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Category: Feature Articles

  • Tesla and the Anthropocene

    Photo credits: Sung Wang (via Unsplash) and Leijurv, CC by-sa 4.0 int’l.

    Tesla’s going to produce $25K cars. Welcome news for many working folks who have, so far, only admired Tesla cars from a distance. And it should be good news for the global transition to sustainable energy—if we believe Elon Musk, the self-crowned Technoking.

    Anyway, that 25K price tag got me thinking. When I can afford a Tesla, should I get one? First, I’m taking a due diligence drive. May I show you the sights?

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  • The War on Terror: Twenty Years and Counting

    Image by Jordy Meow.

    With the War on Terror in its twentieth year, thrust back into the public discourse with the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Linda Sarsour, prominent Palestinian American activist and thinker, one of the national co-founders of the Women’s March (the largest single day protest in U.S. history), expressed what has been the core experience over the last two decades, “Unfortunately, we’ve been sitting around for twenty years, watching people who look like us, who pray like us, die.”

    As Sarsour noted, the past two decades have been devastating for people within the U.S. but especially for those living abroad, especially those in the Central Asian and Middle East region. From the drone strikes of weddings to now, leaving a political vacuum for groups like the Taliban to re-emerge and reconquer, U.S. involvement, justified by the War On Terror, has left countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, utterly “decimated”, Sarsour said.

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  • Hitchcock’s Sabotage: Film as Terrorism

    Oscar Homolka in Alfred Hitchock’s Sabotage.

    As compulsively watchable as it is, Hitchcock’s Sabotage makes a real hash out of Conrad’s The Secret Agent–that prescient novel which so accurately predicted the ways in which radical underground groups could be penetrated and manipulated by intelligence agencies into doing the repressive work of the state.

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  • Tulsi Gabbard Uses 9/11 Anniversary to Spread Islamophobic Message of Hate

    Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday used the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to promote an anti-Muslim message, the latest in a series of moves by the former congresswoman aimed at courting the right-wing. More

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  • Arendt and QAnon

    Image by Wesley Tingey.

    Although she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt had Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, QAnon’s, and most of the Republican Party’s number, down to almost the last decimal point. Nowhere else will one find a more chilling anticipation and explanation of Trumpism’s deranged conspiracy-mongering and startling resilience.

    Since 2016, it’s been obvious that Trump himself is a purveyor of conspiracy theories, notably about a “deep state” conspiracy (which about 40% of Americans now believe) and 2020 election fraud. Republicans’ steadfast, sycophantic support for Trump, coupled with their recent decision to neither censure Taylor Greene nor strip her of her committee posts, their failure to vote to convict Trump in the Senate during the recent impeachment trial, and an ongoing, farcical “election fraud” investigation in Arizona authorized by state Republicans, confirm that they have morphed into a far-right party with a solid authoritarian base, one reminiscent of European extremist parties.

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  • 9/11: The Doctrines of Bush, Obama, Trump & Biden

    Image by UX.

    Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on September 11, 2001 as a historical event and provide how this day continues to shape the way the United States sees itself in the world?

    Richard Falk: The attack itself on 9/11 was a most momentous event from the perspective of international relations, undermining the dominating historic role of hard power under the control of national governments in explaining historical agency.

    Dramatically, 9/11 revealed the vulnerability of the most powerful country, as measured by military capabilities and global security hegemony, in all of world history, to the violent tactics of non-state combatants in coercive interactions labeled by war planners as ‘asymmetric warfare.’

    On the basis of minimal expenditures of lives and resources, al-Qaeda produced a traumatizing and disorienting shock on the United States from which it has yet to recover, responding in ways that are fundamentally dysfunctional with respect to achieving tolerable levels of global stability in a historical period when security threats were moving away from traditional geopolitical rivalries as climate. While not fulfilling its goals, great devastation and human suffering was spread far and wide, especially in the Middle East and Asia.

    Such an efficient use of terrorist tactics by al-Qaeda, not only as an instrument of destruction, but as a mighty symbolic blow directed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, embodiments of American economic and military hegemony. The effect was further magnified by its status as a spectacular visual moment unforgettably inscribed on the political consciousness of worldwide TV audiences, conveying the vulnerability of the strong to the imaginative rage and dedicated sacrifice of the avenging weak.

    Of course, the ‘success’ of this attack was short-lived, producing an initial wave of global empathy for the innocent victims of such mayhem, heralding widespread support in the spirit of internationalist solidarity on behalf of greatly augmented efforts at criminal enforcement of anti-terrorist policies and norms. Yet this early international reaction sympathetic to the U.S. has been erased in the American memory, as well as overshadowed internationally by the effects of the American over-reaction that claimed during the next twenty years many times the number of innocent victims than were lost on 9/11. This over-reaction has had counterrevolutionary impacts worldwide that are still reverberating.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Falk – Daniel Falcone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Central America’s Forgotten History

    Aviva Chomsky’s new book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, provides a much-needed corrective to the skimpy and frequently inaccurate coverage of Central America which dominates U.S. media. But more than that, it makes a compelling case for, in Chomsky’s words, “changing the structures and institutions which have brought so much harm [to the region].”

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  • 9/11 and the American Mind

    Still from When the Towers Fell.

    It is the second plane that haunts the mind, curving on a course that seems to descend right out of a waking nightmare. Even before it struck that ugly steel and glass tower, there was already a dreadful familiarity to it. Somehow we’d seen its shape before. The Hindenburg in flames. JFK’s head blooming open on the Zapruder film. The Challenger space shuttle exploding live before our eyes in the stratosphere on an impossibly sunny Florida day. The Waco fire incinerating women and children in those Texas winds. The events of 9/11 played out like a horrifying novelty show, seared into the brainpan of the nation by thousands of instant replays.

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  • Republicanism For The Anthropocene

    Image by NASA.

    You don’t have to read the almost 4,000 pages of the grim new IPCC Climate Report to know the gravity of Earth’s situation where humans are driving at least a million species, including their own, to extinction. We’ve had warnings for a long time, from Joseph Fourier (1824, greenhouse effect), Svante Arrhenius (1896, CO2 emissions), Guy Stewart Callendar (1938, global warming) and others through to the IPCC report of 2007 (90% sure that CO2 emissions were responsible for most observed climate warming). Scientists had done their thing but where were the political thinkers? The climate disaster is a political problem. You only have to look at who is most affected. It’s no news that low-income individuals and peoples are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, that developing countries suffer about 99% of the casualties caused by it, but the fifty poorest countries account for 1% of greenhouse gas emissions, while 92% are attributable to countries of the so-called Global North (as if this were merely a geographical category) with only 19% of the global population. It’s evident that the problem is neoliberal capitalism, which has been regulating markets in favor of the rich for the last fifty years.

    Naturally, this system isn’t presenting solutions. When necessary, there’s a greenwashing tweak here or there. We’re told we’re all guilty and all doomed. Meanwhile big corporations will keep making a killing, billionaires will look for bolt holes in remote places, and governments will keep lying. Their tax systems tell us where their loyalties lie: they’re billionaire friendly. So, it’s après moi le déluge because, as we say here in Catalonia, they couldn’t give a rabbit’s fart.

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  • Up in Smoke

    Image by Marcus Kauffman.

    As my wife Chelsea and I drove through Arizona on our annual pilgrimage from California to Montana, orange smoke billowed along the darkened horizon, signals of hearts shattered and landscapes scorched. Days earlier nineteen hot shot firefighters died together as they battled the intense blazes near the mountain town of Yarnell. It was the most lethal wildfire America had witnessed in 80 years.

    The Yarnell flames were so erratic and intense the team became suddenly trapped, and despite each of the men deploying their individual fire shelters, all fighting the flames that day perished. The lone survivor was out fetching a truck for his crew, only to return to the gruesome scene to find his buddies were gone. It was the single deadliest incident for firefighters since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

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  • The Other Forever War

    Still from Straight Outta Compton. (New Line Cinema)

    Why does the drug war grind on, decade after decade, immune to reason, often grotesque in its hypocrisy? How can one listen without laughing to the solemn posturing of the U.S. government about the  stings Mexican banks for their washing of drug money, without a word about corresponding drug money-washing by U.S. banks? Small wonder Mexican politicians deride the US  for its double standard.

    In all its hypocrisy and cruelty the drug war drags on because it serves an important repressive function that no state is eager to abandon. If its real, as opposed to its proclaimed purpose is recognized, the drug war “works.”  And that purpose has never been the halting of production, shipment and consumption of drugs. Take a look at the history of drug wars over the past 175 years. These drug wars are either openly avowed or tacit enterprises that expand the drug trade, or they are pretexts for social and political repression.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • JP Sottile on Biden’s Infrastructure Bill

    CounterPunch once again chats with the Newsvandal, JP Sottile. Eric and JP discuss Biden’s infrastructure bill, the shifting political terrain in Washington, the Left and the Right over the decades, and the dying planet. Don’t worry, it’s fun!

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  • I, Ken Loach

    Not all socialists get expelled from Labour, but most people expelled from Labour are socialists. This is a strange thing for a party that claims the heritage of democratic socialism. And yet it is the mark of Keir Starmer’s leadership. The expulsion of socialist filmmaker Ken Loach from the Labour Party is a testament to […]

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  • The Dollar General Theory of Money and Employment

    I’m so tired Tired of waiting Tired of waiting for you – The Kinks For the last month and a half I’ve driven the backroads of southern Indiana, criss-crossing the unglaciated hill country 40 miles south of Indianapolis and 40 miles north of Louisville. It’s mostly forested here, large remarkably unbroken stretches of deciduous woodlands, […]

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  • The Earth Burns and the Free Market Won’t Save Us

    Yes, the time for talk is well past and one more report isn’t likely to change minds or induce new action. Nonetheless, it is always useful to have the latest information when dealing with an ongoing emergency. The world’s government shouldn’t need the latest United Nations report on the state of Earth’s climate to act […]

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  • From South Africa to Israel

    During this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, Algerian Fethi Nourine was slated to battle Israeli Tohar Butbul in judo. Before the bout, Nourine withdrew in protest of Israeli policies, expressing support for Palestinians. “We worked a lot to reach the Olympics but the Palestinian cause is bigger than all of this,” he stated. Nourine and his trainer were recalled by Algeria, suspended by the International Judo Foundation, and will likely face additional punishment.

    Days later a second judoka, Sudan’s Mohamed Abdalrasool, also withdrew from a bout against Butbul. Although Abdalrasool’s reasoning remains unclear, the withdrawals recall the era of anti-apartheid activism and the actions of the sports boycotts taken against South Africa. Like Nourine’s latest example, past athletes, teams, international sporting bodies, and anti-apartheid campaigners leveraged sports in their refusal condone apartheid policies, enabling South Africa’s ostracization.

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  • India’s New IT Rules Paving Way for Legitimised Surveillance

    Image by Naveed Ahmed.

    As the Indian government is confronted with a global snooping scandal with over 300 journalists, politicians and bureaucrats on the list of those surveilled by the state, the Modi government had intensified its bid to rampage through the country’s latest Internet Technology laws. 

    While the central government claims that the new laws are aimed at quelling the crisis of misinformation in the country by targeting sources, social media giants, alternative media platforms and privacy activists claim that the laws will bring them under direct government oversight giving enormous power to the executive to crackdown on privacy and dissent–leading to increased censorship.  

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  • Pierre’s Razor

    Pierre Sprey (Fifth Estate).

    My friend Pierre Sprey died at his desk this week of an apparent stroke, probably provoked by some new outrage leaking out the Pentagon, an institution his piercing mind had dismantled contract by bloated contract.

    Pierre had a roving intellect that ranged across many disciplines. You might call him a polymath, though the word sounds much too Greek for that old blues aficionado.

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  • The Gunning of America

    Image by Maria Lysenko.

    There were already enough guns in circulation in the United States for every man, woman, and child, with 67 million left over in 2018.  The number has risen significantly in subsequent years: nearly 23 million guns were sold in the U.S. in 2020. At least 20 million of the guns in the U.S.  are military-style assault rifles, designed and fitted for killing and maiming on a mass scale.

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  • Fannie Lou Hamer and the Ongoing Struggle for Voting Rights

    Fannie Lou Hamer was a firebrand. She was a civil rights organizer that doesn’t come along every day. Charismatic, she did not kowtow to charismatic leaders. An individual who was a force of nature, she preferred group leadership. A politician who could have led nationally, she believed fiercely in the local and in grassroots organizing. […]

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  • The Windsors: A Major Counter-Revolutionary Backstop For Bourgeois Britain 

    The death of Elizabeth Windsor’s husband Philip Mountbatten earlier this year prompted an establishment-led frenzy of monarchism across Britain, with wall-to-wall sycophantic TV and radio coverage and Covid public information boards replaced with Philip’s portrait. The standard view of the British monarchy is that they are no more than symbolic figureheads lacking any real power; […]

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  • An Encounter at Nez Perce Creek

    Late June, Nez Perce Creek, Yellowstone. I was following closely the path the renegade Nez Perce took 115 years ago, a trail that allowed them to put some space between themselves and homicidal General Otis Howard and his US Army troops. Even then Yellowstone, already a national park, stood as a sanctuary of freedom and […]

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  • Rebirth of a Nation: US History According to DW Griffith

    Still from Birth of a Nation.

    Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it’s perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it’s possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson’s and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House.

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  • We Don’t Need to Wait for Centuries to Build a Better World

    A crucial argument for the incessantly promoted idea that capitalism will be with us for a long time to come is the idea of inertia in human understanding. Ideas are stubbornly persistent and can only be changed over long periods of time. Slow evolutionary change is the best we can hope for, and the prospects even for that are uncertain and fragile.

    If the above were true, then there would have been no revolutions in history. That is quite obviously not the case. Consciousness can change rapidly. It does so exceptionally and under rare circumstances during periods of social upheaval. Yes, not everyday occurrences. But they do happen. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin famously said.

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  • Trial By Fire: Too Hot to Handle?

    Image by Malachi Brooks.

    In her documentary Bring Your Own Brigade two-time Academy Award nominee Lucy Walker is a bit like Alexis de Tocqueville, her fellow European who came to the USA and observed its exotic inhabitants early in the 19th century. If the French philosopher observed how Americans’ mentality affected democracy in the 1830s, almost 200 years later the London-born Walker is studying how the character of Californians is being brought to bear on the increasingly common and fierce phenomenon of wildfires.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Eileen Jones on American Movies, Why So Many Films Suck, and Her Top 5 Films Leftists Must See

    Welcome to CP+ Radio’s latest episode with Eileen Jones and Eric Draitser

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  • Buy Them Up!: Why We Must Nationalize the Banks

    Image by Jack Cohen.

    As we struggle to emerge from the COVID pandemic, it’s hard to imagine fending off our economic malaise without addressing the elephant in the room: Wall Street. The 2008 financial crisis destroyed 40% of the world’s wealth in less than a year. Almost no one has gone to prison for the white-collar crime Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs perpetrated. Wall Street apologists have spent thousands of hours on talk shows and millions of dollars in courts downplaying their behavior – but the banks crashed our economy, and they will do so again as long as they remain underregulated. Though it’s been over a decade, American political and economic life won’t be put on a solid footing until we achieve closure by redressing Wall Street’s 2008 offenses. The safest thing for our economic future is nationalizing the banking industry.

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  • Sorry Twitter. It Wasn’t Personal. It’s Political.

    Image by Alexander Shatov.

    It seems that finally we are having a wider public discussion on the inherent dangers of the social media platform Twitter. A debate that has been certainly galvanised by a recent article from a self-confessed “Twitter Addict” Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, titled “You Really Need to Quit Twitter”. Explaining how she found herself constantly seduced by the platform, Flanagan writes, ‘I know I’m an addict because Twitter hacked itself so deep into my circuitry that it interrupted the very formation of my thoughts. Twenty years of journalism taught me to hit a word count almost without checking the numbers at the bottom of the screen. But now a corporation that operates against my best interests has me thinking in 280 characters. Every thought, every experience, seems to be reducible to this haiku, and my mind is instantly engaged by the challenge of concision’. Realising that the likes of George Orwell would probably have never been found dead on this platform, while also noting the anxiety the platform induces in both its users and those who have the temerity to leave, Flanagan finally realised that ‘Twitter is a parasite that burrows deep into your brain, training you to respond to the constant social feedback of likes and retweets. That takes only a week or two. Human psychology is pathetically simple to manipulate. Once you’re hooked, the parasite becomes your master, and it changes the way you think’. Twitter then not as a mere arbitrary communications outlet; rather as a viral disease for reconfiguring human connections by literally cutting into language and altering the very structure of consciousness itself.

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  • Walking Around Blind Without a Cane

    Image by Unseen Histories.

    Declarations that the United States has fallen into conditions resembling a “civil war” have become hackneyed and cliched. That such an extreme condemnation of American culture and politics can transform into a bromide demonstrates how deeply institutional and social dysfunction trouble the world’s wealthiest country. Even more disturbing are those surveyors of politics and history who persuasively argue that, in many ways legally and culturally significant, the Confederacy has triumphed long after Gettysburg. An entire literature has emerged to accompany the flatulent rise of Donald Trump, and the radical right wing in American politics. Heather Cox Richardson, historian at Boston College, details the tragic state of affairs in her book, featuring a title that functions as a thesis: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for Soul of America. It makes for good bedside reading, along with Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s exposé, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

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  • Is Cinema Dead Again?

    Image by Dibakar Roy.

    Perhaps no other art form has died as consistently as the cinema. Throughout almost every moment of its history, critics have proclaimed the medium to be dying, decaying, declining, or decadent.

    Any history of cine-death would have to begin in 1895, when Louis Lumière purportedly called the cinematograph “an invention without a future.”

    Thirty years later, critics like René Clair, Rudolf Arnheim, and Béla Balázs worried that technological advances would precipitate cinema’s demise. In their view, the advent of sound and color would make the movies too much like real life. How would spectators fall into a dream-like trance if the images were realistic?

    The invention of the television caused movie attendance to drop precipitously in the 1950s, bringing about a new wave of concern. After that, cinema’s death became a commonly invoked trope for critics, theorists, and filmmakers alike.

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