The death of Warren Hinckle, a journalist long forgotten outside San Francisco, brings back Ramparts magazine’s crowning moment, also one of crucial moments of postwar liberalism. At a stroke, in March, 1967, the presumptions of innocence by purportedly freedom-loving (albeit hawkish) prestigious intellectuals were stripped off. It turned out that the grand banquets and conferences with literary-and-other luminaries, the New York Times-reported cocktail parties, indeed the whole egghead-celebrity thing, was at base a CIA operation called, without irony, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The list of collaborators was a long one, but Mary McCarthy, Irving Kristol, Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook and the Trillings, Diana and Lionel, among the most famous Americans, with European stars including Isaiah Berlin and Arthur Koestler at the top (Hannah Arendt in both categories). The Partisan Review, Encounter and a considerable stream of literary or quasi-literary journals existed, as it turned out, with the help of intelligence-agency donations. More

The political establishment in the U.S. is rapidly moving toward a crisis of legitimacy as capitalist democracy is exposed as a system of insider dealing where war, manufactured social misery and environmental catastrophe are ever-more-implausibly posed as solutions to their own facts. With growing evidence, as if any more were needed, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton spent her time at as Secretary of State filling the coffers of the Clinton family slush fund, the Clinton Foundation, with the tainted money of special pleaders, despots and global misery mongers as she went about launching wars-of-choice against some fair bit of the planet.

While the intersection of commerce and governance--- capitalist imperialism, has long been the operating model of America’s leadership class, the pretense of inclusion in the affairs of state through nominal political participation provided a cleansing veil for a citizenry toiling to produce corporate profits in exchange for the modest give-back of living indoors and eating regular meals. More damning than corruption, about which Americans have rarely taken issue as long as they perceived it in their own interest, is clear delineation of class difference, the ‘inside’ from ‘outside’ which the trade in public-private funds of Clinton Foundation donors rendered evident. More

Today, thousands of people are gathered in Yellowstone to celebrate the centennial birthday of the National Parks, which many say is perhaps the best idea that America has ever had. But no one is in Gardiner, Montana, today to mourn the dead. And indeed, most do not know of the catastrophe that hit the grizzly bear, one of the Park’s most beloved icons, in 2015, when 85 bears died out a population of perhaps 717 animals.

Last week, government data was released showing that bear deaths during 2015 shattered previous records, and that thresholds for allowable female deaths were exceeded by a large margin. The death toll of 85 grizzlies is not an anomaly, but rather the most recent manifestation of a decade of unsustainable high grizzly bear mortality. More