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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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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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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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.
Welcome to CP+ Radio’s latest episode with Eileen Jones and Eric Draitser
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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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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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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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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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Fidel Castro speaking in Harlem, October, 1995.
When it came to Fidel Castro, the CIA spared no effort across more than a quarter of a century. William Colby admitted to the Church committee that the agency had tried and failed to kill Castro several times, but not nearly as often as its critics alleged. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Colby observed. “Castro gave McGovern in 1975 a list of the attempts made on his life – there were about thirty by that time – as he said, by the CIA. McGovern gave it to me and I looked through it and checked it off against our records and said we could account for about five or six. The others – I can understand Castro’s feeling about them because they were all ex-Bay of Pigs people or something like that, so he thinks they’re all CIA. Once you get into one of them, then bingo! – you get blamed for all the rest. We didn’t have any connections with the rest of them, but we’d never convince Castro of that.”
Five or six assassination plots is a sobering number, especially if you happen to be the intended target of these “executive actions.” But even here Colby was dissembling. He certainly had the opportunity to consult a secret 1967 report on the plots against Castro by the CIA’s Inspector General John S. Earman, and approved by Richard Helms. The CIA had in fact hatched attempts on the Cuban leader even prior to the revolution. One of the first occurred in 1958, when Eutimio Rojas, a member of the Cuban guerrillas, was hired to kill Castro as he slept at a camp in the Sierra Maestra.
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Perhaps the best thing you can say about Donald Rumsfeld is that Henry Kissinger hated him. The antagonism dated back to the Ford Presidency, when Rumsfeld undermined Henry K’s freelance diplomacy and covertly sought to destroy Kissinger’s détente project. Rumsfeld (“Rummy to his friends”–though he confessed to Nixon that he never drank with reporters or […]
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There are hundreds of ugly faces of poverty. And most people can see the connection between it and one of the most heinous crimes humans can commit, within our own species: humans selling humans. Humans who are not poor, vulnerable, and traumatized selling others who are. Yet it tends to be defined in logistical terms […]
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Antiracism as Thoughtcrime The sloppy fascist Donald Trump may no longer reside in the White House but he’s back on the hate rally campaign trail selling his big Hitlerian Stolen Election Lie. Meanwhile, Trumpist white nationalism is booming in the “red states,” where Amerikaner[1] Republicans hold the reins. One of many signs of this right-wing […]
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LFG is similar in a number of ways to another documentary – FTA, which was made half a century ago. As in the latter, the “F” stands for “fuck” in LFG, too. In the case of the 1972 nonfiction film, the initials stood for Fuck the Army (see: FTA (imdb.com)), while LFG is the acronym […]
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On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Bechtel, the gargantuan global construction firm based in San Francisco, issued its revenue numbers for 2004. While the situation continued to deteriorate for the US military forces in Iraq, Bechtel reported more fragrant news. Although the privately-owned company doesn’t disclose its profits, Bechtel did announce that […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
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RN: Your new film series – Can’t Get You Out of My Head – seems to contradict some of the arguments you made in previous series, for example, the notion that computers and the internet have taken over our lives. AC: I think the problem you have with me is that there isn’t any consistency. […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Niemi.
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Umberto D. opens with a street protest in Rome. The scene is shot from above. As the marchers approach an intersection a city bus cuts through the crowd, indifferent to their presence. The camera zooms in and we see that these are old men, carrying signs and chanting for an increase in their pensions. “I […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
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Image by Julia Zyablova.
When you want to know if the US government, or the political party in charge, is pulling a fast one on the public, look at the name they give a new program or law. The USA PATRIOT Act is a classic example. An acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, that law, passed in November 2001 with no hearings, was actually a huge wishlist of a decade’s worth of repressive and invasive assaults on the Bill of Rights pulled off Congressional shelves rushed through for President GW Bush’s signature using the 9-11 attacks as justification.
When it comes to assaults on Medicare, the same thing happens. Medicare Advantage, originally called Medicare Choice, introduced in 1997 during the Clinton administration, got its even slippery monicker in 2003. It neither improves choice nor is an advantage. Presented to Medicare enrollees as a better option than the government’s traditional Medicare Parts A and B and D, it actually reduces the choice of doctor and can leave patients without any protection from huge health costs or any ability to buy supplemental insurance.
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Marvin Gaye, 1971. Image credit unknown.
In 1967 media critic Marshall McLuhan collaborated with illustrator Quentin Fiore on an eye-catching little book titled The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. The book was an alternative and provocative means to express the idea first expressed by McLuhan in a 1964 book that it is the technologies of presentation that are the messages of modern media, not the content. This idea is still debated and one imagines there are as many arguments for McLuhan’s possibility as there are against it. From the three network television of the 1960s and 1970s to the social media madness of 2021, much has changed in the world of communications, yet its essence as a vehicle for control continues to be understood by those in power. Conversely, its potential as a vehicle for subversion is also understood.
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Hundreds of activists and union workers successfully prevented a container ship owned by an Israeli company from docking and unloading its cargo in Oakland, California, earlier this month in protest of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Then on June 9, people in Vancouver, Canada, gathered to stop the same ship. These and other “Block the […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Naomi LaChance.
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In 1994, I was the only non-law-enforcement expert on fake ID willing to go on national TV to talk about it. I had edited a dozen books on false identity documents for counterculture bookseller, Loompanics Unlimited, such as Reborn in the U.S.A., Reborn in Canada, Reborn with Credit, How to Get Lost, How to Disappear […]
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Innovation is said to be the mainstay of capitalist ideology, one of the supreme virtues of a system built to reward individual initiative. The genius of capitalism, according to Bill Gates, rests in ‘its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest.’ Potential for big financial returns on innovation, he adds, ‘unleashes a broad set […]
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Image by Taylor Brandon.
America’s domestic activists have achieved a great deal. In particular, they have pressured Joe Biden into moving significantly to the left—though, not nearly left enough, given the scale of the challenge—on issues relating to climate and infrastructure. It is perhaps against this backdrop of mounting grassroots pressure that the President told Israel to end its latest effort to, in the words of Israeli commentators, “mow the grass” in occupied Gaza, which along with the increasingly annexed West Bank is Palestinian territory. Whatever the motivation, Israel did, as usual, what its U.S. master instructed.
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Image credit: Giniw Collective.
This week, TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) announced that they were finally terminating the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) project after over a decade resistance from the Alberta tar sands to Wall Street to the White House to the Gulf Coast.
It stirs a lot of feelings and memories for me. I’ve devoted myself to climate direct action for over two decades. Half of it, I spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. Through my KXL journey, I was arrested sitting-in the White House, recruited tens of thousands to pledge to take action, trained thousands in direct action to disrupt Obama’s approval of the pipeline (hell, I even trained the trainers), supported the environmentalists and landowners that disrupted the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline in Texas (which got built anyway) and generally made elite politicos and Wall Street bankers miserable over it. In 2013, I discovered that TransCanada had compiled a file on me and my friends and traveled to law enforcement along the pipeline route with a PowerPoint telling them that we were terrorists. We also declared victory on KXL more than once.
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One of the more nauseating things I’ve long heard from white guys of a certain stupid, faux-Marxist, fascism-appeasing, red-brown, and Trumpenleft bent[1] is that racism, nativism, and sexism are just “scams” used by the ruling class to divide the noble proletariat and divert its attention away from the working-class solidarity required to fight capitalism. To […]
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A still from In the Crosswind.
As Estonia prepares to mark the 30th anniversary of regaining its independence from Soviet rule Martti Helde’s In the Crosswind (Risttuules) is blowing onto U.S. screens to remind viewers of an especially egregious crime against humanity: The 80th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s purported Baltic purge. Shortly after Crosswind’s rapturous opening depicting Erna and her husband Heldur enjoying an Estonian idyll at their countryside home, 40,000 people are deported from the Baltic Republics as part of Stalin’s alleged plot for ethnically cleansing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as titles in English inform us.
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In her new book, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (out in paperback in July from UC Press), veteran writer and educator Juliet Schor examines both nonprofit and for-profit “sharing platforms” that sprang up in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. Schor writes that in […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ben Terrall.
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“China has an overall goal … to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch.” Joe Biden, March 26, 2021 There it is, plain and raw, the abiding essence of the American elite’s foreign […]
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Floyd.
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Irrigation depleted Klamath River north of Yreka, California.
This week I drove down I-5, dodging Amazon Prime semi-trailers from Oregon City to Burbank. The 916-mile drive south offers a kind of triptych of what the West has been doing to itself all of these years, truth (to reformulate Godard) at 102 feet per second. I crossed depleted rivers, from the Santiam, Willamette and Umpqua to the Rogue, Klamath and Sacramento, mercilessly drained to irrigate alfalfa fields, pistachio orchards and rice paddies. And fresh clearcuts defaced the Siskiyou and Cascade Ranges.
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