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Lee's Link |
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2/3/12 The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It By Robert ScheerThat Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
2/1/12 Obama Can Win Big with FDR Formula By Robert McElvaineObama and his advisers are likely tempted to opt for a stand-pat reelection effort because of the improving unemployment numbers. That may be enough to get him reelected. But it won’t be the sort of transformative election that could secure his place in history as a great president ....
1/30/12 Huge Protest in Pakistan Against US Drone Attacks By Common Dreams staffOver 100,000 Pakistanis rallied in Karachi Friday afternoon to protest US drone strikes on their country. The demonstrators also demanded that the Pakistani government continue the blockade on the NATO supply route to Afghanistan.
1/29/12 The Truth Behind Why High Calorie Chef Paula Dean Is Pushing Diabetes Drug By Brad JacobsonNo other national food personality is better poised to reach the millions of Americans who suffer from Type 2 diabetes and sell them on a "healthy" comfort food diet than the Queen of Southern Cuisine. Recipes that might not be quite as orgiastically fattening and seismically carb-laden as her infamous bacon cheeseburger sandwiched between a Krispy Kreme doughnut bun, but which, in the end, will still tether legions of diabetics to its [$500/month] drug.
1/27/12 Not a Peep about President's Praise for War By Laura FlandersPost-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news -- of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama's next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.
1/24/12 By James SurowieckiAt this point, the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President. His fellow Republican candidates, of all people, have painted a vivid picture of private-equity firms—including Bain Capital, where he worked for fifteen years—as job-destroying vultures, who scavenge the meat from American companies and leave their carcasses by the side of the road. Not since the days of “Wall Street” and “Barbarians at the Gate” have the masters of leveraged buyouts looked quite so bad.
1/16/12 NPR/NYT Guru Adam Davidson's Discredited Economic Principles By Lynn Parramore Mr. Davidson wants to make us think that he’s one of us. You know, just a curious guy without formal training in economics who wants to know how things work. But in reality he is what we might call a “One Percent Whisperer”—a salesman for conservative economic philosophy who regurgitates ruinous myths that have led to policies that depress prosperity and chuck justice out the window. |
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1/12/12 What to Do About the Nanny? By Sady Doyle “All the Single Ladies” belongs to a popular type of female journalism: carefully researched, sophisticated, subtly reactionary, each sentence so alluringly polished that you can almost forget it’s a 10,000-word article about how tough it is not to have a boyfriend. |
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12/31/11 What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success By Anu Partanen Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality. |
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12/27/11 The undeniable Palestinian right to resist occupation By Noam Sheizaf Only in the context of the occupation can throwing stones at a bullet-proof army jeep be seen as an offense deserving the death penalty, carried out on the spot (clearly, the soldiers weren’t acting in self-defense). Furthermore, as recent attacks by settlers on soldiers – including a brick thrown from close range on the IDF regional commander – demonstrated, the army’s treatment of Jews is very different (to be clear, I don’t call for shooting Jewish stone-throwers either). But there is a larger issue here, concerning the whole notion of “legitimate” resistance to the occupation. |
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12/24/11 A Christmas Message From America's Rich By Matt Taibbi People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich. What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens. |
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12/18/11 How Ayn Rand Helped Make the US a Selfish, Greedy Nation By Bruce E. LevineWhile Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children. |
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12/10/11 When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids By Marion Brady A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public. |
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12/1/11 Federal Judge Pimp-Slaps the SEC Over Citigroup Settlement By Matt Taibbi Rakoff’s 15-page final ruling read like a political document, serving not just as a rejection of this one deal but as a broad and unequivocal indictment of the regulatory system as a whole. He particularly targeted the SEC’s longstanding practice of greenlighting relatively minor fines and financial settlements alongside de facto waivers of civil liability for the guilty – banks commit fraud and pay small fines, but in the end the SEC allows them to walk away without admitting to criminal wrongdoing. |
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11/27/11 Without Accountability, No Lessons Learned By James Zogby Because we have not, and, it appears, will not, "call on the carpet" those who justified torture, fabricated the case for war in Iraq, and sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women into a country we did not know in order to engage in a conflict with no good end in sight, this same cast of characters are still polluting the policy debate. From their lofty perches at universities, "think tanks" and as advisers to candidates for higher office, they are recognized as "experts" calling for more wars that will only make a bigger mess, while the mess they created has still not been cleaned up. |
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11/25/11 Clash of the titans: Email v social media The headlines were unequivocal - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had announced that email is dead. |
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11/21/11 Papandreou understood the role of the two Friedmans (Thomas, and before him, Milton). Globalization’s implosion needed apologists, much like the professors and pundits who, a century ago, blithely sang praises of the Bolsheviks while ignoring the rotting bodies. Lenin had a name for them: “useful idiots.” By Greg Palast |
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11/19/11 If You Lived in Iran, Wouldn't You Want the Nuclear Bomb? And then you pause to remind yourself of the fundamental geopolitical lesson that you and your countrymen learned over the last decade: the US and its allies opted for war with non-nuclear Iraq, but diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea. By Mehdi Hasan |
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11/16/11 IDF, police forcibly remove Palestinian “Freedom riders” from Israeli bus Six activists boarded an Israeli bus in the West Bank that typically services Jewish settlers, with the intention of trying to reach East Jerusalem, which West Bank Palestinians are forbidden from entering without special permits. The campaign was part of an effort to call attention to Israel’s occupation in general, and policies of segregation and restricted freedom of movement in particular. By Mya Guarnieri and Noa Yachot |
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11/14/11 OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent. By Jeffrey D. Sachs |
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11/12/11 Obama, Sarkozy are right to not believe Netanyahu This week, when the American president was attacked for his “open mic” rants with French president Sarkozy over the Israeli PM’s character, it was hard not to remember this video from 2001, in which Netanyahu bragged on how he manipulated the Clinton Administration and stopped the Oslo Accords. By |
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10/26/11 The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement What are the Occupy Wall Street protesters angry about? The same things we’re all angry about. The only difference is the protestors turned their anger into public action. Occupy Wall Street lit the embers and the sparks are flying. Whether it turns into a genuine populist prairie fire depends on all of us. By Les Leopold |
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10/25/11 Abandoning the Stacks for a Multimedia Wonderland Many predicted that the rise of the digital book would signal the demise of the library. But the opposite has been the case. The world's top architects have designed a number of modern libraries in recent years -- though the focus is no longer on the books. By Bernd Musa and Hilmar Schmundt |
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10/24/11 Swiss Valley Braces For Massive Glacier Break A chunk of ice the size of 12 football fields is in danger of breaking off a Swiss glacier. If that happens, the fallen ice could melt, forming a reservoir that could send a flood rushing into the valley below. But officials in the community insist there is nothing to fear. By Kristin Allen |
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10/23/11 BRITAIN’S podgy pets are heading for a “diet disaster” after being fed too many fatty treats from takeaways to crisps and cakes, according to a new report from one of the country’s leading animal welfare charities. |
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10/22/11 The $1 Trillion Student Loan Rip-Off The impossibility of escaping student loan debt is why an industry sprang up to foist useless, overpriced degrees on vulnerable people. It’s a scam, but a profitable one, and respectable enough for major establishment players to feel comfortable making a killing on it. By Alex Pareene |
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10/21/11 Very Large Array telescope in public call for new name One of the world's most famous radio telescope facilities needs a new name - and ideas are wanted. By Jason Palmer |
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10/20/11 Disneyland workers answer to 'electronic whip' In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees' work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine. By Steve Lopez |
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10/19/11 Millions of Americans hoped President Obama would nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer financial watchdog agency she had created. Instead, she was pushed aside. By Suzanna Andrews |
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10/18/11 A bad week for the nutritional supplements industry Two separate studies published this past week, involving tens of thousands of subjects, showed that high doses of vitamins and supplements, rather than being helpful, can sometimes kill you. |
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10/17/11 The Contrasting Psychologies of 'Occupy Wall Street' and the 'Tea Party' What to make of Occupy Wall Street: ignore it as silly excess or embrace the movement? celebrate the energy or ridicule the process? fear the consequences or welcome the possibilities? No easy answers, except for the wrong ones. What can be said is that how you respond at this still early stage depends on how your psychology fits, or doesn’t, with the psychology of this emerging movement, and how that fit contrasts with the very different psychology of the Tea Party. By Todd Essig |
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10/16/11 From public sex to "pickup lines" to poop, right-wingers are obsessed with raunchy riffs about Occupy Wall Street. By Mark Follman |
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10/15/11 Prize-winning Colorado goat in doping row The grand champion goat from this year's Colorado State Fair has been disqualified after testing positive for an unapproved feed additive. |
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10/14/11 I briefly visited the “We are the 53%” website, but I first saw your face on a liberal blog. Your picture is quite popular on liberal blogs. I think it’s because of the expression on your face. I don’t know if you meant to look pugnacious or if we’re just projecting that on you, but I think that’s what gets our attention. By Max Udargo Thanks to Roger Kolaks |
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10/13/11 Like most people living through this jarring age of economic turbulence and political dysfunction, you can probably recall a moment in the last few months when you thought to yourself that our lawmakers and corporate leaders are all crazy. And not just run-of-the-mill crazy, a la George Costanza’s parents, but the kind of crazy that makes films like Silence of the Lambs and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so frightening. |
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10/12/11 Rivers of ice: Vanishing glaciers Stunning images from high in the Himalayas - showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so - have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London. |
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10/11/11 The English Language Ain’t That Bad I grew up with a father possessed of strong views about linguistic matters, which he did not keep to himself. But I’ve prided myself on encouraging verbal laissez-faire in the young. When I taught English years ago, I would often be asked whether it was all right to use “language,” which meant “bad language.” “Go ahead,” I’d say, “so long as there’s some point to it.” Jane Miller |
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10/10/11 Real-life Jedi: Pushing the limits of mind control Granted, we may not be able to lift a spaceship out of a swamp like Yoda does in The Empire Strikes Back, but it is possible to steer a model car, drive a wheelchair and control a robotic exoskeleton with just your thoughts.
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10/9/11 Politics and the bugnut Christians Since Roe vs. Wade, religion and politics have gotten ever more entwined. Instead, we should move on to the truly magical word: American. |
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10/8/11 London 2012: Cleaners set to spy on dopers Cleaning and security staff will be tasked with informing on doping cheats during next summer's Olympics games.
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10/7/11 Philanthropist John Gray does power lunch with Portland kids and sees the value of his giving Just after 12:30 p.m., Gray walked into the Community Transitional School, a private institution for students from homeless and poor families. Nearly all the children lead nomadic lives. Last year, for example, one girl moved 46 times. Home, if that's what it can be called, is a cheap 82nd Avenue motel room, a domestic violence shelter, a church basement and low-income apartments. Tom Hallman Jr. |
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10/6/11 Putting Pundits to Shame: Protesters Know Exactly What They're Fighting For Genuine grassroots movements don't begin with poll-tested messages or slick media operations and aren't fronted by polished spokespeople. In any group of ordinary citizens, be it a Shriner's convention or an uprising against the Wall Street hucksters who took down the global economy, there will be some number who are in fact confused or clueless. A visiting reporter can shape whatever narrative he or she chooses by simply selecting whom to interview and which parts of those interviews make the cut. |
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10/5/11 Firm Wins Battle to Register F-Word as Trademark A German company has won its court battle to register the F-word as a trademark. The brand name of its "Ficken" schnapps will now enjoy legal protection. The term may be in poor taste, but it may soon be used to market spirits and other drinks. |
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10/4/11 According to Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal by Robert D Leighninger Jr, the Civilian Conservation Corps alone, for example, built 46,854 bridges, 3,116 fire lookout towers, 197 large dams, and planted over 3 billion trees, plus a great deal more. Throughout the Great Depression, the government put unemployed people to work, creating an enormous web of public infrastructure that not only helped us win World War II in the following decade, but that helped lay the foundations for decades of post-War prosperity. |
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10/3/11 We in the over-65 set have become the present-day equivalent of Reagan’s notorious “welfare queens,” supposedly living high on the hog at the expense of the taxpayer. According to what I call the Myth of the Greedy Geezer, we lucky oldsters spend our time lolling about in lush retirement villas, racing our golf carts to under-priced early-bird dinner specials and toasting our good fortune with cans of Ensure - all at the expense of struggling young people, who will never enjoy such pleasures since the entitlement “Ponzi scheme” will collapse long before they are old. |
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10/2/11 For 35 years, Chuck Baldwin preached paranoia and prejudice from his Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla. It seemed like a heavenly match of man and city. The one-time chairman of Florida Moral Majority pontificated on the evils of the federal government and abortion in the very burg where two doctors who performed abortions were murdered one year apart. Pensacola also was the home of the anti-evolution Dinosaur Adventure Land— “where the Bible and dinosaurs meet.” Its creator reviled the U.S. government and is now in prison for tax fraud. |
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10/1/11 The Due-Process-Free Assassination of US Citizens is Now Reality Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed. |
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9/30/11 Beetle's beer bottle sex wins Ig Nobel Prize That's right, certain Australian beetles will try to copulate with discarded beer bottles, but they have to be of the right type - brown ones with bobbly bits on them. |
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9/29/11 Share Traders More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows What makes individual stockbrokers blow billions in financial markets with criminal trading schemes? According to a new study conducted at a Swiss university, it may be because share traders behave more recklessly and are more manipulative than psychopaths. SPIEGEL Staff |
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9/28/11 Country music brings home US economic woes Country music and hard times. A cliché perhaps, but try telling that to legions of fans across the United States, many of whom are on the frontlines of economic struggles, seeking solace in the music. Paul Adams |
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9/27/11 America Should Halt the Use of Unmanned 'Killer' Drones If some other country were sending pilotless aircraft over Nebraska to kill people they regard as threats, Nebraskans might not be too happy. Negative reaction to our drone attacks has been strongest in Pakistan, where drones are regarded as a terrorist weapon. Residents of certain regions in Pakistan say they never know when a missile might fall out of the sky. |
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9/26/11 Why I Cannot Answer Questions about My Grandfather Bestselling German crime author Ferdinand von Schirach is the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, who was head of the Hitler Youth. In an essay for SPIEGEL, he writes for the first time about his relationship to his grandfather and why he cannot explain his grandfather's deeds. |
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9/25/11 On Israel and Palestine, Obama is Rick Perry But forget the campaign for a moment — which is what Obama should have done when addressing the U.N. The president's speech was an embarrassing disaster. Since 2009, 1,600 Palestinians (overwhelmingly civilians and over 400 children) have been killed by the Israeli army. Thirteen Israelis have been killed over the same period. Despite that, Obama devoted 120 words of his speech to Israeli suffering (even going so far as to cite the Holocaust) and not one word to Palestinian suffering. |
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9/24/11 Note to GOP Candidates: Obama is No Socialist Indeed, he has made the point again and again that he rejects the socialist and social-democratic solutions that have worked in countries such as Germany, Sweden, Britain and Canada. He has rejected “socialized medicine” in favor of a health care reform plan that requires uninsured Americans to buy policies from for-profit insurance companies. He has refused to get tough on Wall Street and the big banks, allowing “too big to fail” private institutions to threaten the US economy. He has chosen not to respond to the unemployment crisis with the sort of jobs programs that Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented during the New Deal era, and that Hubert Humphrey made central to his advocacy as a senator and presidential candidate in the 1960s and 1970s. |
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9/23/11 Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? Is The Washington Post a Criminal Enterprise? Ever since Texas Gov. Rick Perry attacked Social Security as a Ponzi scheme as an opening gambit in his presidential campaign, we have been treated to a spirited debate in the media on the truth of this proposition. Those of us who consider this to be ill-informed nonsense that has the effect of misleading the public about the state of Social Security's finances were told to lighten up. After all, what is wrong with debating the topic? |
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9/22/11 Their argument is straightforward: If the idea behind a two-state solution is dividing land among the two peoples, how can Israel unilaterally continue to settle the contested land while carrying out negotiations? Israeli unilateralism, in other words, has driven the Palestinians to choose the unilateral path. The only difference is that the latter's unilateralism is aimed at advancing a peace agreement, while the former's is aimed at destroying it. |
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9/21/11 Real Class War Is Working to Keep Those Below You Down Conservative discourse about the “undeserving” poor being where they are because of some inherent personal faults might make some sense if we were all born with the same opportunities to get ahead. Tragically, however, in today’s economy, the single greatest predictor of how much an American child will earn in the future is how much his or her parents take home. |
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9/20/11 Bibi and Obama pave the way for one-state solution In October 2010 I started writing the “Wild card” campaign. To make a long story short, it was an effort to convince people of the need for the U.S. to support a unilateral declaration of independence at the UN. The reasoning behind the campaign was that a unilateral declaration would not immediately bring about a Palestinian state, but that American support of this move would level the playing field of the conflict. |
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9/19/11 Et tu, Brute? After all, in your Cairo speech you promised a new dawn for the Muslim world, you promised a new America to the Arab world. And what came of this? The same old American wolf - which blindly and automatically supports every whim of Israel's to such an extent that it is not clear which is the world power and which is the protectorate - and not even dressed in sheep's clothing. The riddle remains unsolved: How is it that the supposedly new America is continuing to sing the same old songs from its evil past? How is it that Obama is behaving as if he does not understand that the Palestinians will no longer agree to live another four decades without civil rights, certainly not in view of all that is taking place around them in the awakening Arab world? |
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9/18/11 Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan. |
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9/17/11 How can birds teach each other to talk? Wild parrots in Australia are apparently picking up phrases from escapee pet cockatoos who join their flocks. Why - and how - can some birds talk? Megan Lane |
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9/16/11 Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. The truth is that the Palestinians have just three options, not four: to surrender unconditionally and go on living under Israeli occupation for another 42 years at least; to launch a third intifada; or to mobilize the world on their behalf. They picked the third option, the lesser of all evils even from Israel's perspective. What could Israel say about this - that it's a unilateral step, as it and the United States have said? But it didn't agree to stop construction in the settlements, the mother of all unilateral steps. What did the Palestinians have left? The international arena. |
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9/15/11 Once in a blue moon, a figure deep inside the Beltway beast leaves and says something profound and honest about the environment in which he works. One such figure is former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel; another is former South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis. Both Republicans presented lucid criticism of their party’s policies and conduct, but were essentially ignored by major broadcast media. Now a Republican staffer in the House and Senate budget committees with nearly thirty years’ service under his belt, Mike Lofgren, has left his position and published a stinging critique of Washington’s partisan ways. Lofgren’s piece, published at Truthout, provides an insider’s assessment of the dynamics that drive the G.O.P., coupled with well-aimed missiles at the Democrats and the Beltway media. It’s also composed in an unusually lucid, entertaining style. |
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9/14/11 How 9/11 Triggered America's Decline For a short time after the attacks, the country seemed united. Americans embraced each other. Even the cold city of New York suddenly seemed warm. But instead of cultivating public spirit, President Bush sought to find a pretext -- any pretext -- to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. This is his most tragic legacy, the fact that America can no longer even mourn its victims properly -- because Americans have long been not just victims, but also perpetrators. |
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9/13/11 The Corporate Media Is Still Censoring Stories Project Censored has an illustrious history of drawing attention to stories that the mainstream press overtly censors or ignores through a corporate media culture that dismisses the existence of topics that threaten the status quo. The organization also promotes media literacy by educating the public about strategies that are used to disseminate misinformation and propaganda. |
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9/12/11 Krugman: 9/11 made Bush, Giuliani become ‘fake heroes’ "What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful," he wrote. "Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons." Andrew Jones |
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9/11/11 9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded A decade after its spectacular Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City's twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not bringing it to the brink of collapse. |
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9/10/11 Let's Put 9/11 Behind Us and End the Blank Check it Has Become for America's Endless Wars The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -- who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -- as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands. |
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9/9/11 Former MI5 head: Torture is "wrong and never justified" Baroness Manningham-Buller said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a "profound mistake" and as a result America lost its "moral authority." |
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9/8/11 The imperial delusions of the United States Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes. |
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9/7/11 NASA Engineers Map to Track 'Amazing' Antarctic Ice Flow In a bid to track future sea-level increases from climate change, researchers at NASA have come out with the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. |
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9/6/11 Ranger's widow expelled from Rumsfeld book signing According to an account posted on Coffee Strong’s website: “Mrs. Joppa-Hagemann introduced herself by handing a copy of her husband’s funeral program to Rumsfeld, and telling him that her husband had joined the military because he believed the lies told by Rumsfeld during his tenure with the Bush administration.” Jordan Schrader |
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9/5/11 Atlas Mugged: The Ayn Rand Six Step Our strength comes not from how the strongest or luckiest among us exploit the rest, but from how we come together as a country to do that which we must do together. Indeed, we are great in proportion to how we treat the least fortunate among us, not the most. |
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9/4/11 Guatemala STD tests 'may have infected 2,500' The extent of US medical experiments in Guatemala on STDs during the 1940s is greater than previously thought, health authorities have told the BBC. |
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9/3/11 WikiLeaks: Handcuffed Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi. |
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9/2/11 Deceit of Shakespearean Proportions You don’t have to slog too deeply through Dick Cheney’s advertisement for himself to grasp not only the wicked cynicism of the man but also how shallow are his perceptions. He recalls his college years in the 1960s, when he was a draft-deferred young Republican during America’s murderous adventure in Vietnam—in which more than 3 million Indochinese and 59,000 Americans were killed—as a time of career advancement through strategic Washington appointments. |
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9/1/11 Why You Won’t See Veterans For Peace on the Cover of TIME Magazine Klein briefly mentions the high rates of suicide, domestic violence, joblessness and homelessness amongst Iraq and Afghanistan vets, but then dismisses it all by saying that that’s all we ever hear about—he wants to tell us the untold story of a handful of vets who came out of their military experience and moved forward in a positive way. But the real untold story is the truth of war, and we will never read about that in the likes of magazines like TIME. |
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8/31/11 The Lewis Powell Memo - Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy Forty years ago this week, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society. |
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8/30/11 Barack Obama has continued virtually all of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s once-controversial terrorism and civil liberties policies, a fact now recognized across the political spectrum. Even the right wing acknowledges these policies have continued under the Obama presidency, which is interesting, because for decades Republicans have made political hay by accusing Democrats of being weak on national security (or “soft on terrorism” in this age of terror). |
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8/29/11 Remembering Steve Jobs’ Record on Workers’ Rights While Jobs' designs for computers may have put humans at their center, working conditions for Apple’s workers put profits at their center. Jobs did indeed revolutionize the computer industry, but in a way that was negative for American workers, who for decades have seen manufacturing job prospects dwindle as jobs go to workers overseas, who in turn often labor in brutal sweatshop conditions. |
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8/28/11 The Catholic priesthood, Bourgeois says, is an “old boys’ club” that wishes to hold onto its power, privileges and prerogatives. He believes that had there been women priests, the priest-pedophilia scandal would not have erupted because such predatory deeds would not have been tolerated. |
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8/27/11 What Did You Learn in School Today? (The Texas Version) The contentious hearings of the Texas State Board of Education received considerable attention in the spring of 2010, but seem to have fallen out of the public consciousness as the new school year begins. The new curriculum, officially called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, deserves renewed attention, as it will undoubtedly surprise most Texans. |
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8/26/11 Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space. |
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8/25/11 Survey: Employers consider ending health coverage Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014, according to a new survey from a large benefits consultant. Tom Murphy |
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8/24/11 Berlin Hotel Offers Camping Under Concrete Love camping but hate the winter cold? Well, now your problem is solved. A new hotel in Berlin offers all the charms of outdoor camping inside a former vacuum-cleaner factory. Tim Tolsdorff |
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8/23/11 5 Reasons Capitalism Has Failed The modern world is ruled by multinational corporations and governed by a capitalistic ideology that believes: Corporations are a special breed of people, motivated solely by self-interest. Corporations seek to maximize return on capital by leveraging productivity and paying the least possible amount for taxes and labor. Corporate executives pledge allegiance to their directors and shareholders. The dominant corporate perspective is short term, the current financial quarter, and the dominant corporate ethic is greed, doing whatever it takes to maximize profit. |
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8/22/11 Another victory for universal healthcare I've talked to liberals who aren't thrilled with Obama's health care plan but nonetheless think it must still be worthwhile, because a) after all, Obama likes it, and b) it at least does something. The fact that the something it does is to entrench corporate power over health care in the US to the point where it would take a nuclear bomb to dislodge it, not to mention to put a lengthy debate about universal healthcare off the national agenda for decades, either doesn't occur to them or is subsumed by their knee-jerk partisan instinct to at least politely nibble at whatever shit sandwich the Democrats happen to be feeding them at any given moment. John Caruso |
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8/21/11 Catholic Charities Loses Same-Sex Couple Adoption Fight In Illinois Circuit Judge John Schmidt ruled Thursday (Aug. 18) that state officials can cancel contracts with Catholic Charities after church officials said they could not comply with a new civil unions law that could require them to place children with same-sex couples. |
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8/20/11 Why Persecute the Poor for Being Poor? Raquel Nelson's conviction for causing her own child's death by jaywalking shows America's indifference to the cost of poverty. |
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8/19/11 Big Ideas and the Concentration of Wealth The financial crash of the 2000s revealed a confluence of many powerful and socially disruptive forces: levels of income inequality not seen since the dawn of the Great Depression, stagnant middle-class living standards amidst strong productivity growth, solid evidence that deregulated markets were driving a damaging bubble and bust cycle, deep repudiation of supply-side economics, and most importantly, even deeper repudiation of the dominant, Greenspanian paradigm that markets will self-correct. |
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8/18/11 Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? The individual mandate was always a bad idea. Instead of recognizing that healthcare is a right, the members of Congress and the Obama administration who cobbled together the healthcare reform plan created a mandate that maintains the abuses and the expenses of for-profit insurance companies—and actually rewards those insurance companies with a guarantee of federal money. |
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8/17/11 'Kids for cash' judge sentenced to 28 years for racketeering scheme The federal indictment says the two judges accepted $2.8 million in kickbacks from the owner and builder of two privately-run juvenile detention facilities. In exchange, the judges agreed to close down the county’s own juvenile detention center, which would have competed with the new, privately-run facilities. In addition they guaranteed that juvenile offenders from their court would be directed to the privately-run facilities. |
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8/16/11 Florida's elderly, kids don't need stinkin' U.S. tax dollars Earlier this summer, a panel of low-wattage trolls known as the Legislative Budget Commission spurned $2.1 million of a federal grant designed to transition ill and elderly Floridians out of nursing facilities and back to their homes. Florida Gov. Rick Scott pays $30 per month for health insurance Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) crashed into office earlier this year on a campaign bashing President Barack Obama's health care plan and its ability to lower costs for consumers, but it turns out that he doesn't mind the governmental twist that allows him to pay a lower insurance premium himself.
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8/15/11 Ignoring the past doesn't erase our responsibility for it It has been observed for at least a century that England and America are two nations separated by a common language. Today there is another difference. England is interested in finding out how it came to participate in an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war. America is not. |
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8/14/11 Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex During a press conference, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told reporters that the new state-of-the-art fetus-killing facility located in the nation's heartland offers quick, easy, in-and-out abortions to all women, and represents a bold reinvention of the group's long-standing mission and values. |
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8/13/11 The Real Villain of John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939) STAGECOACH (1939) directed by John Ford from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols is generally considered to be the first adult Western - adult in the sense that it took a set of archetypes who were familiar to audiences from Westerns of the past (the dancehall girl/prostitute, the Southern gentleman gambler, the drunken doctor, the young outlaw, the girl from the East), placed them in a quasi-allegorical setting (a stagecoach traveling from one small town to another through hostile territory), and let them interact in such a way as to reveal unexpected nuance and depth. |
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8/12/11 Elites "Shocked" The Poor Are Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity Measures The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. |
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8/11/11 Upper-class people less empathetic than lower-class people: Study “One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull," Keltner added. "Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The ‘thousand points of light’—this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society—is improbable, psychologically."
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8/10/11 Health Insurers Sacrifice Americans for Profit Three of the biggest health insurers have announced quarterly earnings in the past few days. If Americans were able to eavesdrop on what executives from those firms tell their Wall Street masters every three months, they would have a better understanding of why premiums keep going up while the number of people with medical coverage keeps going down. |
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8/9/11 The Pentagon’s New Power Elite In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once “special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura. |
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8/8/11 When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit. |
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8/7/11 Air Force Pulls Christian-Themed Ethics Training for Nuclear Missile Officers The Air Force, in response to an exclusive report published by Truthout earlier this week, has withdrawn materials used in a training session that relied upon Bible passages and a quote from an ex-Nazi SS officer to teach missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons. |
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8/6/11 Who Wants to Go Back to the ’50s? Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.” |
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8/5/11 This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy. In the face of America's apparent political insanity, Europe must learn to take care of itself. |
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8/4/11 THIRTY years ago [yesterday], when he threatened to fire nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off an illegal strike, Ronald Reagan not only transformed his presidency, but also shaped the world of the modern workplace. |
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8/3/11 Burning Man’s Just for Rich People Now If we didn't attend the week-long Burning Man festival in Nevada every year, we probably wouldn't be the deeply spiritual, open-minded individual that we are today. We'd just be another emotional eunuch living in America, ignorant in the ways of radical self-expression. Sadly, we and our collection of fruit-flavored body paints and hovercrafts won't be able to go hang out on the Black Rock City playa this year, because last week festival tickets completely sold out for the first time in its 25-year history. |
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8/2/11 How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, our friends and our neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never met and never will meet. |
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8/1/11 Israeli protesters must remain in tents until time is right It was the night that every Israeli can and should be proud of being Israeli, as never before. Israel's true pride march took place yesterday. There can be no better public relations campaign for this despised, shunned country than the demonstration last night of this new Israel. The Foreign Ministry should broadcast the images to the entire world. Israeli democracy celebrated last night as it has not done in years, standing up against all those who would see it fall. |
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7/31/11 Inside the Right-Wing Christian Law School That Brought Us Michele Bachmann When Oral Roberts University sought to set up a law school, it called in Christian Reconstructionist Herb Titus. Michele Bachmann is the law school's most famous graduate. |
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7/30/11 Town Removes Grave of Hitler Deputy Hess For years it has been a pilgrimage site for right-wing extremists who wanted to celebrate Rudolf Hess as a martyr. It was also the object of shame among many locals. But now the controversial gravesite of Hitler's right-hand man has been removed from the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel. |
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7/29/11 Keeping some voters from the polls is part of the game plan Do Republicans feel passionately about voter fraud while Democrats don’t care? No, but the fact that cases of voter fraud are harder to find than Rockefeller Republicans these days explains why there is such a partisan divide on the issue. The real purpose of such laws is to discourage poor and/or black voters from going to the polls and voting for Democrats. |
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7/28/11 The Tax Burden of the Very Rich The main reason that the tax rate in the United States for the rich is low is that being rich, many of the rich do not need to work. It has long been accepted by Republicans in Congress, among others, that unearned income should receive more favorable treatment than earned income. According to the IRS, in 2008 only 8 percent of the income of the top 400 earners in the country came from salary and wages. Close to 10% came from dividends and about 56% came from capital gains. Happy to help those who have prospered, either through their own efforts or through a wise choice of ancestors, Congress decided that people who receive dividends should only pay 15% tax on those dividends. Similarly, Congress thinks that capital gains, subject to a few non-onerous rules, should only be taxed at 15%. There is another group with very large incomes that also pays tax at the 15% rate. Those are hedge fund managers. |
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7/27/11 Why Medicare Is the Solution — Not the Problem You have lower back pain? Almost 95% of such cases are best relieved through physical therapy. But doctors and hospitals routinely do expensive MRI’s, and then refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who often do even more costly surgery. Why? There’s not much money in physical therapy. |
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7/26/11 Friends, family mark 100th birthday of a Florin hero Bob Fletcher – who officially turns 100 on Tuesday – didn't see combat in World War II. But he was shot at for being a Japanese sympathizer when he quit his job to save three local Japanese American farms whose owners were sent to internment camps. Stephen Magagnini |
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7/25/11 Corporate Tax Holiday in Debt Ceiling Deal: Where's the Uproar? For those who don’t know about it, tax repatriation is one of the all-time long cons and also one of the most supremely evil achievements of the Washington lobbying community, which has perhaps told more shameless lies about this one topic than about any other in modern history – which is saying a lot, considering the many absurd things that are said and done by lobbyists in our nation’s capital. |
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7/24/11 Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."
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7/23/11 Barack Obama: The Democrats’ Richard Nixon? There is no question that Barack Obama is one of our most enigmatic presidents. Despite having published two volumes of memoirs before being elected president, we really don’t know that much about what makes him tick. The ongoing debate over the deficit and the debt limit is clarifying what I think he is: a Democratic Richard Nixon. |
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7/22/11 It's confusing to see the snarling red faces of America's financial overlords. Of all the people on earth, what do they have to be angry about? They almost obliterated the world economy, and as punishment, we opened up the U.S. treasury and told them to haul off as much as they could carry. Meanwhile, everyone else is just praying the Medicare age won't be raised beyond 82. |
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7/21/11 Justice Dept. Gives Torture a Pass What will we say when other governments follow our example by providing immunity from prosecution to torturers? |
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7/20/11 Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis. |
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7/19/11 As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism—the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit. |
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7/18/11 Crunch Time for Public Sector Unions The media attack on public sector unions has reached a timely zenith, perfectly in sync with the politicians' anti-union deathblow. This coordinated campaign is happening nationwide, and includes Democratic and Republican marauders on a state-by-state basis. There are several state battlegrounds where this war is coming to completion, but no winner has been declared. If Democratic and Republican Governors are able to force massive concessions on public sector unions -- and the corresponding cuts to services these employees deliver to the public -- the labor movement and social safety net will both be decimated, paving the way for even more brutal, future attacks. Shamus Cooke |
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7/17/11 Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of "progressive" Rob Bell’s Love Wins. |
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7/16/11 Breaking Point: Obama and the Death of the Democratic Party There is only one thing you can reasonably conclude as you watch the political theater that is transpiring: what the voting public thinks really isn’t all that important. And to the extent that it does matter, it can easily be channeled by those with sufficient money to pay the tab. Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, but in our modern era, that honor goes to tribalism. The list of horrors that people found intolerable when George Bush was in office, but are now blithely accepting because “Sarah Palin would be worse,” grows longer every day. |
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7/15/11 ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”—and vouchers “scholarships”—but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools. |
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7/14/11 Meet The Indonesian Workers Who Make Your Nikes: 50 Cent Hourly Wages, Beatings, And Humiliation In 2001, following protests by labor and human rights advocates, Nike pledged a series of reforms following the revelation that some of its developing world workers were children. But a new investigation conducted by the Associated Press appears to find that poor conditions persist in many of Nike’s factories. |
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7/13/11 US Calls Mount to Investigate Bush Era Officials for Torture Senior officials under the former George W. Bush administration knowingly authorized the torture of terrorism suspects held under United States custody, a Human Right Watch (HRW) report released here Tuesday revealed. Naseema Noor |
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7/12/11 The GOP's Honeymoon Is So Over Republicans swept last year's elections. The GOP captured more than 675 state legislative seats, flipped 10 governor's mansions, gained control of over 20 state legislative chambers, and won more than 60 seats in Congress previously occupied by Democrats. David Elliot |
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7/11/11 Copper kills 97 pct of hospital ICU bacteria-study The study, presented at the World Health Organization's 1st International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control (ICPIC) in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday, backed what research teams at three U.S. hospitals suggested four years ago: replacing the most heavily contaminated touch surfaces in ICUs with antimicrobial copper will control bacteria growth and cut down on infection rates. Chris Kelly |
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7/10/11 Republican Preachers: Believing What You Know Ain't True In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain makes a stinging observation on the overtly religious. “Faith is when you believe something you know ain’t true.” This is a perfect description of the religious asylum that is now the Republican Party and the tortured gospel they are spreading all over the country. Virtually the entire barnyard of their presidential candidates are preaching a mix of born again religious revivalism and brutal 19th century industrial capitalism, that they “know ain’t even remotely true.” Brian Moench |
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7/9/11 According to Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who headed President Obama’s education transition team, though we already “test students in the United States more than any other nation,” our students “perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science.” Yet the Obama administration, backed by corporate foundations, is nonetheless intensifying testing at all levels, as if doing the same thing and expecting different results is innovative “reform” rather than what it’s always been: insanity. |
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7/8/11 Working for Apple 'Should Be Looked at As An Experience' A Bay Area employee described what happened last year when he and about a dozen co-workers realized employees with years of service were being paid less than new hires doing the same work. Agitated about the situation but concerned about retaliation, the workers committed to a plan: during the approaching round of annual one-on-one meetings between workers and managers, they would each ask about pay disparities. |
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7/7/11 O.J. and Casey Anthony To Be Wed Said Simpson,"I knew from yesterday at around 11:00 AM that Casey and I were meant to be together. We were accused, some say wrongfully, of heinous crimes. We both chose not to testify at our trials so the jurors could get home to their families. And in both our cases those 12 men and women were able to ignore the facts and do what was right." |
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7/6/11 Eight myths to chill an old-school Republican's soul Today we have the spectacle of smart, patriotic men and women putting their brains and integrity on ice to please a party dominated by anti-intellectual social Darwinists and the plutocrats who finance and mislead them. |
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7/5/11 Duct tape can even be used in the fight against infectious disease An infection-prevention team at Trinity Medical Center in the Quad Cities along the Illinois and Iowa border, wanted to create safe zones in which healthcare workers could talk to patients with infectious diseases. So they used 3-foot squares of red duct tape to indicate where precisely that zone was located.
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7/4/11 Wasteful Afghan projects: Where does the buck stop? Inefficient and unsustainable construction projects in Afghanistan have swallowed billions in American taxpayer dollars, and may contribute little to defeating the Taliban, but no one's certain who's to blame. |
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7/3/11 It’s Not India, Congo or Afghanistan: The Subjection of Women is Its Own Religion My mother began her career as a high-school teacher in a country that regarded women as the property of men. She could not get a bank account or a credit card of her own, only one bearing my father’s name – and only with his permission and under his control. Most jobs were open only to men. Only a quarter of drivers were women, and the whole phenomenon of women driving was hotly debated in the media. |
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7/2/11 Recycling hotel soap to save lives Derreck Kayongo and his Atlanta-based Global Soap Project collect used hotel soap from across the United States. Instead of ending up in landfills, the soaps are cleaned and reprocessed for shipment to impoverished nations such as Haiti, Uganda, Kenya and Swaziland. |
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7/1/11 Don't Look on the Bright Side: Pessimism, Not Magical Thinking, Is What Will Save Us But it would pretty much take a miracle for our intractable problems to become tractable. Without one, political polarization is not about to give way to kumbaya. Cultural coarsening is not going to reverse course. The middle class will not be resurgent; the gap between rich and poor will not start closing; the plutocrats calling the shots will not cede their power. No warning on its way to us -- no new BP, no next shooting, no future default -- will bring us to our senses about the environment, assault weapons or derivatives for any longer than it takes for the next Casey Anthony or Anthony Weiner comes along. |
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6/30/11 How Hank Paulson's inaction helped Goldman Sachs Paulson "knew that if he acted the way he should, that would have burst the bubble. Then Goldman Sachs would have been left with a very substantial loss, and that would have been the end of bonuses at Goldman Sachs." Greg Gordon |
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6/29/11 FYI, Michele Bachmann: John Wayne Isn't an American Hero Bachmann may hate gays, think the American Revolution started in New Hampshire, and believe God personally chose her to be one of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, but she obviously didn't mean to compare herself to a mass murderer. Nicole Fabian-Weber |
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6/28/11 The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why? The great financial crisis of 2008–2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood”—that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all indications are that the pattern is set to continue. Paul Krugman & Robin Wells |
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6/27/11 A Real Pullout or a Shell Game? America, for all its B-1 heavy bombers, strike fighters, missiles, helicopter gunships and drones, armor, super electronics, spies in the sky and all the other high tech weapons of modern war has failed to defeat some 30,000 tribal fighters with nothing more than small arms and legendary valor. Eric Margolis |
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6/26/11 Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh. Matt Taibbi |
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6/25/11 Perhaps the most disheartening thing about Obama’s speech was the absence of fresh thinking, or even clear thinking. It was hard to tell whether he was sticking with his counterinsurgency strategy or switching to a counterterrorism approach—or, perhaps, doing a little of both. There was no evidence he had considered the possibility that the war is being perpetuated not by rational pursuit of our national interests, but by its own inertia. Eugene Robinson |
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6/24/11 The GOP's CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country to Sweep Back Into Power The hard reality in the United States today is that the Republicans and the Right are now fully organized, armed with a potent propaganda machine and possessing an extraordinary political will. They are well-positioned to roll the U.S. economy off the cliff and blame the catastrophe on Obama. Robert Parry |
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6/23/11 Climate to wreak havoc on food supply, predicts report This report is the first foray into the field by the CCAFS initiative. To assess how climate change will affect the world's ability to feed itself, CCAFS set about finding hotspots of climate change and food insecurity. Jennifer Carpenter |
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6/22/11 Paul Krugman on Inspiration for a Liberal Economist In The first book you’ve chosen isn’t about economics at all; it’s a work of science-fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. But was it part of what inspired you to become an economist? Sophie Roell |
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6/21/11 U2's The Edge loses Coastal Commission vote, 8 to 4 "In 38 years of this commission's existence, this is is one of the three worst projects that I've seen in terms of environmental devastation," Peter Douglas, the agency's executive director, said. "It's a contradiction in terms -- you can't be serious about being an environmentalist and pick this location" given the effects on habitat, land formation, scenic views and water quality. Matt Moody |
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6/20/11 At Harvey Apartments, the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe live on Hollywood’s Harvey Apartments present a bright face: 80-foot-tall murals of the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe. But a darker past lies inside the 177-unit building. R. Daniel Foster |
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6/19/11 Rick Santorum is against abortion for any reason, with one exception Karen [Santorum] was going to die if her pregnancy was not ended, if the fetus was not removed from her body. So, at 20 weeks, one month before what doctors consider ‘viability’, labor was artificially induced and the infected fetus was delivered. It died shortly thereafter. DarkSyde Thanks to Roger Kolaks |
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6/18/11 Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost. Jamie Holmes |
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6/17/11 Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost. Jamie Holmes |
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6/16/11 The Problem of Republican Idiots One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives. Eric Alterman |
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6/15/11 Boeing gets corporate welfare in S.C. According to an analysis by The (Charleston) Post & Courier, Boeing is being given a package of incentives worth more than $900 million - at least $150 million more than Boeing has said it would spend to build the plant - this while education and other important programs are being cut, undermining the state's ability to compete over the long haul. Isaac Bailey |
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6/14/11 From the time it was put in place in 1949 until its demise in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine required holders of broadcast licenses to provide the public with news and public affairs programming, and present opposing viewpoints on controversial issues. Back then, the airwaves were dominated by the "big three" networks ABC, CBS and NBC -- which broadcast over publicly-owned airwaves under licenses issued by the government. The idea behind the Fairness Doctrine was to keep broadcasters from monopolizing the airwaves with a biased viewpoint, and assure that those entrusted with the public airwaves broadcast a diversity of viewpoints on important issues. Anne Landman |
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6/13/11 Oprah’s Celebrity Pyramid Scheme The Age of Oprah came to an end not with a bang, but with a long series of celebrity purrs. Heartfelt testimonials poured in from Michael Jordan and Madonna. These were punctuated from the great Midwestern citadel of personal empowerment by awkward, Oscar-style invocations of the little people. Tom Hanks, the celebrity emcee, addressed her eminence thusly: “As you’ve said over and over again, ‘It’s all about them.’” Chris Lehmann |
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6/12/11 Reflections on Israel: From Idealism to Ethnic Cleansing In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting. Larry Gross |
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6/11/11 The 10 Easiest Ways to Waste Time on the Internet There was a time when the only way to pass a rainy afternoon was talking to the people in your house and playing a few hands of Canasta. Then came TV and board games and calling your friends on the phone. Now we all just head to the nearest computer and get sucked into the swirling abyss of the Internet. Everyone wastes their time in a different way, but these are all very common, easy to come by, and deadly to personal productivity. Brian Moylan |
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6/10/11 Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore. NPR Staff |
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6/9/11 The Fascinating Story of How Shameless Right-Wing Lies Came to Rule Our Politics It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. The former has always been with us: Kings, corporate executives, politicians, and ideologues from both sides of the aisle have been entirely willing to bend the truth when they felt it necessary or convenient. So why does it seem as if we're living in a time of overwhelmingly brazen deception? What's changed? Rick Perlstein |
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6/8/11 Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad In la-la land they may have been, but even the embassy planners couldn’t help but leave some room for the creeping realities of an Iraq in chaos. The compound would purify its own water, generate its own power, and process its own sewage, ensuring that it could outlast any siege and, at the same time, getting the U.S. off the hook for repairing such basic services in Baghdad proper. Peter Van Buren |
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6/7/11 Turning a Nuclear White Elephant into a Funfair In the early 1970s, construction began in Germany on what was supposed to be the world's most technologically advanced nuclear power plant. But public protests and nuclear disasters elsewhere kept the plant from ever going online -- and then a Dutch developer with a dream arrived on the scene. Jörg Diehl |
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6/6/11 Geithner and Goldman, Thick as Thieves What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent. Robert Scheer |
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6/5/11 German Catholic Doctors Offer Homeopathic 'Gay Treatment' A Catholic doctors' association in Germany believes it can cure the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians with sugar pills -- though only at their request, the group says. But the homo-homeopathy has been harshly criticized by members of its target community. Christoph Seidler |
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6/5/11 17-Year-Old Challenges Michele Bachmann on Law Most high school students are concerned about their grades or getting into a good college, but 17-year-old Zack Kopplin is focusing on conducting a national campaign to challenge a congresswoman on her basic understanding of the separation of church and state. Allison Kilkenny |
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6/4/11 The Next Bubble Is About to Burst It's the beginning of summer: warmer weather, longer days, the end of the school year. And that means graduation for thousands of young people across the U.S.; graduation with more student debt than ever before, and into a job market that is anything but promising. Sarah Jaffe |
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6/3/11 GOP will keep democracy from running amok The GOP’s dream scenario is a low turnout dominated by a grumpy, aging core of conservative white people who can’t stand Obama. With their party outnumbered on Florida’s voter rolls, top Republicans hope that rigging the voting rules will improve their chances to recapture the White House. Carl Hiaasin |
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6/2/11 iHate Tax Dodgers Like Apple Computer In 2004, Congress passed a similar tax holiday — with Apple dodging $255 million at the time. These tax dodgers argue they will create jobs if they’re allowed to bring their profits home lightly taxed. But independent studies show that the 2004 tax holiday did little to create jobs. In fact, profits mostly went to boost stock prices and CEO pay, and enable companies to buy back stock. Chuck Collins |
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6/1/11 Writer urges Internet junkies to ‘switch off’ and think Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist -- until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.
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5/31/11 It’s impossible for me to allow Memorial Day to pass without thinking of the sacrifices my father and his generation made to build better lives for future generations like mine. And so it is today, Memorial Day 2011, when my thoughts turn to what he dreamed for me and his grandchildren and how glad I am that he isn’t here today to see how woefully I failed to protect what he fought for. Donna Smith |
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5/30/11 Butterflies close wings to avoid sex In the fleeting existence of a female small copper butterfly, sex is a one-time affair. Victoria Gill |
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5/29/11 Murfreesboro shows our country has lost its mind So, it turns out Islam is a religion. Imagine that. Granted, this would be considered self-evident by most of us, but it has been a matter of great controversy in the Tennessee town of Murfreesboro, where 17 people went to court last year to prevent a group of Muslims from building a mosque. On their own land. Leonard Pitts Jr. |
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2/28/11 Skin cells 'turned into neurons' by US scientists A Californian team say they have managed to convert human skin cells directly into functioning brain cells.
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5/27/11 Reasons All Workers Should Support Unions Unions did not cause our economic mess: Greedy bankers drove the financial system to the brink of collapse. Moreover, public workers’ desire for decent wages and benefits is not busting state budgets: The same recession is starving states of essential revenue. David Zonderman |
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5/26/11 Netanyahu is not ready for any deal with the Palestinians So many questions and interpretations over nothing. Because the truth is simple and down-to-earth: Netanyahu is not ready for any agreement, any concession, any withdrawal. As far as he's concerned, it's all the Land of Israel - for both historical and security reasons. All the rest is just words. Just speeches designed to relieve some of the pressure being applied by U.S. President Barack Obama. Just bluff and deception. Nehemia Shtrasler |
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5/25/11 Why the Rich Love High Unemployment In the boardrooms of corporate America, profits aren't everything - they are the only thing. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers' living standards, but their decisions are neither coordinated nor intentionally harmful. Call it the "paradox of profitability." Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders' best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company's income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities. Mark Provost |
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5/24/11 Rapture Ready: The Science of Self Delusion “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology. Chris Mooney |
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5/23/11 Rival Cities Battle for Leaning Tower Title Officially the title of world's "farthest leaning tower" belongs to a church in the German village of Suurhusen. But the distinction turns out to be the envy of a number of other cities with crooked towers of their own. Italy's world famous tower isn't even close. Matthias Schulz |
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5/22/11 Rabbi Lerner's Response to President Obama's Middle East Address President Obama was foolish to describe Palestinian attempts to gain recognition at the United Nations this coming September as an attempt to "delegitimate" Israel. That Palestinian strategy is completely non-violent and helps clarify to Israel without any anti-Semitic elements the strong desire of the world community that Israel should return to the pre-67-boundaries with some minor border changes that will allow Israel to incorporate some of the West Bank settlements closest to Jerusalem. Rabbi Michael Lerner |
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5/21/11 Taxpayers Subsidize Big Oil, World's Most Profitable Industry The US Senate couldn't muster the votes to end $2 billion a year in taxpayer subsidies for the five biggest US oil companies. The House had already voted to block efforts to repeal tax breaks for Big Oil, in sharp contrast to its vote to strip tax credits for small business health insurance. Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin |
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5/20/11 Santana is Booed for Using Baseball's Civil Rights Game to Speak Out for Civil Rights The reason Atlanta was such a brutally awkward setting for a Sunday Civil Rights setting, was because Friday saw the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, sign HR 87, a law that shreds the Civil Rights of the state’s Latino population. Modeled after Arizona’s horrific and unconstitutional SB 1070, HR 87 authorizes state and local police the federal powers to demand immigration papers from people they suspect to be undocumented. Those without papers on request will find themselves behind bars. Dave Zirin |
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5/19/11 Guarding Health is Not Their Business, But It is Ours I wondered how we have allowed this country to amble onward to the point where 1,275 Americans who carry health insurance go bankrupt every single day (if the courts stayed open seven days a week) while an insurance company CEO like Angela Braly pockets $140,000 for her day’s salary. Every day. Donna Smith |
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5/18/11 For-Profit College and the Real Debt Crisis These companies make their profits by aggressively recruiting students and pushing them to take out large federal loans to cover the cost of tuition. Seventy-seven percent of the revenue at the five largest for-profits comes from federal student loans and grants. Katrina vanden Heuvel |
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5/17/11 Rocky and Bullwinkle and the statue that spun Many L.A. landmarks have fallen, but the 15-foot fiberglass likeness of the moose and squirrel stands sentinel to cartoon mischief and edgy animated humor. Steve Harvey |
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5/16/11 While some colleges are starved for resources, for many others it’s not for lack of money. Even at those colleges where for the past several decades tuition has far outpaced the rate of inflation, students are taught by fewer full-time tenured faculty members while being looked after by a greatly expanded number of counselors who serve an array of social and personal needs. At the same time, many schools are investing in deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers and expensive gyms. Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa |
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5/15/11 The Right's 'Big Lie' Strategy: When Losing, Simply Rewrite History Collectively, conservatives want to create a class of consumer-citizens who are passive and ill-equipped to ask any hard questions about power, politics or society. The Right does not want critical thinkers or active citizens. Instead, they want to create drones who worship the market and live out a dystopian reality that is torn straight from the pages of one of Ayn Rand's unreadable novels. Chauncey DeVega |
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5/14/11 Thanks to Decades of Conservative Spin A good number of Americans are hopelessly confused about taxes, deficits and the debt. And it's no mystery why – conservatives have spent 30 years divorcing the taxes we pay from the services they finance. They've bent themselves into intellectual pretzels arguing that cutting taxes – on the wealthy – leads to more revenues in the coffers. They've invented narratives about taxes driving “producers” to sunnier climes, killing jobs by the bushel, and relentlessly spun the wholly false notion that we're facing “runaway spending” and are “taxed to death.” Joshua Holland |
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5/13/11 Battle Pits Cocoa Speculators against Chocolate Makers Food commodities -- from wheat to rice to soybeans -- have become objects of speculation. While cocoa speculators are threatening the survival of some of Germany's oldest chocolate makers, entrepreneurs in Ghana are trying to give farmers a larger share of the profits. Hauke Goos and Ralf Hoppe |
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5/12/11 The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes. Paul Krugman |
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5/11/11 The Targeted Assassination of Osama Bin Laden When he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a Navy Seal team in Pakistan, President Barack Obama said, “Justice has been done.” Mr. Obama misused the word, "justice" when he made that statement. He should have said, "Retaliation has been accomplished." A former professor of constitutional law should know the difference between those two concepts. The word "justice" implies an act of applying or upholding the law. Marjorie Cohn |
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5/10/11 Torture: Immoral, Illegal, Counterproductive, and Un-American People who believe in morality — and not everyone does — will oppose torture because they consider it deeply immoral. People who believe in the rule of law will refuse to employ it because it is illegal. And people who are proud to be Americans should reject it because it is profoundly un-American. The U.S. Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Peter Weiss |
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5/9/11 Supply-Side Economics in Fact and Fancy Supply-side economics is a hearty perennial, one that closely follows the election cycle. Every four years ambitious Republican politicians (and not a few ‘centrist’ Democrats) rediscover that the wealthy would like to pay less in taxes. But the rhetoric of politics does inhibit the wealthy, their kept intellectuals, and paid spokesmen from arguing their case directly. In democracies, even those resembling plutocracies, the rich must present their own interests as coinciding with the general good. Robert E. Prasch |
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5/8/11 The World's Best and Worst Places to Be a Mother In many parts of the developing world, the day a woman becomes a mother is a day too often obscured by terrible tragedy and danger. Caty Borum Chattoo |
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5/7/11 By letting kids in Las Vegas drop remote-controlled bombs on kids in Pakistan, Yemen and now Libya, drones are one of those instruments. But they are only one of many. Indeed, while President Obama preposterously claimed this week that most Americans "know well the costs of war," it's quite the opposite: most Americans have been insulated from those costs -- and it's no coincidence that as we've become more insulated, we've happily waged more frequent wars. David Sirota |
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5/6/11 The New York Times's tortured line on torture The Times frankly referred to waterboarding as torture in 1945 in reporting on its use against American prisoners of war who were held by the Japanese. No less an authority than US Senator John McCain has noted that some Japanese officers were executed for waterboarding prisoners. And Harvard's Shorenstein Centre last year produced a study showing that waterboarding was routinely described as torture – until the Bush White House started using it against terrorism suspects. Dan Kennedy |
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5/5/11 It is hard to escape the fact that, in far too many ways, bin Laden won even in death. He hoped to provoke a drastic over-reach from that resident idiot in the White House, and he got what he was after. The damage done to us by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and the rest of that crowd of cretins will echo painfully down the corridor of our history for a long time to come. Osama bin Laden hurt us, and in response, we hurt ourselves ten times worse. We are still hurting ourselves; 24 hours before the news of his death hit the wires, all the "mainstream" media could talk about was birth certificates. This is not the characteristic of a flourishing society. This is the characteristic of a failing state that lacks the courage or the will to address what truly ails it. William Rivers Pitt |
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5/4/11 Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale. Johann Hari |
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5/3/11 Wal-Mart -- It's Alive! How the Company Is Terrorizing the Country with its Corporate 'Personhood' If Wal-Mart is a person, as per the Supreme Court, it's a behemoth terrorizing the countryside. But when it comes to workers' rights, it remains curiously immune from lawsuits. Barbara Ehrenreich |
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5/2/11 The Donald makes (almost) humble speech Ever since I braced President Obama about his birth certificate, I’ve been hounded by the media to produce my own birth records (which is fine), my tax returns going back five years (which I’m looking for), my contract with NBC (which I’ve misplaced, though I’m pretty sure it’s in my golf locker down at Mar-a-Lago), a list of all current corporate holdings and mortgage positions (like I keep track), and a sworn affidavit from my hair stylist stating that no orangutans were harmed during the weaving of my toupee. Carl Hiassen |
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5/1/11 At 8th Anniversary of Bush's Landing on the Deck: 'Mission' Still Not 'Accomplished' Sunday marks the 8th anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day, or as it might better be known, Mission Accomplished (NOT) Day. Coming on a weekend, there will be even fewer mentions of this in the national media than last year, and Keith Olbermann will not be on the air to update the usual close to his telecast when he marks exactly how many days since Bush declared victory (you do the math). Greg Mitchell |
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4/30/11 As a Holocaust Survivor, AIPAC Doesn't Speak for Me The vicious discrimination brought to bear against Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves no applause from members of Congress attending the AIPAC conference. Hedy Epstein |
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4/29/11 The Tea Party Dialectic of Alan Ladd and Jack Palance There is a vision, I think, in the current political turmoil. I’m beginning to see it, like the great hazy vista that comes onto the movie screen right after the Paramount peak fades out. This vision of America, conjured by the Tea Party and foreshadowed — currently — by the debt-ceiling crisis, grips a nation that wants, needs, aches to return, in some ill-defined way, to a past utopia of frontier individualism. David Benjamin |
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4/28/11 It’s Time to Revive an Old Rallying Cry: Labor Is Not a Commodity! For the last several decades, formerly mainstream trade union principles—such as the ideas that labor is not a commodity, and that labor creates all wealth—have been marginalized within the labor movement. With rare exceptions, such as the United Electrical workers union's takeover of the Republic Windows plant in Chicago, the labor movement has failed to challenge the illegitimate, management-inspired viewpoint embedded in the legal system. Joe Burns |
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4/27/11 There is no place in the United States that more cruelly illustrates the intensifying conflict between corporate power and democracy than Benton Harbor, Mich., the first city to be placed under what some Michiganders call “financial martial law.” Roger Bybee |
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4/26/11 Beware of Vampire Squids and Their Stadium Schemes This is the kind of story the Vanity Fair ad is supposed to obscure—the kind of story that got Goldman its Rolling Stone magazine billing as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It’s a reputation the bank deserves—one that should make every local official in America hesitate the next time that squid slithers into their town. David Sirota |
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4/25/11 Canada’s Health Care: An Alternate Universe Although some Americans get very good health care, there are many who get little or none. Then there are others who get too much: tests, procedures and drugs that they don’t need. The whole system is fragmented, chaotic, inefficient and terribly expensive. We are not getting good value for our enormous expenditure on health care. Elizabeth Rosenthal, MD |
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4/24/11 Greg Mortenson's wild Pakistan tale exposes more than just a literary BS artist – it reveals Americans' delusion about their 'civilising' mission in Af-Pak. Madeleine Bunting |
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4/23/11 What conceivable rational purpose does this endless slaughter serve? Isn't it obvious that the stated goal of all of this – to reduce the threat of Terrorism – is subverted rather than promoted by these actions? Glenn Greenwald |
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4/22/11 Corporate Coup d’état Coming Soon to a City Near You Disaster capitalism is on display around the country, as legislators use the debt crisis afflicting their states as an opportunity to hollow out the public sector. In Michigan it’s being packaged as “emergency financial management” by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who is looking to exploit an economic crisis that has left his state with a severe budget deficit. In March, Snyder signed a law granting state-appointed emergency financial managers (EFM) the ability to fire local elected officials, break teachers’ and public workers’ contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services, entire cities or school districts, all without any public input. He claims these dictatorial restructuring powers will keep Michigan communities out of bankruptcy. Rania Khalek |
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4/21/11 The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.” Robert Scheer |
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4/20/11 Obama ran against Bush, but now governs like him He ran as the anti-Bush. Silver-tongued, not tongue-tied. A team player on the world stage, not a lone cowboy. A man who'd put a stop to reckless Bush policies at home and abroad. In short, Barack Obama represented Change. Steven Thomma |
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4/19/11 Another Equal Pay Day? Really? If one more person points to Meg Whitman or Arianna Huffington as proof of women's earning power, I'm going to scream. That's like saying Tiger Woods and Will Smith are slam-dunk proof that black Americans have broken into the ranks of the über-rich. Marlo Thomas |
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4/18/11 Why Sarah Palin doesn't get what she deserves OK, so Sarah Palin probably isn't running for president. She may have told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that she was "tempted" because she was "wondering who the heck is going to be out there with a servant's heart willing to serve the American people." But evidence suggests there's not a lot to wonder about when it comes to her candidacy. Meghan Daum |
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4/17/11 The way to change public opinion is not to pile up more and more facts, but to change the narrative through which those facts are interpreted. That means a full-scale campaign to discredit and debunk the story of Israel as an innocent, endangered victim, while promoting a more accurate story of Israel as the regional superpower, already fully secure against attack. Ira Chernus |
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4/16/11 Saving the World...One Mouthful at a Time Westerners might get a bit queasy when they think about eating locusts, spiders or ants, but they make up delicacies and key sources of protein in much of the world. A new movement is trying to bring them onto Western plates in an effort to save the environment. Hilmar Schmundt |
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4/15/11 The Real Housewives of Wall Street Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? Matt Taibbi |
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4/14/11 Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System “…There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.” Chris Hedges |
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4/13/11 Civil War's 'conspiracy of amnesia' The South ... would begin to spin grand, romantic fables of a “Lost Cause’’ that had been fought for “state’s rights’’ or constitutional principle, or any other reason it could invent, so long as it was not slavery. Jefferson Davis, who before the war had flatly declared “the labor of African slaves’’ the cause of the rebellion, would write after the war that slavery had nothing to do with it. Leonard Pitts Jr. |
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4/12/11 Charter Schools Outsource Education to Management Firms, With Mixed Results Since 2008, an Ohio-based company, White Hat Management, has collected around $230 million to run charter schools in that state. The company has grown into a national chain and reports that it has about 20,000 students across the country. But now 10 of its own schools and the state of Ohio are suing, complaining that many White Hat students are failing, and that the company has refused to account for how it has spent the money. Sharona Coutts |
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4/11/11 Fool Us Twice? Can Obama Get Reelected? The president only has one major accomplishment to his credit: healthcare reform. However--assuming Republicans don't repeal it--it doesn't go into effect until 2014. Which, from Obama's standpoint, actually helps him. After people find out how it transforms the First World's worst healthcare system into something even crappier and more expensive, they'll be burning him in effigy. Ted Rall |
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4/10/11 Pie-ing a Belgian Archbishop with Carefree Abandon The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium has been repeatedly targeted by pie-throwing activists angry over comments he made about gay people. Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard reportedly claimed AIDS was an "intrinsic justice" for homosexuals. |
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4/9/11 The Strange Love Affairs of a Penguin and a Swan Talk about unrequited love. A swan in western Germany has decided he is in love with a blue tractor. Not to be outdone, a Sea Life penguin in Constance has fallen for a rubber boot. Spring, it would seem, has sprung. |
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4/8/11 Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret. Joseph Stiglitz |
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4/7/11 The Slippery Slope of "Humane Intervention": Why Do Liberals Keep Talking Themselves into War? Obama has shown exemplary courage in facing down a fourth-rate tyrant with a fourth-world army with a toughness he has never shown against out-of-control Republicans at home. If you're afraid of the big bully in your own block, it's smarter to find a smaller one to fight over yonder. Clancy Sigal |
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4/6/11 States broke? Maybe they cut taxes too much "At least half of our current budget problem is a direct result of the tax changes we made in 2005. A lot of people don't want to hear that, but that's the reality. Much of our pain is self-inflicted," said Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal government-research group in Cleveland. Tony Pugh |
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4/5/11 Selling off utilities, forests, and roads is not about saving taxpayers money. It’s about giving capitalists control of these assets so they can be used to generate profits. Cutting social services is about ensuring that workers depend on low-wage jobs for survival. Capitalists’ goal, as always, is a greater share of wealth for them and a smaller share for the rest of us. Clear away the befogging rhetoric, the rhetoric that masks class struggle, and it becomes clear that the bottom line is the bottom line. Michael Schwalbe |
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4/4/11 Dr. Oz, Andrew Wakefield and others, um, 'honored' by James Randi We doubt that either Dr. Oz or Andrew Wakefield will be proudly displaying these honors on their mantelpieces: Both received "Pigasus Awards" this April 1 from the James Randi Educational Foundation for the dubious honor of being among the "5 worst promoters of nonsense."
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4/3/11 Westboro Baptist Church revisited Under the guidance of their angry pastor, the Phelpses have arrived at the idea that the only Biblical practice for Christians in our age is to carry placards with unbelievably offensive anti-gay slogans (Fags in Hell, Fags Eat Poop, and so on) and turn up at high-profile funerals, especially those of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Louis Theroux |
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4/2/11 Not only has the so-called trickle-down theory of economics been revealed to be a cruel hoax, but most of the good industrial jobs have left the country, the middle class has been eviscerated, the wealthiest Americans (even in the wake of the recession) have quintupled their net worth, and polls show that upwards of 70 percent of the American public feel the country is “going down the wrong track.” David Macaray |
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4/1/11 Dreamliner Becomes a Nightmare for Boeing Boeing wanted to revolutionize the airplane business with its Dreamliner, which was to be built using a modular approach. But the US company went too far in its outsourcing, and the aircraft has been plagued by production problems. Delivery is now way behind schedule and the delays could cost the firm billions. Dinah Deckstein |
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3/31/11 Obama's Fatal Corporate Addiction If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama’s “Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.” But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn’t pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year—and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate—has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.” Robert Scheer |
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3/30/11 All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking middle class Americans to pay for budget deficits caused mainly by a recession caused by Wall Street; they are attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, which has provoked a huge Main Street Movement to fight back. Zaid Jilani |
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3/29/11 How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon. Mark Boal |
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3/28/11 Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now In 1975, a Democratic Party emboldened by civil rights, environmental, antiwar, and post-Watergate electoral successes was on the verge of seizing the presidency and a filibuster-proof congressional majority. That year, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were two of the three top-grossing films -- the former a parody using the late-sixties sexual revolution to laugh at the puritanical fifties, the latter based on the novel by beat writer Ken Kesey. Meanwhile, three of the top-rated seven television shows were liberal-themed programs produced by progressive icon Norman Lear, including "All in the Family" --a show built around a hippie, Mike Stivic, poking fun at the ignorance of his traditionalist father-in-law, Archie Bunker. David Sirota |
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3/27/11 A Sufi Islamic center and farm in the town contains a small cemetery on its grounds. When a member of the Sufi community was killed in a car accident and buried there, Sidney’s town supervisor Robert McCarthy called the cemetery illegal and said its two graves might have to be moved. In August 2010 the town’s board of supervisors tasked its attorney with researching how to close down the cemetery. Sven Eberlein |
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3/26/11 The world of celebrity 'tough-guy' law enforcement took a bizarre turn this week when chubby middle-aged action hero Steven Seagal, a SWAT team and two tanks accompanied controversial Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio on a daring raid that resulted in the arrest of a single unarmed man charged with raising chickens for cockfights. Joshua Holland |
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3/25/11 How You End Up Bankrolling Fox News When giant, prosperous, multinational corporations weasel out of their tax obligations, ordinary citizens are the ones who are forced to make up the shortfall. That is effectively a tax subsidy for the corporations funded by you and me and all of the indignant Tea Partiers who claim to oppose special interest favors for the elite. Mark Howard |
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3/24/11 The Human Cost of Slashonomics What is most maddening about the budget debate is that few legislators are talking about alternatives like increasing revenues by closing obscene tax loopholes and corporate giveaways and making the wealthy pay their fair share. Instead, the proposals hit the most vulnerable people the hardest—lower-income people, children, seniors, people with disabilities, unemployed workers, and others. Katrina vanden Heuvel |
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3/23/11 Republicans were clearly also hoping that if they threw enough mud, some of it would stick. For people like Ms. Warren — people who warned that we were heading for a debt crisis before it happened — threaten, by their very existence, attempts by conservatives to sustain their antiregulation dogma. Such people must therefore be demonized, using whatever tools are at hand. Paul Krugman |
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3/22/11 US Army Apologizes for Horrific Photos from Afghanistan The images are repulsive. A group of rogue US Army soldiers in Afghanistan killed innocent civilians and then posed with their bodies. On Monday, SPIEGEL |