Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

Jeffrey St. Clair

CounterPunch

Portland, OR, United States

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • CounterPunch
  • Mint Press News

Past articles by Jeffrey:

When Neoliberals Declared War on the Poor

For Bill Clinton and Dick Morris polls were everything. Morris developed what he called a “neuro-psychological profile” of the American voter, and established an iron rule that no initiative could be undertaken by the White House unless polling showed an approval rating of 60 percent. By constant polling, he concocted what he called a “values agenda,” for Clinton. At the top of the list was… → Read More

Roaming Charges: The Ugliest Thing in America

Earlier this week, while driving across the Oregon outback, I switched on the radio hoping to pick up a recorded sermon by one of the great old-time evangelists of the 50s and 60s on a subject like demonic possession and communism that you often find lurking on the far end of the dial. But the only channel with a static-free signal was pumping out the Glenn Beck Show, who I hadn’t heard since he… → Read More

Roaming Charges: The Upside-Down World

General Milley seems to understand what joystick bombardiers like Victoria Nuland and Tony Blinken don’t: that the only predictable event in war is that something unpredictable will happen to dramatically change its course, usually for the worse. → Read More

Roaming Charges: Dizzy Miss Lizzy, the Last Spin

Ideologically Liz Cheney was pretty much in lockstep with Trump, backing nearly every vicious social and economic policy he sent to the Hill. (She voted for Trump bills 93% of the time.) She might as well be Stephen Miller's political doppelgänger. Liz only diverged from Trump on those few occasions when he went soft on foreign policy–on Russia, Iraq, Syria, North Korea and Afghanistan. She's… → Read More

Roaming Charges: Tears of Rage, Tears of Grief

Police lie. They lie as a matter of course. They lie incidentally. They lie strategically. They lie habitually. They lie when lives are on the line. They lie to protect their own skin. They lie to protect their buddies. They change their stories to fit the facts. They change the "facts" to fit their stories. They lie when they interrogate you. They lie in affidavits and depositions. They lie on… → Read More

Roaming Charges: The End of the Innocents

+ Though many police departments use the motto "protect and serve," cops don't have to come to your rescue, help you when you're in distress or try to save your child from being shot. Under a Supreme Court case called Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, the police can't be held accountable for not coming to your aid, even if the lives of your children are at stake. Yet they have the absolute right to… → Read More

Roaming Charges: Caught in a Classic Trap

The US running out of infant formula at the same time the Domestic Infant Supply is about to increase sets up the next GOP bodily mandate: compulsory breast-feeding (though not in public). → Read More

Roaming Charges: An Unconquerable Thing

A year of fighting on the eastern front in 1915 generated six million refugees in Ukraine and the Balkans. On his way to assume command from the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the Tsar rode in his Rolls Royce past one stream of refugees that stretched 20 miles long. There've been nearly twice that many people displaced in Ukraine alone in the last 30 days. → Read More

Booked Up: Ban These Books, Please (the Writers Need the Money)

There’s an old cliché that history is written by the victors. This is often credited to Winston Churchill, but probably goes all the way back to Tacitus, if not Herodotus. True enough, I suppose. But let the losers and victims start writing history and watch all hell break loose, as we’re seeing with the hysterical reaction to Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project. Nothing better captures… → Read More

Roaming Charges: Police Crime Blotter, 2021

Fourteen-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta was in a dressing room at a Burlington department store in North Hollywood and police officers opened fire on an assault suspect. After the shooting, the investigators found a hole in a wall of the store and behind it found Valentina on the floor of the room where she'd been trying on dresses for her quinceañera, dead at the scene from a gunshot wound… → Read More

Cinema Without Cinemas: Watching Movies in 2021

Do I miss the social experience of watching a film in the dark with other anonymous members of the community, plunging into a collective dreamscape? Not really. Today's Hollywood auteurs are algorithms developing plot lines culled from data-mining the obsessions of 16-year olds from four years ago, when the movies went into production, with all the aesthetic efficacy of a flu shot based on a… → Read More

Roaming Charges: When the Inevitable Becomes the Criminal

The Huntington Beach blowout was not merely predictable. It was inevitable. But when does the inevitable become the criminal? And where does the liability begin and end? With the pipeline company? The oil drilling company? The holding companies? Their lobbyists and PR hacks? The hedge funds? The regulators? The politicians? → Read More

Roaming Charges: All That Twitters is Sold

No one can pinpoint precisely when the US war on Iraq began, but certainly dates back at least to 1962 when the CIA began plotting the overthrow of Abd al-Karim Qasim (who was executed in early 1963). And, of course, no one can predict when, if ever, the war on Iraq will come to an end. But it's became the duty of each American president since JFK to declare the Iraq war over, then expand it...… → Read More

Roaming Charges: Flaming Patriots

On almost every issue that matters, including the future of life on the planet, the US government, if not the entire US culture, has become a real time case study of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where the more incompetent it becomes, the less able it is to realize that what it's doing isn't working. The less you know, the less you know what you don't know. More → Read More

Roaming Charges: How Bio-Warfare Came to Colombia

There's a theory that Israel controls US politics, that the most powerful war-making state the world has ever known is a mere puppet of Israel, institutionally incapable of asserting its own agenda in the Middle East. This is a convenient myth for both parties, since it makes Israel seem more powerful than it is and it tends to exculpate the US from direct complicity in ergregious human rights… → Read More

Roaming Charges: I, the Juror

The clock had been ticking since December, when I narrowly managed to evade jury duty, as the pandemic was spiking. I wouldn’t say our county is run by Covid deniers. But you can’t say it’s run by epidemiologists, either. The daily injustices at the courthouse must go on, killer virus be damned. My reprieve, however, More → Read More

Roaming Charges: It is What It is, But is That All There is?

In order to understand the sometimes perplexing nuances of the US political economy, you first have to realize that the people who manage it believe as an article of faith that the poor have too much money and the rich not enough. More → Read More

Roaming Charges: Let's Get Small

One of the most useful things about Obama's memoir is that he reminds who some of the people now being recycled into the Biden administration really are. John Kerry, for example, who Obama describes as working assiduously to convince greens to "offer up concessions on subsidies for nuclear power and the opening of addition US coastlines to offshore oil drilled." Obama writes this with gratitude… → Read More

Roaming Charges: the Fog of Bores

I keep hoping that one day there'll be a presidential candidate who just says very plainly: I don't want to invade anyone else's country or drone their wedding parties; I don't want to torture anyone; I don't want your family to go bankrupt from the bills for your daughter's chemo; I want you to be paid fairly for the work you do and not be preyed upon by bill collectors when you're unemployed;… → Read More

Roaming Charges: It Had to be You

Kamala Harris is the least surprising VP pick since Bob Dole tapped Jack Kemp as his running mate in 1996. Harris is as bland, safe and predictable as Kemp, but she adds little to an already boring campaign and comes with toxic baggage of her own that may repel the voters Biden needs the most. Biden is counting on Harris' reputation as a prosecutor to make a case against Trump that most people… → Read More