April 8, 2011
A battle for the heart and soul of American democracy is being waged in this country. But it might not be the battle you’re watching.
A battle for the heart and soul of American democracy is being waged in this country. But it might not be the battle you’re watching.
President Barack Obama has given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011, provided that Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki officially requests it, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, unveiled two proposals this week which if enacted would constitute a mortal threat to our nation’s health – particularly to the health of our seniors and our most vulnerable populations.
The consequences of three decades of anti-government Reaganism and free-market extremism are now coming clearly into view, a cruel and brutish America split sharply between a few lucky haves and many desperate have-nots.
The Obama administration’s decision to use a military tribunal rather than a federal criminal court to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others means the real motives behind the 9/11 attacks may remain obscure.
On March 20, Americans, in a vet-led assembly, gathered to support PFC Bradley Manning who is accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks and who has been held in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Base for seven months.
The neocon editors of the Washington Post, who have pushed the Iraq War since the beginning, are bummed out over the looming reality of America’s strategic defeat after eight years of fighting.
Before he went over that mountain top in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. said he had already seen the other side, as he spent his last days on earth fighting for the garbage men of Memphis while speaking out about the twin evils of war and poverty.
It will be recalled that after the September 2009 issuance of the Goldstone Report suggesting that Israel might be guilty of war crimes, Judge Richard Goldstone was barred from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. That is how much resentment was produced by the critical report that bears his name.
The historical parallel most unnerving the Obama administration about the Libyan conflict is not Vietnam or Iraq, but Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration eagerly armed Islamic fundamentalists as a proxy force against Soviet troops only to see these “freedom fighters” morph into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes eleven of them and says to the Tea Partier, "Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!"
Spokespersons for NATO, European politicians, members of the Obama administration, and the President himself have been out and about seeking to articulate justifications for the ongoing intervention in Libya. For better or worse, their public statements do not always make sense.
Forget Libya. The real bombing is not underway there. Pay less attention to Pakistan. The drone attacks there pale in comparison.
Guns in churches, schools and bars. Immigrants expelled to solve financial problems. Morality praised as the key national issue.
Twenty years ago, in spring 1991, the United States was at a crossroads that would decide the near-term fate of American democracy, but that reality wasn’t apparent to many. What was clear was that the U.S. empire was resurgent.
Things are bad when a president who says he wants out of Iraq and claims American soldiers will soon start to withdraw from Afghanistan succumbs to international and domestic pressure to do the heavy lifting in yet another civil war — this time in Libya.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both believe that the United States should have begun bombing Libya before the United Nations Security Council approved the mission – a sign that the two preeminent American newspapers continue their slide into neoconservatism.
The announcement by U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy in congressional testimony that the United States would continue to carry out "counter-terrorism operations" from "joint bases" in Afghanistan well beyond 2014 signaled that President Barack Obama has given up the negotiating flexibility he would need to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban leadership.
Tsunami is a Japanese word – one sign of the island nation’s intimate relationship with the destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds it.
“Let me be clear,” President Barack Obama is fond of saying – and his desire was on full display two years ago when he announced a “comprehensive, new strategy” for the war in Afghanistan.
In Berlin, Germany, in early 1939, at Friedrichstrasse railway station, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, my grandmother placed my mother and her older sister, with a few family valuables sown into their clothing, on a Kindertransport bound for Great Britain.
If you think the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) couldn't possibly make its prisons more inhumane no matter how hard it tried, you are wrong. It has created CMUs, or Communications Management Units, where the “management” part consists of denying inmates virtually all communication with their families and the outside world.
Richard Falk, the United Nations Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, told the world organization’s Human Rights Council that the "continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation."
Like Jake LaMotta and his brother Joey in the bloody boxing classic Raging Bull, we are gluttons for punishment. So here we are again, third week in a row, defending NPR against the bare-knuckled assault of its critics.
It's been a long time since I sat in a college literature class and learned about the theater of the absurd, the work of great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Camus, among others.
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia.
American neoconservatives worried that the pro-democracy wave sweeping the Middle East might take out only "moderate" Arab dictators, but the neocons now see hope that uprisings will topple "enemy" regimes in Libya and Syria.
Last week, Detroit News auto critic, Scott Burgess, resigned after a “Chrysler dealer complained about his review of the Chrysler 200 — the centerpiece of the company’s 'Imported from Detroit' advertising campaign."
The failure of the General Electric nuclear reactors in Japan to safely shut down after the 9.0 Tahoku earthquake – on the heels of last year’s catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deadly methane gas explosion in Massey’s West Virginia coal mine – underscores the grave dangers to human society posed by current energy production methods.
The Florida state legislature has passed Bill 736, and Gov. Rick Scott has signed it. So this effort to "reform" teaching practices in the Florida public schools is now law.
Since Saturday night, the United States, France, and Britain have been bombing Libya with cruise missiles, B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, and Harrier attack jets. There is no reliable estimate of the number of civilians killed.
On a state visit to Chile on Monday, President Barack Obama deflected questions about U.S. support for the late Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship by warning against the risks of becoming “trapped by our history.” But a clear and present danger to the United States is that it is being trapped instead by false and misleading narratives.
There is no question that the Christian church of the first three centuries regarded itself as a nonviolent community. It makes perfect sense. Jesus clearly taught and modeled the nonviolent love of friend and enemy, and his earliest followers tried to do so.
What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of the nuclear age?
Whether you believe that the United Nations resolution authorizing extensive intervention in the Libyan civil war is justified or not, and whether you believe that the admittedly eccentric 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi over a complex and fractious tribal society has been cruel, there is one thing that all objective observers should be able to agree on.
The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids in Afghanistan last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.
As Americans turn to their news media to make sense of the upheavals in the Middle East, it’s worth remembering that the bias of the mainstream U.S. press corps is most powerful when covering a Washington-designated villain, especially if he happens to be Muslim.
Although people can be educated in a variety of ways, experience is a particularly effective teacher. Consider the Japanese who today are certainly learning how dangerous nuclear power can be.
The United States government, in violation of international human rights treaties, is trying to prevent the return to Haiti of twice-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was deposed in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat in 2004.
When I arrived in the capital of Qatar, as one of the guest participants in the 6th annual Al Jazeera Forum focused on the Arab world in transition, it was clear the mood had changed.
A number of years back, Pauline Kael took Steven Spielberg to task for his depiction of rural Georgia circa 1909 in his movie, “The Color Purple,” averring that Spielberg's only field of reference seemed to be images culled from cinematic history, rendering his movie tone deaf regarding the rhythms and cadences of life during the era.
Read on.The hideous King of Bahrain has called in troops from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait to attack pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain.
George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable – such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants.
It appears the most serious offense you can commit in Washington these days is telling the truth. You get a pass on torture, aggressive war, killing civilians, lying, destroying evidence and such, but don’t dare give honest information to the American people.
The ecological crisis posed by the exploding and leaking nuclear power plants in Japan following the massive earthquake and tsunami there presents an opportunity for Americans to rethink nuclear power.
I live in a university town just west of the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both the town and the university share the same name, hence West Chester University. WCU is a publicly owned institution and part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE).
Today’s American political crisis has many facets, but a key one is narrative – how the history and ideals of the United States are understood by the public. The strategic importance of narrative is why the Right has invested so much in building media to redirect and control the national storylines.
Government budgets are as much moral statements as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. The language is different, but the essence is the same. Budgets reveal the values of the nation.
Come on now: Let’s take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective.
The eulogies for Washington Post columnist David Broder and the chaos surrounding National Public Radio have coincided as an unintended commentary on what went wrong with the U.S. news media.
I write to you in your capacity as the commander-in-chief of the armed services of the United States to express my concern, indeed my outrage, at the way in which the prosecution of U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning is being conducted.
Reports that Bradley Manning is being held nude every night at the Quantico Brig, then forced to stand naked in the hallway while he waits for his clothes, shows the inconsistency of the treatment of Manning with basic American values of due process, fair trial and human dignity.
Two clandestine operations during hard-fought presidential elections of the past half century shaped the modern American political era, but they remain little known to the general public and mostly ignored by historians. One unfolded in the weeks before Election 1968 and the other over a full year before Election 1980.
The killing of four Americans by Somali pirates was tragic. No excuse exists for murder. But at the risk of seeming harsh, I believe there is much contributory negligence to go around.
CNBC, the top U.S. business news channel, is running propaganda ads in support of unbridled capitalism, including a 1979 clip of right-wing economist Milton Friedman besting talk show host Phil Donahue in a debate over the merits of greed.
Amidst all the stirring political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the name "Marshall Plan" keeps being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the political advances, which hopefully will be somewhat progressive.
Okay, I know we don’t write much about sports, but I had a thought about how to resolve one of the sticking points in the NFL negotiations with the players’ union – the issue of expanding the regular season schedule to 18 from 16 games.
The term “class war” has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
Last week, I made another of my doomed attempts to use politeness and rationality to get people with power to correct false statements.
Many big issues fill our daily news – political upheaval in the Middle East, budget-cutting in Washington, and a challenge to public unions in Wisconsin – but there is another dark storm cloud on the horizon, the renewed battle over the issue of church and state.
There is no doubt that Julian Assange, the head of the WikiLeaks organization, and Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents, are being singled out and made examples of by the Obama administration.
The CIA shared with George W. Bush’s Justice Department the details of how an interrogation strategy – with an emphasis on forced nudity and physical abuse – could train prisoners in “learned helplessness” and demonstrate “the complete control of Americans.”
The mysterious fortune of ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak got an early boost from millions of dollars in cash bribes delivered by CIA-connected arms merchants in the late 1970s, according to two participants.
A disorderly conduct charge against former CIA analyst Ray McGovern – for standing silently with his back to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – was dropped on Wednesday in what McGovern called a victory for the constitutional right to dissent against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Establishment Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates enjoys a charmed life based on a charming persona. The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is always ready with fulsome praise for his “candor” and “leadership” – and even for his belated recognition that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were nuts.
If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is “a real journalist,” recent events should erase all those doubts. Indeed, they should put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.
Twenty years ago, with a resounding victory in a 100-hour ground war against Iraqi troops in Kuwait, the first Bush administration completed the restoration of a powerful public consensus, a renewed national commitment that the United States should act as the world’s imperial policeman.
Hats off to writer Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?”
Read on.When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
If you have the stomach to listen to the likes of Glenn Beck or track the antics of people like Sarah Palin, you might get the idea that today’s American political conservatives are a bunch of radicals and extremists. And, as we will see, you would be correct.
In today’s English language, a prophet is someone who has the power to predict the future, but that is not the role of the prophets that we find in the Bible.
"More cheese, less sleaze!" That was the funniest group chant at Tuesday’s rally of several hundred union and other progressive activists outside the Manhattan headquarters of Fox News.
As the youth-led Freedom Movement of 2011 spreads rapidly across the Middle East, one can only wonder what would be happening in Iraq today if the U.S. had not invaded eight years ago.
A great tragedy of the United States is that the answer to many of the country’s domestic problems is obvious, even simple, but can’t be done because of a dominating political/media dynamic that rules that solution out.
It’s not just Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent efforts to strip public employees of their right to collectively bargain that have citizens of his state outraged. Walker is nothing short of a radical hell-bent on privatizing the public sector of Wisconsin.
It was not until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked to the George Washington University podium last week to enthusiastic applause that I decided I had to dissociate myself from the obsequious adulation of a person responsible for so much death, suffering and destruction.
Under President Barack Obama's new budget for fiscal year 2012, the Great American War Machine just rolls on and on.
Thank you Bernie for breaking your silence, even if you are still clinging to that cover-up mode you adopted since your guilty plea took all the blame for your crimes on yourself.
The inspiring moments when President Obama appeared before the cameras, and thus the world, to declare that the dictator Hosni Mubarak must step down and the people of Egypt must be given the inalienable right to self-determination are now in the past.
The national Republican leadership embraced anger during the first two years of Barack Obama’s term with rank-and-file Republicans even brandishing guns at rallies. But anger is suddenly a bad thing again, at least when expressed by public employees defending their collective bargaining rights.
The uprising in Egypt has to be added to the truly world-changing events that I have witnessed in my life. The others I would call “the big three”: World War II, the American civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War.
Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.
Read on.In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.
Read on.Sometimes the hypocrisy is just overwhelming. So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would deliver a speech hailing the peaceful protests that changed Egypt while 71-year-old Ray McGovern was roughed up and dragged away for standing quietly in protest of her support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read on.Iranian parliamentarians presented an ugly scene on Tuesday with raucous chants calling for the executions of two opposition leaders – and the U.S. news media was quick to denounce the Iranian government – but there is a complex history that Americans aren’t getting.
Read on.A visit to the remote Reagan ranch in the mountains near Santa Barbara, California, on the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth set me thinking about Reagan’s foreign policy record.
Read on.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently traveled to Israel and Jordan to assure these two "partners" of the steadfast nature of U.S. loyalty.
Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence
community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.
Twenty years ago, as Americans were celebrating Valentine’s Day, Iraqi husbands and fathers in the Amiriyah section of Baghdad were peeling the remains of their wives and children off the walls and floor of a large neighborhood bomb shelter.
Read on.On the long morning after, protesters returned to Tahrir Square to clean it up and savor their victory. There were even some initial scuffles with the military that may be over-anxious to assert control and show it is in charge.
One of the really progressive acts that followed the end of World War II was the establishment of the principle of universal jurisdiction (UJ), a legal process that allows states that are signatories to various international treaties and conventions (such as the Geneva conventions) to prosecute alleged violators of these treaties, even when these violations are committed outside the country’s usual jurisdiction.