It’s that time of the year again when AIG’s executive bonuses are announced…and as every American raised on sitcoms knows, this means it’s that time in the show when the plot-twist causes the audience to gasp, and the camera cuts to a close-up of [NAME OF HORMONALLY-CAPABLE ACTOR-OF-COLOR] who delivers the viewer-pleasing catchphrase: “It’s outraaaaageous!” (more…)

This article was first published in The American Conservative, March 1, 2010.

If the last few decades prove anything about America’s strategy in fighting Islamic terrorism, it’s that no matter what the other side throws our way, America will respond in the most counterintuitive and self-destructive manner imaginable.

The routine goes something like this: if America is attacked by terrorists from Country A, then our response will be to bomb the hell out of Country Z, in which Z equals a doormat of a country whose sole purpose is to provide an easy, morale-boosting win. This strategy has produced mixed results, from total failure to complete catastrophe, depending on variable Z. The doormats have turned out to be booby-trapped. (more…)

Gold coin issued by Nicholas Deak at the peak of the last gold boom

While working on my upcoming book out here in the High Desert, I went off on one of those research tangents that led me to an old Time article about the bizarre murder, 25 years ago, of a man Time once called “the James Bond of the world of money.” The murderer was a classic  ”lone nut” of the sort who conveniently appear every now and then to take out inconvenient people. But unlike other lone nuts who may or may not have been part of some bigger conspiracy, this particular lone-nut murderer–a homeless schizophrenic woman who somehow trekked thousands of miles to kill Nicholas Deak–creeped me out for very personal reasons. Back in 2002, when I was facing the scariest and most serious death threat in all  of The eXile’s 11 years, I was told exactly how I would be killed–and the details described to me have an eery similarity to the way Nicholas Deak was murdered.  (more…)

I promised this guy I’d review a new novel called Exiles, so the review could appear in eXiled and provide some sort of synergistic frisson in the universe or something. That was months ago and I still haven’t done it. Here’s why:

It may be that I will never send Iris this letter, Spiegel thought. But someday I will see her and we will talk about these things, and then she will know.

You see? That’s the last line of the novel. I peeked at it to see where the thing would end up if I actually read all 344 pages, and that’s the final kicker. Note how the contractions have all dropped out, always an ominous sign in any novel written after 1890. “I will see her, we will talk, she will know.” Straining for lofty effect by not writing I’ll, we’ll, she’ll—bad. Very bad.
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If President Obama wants to really understand why he got his ass handed to him in the Massachusetts Senate race—a defeat as shocking and strange as if Joe Lieberman was elected president of Iran—he might want to read one of the thousands of economic horror stories happening around the country every day, stories that have put most Americans in a very foul, desperate mood. Like this story out of a small town in northern Indiana, where a casket maker was forced to close down operations and lay off its 50 employees because Americans can no longer afford bury their loved ones, and instead they’re cremating their bodies to save money.

Even the dead are suffering in today’s economy. (more…)

Even the strongest Afghani brown can’t save Scottish junkies from the waking-nightmare that’s gripped them since December—when word first leaked out in the press of dope-fiends dropping dead from Anthrax-tainted heroin. Since December, press reports say there have been 14 confirmed anthrax poisonings among Scottish heroin junkies, and one in Germany. Eight of those have died. As any Irvine Welsh reader knows, the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh are notoriously smack-plagued, so panic has no doubt hit copping centers in these towns especially hard. (more…)

This article was first published in Alternet.

A lot of us have been wondering, despondently, why the Hell Barack Obama is keeping Timothy Geithner on the job as Treasury Secretary, given his central role in the plunder of trillions of dollars from American taxpayers, and his record of subverting democracy in the service of Wall Street billionaires. Geithner’s the guy that drove the getaway car in the heist — so why was he hired to run the Treasury? You’d expect to see a guy as corrupt as Geithner serving as the Finance Minister in some Central Asian autocracy — but not in Barack Obama’s government, not after all he promised in the campaign. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on February 19, 2004.

Haiti popped into the news again, and I decided it was time to tell the whole military history of the place. It’s got to be the most amazing, bloodsoaked, heroic, messed-up story in the Western Hemisphere: slave armies defeating Napoleon’s troops, huge castles built in the middle of the jungle, endless three-cornered war between whites, blacks and mulattos…it’s just incredible. In fact, it’s so wild and complex I’m going to have to divide it into two columns. This one will cover Haiti up to independence in 1803. Next issue I’ll bring it from there to the present.

Haiti is like the big slaughterhouse across the tracks: you kind of know what goes on in there, but you’d rather not think about it. (more…)

This article first appeared in Alternet.

Wall Street Vampires: Lately, a lot of Americans, myself included, have used the blood-sucking freaks as a metaphor to describe the Wall Street billionaires who rule us, and who are ruining us.  Like so many awful stories of the past few years, it turns out that these Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles, and feed themselves by luring poor, desperate humans into their dens, hooking them into blood-pumping machines, and sucking out their plasma for mind-boggling profits. (more…)

Riot at Indian TV station over Exiled Online article

This has to be the single weirdest episode in my journalism career–and that’s saying a lot, considering all the strange and scary shit I’ve been through over the past decade-plus. I caused a mass riot in India, leaving 185 people arrested so far, and about 100 business owned by Larry Summers’ oligarch-friends smoldering in ruins. The class war is on–but not in the supposedly free-spirited United States of America, where you can rape Americans of everything they’re worth and never worry about so much as a broken window… instead my article sparked an uprising on the other side of the globe. Go figure. (more…)

This article was first published by AlterNet.

We’ve been lied to for years now about the severity of California’s water shortage. The media and state officials have been ringing the alarm,  warning that the state was in the grips of the quite possibly the “worst California drought in modern history,” when in fact the state nearly pulled in its average rainfall in 2009. The fearmongering is about to go into overdrive, as powerful interests start whipping up fears of drought to push through a $11 billion bond measure on the upcoming November elections, setting up the Golden State for a corporate water grab. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2002.

Reading the leaks from Washington, you can tell we’re gearing up to do something in Yemen. A little regime-change action maybe, a sideshow to the big production number in Iraq. Hitting Yemen makes sense–a lot more sense than occupying Iraq. (more…)

What are the best movies of the decade? How the hell should I know? To hear the critics tell it, it’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, plus a lot of other solemn bummers I didn’t see.

However, among the ones I could bear to look at, here are the highlights. We’ll start just with 2009, which was a weirdly good year for films, though everything else blew.
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This article was first published by TruthDig (truthdig.com)

Michele Bachmann has become known as the Queen of the anti-government Tea Baggers, protesting health care reform and slamming every other government handout as “socialism.” But what her followers don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is also a queen of another kind—a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money. (more…)

Quick dispatch with some groundbreaking news: Mexican marines shot it out with Arturo Beltran Leyva and his bodyguards in some luxury mall/department store in Cuernavaca, about 50 miles south of Mexico city. Unreal. The shootout—caught on tape—happened in the middle of the night on the streets of the city. This episode has the possibility of bringing a lot of violence, with the reacomodos (what we call when the bloody realignment of power happens) and all fights for control of the plazas. (more…)