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 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 businesses 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…)

Anne Applebaum is a dingbat. I don’t throw that word “dingbat” around lightly, folks. But I just made the mistake of clicking a link that led me to an Anne Applebaum column, and seriously dude: Anne Applebaum? She’s a dingbat. Big time. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on June 23, 2003.

As Russians openly strive to become elitny, America’s dominant oligarchs and feeble intellectuals live in a state of grotesque denial about their elitism. Billionaires act like hicks and get away with it. Liberal intellectuals try to suckup by learning sports metaphors. The smoke and mirrors works well for the billionaires but not for the nearly-extinct Left. So why are Americans still in the elitist closet? (more…)

This story was first published on AlterNet.

What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army’s refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred — and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?

We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then — poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I’d imagined it — such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2003.

Reading the Western press accounts of the Khodorkovsky arrest has at times been as unpleasant as one of my famous giardia attacks. I’m not sure which version is more ridiculous: the mainstream line which portrays the YUKOS oligarch as some kind of billionaire Aung San Suu Kyi, a martyr to corporate good governance and liberal politics…or the simplistic flip-flop, which argues that Khodorkovsky was once a brutal thief, and therefore he’s getting his just desserts. (more…)