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Category: Feature Articles

  • The Love of Comrades

    Image by Anastasiia Chepinska.

    After an apparent, all-too-brief détente in the battle over LGBTQ rights, gay and trans rights have again become a flashpoint in the American culture wars. Ron DeSantis, a notorious homophobe, transphobe, and antifeminist, is one of the main 2024 presidential candidates. Although marriage equality and its attendant economic and social benefits for the LGBTQ community seem to be relatively well ensconced and are now reinforced by the Respect for Marriage Act, Orwellian “religious liberty” laws threaten to corrode its effect by undermining equality in public spaces and institutions. Trans rights, drag queens, and LGBTQ books in libraries are all under assault, metaphorically and literally.

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  • Top Ten China Hawks Most Likely to Start a War with Beijing

    War between China and the U.S. would spell doom for humanity. That’s because once the Chinese sink those sitting ducks called U.S. aircraft carriers, hotheads in the pentagon will want to bomb Chinese cities. No one will stop them. And then things turn nuclear. To those geniuses who say, well, we’ve basically been fighting Russia […]

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  • Megamen for Donuts

    “My favorite things, my favorite things… / Blue jeans, see a red-haired girl / Sweet peanut butter, slow-burning candle / Cup of a tea and a good book and the dance of the reindeer, and also… / Pachinko, yeah / Pachinko / Pachinko / Wah, Sankyo…” This beautiful, probably improvised minor key piano ballad by […]

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  • When Does a Formal Democracy Degenerate into Fascism?

    Poster saying Smash Fascism.

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    It can happen here. “Here” being any country in which capitalism rules. When does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into fascism? That is a question that needs an answer in many places, certainly not excepting the United States, which has already experienced a self-coup attempt with unmistakable fascist overtones.

    We’re referencing Donald Trump’s attempt at a self-coup, to use the Latin American phrase, in January 2021. Many people, even on the Left, laugh at that day’s events, pointing out that the would-be putsch had no chance of success. It did have no chance of success. That does not mean it should be cavalierly dismissed; on the contrary, it should be taken with utmost seriousness. Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923 had no chance of success, either, and his violent movement remained on the lunatic fringe for several more years. But we know how German history would turn out.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Richland: Smalltown Americana – With an Atomic Twist

    Image of students by Richland High School.

    Image by Helki Frantzen.

    At a decidedly leisurely pace, director Irene Lusztig painstakingly paints a portrait of an outpost of Americana in eastern Washington State, Richland where virtually all of the townsfolk, except for homemakers, worked since the 1940s at neighboring Hanford. By most economic indicators, those employed by Hanford’s industrial plant earned a decent if not opulent standard of living. The workers and their families enjoyed prosperity and a river in a lovely rural Northwestern setting, where these members of the proletariat could afford to buy consumer products, take their families on vacations and send their children to good universities.

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  • James Watt and the Origins of the Corporate Counterattack on the Environment

    On October 9, 1983, I was at the old Weir Cook airport in Indianapolis awaiting the arrival of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous news that his nemesis James  G for […]

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  • The Surplus and the Bystander

    Arun Kundnani. Photo: Freya Billington.

    Arun Kundnani is an author, professor, and activist who began his new book

    If you read about broken-windows policing, it’s pretty clear that neoliberals’ main concern is precisely to make people, who don’t have a wage, pay for their enjoyment of our streets. People who earn wages are disciplined by their need to compete; someone else can always replace you on the job, right? But if you’re unwaged and get a welfare check, irrespective of what you do in life, you’re breaking the neoliberal rules. The fear is that you can go down a street and have the fun of breaking a window cost-free, no price mechanism to restrain your behavior. So the police need to make that low-Level crime cost.

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  • Trump, the Final Undoing?

    Republican leadership time and time again has proven itself to be people who care about nothing more than power. They don’t have principles. They don’t have morals. All they want to do is hold onto power by any means necessary. And living in a red state, I see many people who claim to love America, claim to be Christians, but have no problem aligning themselves with a man who is clearly antithetical to everything they say they believe.

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  • Nuclear Fracking

    Schematic for the Project Gasbuggy nuclear test. Image: Department of Energy.

    In all there were three big nuclear explosions in the Colorado Basin: Project Gas Buggy, Project Rio Blanco and Project Rulison. Rulison was the last major episode in the Atoms for Peace program. The peace in question wasn’t a cooling of the tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, but between two even more entrenched rivals: the nuclear industry and the oil companies, then locked in fierce combat over which sector would control America’s energy future. The AEC wanted to prove that a few well-placed nuclear bombs could strategically rearrange the geology of the Earth’s the crust in such a way as to release deeply buried and once untappable reservoirs of oil and gas.

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  • The Hat of Abdul Haq

    Forty years ago this month in Peshawar in North-West Pakistan, my taxi pulled up outside the gates of the headquarters of exiled Afghan mujahideen leaders Younis Khallis and Abdul Haq. I didn’t know either men but what I did know was that they both belonged to Hizb-i-Islami, one of seven Afghan resistance groups based in […]

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  • The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Mammon and the Hippie Pope

    To use a word whose Catholic meaning I learned in second grade at St. Mary’s Elementary while studying for my First Communion, let me make a small confession.  It seems relevant to the response I have to Mary Jo McConahy’s new book Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right.  That confession is this: […]

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  • How Assassination Became Policy at the CIA

    The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the […]

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  • Lawlessness in the Name of Law and Order

    The most remarkable thing about the news related to the historic indictment of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump by a New York state grand jury in Manhattan last Thursday afternoon so far is the unhinged nature of reaction from the Republi-fascist (Rf) Party. From House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) to House Majority Leader […]

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  • How Many Monsters are You?

    Late in the afternoon of March 20, 2023, Monica Johnson, veteran employee at Manhattan’s Missing and Unidentified Persons Bureau, was busy playing Candy Crush on her iPhone, when she looked up to see a woman dressed in a dark robe and hijab standing by her desk. The woman told her that she wanted to report […]

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  • American Whiplash

    Famously, in response to the Supreme Court’s Worcester v. Georgia decision protecting Native American rights, Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” The quote is apocryphal, but it goes to the heart of one of the most vexing problems in politics. We think of politics as if it’s a question of statutes, laws, and parliamentary procedure, of getting a policy to the finish line à la Schoolhouse Rock’s timeless ditty “I’m Just a Bill”, as if we could breathe easy once bills are signed into law.

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  • Ecocide and Ecoside

    If we’re going to fight something, we need to know what it is. If a crime is to be prosecuted, we must know what the crime is. At first sight, and in its dictionary definition, ecocide seems to be fairly straightforward: “the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human […]

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  • The Last Child of My Lai

    The My Lai Massacre, where American GIs murdered 502 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, occurred 55 years ago this week. Around 11:30 on March 16, 1968, Captain Ernest Medina ordered a ceasefire of US troops under his command in the south Vietnamese village of My Lai 4. After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There […]

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  • How Does an Economic System so Hostile to Life Endure for Centuries?

    When we conceptualize the power that maintains capitalism, violence and ideology readily come to mind. Despite the vast inequality, grotesque exploitation, contempt for life and the environment, chronic instability and the rebellions that repeatedly arise and sometimes take power, capitalism seems firmer in the saddle than ever, spreading its suffocating tentacles to virtually every place on Earth.

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  • Comedy Vacui

    One of the most distressing disappearances from multiplexes in the last half decade is the studio comedy. I’m far from the first person to point out their absence, but I don’t think streaming and “prestige television” are entirely to blame. Romantic comedies have also vanished, and last year’s Ticket to Paradise is the exception that […]

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  • When the CIA Came for Al McCoy

    In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven, Connecticut. Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also knew several Southeast Asian languages, as well as the political history of the region. He […]

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  • The Speech of Robots

    “The algorithm, he said, was YouTube’s speech and distinct from what users had posted.” – New York Times, Feb. 21, 2023 If the algorithm is speech just as money is speech, then it has the protection of the First Amendment and cannot be obstructed. (Citizens United, 2010) However, Constitutionally both the free speech of money […]

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  • “Look, I Got My Life Out of this Cat”

    In the late 1960s, Paul Coates, after a stint in Vietnam, had left the US Army and was back in the States. He settled in Baltimore, found a job, got married, started a family. But life in the army had awakened Paul to Black consciousness, and he found himself hanging out at the local chapter […]

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  • Thatcherism in End Times Drag

    A largely innocuous, if somewhat tedious, traffic reduction scheme in Oxford, England has in recent months become a bizarre cause celebre of the international far right. Since last May, three areas of East Oxford have had the bulk of their residential streets closed to through traffic to create what are called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). […]

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  • The CIA’s Changing Take on the Climate Emergency

    Factories along the lower Columbia River, January, 2023. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

    One of the earliest climate-related documents in the CIA library is a 1958 Joint Services Publications report on Soviet analyses of so-called global “heat balances.” The report mostly consists of hundreds of footnotes referencing the work of Soviet climatologists who seemed way ahead on the issue. Until the 1990s, most of the CIA research entries for “climate change” and “global warming” are simply translations of Soviet science journals.

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  • Emancipation, Hollywood’s Best Civil War Movie Ever

    Still, from Emancipation.

    Emancipating Film History

    The Civil War is among Hollywood’s favorite, most frequently filmed wars, and since the silent era numerous popular motion pictures have dramatized “the war between the states.” This oeuvre includes notable productions such as: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation; Oscar-winner Victor Fleming’s 1939 Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller; John Huston’s 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage; 1989’s Glory; as well as Ken Burns’ epochal 9-episode nonfiction TV series The Civil War, which won two Emmy Awards. Now add to this list what is arguably Tinseltown’s best Civil War movie ever: Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, starring Will Smith and Ben Foster.

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  • Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree?

    “I’m watching these trees fall over in the park because of being baked in the heat,” observed David, my climbing instructor. He has lived in Joshua Tree for some 30 years, just a stone’s throw away from the entrance to its namesake Joshua Tree National Park, where the Colorado and Mojave Deserts meet. As a […]

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  • Call it Whitewashing or Greenwashing, World Bank Subterfuge Doesn’t Fool Us

    Image by Markus Krisetya.

    Every so often, the World Bank puts out a paper that calls for better social protection or at least a somewhat better deal for working people. The public relations people there evidently believe we have very short memories.

    No, dear reader, the World Bank has not changed its function, nor have elephants begun to fly. Without any hint of irony, the World Bank’s latest attempt at selective amnesia is what it calls its “Social Protection and Jobs” strategy, in which it purports to advocate that the world’s national governments “greatly expand effective coverage of social protection programs” and “significantly increase the scale and quality of economic inclusion and labor market programs.” Hilariously, the World Bank titles its 136-page report fleshing out this strategy “Charting a Course Towards Universal Social Protection: Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity for All.”

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  • Black Power Remakes the World

    In 1965, two twenty-somethings, Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons, activists seasoned by Mississippi Freedom Summer and Arkansas Black sharecropper organizing, met, completely by chance, at the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). So began almost 60 – and counting – years of their lives and work together in what was to become […]

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  • Did Timothy Leary Save my Life?

    Timothy Leary at The Ranch, during a 1967 interview with ABCNews.

    What would Timothy Leary have made of today’s counterculture becoming in some ways like the sole preserve of the right? Was there not something of Leary in the ‘QAnon Shaman’ guy with his painted face and horned hat and tattooed chest at the US Capitol riot on January 6 last year? I don’t believe so. Besides, Leary had he still been alive may have been the first off the block to interrupt the shouting match, possibly even with a resurgent call for peace.

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  • Mandela’s Death or Other Dramatic Developments…

    Declassified US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents from the 1980s reveal that the Agency expected that Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), future President of South Africa, would die in prison. The CIA hoped that the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-89) would be able to co-opt the African National Congress (ANC), of which Mandela was a leading figure, and […]

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