radiofree.asia

Category: Feature Articles

  • 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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  • Killing Castro

    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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  • CounterPunch.org 2021-07-14 17:20:11

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  • They Called Him Star Child

    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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  • Hold Up The Mirror Of Human Trafficking And What Do You See?

    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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  • The Assault on Critical Race Theory

    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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  • Bend It Like Megan: Will World Cup Winners Also Become Equality’s Champs in LFG?

    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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  • Straight to Bechtel

    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.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Can’t Get You Out of My Head

    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.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Umberto D.: Refugees From Capitalism

    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.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.