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Today's Stories

November 12, 2007

Vicente Navarro
Why Hillary's Health Care Plan Really Failed

Ben Brown
A Tribute to My Vietnam Vet Father

 

November 10 / 11, 2007

Alain Gresh
Uncle Sam's New Backyard: How to Turn a Region into a Graveyard

Mike Whitney
For Whom the Closing Bell Tolls: the Last Dead Bull on Wall Street

Ron Jacobs
A View from the Pakistani Left: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Jeffrey St. Clair
The First Dambuster: a Coyote Story

Alan Farago
Tangled Up in Blue: a Brief History of Florida Environmentalism

Binoy Kampmark
When Language Drowns: Torture in America

Robert Fantina
Legitimizing Torture

Fred Gardner
Psychological Torture in the Name of Family Values

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The General in His Labyrinth

Nicola Nasser
NATO's Southward Drift

Philip Rizk
The Blame Game in Gaza

Michael Dickinson
Condom Nation: the Pope vs. Terry Higgins

Joel S. Hirschhorn
The Grand Delusion: a Conspiracy of Two Parties

Paul Krassner
Flunking Out of the Electoral College

Wadner Pierre /
Joe Emersberger
The Ongoing War on Journalists in Haiti

 

November 9, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
In the Kandil Mountains with the PKK

Mohammed Hanif
Musharraf and the Drunk Uncle

John Ross
Blackwater Goes to Mexico

Mike Whitney
Ron Paul, Big Media's Invisible Candidate

Tom Barry
In Latin America, the Hillary Clinton Policy is the Bush Policy

Corporate Crime Reporter
Is the AFL Trying to Derail Single Payer Health Care?

Badruddin Khan
Pakistan and the Israel Lobby

David Macaray
The WGA STrike: the Empire Strikes Back

Martha Rosenberg
The Blood Sport of Vice Presidents

Website of the Day
Stryker Blockade!

 

November 8, 2007

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Meeting the Other in Israel and Palestine

William Loren Katz
Waterboarding in American History

Mike Whitney
The Long Fall: a Market Without Parachutes

Sheldon Richman
Why Woodstock May Have Saved John McCain's Life

Liaquat Ali Khan
Solidarity with Pakistan's Lawyers

Marc Gardner
The Victims of "Jessica's Law": Parolees Without Rights (or Homes)

Jackie Corr
The Big Fish from Whitefish: Montana, the Last Retreat of the Investment Banker?

Brenda Norrell
Between Bombs and Border Walls

Dave Lindorff
Ridiculing Impeachment at the New York Times

China Hand
Rewriting the History of the Sudan Calamity

Sen. Russ Feingold
FISA and America's Basic Freedoms: Let's Not Repeat the Mistakes of the Patriot Act

Website of the Day
The Welfare Poets Meet Hugo Chavez

 

November 7, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Dollar's Fall Collapses the American Empire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: Can't the Democrats End the War By Not Bringing the Funding Bill to the Floor?

Vijay Prashad
The Apotheosis of Bobby Jindal

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Educating Pakistan: What Mukasey Can Teach Musharraf

Alan Farago
To Bee or Not to Bee? The Politics of Colony Collapse

David Macaray
The Writers' Guild Strike: Is There an Ice-Breaker?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Case of the Slimy Senator: Chuck Schumer Greenlights Mukasey

Charlotte Laws
What We Learned from Stephen Colbert's Presidential Campaign

Daniel White
Zahid's Story

William Cook
The Politics of Servility: Congress and the Israel Lobby

Website of the Day
Safe Lawns

 

November 6, 2007

Mike Whitney
Welcome to Year 27 of the Reagan Revolution

Ralph Nader
Who Determines the Price of Oil?

Andy Worthington
The Torture of Ali al-Marri

Pam Martens
Wall Street Metes Out Street Justice to Citigroup

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Dark Future

William Schroder
The Return of Water Torture

Stephen Lendman
Punishing Gaza

William Blum
Cuba and Original Sin

Former US Intelligence Officers
A Memo on Torture, Intelligence and Mukasey

 

November 5, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
How I Spent the Eighth Brumaire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: The Democrats and Single Payer

David Macaray
How to Turn Workers Against Each Other (and Make Them All Poorer)

Gary Leupp
General Musharaff's "State of Emergency"

Dave Lindorff
Those Minot Nukes

Ludwig Watzal
Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
Tensions Ease in Iraqi Kurdistan

Peter Stone Brown
John Fogerty Makes Peace with His Past

Michael Simmons
Yo! What Happened to Peace?

Website of the Day
Petition: In Defense of the Morton West HS Antiwar Students

 

November 3 / 4, 2007

Tariq Ali
Pakistan Sinks Deeper into Night

David Price
Army's Price Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

Jeffrey St. Clair
Splitsville

Alan Farago
The Housing Crash, Suburban Sprawl and the Crisis of the American Middle Class

Paul Krassner
He's Back! Don Imus Meets Michael Richards

Rannie Amiri
Why the U.S. is Safeguarding Iraq's War Criminals

P. Sainath
Indexing Humanity, Indian Style

Ayesha Ijaza Khan
Pakistan in a Daze

Robert Fantina
Is the Bush Administration Talking Itself Into a War With Iran?

Seth Sandronsky
The Politics of Health Care in California

Ron Jacobs
The Bebop of Baraka

Ramzy Baroud
A Case for Arab Dignity

Heather Gray
When Capitalists Get a Free Ride

 

November 2, 2007

Dr. Mary Pipher
Acting on Conscience: Psychologists and Abusive Interrogations

Saul Landau
How Pete Stark Became a Pariah

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as House Arrest

Sharon Smith
A Tale of Two Stadiums

Gary Leupp
Fascist Beatifications: the History and Politics of Sainthood

Gregory Harms
The Chorus of Slander on Palestine

Christopher Brauchli
Racism in High Places

Peter Morici
The Falling Dollar and the Stubborn Trade Deficit

Dave Lindorff
The Easy Way to Stop the Looming US Attack on Iran

David Penner
Zombie Nation

Website of the Day
Fall in Yosemite

 

November 1, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
The Wages of Hegemony

Patrick Cockburn
The Most Dangerous Dam in the World

Dave Lindorff
The Air Force Report on the Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

Jonathan Feldman
The Strange Political Economy of Death in the South

Mike Ferner
They Met the Resistance in Iraq

William S. Lind
A Question for Would-Be Presidents

Diana Johnstone
"Fascislamism" Versus "Shoah Business"

Jacob Hornberger
The War on Telephone Privacy

A..K. Gupta
The Apocalypse will be Televised

Lyuba Zarsky /
Kevin Gallagher

The Enclave Economy of Mexico's Silicon Valley

Felice Pace
Does the SPLC Equate Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism?

Website of the Day
This One's for You, Ed Abbey

 

October 31, 2007

Bill Quigley
New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System

Rev. William E. Alberts
A Trail of American Blood: From the White House to CBS News

Ray McGovern
Attacking Iran for Israel

Eric Walberg
Poisonous Espionage: Litvinenko and the New Cold War

V. G. Smith
The Second Death of Guy Môquet

Luis J. Rodriguez
"Social Cleansing" from Guatemala to LA

Sheldon Richman
Bush has Time to Run the World

Walter Brasch
A Real Halloween Scare

Website of the Day
Boogie Rocks!


October 30, 2007

David Price
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

M. Shahid Alam
The Pakistan Question

Andy Worthington
The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo

Patrick Cockburn
The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba

Anthony Papa
The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws

Floyd Rudmin
What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means

Sherwood Ross
Giuliani and Torture

Website of the Day
The Worst Lobby? You Decide

 

October 29, 2007

Lisa Hajjar
Inside Israel's Military Courts

Joe DeRaymond
The Politics of Lethal Injections

Patrick Cockburn
The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan

Isabella Kenfield /
Roger Burbach

Corporate Murder in Brazil

Fred Gardner
The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner

Farzana Versey
Caricaturing Islam

Stephen Fleischman
The Greening of the Oligarchy

Marcelle Cendrars
The Congressional Rip Cord

Eamonn McCann
Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables

Martha Rosenberg
For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter!

Website of the Day
Campaign 2008

 

October 27 / 28, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Dam That Isn't There

James Bovard
Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture

Ralph Nader
Beyond the Rule of Law

M. Reza Pirbhai
The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!

Robert Sandels
Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations

Jacob G. Hornberger
Ruling By Decree

Missy Beattie
The Arsonists in the West Wing

John Ross
U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca

Robert Fantina
Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader

Ron Jacobs
Labor at the Crossroads

Ali Moayedian
In Search of Logic About Iran

David Michael Green
What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism?

Poets Basement
Block, Davies and Ford

Website of the Day
Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video

 

October 26, 2007

Brian Cloughley
Revenging Bloodshed

Saul Landau
Portrait of Rudy

Ahmad Al-Akras
Getting Justice in the HLF Case

Franklin Lamb
Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry?

Mike Whitney
Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest

Dave Lindorff
Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians

Alan Farago
A Castro Behind Every Bush

Yifat Susskind
Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror

Website of the Day
Dead Life in a Political Prison


October 25, 2007

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Iraq's Environmental Crisis

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homes of the Crash Test Dummies

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fraudulent War on Terror

Col. Dan Smith
The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment

Alan Farago
The Way to Paradise?

Chris Kutalik
The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels

Brian McKinlay
John Howard and the Curse of Bush

Cindy Sheehan
Pete, Nancy, George and WW III

Website of the Day
Support the America's Program!

 

October 24, 2007

Natalie Washington-Weik
White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicides

Michael Birmingham
What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Nuclear Democrats

Tariq Ali
Bush's Cuba Detour

Farzana Versey
Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf

Dave Zirin
White Noise

James Murren
What "Support Our Troops" Means

Todd Chretien
Looking Reality in the Face

Martha Rosenberg
What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage?

Website of the Day
Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power

 

October 23, 2007

Ralph Nader
Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric

Lawrence R. Velvel
Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept.

Vijay Prashad
The Nuke Deal is Dead

Bonnie Bricker /
Adil E. Shamoo

The True Cost of War for Oil

Dave Lindorff
Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment

Mike Whitney
The Big Squeeze

Farzana Versey
Race with the Devil

Stanley Heller /
Ben George

Something New from the Antiwar Movement

Marcelle Cendrars
You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive

Regan Boychuk
Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response

Website of the Day
King Corn

 

October 22, 2007

Ishmael Reed
Should Blacks Go Green?

Marjorie Cohn
Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie

Rannie Amiri
Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness?

Diane Farsetta
Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams

Todd Alan Price
Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education

Robert Jensen
The Quagmire of Masculinity

Stephen Lendman
The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers

Jemima Khan
The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf

Sunsara Taylor
David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth

Binoy Kampmark
No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections

Website of the Day
Support the Center for International Policy

 

 

October 20 / 21, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld

Tariq Ali
A Massacre Foretold

Jeffrey St. Clair
Greetings from Echo Park

Andy Worthington
The Shame of Diego Garcia

Mike Whitney
Housing Flameout

Daniel Wolff
Play It As It Lays

David Rosen
Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution

Saul Landau
David and Goliath in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
COINTELPRO and the Panthers

Robert Fantina
The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones

David Heleniak
Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm

Joe Allen
Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS

Prairie Miller
Lions for Lambs

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Crash!

 

October 19, 2007

John Ross
Che's Mexican Legacy

Sheldon Rampton
Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda

Rahul Mahajan
A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha

Devra Davis
Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer

Christopher Brauchli
Blasphemous Science

Wadner Pierre
Haiti After the Deluge

Bill Quigley
Jailed for Justice

Website of the Day
Textbook Sticker Shock

 

October 18, 2007

Saree Makdisi
Academic Freedom is at Risk

Meg Dwyer
What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead?

Alevtina Rea
Sketches of Russian Life

Norman Solomon
The United States of Violence

Kristoffer Larsson
Something is Rotten in Sweden

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes are Back and So are We

Website of the Day
Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"

 

October 17, 2007

Steve Niva
Counter-Insurgency, American-Style

Andy Worthington
The Case of Mohamed Jawad

Alan Farago
The Credit Shock

Russell Mokhiber
The New Billionaire-Criminal Class

Sharon Smith
Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered

Mike Whitney
Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman

Robert Fantina
Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual

Chris Irwin
Where Have All the Rednecks Gone?

Website of the Day
Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University

October 16, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize

Paul Findley
Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby

Robert Bryce
Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts

Uri Avnery
The Mother of All Pretexts

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraqi Genocide

Ray McGovern
What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It?

Norman Solomon
The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal

Martha Rosenberg
The Curse of Cymbalta

William S. Lind
Out of the Frying Pan

Joel S. Hirschborn
Time to Boycott Voting

Website of the Day
Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play

 

 

 

 

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November 12, 2007

Dirt Farmer

The Return of Levon Helm

By PETER STONE BROWN

The first time most people heard Levon Helm sing was way back in 1968 when The Band released Music From Big Pink. You had to wait until the end of side one to hear him, and the song was the album's most accessible, "The Weight." The song was at once out front but also vague and mysterious in a Dylan-esque sort of way. Helm's voice was an immediate grabber drawing you into the lyrics in which the singer always seemed to lose. His voice summoned all of American roots-based music all at once, country, blues, folk, gospel, somehow adding up to rock 'n' roll and perfect for storytelling. Helm's storytelling would later be put to excellent use in the film, The Right Stuff as well as a couple of music documentaries, one detailing the music to be found on Highway 61.

When the original version of The Band dissolved in 1976, Helm released a succession of solo albums. The first Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars looked great on paper. Surrounding himself with some of the greatest blues and R&B players, at the time, three-fourths of Booker T & the MGs, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, and several the of the top New York session horn players, the album promised more than it delivered. It was tight, it was funky, the songs for the most part were there, but that undefined spark, the magic that should have taken it higher was curiously missing.

In concert, they appeared unrehearsed with key members not showing up. Helm's next eponymous album found him diving even deeper into R&B, and while he's pictured holding drumsticks on the cover, he's not listed as playing drums. Again surrounded by some of the greatest R&B session guys, it was in the good, but not great category. At the time, I wondered why Helm's excellent cover of "Take Me To The River" was ignored on FM rock radio in favor the Talking Heads' rendition.

Helm turned to Nashville for his next album, which while staying close to R&B also showed more of a country influence. It had one killer track, "Blue House of Broken Hearts." Helm, then returned to The Band's original label for one more eponymous album, which featured more R&B, plus a couple of classics, "Willie and the Hand Jive," and "Money."

Around this time, Helm reformed The Band, at first with his cousins, The Cate Brothers, and then a more defined line-up. It was good to see them, and while the shows had a far more relaxed, friendlier atmosphere, the intensity was missing. The Band was one of the tightest groups I've ever seen on stage, up there with James Brown's bands and Booker T & The MGs ­ a group easily capable of duplicating the sound they achieved in the studio onstage. The second version of The Band would often resort to blues they could play in their sleep and occasionally other usually blues flavored covers.

Then tragedy struck with the suicide of singer/pianist Richard Manuel. They continued to perform as The Band, and also as solo performers and duos. In the early '90s their first new album as The Band appeared, followed by two others. They all had moments. When their last album, Jubilation was released, it was obvious on that album was well is in a documentary that was shown on TV at the time, there was something severely wrong with Helm's voice. It was announced not long after he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. I'd stopped going to Band shows by then. At the last show I saw the blew cues on songs they'd played hundreds of times and I didn't want the good memories erased by bad ones.

The cracks in The Band myth were starting to show big time. Rick Danko was busted in Japan for heroin possession and spent several months in jail before being released. Insanely overweight, he died in his sleep in 1999. There was no doubt The Band was finished.

Unable to sing, Helm formed a blues band, The Barn Burners. I went to see them once. They were ok, a good blues band with a great drummer. Helm, a totally natural musician, had long ago mastered the art of Chicago blues drumming in a style based more on feel and soul than precision.

Bankrupt and disgusted with the music business, in effort to save his home and recording studio from foreclosure, Helm started a series of concerts at his home in his studio, "The Midnight Rambles." With the help of ex-Dylan sideman, Larry Campbell, Jimmy Vivino, other notable players as well as various guests and opening acts, Helm brought music back to what it should be, a moving, shared, intimate, no bullshit experience. And slowly but surely Helm began singing again.

At the end of October, Helm released a new album, Dirt Farmer. Produced by Larry Campbell, and Helm's daughter, Amy, it is an outstanding achievement. To say it is his best solo album is understating the case. It virtually wipes out all his previous solo album as well as those by the reformed Band. It's the first album I've heard in ages that made me reach for the CD booklet to see who is playing what.

Helm's voice is not what it once was. After throat surgery and 28 radiation treatments, how could it be? It doesn't matter. The heart and soul, the all important ingredients in making music magical are there in abundance.

Interestingly the album is all acoustic and consists of traditional and/or traditional sounding songs by contemporary writers. Some of the songs, Helm learned from his parents growing up. One of the songs, "Little Birds" was done by The Band at their earliest live performances.

Much of the credit has to go to Larry Campbell, who provides, guitar, fiddle, mandolin, resonator guitar, and dulcimer. He sets the perfect tone for each song, and you'd never know he's overdubbing. It is his fiddle work that shines. Revealing his love and knowledge of Celtic music (displayed on his solo album, Rooftops), his playing is somehow rough and smooth at the same time, but never slick. Always a team player, he simply knows what to do, always putting the song first.

Also standing out are the startlingly real harmonies of Helm's daughter Amy, and Campbell's wife, Teresa Williams. They zero in on just the right amount of roughness inherent in the music, beautiful without being pretty. While the sound of the recording is clean, the feel is of a front porch on some lonesome mountain, not that of a recording studio.

The music itself is as old as those mountains, familiar, yet new at the same time. The opening tune, a Stanley Brothers tribute, "False Hearted Lover Blues," is the same melody as "Little Maggie," and 'Poor Old Dirt Farmer" is "Rye Whiskey" as well as the Irish song, "Rosin The Beau."

Helm's voice, older, craggier, fits the material perfectly, and his drums, never obtrusive make the songs rock. The other instruments, occasional pump organ or piano, additional percussion add just the right amount of color, appearing when necessary then fading into the blend.

Helm can't resist touching on the blues which he does on J.B. Lenoir's "Feelin' Good," or mixing up genres, giving the Carter Family's, "Single Girl, Married Girl," a loping New Orleans flavored piano-based rhythm. He also moves into gospel territory on the funky brooding "Calvary," and the closing track, Buddy and Julie Miller's, "Wide River to Cross."

The standout track, on an album of mostly standouts, is a totally moving cover of Steve Earle's, "The Mountain," which Helm makes his own. In the notes, Helm says he first heard the song watching Amy Goodman's TV show, "Democracy Now." Helm's storytelling gifts were never more evident. He is the miner in the song, especially on the heartbreaking third verse:

I was young on this mountain but now I am old
And I knew every holler, every cool swimmin hole
'til one night I lay down and woke up to find
That my childhood was over and I went down in the mine.

For those fans of The Band, who've been waiting, perhaps since the second Band album for a return to the feel of what Greil Marcus has termed, "music remembered," Dirt Farmer has it in abundance.

Peter Stone Brown is a musician, songwriter, and writer. He can be reached at: psb51@verizon.net



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