Mr. Carl Kandutsch, a business lawyer down Plano way (and, it turns out, a fellow CounterPunch contributor), writes in to take issue with a recent post I put up here in these run-down precincts. I had written what I thought was a straightforward piece asking readers to consider giving some support to a writer I admire — Arthur Silber — who is going through a serious medical crisis. I must say I was a bit taken aback by some of the responses, which seemed to come from the Paul Ryan school of social compassion: “Losers who are sick and low

Arthur Silber continues to reel from crisis to crisis in his long battle with deteriorating health. Every few months, a new front opens, or else lingering ailments flair up with malevolent force. Right now, he is facing hundreds of dollars (at least) in bills to treat a serious eye ailment, while struggling to meet basic expenses for survival. Silber, one of America’s finest writers and political analysts, lives solely on contributions from readers of his blog. That he continues to write at all, through incessant physical pain and the many crushing burdens of life on the financial margins, is remarkable;

The “Global War on Terror” may have been semantically erased by the propagandists of the Obama Administration, but on the ground, it is still going on — and still spawning a multititude of malevolent consequences, as Patrick Cockburn details in a powerful series of articles. Cockburn’s look at the historical record doesn’t begin with 9/11, of course; the fatal alliance between Washington and the most retrograde and repressive forms of Islam — which gave rise to the Terror War and its present reality — go back several decades. [The first three parts of the series are here, here and here.]

Has it only been 10 months since Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000 — no, 200,000 — no, wait, 2 million– secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington’s global surveillance state, which far outstripped the wildest, wettest dreams of the Stasi, of Stalin, yea of Orwell himself? Try to recall those dark days — now long since banished, thank God! — when the American imperium thrust its grubby hands and greedy eyes into every single digital pie available, scarfing up emails, URLs, locations,

While Russian barbarians violate the sovereignty of another nation in an unconscionable show of force, American agents of peace and light make nice with friendly locals overseas: American Special Forces troops … scaled his walls with ladders on Thursday, arresting [Qazi Nasir] Mudassir and two other employees of [his] Radio Paighame Milli. … They were apparently unaware, he said, that his radio station is supported in large part by pro-government, pro-coalition propaganda advertisements paid for by the American military. Mr. Mudassir said a force of more than two dozen Americans carried out the raid, ransacking his premises and damaging much

1.The Western intervention in Ukraine has now led the region to the brink of war. Political opposition to government of President Viktor Yanukovych — a corrupt and thuggish regime, but as with so many corrupt and thuggish regimes one sees these days, a democratically elected one — was funded in substantial part by organizations of or affiliated with the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (a longtime vehicle for Washington-friendly coups), and USAID. It also received substantial financial backing from Western oligarchs, such as billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and sole bankroller of the new venue

The title of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story came to mind when I read of the death of Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust. She was 110, and grown up in Prague, where both Kafka and Mahler had been friends of her family. Herz-Sommer had  gained some fame in her last years for her remarkable spirit, and her dedication to the music of Chopin, which helped sustain her during her time in a Nazi camp — and probably saved her and her son from death. She was in the “model” camp at Theresienstadt, used by the Nazis as

(This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared on CounterPunch today.) It is no secret that Barack Obama is one of the supreme illusionists of modern times. The disconnect between his words and his deeds is so profound as to be almost sublime, far surpassing the crude obfuscations of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Their projections of unreality were more transparent, and in any case were merely designed to put a little lipstick on the pig of policies they were openly pushing. For example, they openly wanted to conquer Iraq and expand the militarist state, they openly

A little late with this, but I meant to mark Boris Pasternak’s birthday this week (Feb. 10, 1890).  It would be hard to express how much his work meant to me when  I was first finding my way into the world. In later years, I had three brief, indirect contacts with Pasternak, beyond his work. In the mid-1990s, I went to his house in Peredelkino, remarkably preserved since his death in 1960, and got to spend a few minutes in his upstairs study, where he’d written his late verse and much of Doctor Zhivago. That same day, after a long,