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For SuicideGirls.com

"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR GOODDAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

Native dancers, Nanwalek, Prince William Sound, Alaska, center of spill damage.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke. And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. (Show me more...)

The occupied territory of Manhattan is supposed to be a demilitarized zone - as long as you ignore the blown-apart corpses in front of the bodegas and Trustwell Corp assassins infiltrating the block parties.

I don't review other writers' books.  Mostly, because I don't like what I see.  But this graphic novel, DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, is too good to let go by unheralded.

Click on the image at the below to get a feel for it.

DMZ is New York in the future, and it looks uncomfortably too much like America today.  There's a phony war on terror, a hunt for illusory insurgents and troublemakers which becomes the trigger-point excuse for crushing the heaving, rising underclass.

Except here, in the comic, America's culture war and class war has moved to its inevitable bloody conclusion:  a corporate junta pretending to provide safety to war-torn New York while using high-tech military intelligence and scum-bag death squads to hold on to power.

In the center of the story is a half-assed but earnest journalist Matty Roth on the Lower East Side whose need to voice the story of the voiceless is at war with his reasonable cowardice.  Tell me about it.

Reporter Roth is sent in to find and cover a charismatic street leader, Parco Delgado, who declares his candidacy with explosives.  Is Delgado a greasy, piece-of-crap thug or a savior in a dirty T-shirt?   What makes creators Wood and Burchielli such smart storytellers is that they don't make the answer simple, but they don't fail to give the answer.

If the story sounds weird it's because any story that's real is weird.

I'm writing this after filing my own story from Eight Mile in Detroit.  One foreclosed home after another, weeds to the roof.  (Show me more...)

 

 Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein [29:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

by Greg Palast

For SuicideGirls.com

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-you-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education - yes!), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on. (Show me more...)

 

 PRN - Greg Palast Investigates 1-29-09 [30:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Greg Palast Investigates - On the Trail. The newest film from Greg Palast, BBC Newsnight.

While the Old Regime has fallen, we still have a lot of work to do.

We don't want your money - we want your commitment: we are asking you to sponsor our newest project:

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