Today's Stories

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

Weekend Edition
February 27 - March 1, 2009

Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Spitting at Dark Times

By KIM NICOLINI

Maybe it’s time for a little dose of happy in a world where happy seems like an obsolete concept. I’m not talking Hollywood, sugar-coated, shallow escapism, but a happy that is grounded in the reality of workaday people, a happy that asks us to put our cynicism aside for just a little while and demands we take reigns of what freedom and pleasure we can derive from life. Where can we find this slice of happy? Try the new Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky.  Whoever thought Mike Leigh, the British social realist and voice of the beaten working class, would make the “feel good movie of the year”? But indeed Happy-Go-Lucky is a spit in the eye to these dark times. However, what makes this piece of happy palatable is the fact that the grime and tension of reality is included in the mix. Just because the film spits in the eye of bleak cynicism, that does not mean these dark times don’t exist. Being a Mike Leigh film, something would be terribly amiss if there wasn’t a dark lining to this movie’s candy-coated exterior. Centered on the effusively bubbly and optimistic Pauline, who goes by Poppy, Happy-Go-Lucky is a brilliant meditation on the power of self-conscious denial, the value of embracing life’s pleasures in whatever form they come and ignoring the doom and gloom dark stuff that can rain on your parade.

The film opens with Poppy riding her bike through London. She is smiling, bouncing, looking all around her, her optimism radiating like glitter from every pour of her body. And she is wearing high heel boots. Why do I mention the boots? Because I noticed the boots immediately, and it was my first of many laughs in the movie. She’s wearing high heels while riding a bike! Of course, we are taught that you can’t ride a bike in high heels. It breaks the rules. It’s dangerous. It’s impractical. You’re not supposed to. But Poppy does ride her bike wearing high heel boots. In fact, she does just about everything wearing high heel boots. Poppy wears her boots like a badge of freedom. Those boots are the symbol of Poppy’s refusal to cave into the boring, nonsensical, life-squashing rules of adulthood. With her constant silly rambling jabber and her garishly outrageous fashions, the inclination is to read Poppy as stupid, as a ditz, as a vacuous girl who puts fun before responsibility. The cynic inside us wants to laugh at her and ridicule her, force her to open her eyes and take a good hard look at reality. But like Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Howard Hawke’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Poppy turns out to be the most brilliant character in the movie. Like Lorelei, Poppy’s philosophy is to live and enjoy life and not be encumbered by unnecessary darkness and nihilism. As we ride along with Poppy and her boots, we are forced to look at the cynic inside ourselves with a critical eye rather than ridiculing Poppy for her optimism. We want to dismiss her, but we can’t. Poppy forces us to set aside our cynicism and feel a momentary liberation with her.  That’s not such a bad thing, really.

The main trope of the movie is Poppy’s driving lessons. Poppy decides she wants to learn to drive a car, so every Saturday, she takes driving lessons with Scott. Scott is the dark underbelly of the film. He is the brooding, resentful, self-loathing working class. A borderline psycho, racist and homophobe obsessed with rules, ethics, and responsibility, Scott seethes with explosive menace. His rotting front teeth, brown with decay, loom inside his scowling face like all the darkness of the world, and they play counter to Poppy’s gleaming white ever-present smile. We feel the threat coming from Scott the minute he enters the movie, yet Popp climbs into the car and drives Scott crazy with her refusal to be “serious” and her bubbling observations of the world around her. Scott tries to teach Poppy to drive safely and follow the rules, but Poppy shrugs off Scott’s authoritarian demands and drives the car through the streets of London like she’s on a ride at Disneyland. More than anything, Scott tries to force Poppy to remove her “high heels.” Her boots infuriate Scott. They mock him because the boots are a symbol of the freedom he feels he will never have – freedom to make frivolous choices, freedom to be sexually expressive, freedom to laugh, to play, to be an individual instead of another cog on the wheel. Poppy never does remove her boots because Poppy’s whole philosophy could be called “driving in high heels.” To take off her shoes would be to close the door on her freedom. In fact, in the end, Poppy quits the driving lessons in a symbolic gesture to refuse to embrace the control and containment of the Scotts of the world.

Freedom, in this Mike Leigh film, is represented by color. Mike Leigh is an amazing colorist , and it is no wonder that this movie made so many Top Ten lists in the art critic circles. The film is visually spectacular. Leigh gives us a gorgeous tapestry of color, not from traditional high art sources, but from objects that represent Poppy’s working class life. Every single piece of color in the film counts – the little yellow car Poppy and her friends ride around in, a purple ironing board, a rainbow-colored crocheted afghan on the sofa, Poppy’s orange underpants. Poppy’s freedom is all about keeping color alive and not letting it be killed by the monotone drudgery of adult responsibility.

Everything in Poppy’s London life is punctuated by bright splashes of red, green, pink, purple, yellow. In a scene when Poppy goes to the suburbs to visit her pregnant sister, Poppy awkwardly sits, like a garish bouquet of plastic flowers, in her sister’s lifeless department store showroom home. There is no color in the sister’s house. Sure it has perfect furniture and is perfectly ideal, but it is also perfectly flat and monotone. It is the tomb of the suffocating suburbs. Mike Leigh has erased the color from this scene to show how bourgeois aspirations are empty and dead. Poppy’s sister gives Poppy a lecture about how she needs to grow up, get married, get a mortgage, and be “happy.” Poppy beautifully and brilliantly explains that she is happy – with her freedom. And Poppy’s freedom comes in a riot of color. Poppy isn’t just wearing rose-colored glasses. She’s wearing rainbow glasses, and she exploits every bright and garish color to its fullest cheerful potential. She has an endless supply of colored lace pantyhose, and she is always dressed in a riot of glittery, bright, clashing color. She frequently wears cherries – cherries on her shirt, on her earrings, on her necklace – because Poppy is bound and determined to make her life a bowl full of cherries even if she is given a bowl of rotting onions.

Certainly the film has its share of rotting onions which come in the form of the brooding menace of men. Scott, the psycho driving instructor, is the primary menace, and he plays on all our conditioned fears of the violence that men do, as we expect at any moment for him to pull out a rope and strangle Poppy. Poppy also has a truly surreal and uncomfortable encounter with a huge, dark, schizophrenic homeless man. This scene consciously makes the audience uncomfortable and asks us to question our own socially conditioned views of homeless people or anyone who lives off the social grid. Much of the tension in the scene comes from our conditioned cynicism playing against Poppy’s sincere acceptance of this man who lives below the surface. But her acceptance doesn’t come easy. We can see the effort she makes to accept this dark force, to walk into the face of threat, to put herself at risk, and to somehow prove that she can turn the darkness into light. This scene takes place in the underbelly of the city with darkness literally pressing in all around Poppy. The way it's filmed makes it seem like Poppy has entered the depths of hell yet spins it into an impossibly safe fairytale. Indeed, much of Poppy’s philosophy (like Lorelei Lee’s) is that fairytales can come true if you don’t cave into artificial social limitations (e.g. schizophrenic homeless men are violent). Whereas we (the cynics) expect the worst in these scenes, Poppy chooses to see the best. She has her rainbow armor to get her through life. In fact, in one scene when Poppy encounters a violent boy in her class (she’s a school teacher), she is literally wearing a big, kitschy, dime store rainbow necklace which dangles around her neck like some kind of magical talisman with protective powers.

Mike Leigh sets us up to believe that the worst is going to happen in these encounters, yet they never pan out to the violence we expect. In doing this, he plays our nihilistic conditioning (life sucks) against Poppy's optimism (life is a bowl full of cherries). Perhaps Poppy’s rainbow does have magical powers. When driving instructor Scott finally goes off the deep end, we expect him to do something terribly violent to Poppy – rape or murder – yet she walks away safely. When Poppy encounters the homeless man, we expect him to lash out irrationally and violently at any moment, yet she goes bouncing along her happy way. When Poppy confronts the violent boy in her class, we expect some horrid tale of abuse and molestation, yet that plot fizzles. And finally, when Poppy actually meets a boyfriend, we wonder what dark secret he is hiding and how things will turn out badly, yet he seems to be just a “nice guy.” What is Mike Leigh saying as Poppy encounters this litany of potentially threatening men only to defuse their menace via her impervious optimism? Is Leigh answering to himself as a director and to his earlier piece of cinematic vitriol Naked? Is he forcing us to interrogate our own skepticism and the fear that is been hardwired into our existence by the media? Probably a little of both.  

One of the reasons we feel so threatened by the men Poppy encounters is because Sally Hawkins’ performance as Poppy is absolutely flawless, and she has made herself so vulnerable through her delivery of the character. She has created a great film icon like Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. So much character is delivered by the way Hawkins’ inhabits her body -- her facial expressions, her flopping limbs tootling about like a big rag doll, and mostly the those tiny glimpses of tension and conflict in her face that reveal the work it takes to be happy and deny the darkness. Because Poppy seems so innocent on the surface, she is also rendered extremely vulnerable. Mike Leigh plays on this vulnerability by setting us up to see Poppy as a potential victim, when actually she turns out to be the ultimate survivor. The movie trailer states, “Seeing the world through Poppy’s eyes can change the way you look at life.” In other words, you could always expect the worst, or you could learn to live like Poppy and accept the best. In a way, Poppy is a kind of 21st century Shaman for the working class, the ultimate Zen Buddhist person, who lets everything roll right over her and lives a free life unencumbered by the burden of the past or the future or of socially imposed life-killing structures. But what Hawkins’ performance shows us is that inscribing a “rainbow lining” to life does not come easily or without effort. It’s those little glimpses of darkness that pass their shadow over Poppy’s face that show us that, yes, she knows the menace, dread, doom and foreboding are there, but she chooses to turn them into rainbows and cherries. But the darkness of reality still haunts the surface of her face. Denial/optimism is hard work.

The strange and ominous dark interior of the film is what makes it so brilliant. If it were all as happy-go-lucky as the title suggests, well, then it would just be another crap mainstream Hollywood film. Nevertheless, it is still a hilariously funny film, and I laughed from beginning to end, but it was laughter that reflected back on itself and made me think about why I was laughing.

On a final note, the movie is also refreshing because it is an ode to that working class, pub-driven London that is often portrayed as dreary and hopeless. Poppy and her friends have turned that stereotype on its head, and showed us that they can find beauty, camaraderie, and fun despite their economic limitations. They show us that working class life in the city doesn’t always have to have a bad ending if you choose to take your rainbows where you can get them. In other words, don’t let the fuckers get you down. Put on your high heels and drive the way you fucking want.

(Happy-Go-Lucky will be released on DVD on March 10, 2009.)

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her daughter and a menagerie of beasts. She works a day job to support her art and culture habits. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Bullhorn and Berkeley Review. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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