Detroit Industry Murals (detail), Diego Rivera, Detroit Institute of the Arts. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Earlier this month, scholars working at the London School of Economics argued, “It’s time to face up to power in the debate about wealth inequality.” The authors...
Marjory Collins, Newsroom of the New York Times newspaper, Sept. 1942, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress. My first fix Every addiction starts somewhere: The hot rush from a heroin injection; the elation after cherries line up on a slot machine; the...
Otis Rush at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1970. Photo: Eatonland, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1969, after nearly 14 years of constant gigging in small blues clubs and cutting scorching singles for obscure labels, songs that received limited radio play but were...
The author was held by the Egyptian police along with other activists by the side of the highway between Cairo and the Sinai. Photo by Tessa Kraan. As Greta Thunberg plans her second attempt to reach Gaza, genocide through forced starvation continues there. Thunberg...
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair I am living in a world that no longer exists. I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, “free frame of reference,” as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz...
Image by Elena Helade. I want to address the global prezmo – my word for “present moment” – but, oh God, my knee gave out the other day. I fell on the floor. I survived. I’m OK. Things happen. But I’m still in the process of trying to empty and sell my house of 40...
Image by Ahmed Abu Hameeda. It is getting harder and harder for me to cover the endless holocaust in Gaza. I am not an objective journalist. In fact, I reject the very notion of objective journalism as inherently problematic and at times downright toxic. I take shit...
A whole history of art history writing could profitably be written concerning the changing uses of illustrations. When an art writer does not use illustrations, as happened in Clement Greenberg’s The Nation reviews, then it’s often necessary to describe in words some...
The Crossroads gazing west over Manhattan. Jonathon Swift wrote: “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible”. The invisible sometimes vanishes before we are aware of what has passed: How does it feel to seek what is no longer- -I imagine the unimaginable. I soothe...
Raw logs from thinning operations in the Oregon Coast Range, awaiting export on the docks in Astoria. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. A recent CounterPunch article by Faith Kearns argued that municipal watersheds should be “thinned” or logged to reduce wildfire risk, citing...
Photograph Source: Wayne Silver – CC BY 2.0 GDP grew at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the first half of the year — that is down sharply from its 2.5 percent rate in 2024. It is not hard to identify the culprits: uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff threats, the loss...
Image by Jr Korpa. In 1948, George Kennan, then State Department Director of Policy Planning and one of the most influential men in the United States government, wrote in an internal memo: “[The U.S. has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of...