th century, how most of the great philosophers loved National Socialism, the boot, the state.  Farther off: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics—friends must be close, nearby, says Aristotle.  And able to spell Nichomachean. 

My friends are my enemies, having sworn fealty to the enemy of everything I hold dear, a simple, gentle, local life.  Sorry to get all serious here but that’s how it is.  Everything I have taught and for which I have struggled all these years is just this: be here, now.  The state is the enemy of all this, a set of pipe dreams for those who abdicate responsibility.  Instead of composting on site, pipe shit elsewhere.  Instead of living authentically in the world, send degraded proxies of yourself elsewhere to foment war and theft even farther afield.  Instead of growing your own food on your own roof and in a collective with your neighbors, fly it in from New Zealand.  Tell yourself often enough that you can’t live without roads, so that you start believing it.  Whip yourself into paranoia so you think you need a standing army to “protect” you.  Fly famous beltway environmentalists around to tell other people how to live.  Keep your distance: the fully detached western democracy home spurns its neighbor, refuses to huddle horizontally or vertically for warmth or affection, and still it cannot stand on its own, but must be held aloft in an entanglement of subsidies and wires and pipes and obeisances to a set of elsewheres in a grid neatly bundled by banksters.  An arrangement of willed helplessness.

The state needs enemies.  Distance leading to helplessness, that’s day one.  It isn’t just that every so often someone sees through, say, Canada’s goodness nonsense about how they’re not fighting in Iraq when, in fact, they are, unless we aren’t counting large-scale “offensive operations” (I think that means, suckerpunch the fuckers before they even think about attacking you) and the “neutralization” of bad guys.  Look under the skirt of all those prim Toronto voter bicyclists who never break the rules at red lights, and what’s beneath the rectitude?  A lock-and-load regime ready to kick some distant ass.

Violence is not incidental, but constitutive.  There’s no reason to have the collocation of a collocation of a collocation we call the state in the first place unless there is an enemy from which the state distances itself.  Enmity is the founding principle, the inaugural instinct, the first exoskeleton of the body politic. No wonder voting and purchasing products from China, the two principle activities of the western political subject, thrive on distance.  There’s just US and UN.

For me, by contrast, proximity is good. 

So who are these distant, close friends?  It is not you, oh my kind, persistent readers, but these long-term long-distance American friends of mine that I’m talking about right now.  Whom I address now.  Are they, are you, there?

Well, it turns out that friendship, appallingly, works at the formal level like a state does. Friendsies?  Sure, friendsies.  But friends cannot be, never could have been, anything other than this potential for loss, which is to say for antagonism.  Enmity makes friendship possible.  You can’t be close without the freedom to be far.  Ouch.  These friendships of mine?  Never meant anything unless abandonment was possible.  Antagonism isn’t just one of the risks of loving, it is the very basis of the friendship.  It’s constitutive.  Oh my, friends.

Derrida’s most popular works on politics and friendship are Specters of Marx and The Politics of Friendship, but I advise no one to read philosophy who has not spent the day outdoors working with her hands, or if you’re in prison, attempting to dig your way out.  Philosophy is the happy hour.  To this end you can get a rare glimpse of Derrida being short and direct in a question-and-answer period at Sussex University, where he describes his own summary of his work as “very, very rough.”  I find that I like my Derrida in the rough.  “We won’t change the world before two o’clock,” he muses, “but what I’m saying is that we have to.”  Goodness, what would feral faun say?  “There is no democracy except as equality among everyone,” (I’ll quote Derrida in the absence of feral faun), “but an equality which can be calculated, countable: you count the number of units, of voters, of voices, of citizens.”  Well, maybe you do, but feral and me, we changed the world before breakfast, just let that definition (of our true selves only counting if we’re counted) drift away like the illusion it is.  The state still steals our money to make roads we don’t want, to pipe our neighbors’ shit into Lake Ontario, to subsidize architecture that’s turned its back on the sun, but it does it as an interloper.  We’re not letting it in the front door with a vote.  You can renounce the empire by two o’clock, become accountable rather than countable.  Feel embarrassed that the empire can count on you to zombie yourself into a voting booth and send off your soul?  Okay, you’re done.  Forgive yourself, move on.  This isn’t rocket science.

But my friends, what about you?  Or, since they’ve promised not to read me, what about them?  Derrida points out that the usual topics of politics are things like government, sovereignty, citizenship, but not friendship.  And I find that I can easily dismiss those topics before my second cup of sassafras—you got to love a tea with a name that can conjure sass and ass—but friendship is another kettle of fish.  Is it possible that the friendliest people on the planet are the most warlike?  If you took just the Southerners in the US armed forces, and just Southern war businesses, you’d still probably have the most powerful force ever assembled.  Certainly the politest and easiest to like.  Hell, maybe I love a boot the same as the next guy.  I’ve put the lowbagger back into the lower U.S. in my time.  I’ve slept a thousand times on the ground in forty-seven of the lower forty-eight, woke up with my face in the dirt, stumbled out and climbed into ten thousand open-faced trucks with Nashville on their minds.  (I’m holding off on Oregon.  Haven’t been able to bring myself to look at all those big trees knocked over.)  I’ve explained to my progressive friends why intelligent normal people would vote for Bush, explained it so many times my friends started thinking I was Bush’s, well, friend or something.

So bust me.  I am Bush’s friend, and Obama’s.  Hitler’s too, for all I know, though Germans are a little weird, and I’d never make my kids wear leather underwear.  On a good day, I even like myself, which would make me my own friend.  Maybe that’s a little kinky.  Whatever.  I didn’t do it, but I dug it, said the citizen to the health inspector regarding his new, unused worm toilet. 

My American friends who’ve voted for Obama aren’t sleeping with the enemy, they are the enemy.  With friends like these, who needs, well, you know.  So now what?  Worst case scenario already happened.  Woke up and your friends threw their lot in with the empire and the pure joy of killing people in Afghanistan.  Feral faun, are you listening to this?  I still love my friends, love them like a brother.

“You haven’t seen your brother in ten years,” says Sebastian, injecting a little note of reality into my weepfest.  “And his house in Nashville is getting repo’d.”

“Well, frankly,” I begin.  But Sebastian has moved on. 

David Ker Thomson is writing a book entitled A, on America and abandonment, portions of which have been published in South Atlantic Quarterly (appearing in January) and in Early American Literature.  Full disclosure: the editors of these publications were friends at the time of publication.  Write to him with suggestions or with snappy answers to the question, “why do policemen wear uniforms?” at dave.thomson@utoronto.ca

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont