Today's Stories

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

January 19, 2009

Kevin Alexander Gray
Time for an New Divestment Campaign

Uri Avnery
The Boss Has Gone Mad

Kathy Kelly
Respite in Gaza

Mike Whitney
What Obama Left Out of His Economic Recovery Plan

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Bernie Madoff

Mats Svensson
For Fatima in Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Bard: Springsteen's Working on a Dream

Norman Solomon
The Return of Triangulation

Jeffrey Sommers
The Baltic Riots: Really Existing Thatcherism

Kenneth Libby
Manipulating MLK Day

Peter Ewart
Robbie Burns, Mackenzie and Gaza

Bob Sommer
"The Fierce Urgency of Now"

Website of the Day
Death of a Whaler

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Caoimhe Butterly
Terribly Bloodied, Still Breathing

Audrey Stewart /
Kathy Kelly
Suddenly Bombs Started Falling: Report from Gaza

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

Ellen Cantarow
I Could Not Save a Single Child

Neve Gordon
How to Sell "Ethical" Warfare

Vijay Prashad
An African-American in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Attack Injures 1.5 Million Gazans

Rannie Amiri
The UN in Israel's Crosshairs

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Forgotten Child

Joshua Frank
Forecasting Obama

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney

Brian Cloughley
Who Runs America?

Belén Fernández
Changing the Equation

Missy Beattie
Peace and Justice Denied

Fred Gardner
Growing Pot for Research

George Ciccariello-Maher
"Oakland is Closed!"

John V. Whitbeck
Democracy Not Partition

Stephen Fleischman
Card Check

Mischa Gaus
Medicare for All! Tackling Union Opposition to Single-Payer

Saul Landau
The End of the Affair

Norm Kent
Perils of the Grow House

Alejandro López
Give Bush the Shoe! (and Send Us the Photo)

David Yearsley
The Glory That Was Dresden

James McEnteer
Doin' the Time Warp Again

Lorenzo Wolff
An Album That Lives Up to Its Cover

Kim Nicolini
Patti Smith's Dream of Life

Poets' Basement
Three Financial Poems by Brian J. Foley

Website of the Day
Lancet: Medical Conditions in Gaza

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

January 29, 2009

"To World Revolution"

Tom Paine's Birthday

By PETER LINEBAUGH

President Obama quoted Tom Paine in the conclusion to his inaugural address last week, but did not name him.

After Obama named the values (honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, loyalty, and patriotism), after he urged us to our duties and responsibilities, and to be ready to pay the price of citizenship, after invoking God, and stating that these values comprised our liberty and creed, he asked us to remember America’s birth (an odd name for independence or revolution when you think about it).

Obama set the scene on Christmas Day, for believers a birthday of a savior.  But let us set aside these undertones, and get to the main story:  Xmas, 1776, and George Washington’s storied crossing of the Delaware river.  It is the subject of the 1850 painting by Emmanuel Leutze, a German ‘48er, who made sure to include an African American and a woman in the crew of the boat named ‘Revolution.’ The Delaware separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania. In New Jersey British troops of George III, King of England, were marching swiftly after the multiple defeats, a rout really, in New York.  In Pennsylvania the American troops were encamped - cold, sick, hungry, their enlistment tours almost up, demoralized, defeated, and wanting to go home.   These were the original ‘winter soldiers’ after whom were named the brave Viet vets who denounced U.S. war crimes in 1971 Detroit.

Washington planned to surprise the mercenary troops at Trenton on the day after Christmas.  It would require a crossing during a windy night through the ice-floes of the river.  A bold, and risky decision.  President Obama says, “At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people…”  And he quotes Tom Paine.  George Washington was the commander of the army, and later he would become president.  I don’t think that he was called “father of the nation” at the time.  When did this title come to be applied?  What is the significance of this figure of speech and how does it relate to “birth” in this rhetoric? I’m not sure.

Anyway, Washington did not rally the troops himself but urged his officers to read what Tom Paine had written on a drumhead, by the light of campfires, published as The Crisis in Philadelphia ten days earlier and available in a pamphlet the day before Christmas Eve.  Obama quotes –

“Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.”

Obama then winds up his address, paraphrasing Paine – the winter, the timeless words, the icy currents, the hope and virtue, then God’s grace and God’s blessing, pretty much ending up monotheistically in the same way that Paine concluded the Crisis paper, beginning his last paragraph with thanks to God.
 
This Crisis paper is brief.  We read it aloud in class in under forty-five minutes.  Most everyone already knows the beginning, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  Paine is serious about the soul.  He will invoke God Almighty several times, and here in the beginning he explains heaven and hell.  “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”  Woman.  It’s just a hint, but on the day after Christmas it gets the attention of these militia men. “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly:  it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.  Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

Here the figure of speech is commerce, cheapness and dearness, or as we would say deflation and inflation.  But it’s not true – dearness does not give value, not according to the labor theory of value anyway.

The body of the essay describes the retreat in flattering terms, it makes the rout sound like the soul of orderliness.  He frankly admits to the panic of the soldiers, and explains that panic is useful not only because it toughens those who survive it but it also exposes the hypocrites, the waverers, the reconcilers, the secret tories.  Then Paine – and this is his brilliance – instead of denouncing tories as traitors addresses them directly, and meets each of their arguments.  “Let us reason the matter together,” he says, quoting Isaiah, like LBJ used to do with MLK or anyone else who rocked the boat.

Another important undertone ripples through The Crisis and comes to the surface at the end – the ravishment of women:  General Howe, commander of the ritish forces, was “ravaging” New Jersey. If further defeat befalls the Americans – and this is the concluding thought - our homes will become bawdy-houses for the Hessians and “a future race to provide for, whose fathers were shall doubt of.” This opens the mind to another meaning of legitimacy.

Nevertheless, this is an essay in a people’s war; they are words of revolution advocating the forcible overthrow of the government. This is partly why, even in 2009, two hundred twenty-three years later, President Obama will not name the man with whose words he closes his address.  Some Presidents name him, Franklin Roosevelt for example, but Teddy Roosevelt called him a “filthy little atheist.”

The soldiers crossed the river, and before marching to Trenton to surprise the Hessian mercenaries (who surrendered with scarcely a fight), they were issued fresh gunpowder and new flints for their muskets.   Paine wasn’t just a wordsmith; he was handy, a tinkerer, a mechanic. He experimented in gunpowder manufacturing and recommended popular mobilization of Pennsylvania kitchens for the production of saltpeter.  Moreover, I think he knew something about flints.
 
He was born in Thetford, East Anglia, England.  I visited there a month or so ago with a friend, a geographer, who explained the peculiarities of the ecology of the region known as Breckland, as the Brecks.  The region is desolate and thinly inhabited, historically because the soil is sandy, and actually because it’s militarized – firing ranges for the soldiers, and an American airbase nearby.  My friend explained that tools of war had been manufactured in the Brecks for centuries, nay, for millennia.  Grime’s Graves is the name of the Neolithic flint mining pits and galleries located not a long walk from Thomas Paine’s birthplace. The spear points, hatchets, and knives made from the flint turn up as arrow-heads do among American farmers.

The production of gunflints reached the stage of industrial take-off only during the wars against the French Revolution when more than a million a month were produced at Brandon just up the river from Thetford along the Little Ouse.  A good Brandon flint knapper could hammer out eight gunflints a minute, according to the observations of Sydney B.J. Skertchly reporting in an 1879 volume of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey.  In a later volume of the Survey (1891) W. Whitaker notes that the cylindrical flint forms found about Thetford produced a distinctly sonorous clinking when struck against one another.  He notes in the same volume that the hand-fashioned implements found in the gravel pits of Thetford “give us our earliest evidence of the existence of our species in England,” (and, as we might add, concerning the same species, the termination of its existence, for the Anglo-American have specialized their relationship there with missiles bearing nuclear warheads.)

I thought it might provide a neat fact to say that the flints issued to the army on the eve of its victory came from that part of England where the author of the fighting words came from, both igniting revolution, but I’m afraid that the provenance of the flints in question is the source of scholarly controversy.  They may have actually been the preferred French flints, honey-yellow in color, and knapped as flakes, in contrast to the black flints of Brandon which were knapped as spalls.  However, the soundings by Seymour de Lotbiniere of Brandon Hall into the three hundred volumes of the 18th century Board of Ordnance records produced a few findings which were published in the Minnesota Archaeologist.  These make it clear that it is certainly possible that the flints came from the Brecks.  In 1775 the Ordnance Board puts in its first order for flake gunflints, or “flints of a New Construction,” which possessed the design advantages of those of French manufacture.  Or, the flints may have been part of the câche of 30,000 black flints seized with the fall of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775 which according to G.M. Trevelyan were immediately sent to Washington.
 
The arcana of scholarly specialists can tease the imagination. While the evidence of lithologists, petrographers, and archaeologists has produced a wealth of evidence over the Victorian pedestrian geologists, such as Skertchly or Whitaker, it does not yet tell us, conclusively, where Washington’s gunflints came from.  But scholarship advances!  By strict reasoning and patient investigation, including fascinating new techniques such as photographic spark array analysis, we cannot exclude the possibility that the flint deposits of the region of Thetford are evidence of a) the first existence of homo sapiens in England, or b) the permanence of the propensity in that species to military hardware.  Furthermore, the evidence does not permit us to say that the flints of Paine’s Brecklands were c) an essential precondition to the independence of America, or, and finally, d) necessary to the victory of the rights of man!  Yet I think sparking provides us with a better analogy than parturition when it comes to the revolutionary war.

Henry Knox was there, going across the river, avoiding the floating ice, marching the nine miles to Trenton in a hail storm, marching “with the most profound silence.”  He wrote his wife, “It must give sensible pleasure to every friend of the rights of man to think with how much intrepidity our people pushed the enemy and and prevented their forming in the town.”  Thomas Paine went on to write further papers of The Crisis, the last and 13th called “Thoughts on the Peace and the Probable Advantages Thereof.”  It was full of grandiose hyperbole, yet Rome was on his mind, “Rome, once the proud mistress of the universe, was originally a band of ruffians.  Plunder and rapine made her rich, and her oppression of millions made her great.”  And there was Obama talking about “greatness” again!  And not a word about the rights of man.  Instead it has become commonplace in 2009 to talk about the U.S. empire.  We now see the American Revolution
in three:  the war of independence from England, the slave revolt from the plantations, and the war of conquest against the native Americans.

So, let’s get back to Tom Paine’s birthday.  It was on January 29, 1737.  This was a significant date and a significant year and for the same reason, namely both are associated with regicide.  The 30th January is the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I in 1649.   In England the republicans of every stripe remembered the day, as did monarchists who called Charles a martyr.  That’s the day.  Now this for the year. 1736 was the last time that the Calve’s Head Club met.  This was gathering for drinks and a feast to secretly commemorate the death of monarchy and all that it stood for.

Regicide then was never far from his mind, especially around his birthday.  I think that he planned for it because all his major writings were generally published at this time of year.  Common Sense in January 1776, the Crisis in December as we’ve seen, Rights of Man part one in February 1791, and Rights of Man part two exactly a year later, The Age of Reason which John Brown and Mother Jones alike admired, was published in January 1794, and Agrarian Justice in which he distinguished between natural and acquired property arguing that earth, air, and water belonged to all as a commons, was published in the winter of 1795.

Though a revolutionary opposing kingship, one-man rule, the puppet-show of sovereignty, the war-making essential to monarchy, he was also opposed to capital punishment and in refusing in France to vote for the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was cast into prison and escaped the guillotine himself only by an amazing accident – the doors of those to be guillotined were chalked the night before, but Paine’s cell door was not yet closed but swung open against the wall and in the dim light it was chalked on the wrong side so that when closed at last it displayed the unchalked side when the executioners came in the morning.

In the nineteenth century the anniversary of the regicide, the 30th January, was no longer much observed.  On the other hand, the birthday of Tom Paine, the 29th January, was the occasion for banquets, drinks, and celebrations by reformers and revolutionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Parsons, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, A.J. Muste, Saul Alinsky, C. Wright Mills.  The list is American because I have relied on Harvey Kaye’s reliable but Americentric study when America could claim to be the exceptional revolutionary beacon. About a decade when it was joined by Haiti, Ireland, France, and the hopes of many others.

“Counter-revolution,” like the “United States of America,” were phrases or neologisms, invented by Paine.  He did not find a place for himself in post-revolutionary America, or during its counter-revolution, so he returned to England. “From what we now see, nothing of reform on the political world ought to be held improbable.  It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.”  In Ireland the United Irish were inspired by Paine’s American and French experiences which they combined in a toast of Belfast,  “May common sense establish the rights of man.”  In India the Bengal renaissance of the 1840s owes much to the work of the Derozians, followers of Vivian Derozio who taught his students at Calcutta’s Hindu College both the Rights of Man and the Age of Reason.  K’tut Tantri who fought with the guerrillas and wrote speeches for Sukarno against Dutch imperialism in Indonesia was known to her comrades as the Mrs. Tom Paine!  When Paine raised his glass in 1792 just before going over to France he toasted “To World Revolution.”

George Lippard, cooperator, unionist, enemy of capitalists honored the 115th birthday of Paine: “that unfailing quill in his hand that shall burn into the brains of kings like arrows winged with fire and pointed with vitriol.”

Ernestine Rose, a New York feminist, organized Tom Paine festivals, a birthday in 1852: “There is no need to eulogize Thomas Paine.  His life-long devotion to the cause of freedom; his undaunted, unshrinking advocacy of truth; his deep seated hatred to kingly and priestly despotism, are his best eulogies.”

Robert Ingersoll, the freethinker of Illinois, gave the Tom Paine birthday address in 1871: “He had more brains than books; more sense than education; more courage than politeness; more strength than polish… He saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench; tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the causes of the weak against the strong – of the enslaved many against the titled few.”

Lester Ward, the Iowa reformer, in a 1912 Tom Paine birthday dinner noted that the political struggle was not enough:  “There was another great struggle to be gone through … a contest for the attainment of social and economic equality.  It is the effort of the fourth estate which used to be called the proletariat, the working classes, the mass of mankind, to secure social emanciation.”

Mumia Abu Jamal remembers that George Washington would not lift a finger to help Paine from the guillotine, and Mumia, himself from death row, quotes Paine’s bitter letter, “And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned your principles, or whether you ever had any.”  The sunshine patriot refused to aid the winter soldier, or ‘the father of his country’ refused to stand by … what? the mother? the Lamaze midwife? instead leaving Thomas Paine to the dungeon and the guillotine.

Mumia sums up, “Thoroughly radical, a believer in international revolution, an opponent of slavery, anti-death penalty, and advocate for the poor, Thomas Paine embodied some of the most humanistic movements of his time.”

Thomas Paine was fond of this time of year.  He concludes part two of Rights of Man by referring to it.  “It is now towards the middle of February,” he says.  “Were I to take a turn into the country, the trees would present a leafless winterly appearance.”  It is not as easy now in 2009 to take such a turn in the country because leisurely strolls have all but vanished given overall social speed-up and the country is not what it used to be either but is asphalted in strip malls and subdivisions.  Still, perhaps we remember people taking such walks.  “As people are apt to pluck twigs as they walk along, I perhaps might do the same, and by chance might observe, that a single bud on that twig had begun to swell.”  This gentle sentence is the key to Paine:  notice how in the logic and the grammar of it the author follows the reader. 

Furthermore, the sentence expresses the first step in reaching an accurate conclusion about the real world, the scientific method begins with the making of an observation.  Then comes the second step, reasoning.  “I should reason very unnaturally, or rather not reason at all, to suppose this was the only bud in England which had this appearance.  Instead of deciding thus, I should instantly conclude, that the same appearance was beginning, or about to begin, everywhere; and though the vegetable sleep will continue longer on some trees and plants than on others, and though some of them may not blossom for two or three years, all will be in leaf in the summer, except those which are rotten.” Nations and individuals are his matter.  Some people can flower, i.e. learn, flourish, speak and act, some quicker than others, some not at all.  Likewise, some nations can throw off despotism. “What pace the political summer may keep with the natural, no human foresight can determine.  It is, however, not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun.” 

The essential point, popular sovereignty, is introduced at last as an adjective and the seasons or the summer, the turning of the earth on its axis towards the sun, is the real world of us all – “the political summer”.  And the paragraph ends with the powerful word ‘spring’, here as one of the seasons, and as we now think about it as one of the stages in revolutionary transformation.  But spring is also a verb, a very active one, sudden, a leap.  And this is what revolutionaries do – they jump and they surprise, here, there, all over.  They do it in together, and nowadays we must do it by commoning.

Paine’s prose reflects his deep beliefs – a) the passage begins and ends not with abstract theories, or imagined romances but with a real objective world common to us all – earth, air, water, b) the common person may understand that world by observation and reasoning, c) the change is accomplished by action.  I should not say the prose reflects these beliefs, because the prose does not say these things directly, instead, we think them as a result of the prose.  Paine guides us; he helps us think.  But we do the thinking. The only thing in the passage which might give us pause– it is two centuries old – is that we live in post-enclosure time, our country, our world, is enclosed, shut up.  His had not yet been, or not completely.  In England, 1804 was the Thetford Enclosure Act privatizing 5,616 acres and denying public access to 80 per cent of the borough.

This year is the bicentennial of the death of Thomas Paine.  He died in what is now Greenwich Village and was buried in New Rochelle attended by a French woman, some Irish men, and two Afro-Americans.

Let us lift our bumpers high for Citizen Tom Paine, for spark array analysis, and world revolution.

• Note:  I thank the geographer Iain Boal, I thank Gillian Boal for provision of my notebooks, I thank Alan Haber for provision of Howard Fast’s edition of Selected Writings of Thomas Paine (1945), a book which J. Edgar Hoover ordered taken from the shelves of American public libraries, and I thank the generosity of Oliver Bone, curator at the Ancient House, Thetford, for photocopying some pages from Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (1986).

SOME FURTHER READING

Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (2005)
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995)
Henry Steel Commager and Richard B. Morris, The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants (1958)
Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006)
Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976)
David Hackett Fisher, Washington’s Crossing (2004)

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com

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