Before Congress goes after bank misdeeds on Wall Street, let's stop the petty theft on Main Street. I mean the predatory mortgages and usurious loans. Had we protected the poor and the weak, the problems of our mighty banks might not be so great. Why don't we have a "National Usury Act"? Why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards?

Thomas Geoghegan

Helen Thomas

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, now represents the 2,000-some women patients in their efforts to halt the grand jury's access to their medical records. "This is nothing more than a fishing expedition spurred on by anti-choice zealots," says Bonnie Scott Jones, the Center's lead attorney on the case. "It has nothing to do with any legitimate investigation of possible crimes -- it is simply a gross and cruel intrusion on extremely private moments in the lives of these women and their families."

Katherine Spillar

Billionaire California bond manager Bill Gross calls it "a haute con job." Bloomberg News columnist John Wasik describes it as "a testament to the art of economic spin." More and more shoppers and consumer simply disbelieve it. Americans are now beginning to understand that the Consumer Price Index has its own share of gimmicks not unlike a sub-prime mortgage or the six pages of fine print that accompanies your credit card agreement.

Kevin Phillips

Even the embedded media, so valiant in their attempts to cast the American presence as well-intentioned and, you know, doing the best it can (under the circumstances), couldn’t help but convey, as they reported on the investigation of the Blackwater killings, the humanity of the grieving Iraqis. In so doing, the coverage hinted, unavoidably, at the truth about the occupation: that we are, to put it mildly, the bad guys, that what we’re doing there is barbaric, racist, insane.

Robert Koehler

Our capability to deliver damage and death across the globe — at virtually no immediate risk to ourselves — gives extra meaning to the words “above all.” But with great power comes great responsibility, a tagline I learned as a teen from Spider-Man comic strips, but which is no less true for that. The problem is that our “global reach” often exceeds the grasp of our collective wisdom to employ “global power” responsibly.

William J. Astore

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay. What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon caricature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

Dave Lindorff

Since the 1970s, the United States has redefined itself from a manufacturing nation to a financial economy built on debt, leverage, and a considerable ratio of speculation. Both political parties have been complicit in this, and the downturn now beginning will be unusual and potentially tragic.

Kevin Phillips

In March, House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that he was investigating the accidental electrocution of troops in Iraq and pressed Defense Secretary Robert Gates for uncensored details on at least a dozen deaths since 2003. Contractor KBR is at the center of the probe, with questions about whether it irresponsibly ignored wiring problems.

Think Progress

A backlash against abstinence-only programs may be brewing among young people themselves. Last October, 25 young people from the Washington, D.C.-based group Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom visited Capitol Hill to lobby for equal funding for comprehensive sex education.

Steve Yoder

This novel’s world flourishes with characters moving about as an army of ants, running in circular logic from which they cannot step free, nor do many of them seem to care even if they were aware. Yossarian and Dunbar stand out almost as villains. Youssarian flows against the social current as the anti-hero; he recognizes the absurd logical loops by which others around him consider their lives perfectly normal.

Mark Biskeborn

It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior. This steadfast blackout occurs despite the fact that the Pentagon propaganda program almost certainly violates numerous federal laws; both Democratic presidential candidates sternly denounced the Pentagon’s conduct; and Congressional inquiries are already underway, all of which forced the Pentagon to announce that it suspended its program.

Glenn Greenwald

The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country's inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments. But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

Elizabeth Edwards

Every “expansion of government in business,” Herbert Hoover had said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism — that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.” That was before the orgies Reagan, that value-added conservative, unleashed in the 1980s, and that his dry-drunk ideological godson George W. Bush managed to squeeze in between two recessions. That they used government to underwrite their upper-class orgies while calling government names is among those elitist ironies men-of-the-people like Reagan and Bush chose not to consort with. It helps to live in the world of slogans.

Pierre Tristam

The problem is that the government, the nation, and the individuals in our country have all taken on massive amounts of new debt. Without investing it anything productive. Even our conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq are not profitable (except for specific war profiteers), they are drains, endlessly creating more debts. Debts which are, bizarrely, kept off the books the way Enron used to do it, or more pertinently, the way George Bush used to do it when he was at Harken Energy.

Larry Beinhart

“In the councils of government,” he warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Nancy Grape

Child abuse. Sexual abuse. Women raised to be baby machines controlled by powerful older men in the name of God. These shockers--and many more--are flagrantly on offer in the spectacle unfolding around the 139 women and 437 children removed by Texas authorities from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. The visuals are riveting: women in pastel prairie dresses and identical pompadour-cum-french-braid hairstyles weeping for their children in state custody; skinny-necked middle-aged men insisting they had no idea it was illegal to marry and impregnate multiple 15-year-olds.

Katha Pollitt

George W. Bush is poised to order a massive aerial bombardment — possibly including tactical nuclear weapons - of up to 10,000 targets in Iran. The attack would be justified on grounds that Iran is interfering with U.S. efforts in Iraq and that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, a charge that was debunked last fall in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

Dan Hamburg

The political noose seems to be tightening on the key members of the remaining miscreants down in the White House bunker -- mainly Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington and Mukasey. (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Powell and Tenet were pushed out the door earlier.) But will the Democrats, having been provided with smoking gun-type evidence of these officials' high crimes and misdemeanors, take the next logical step to end this continuing nightmare of law-breaking at the highest levels?

Bernard Weiner

In Congress last week, Representative John Tierney, Chair of the House National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, convened the latter in a series of hearings to examine the US missile defense program: "What are the Prospects, what are the Costs? Oversight of Missile Defense (Part II)." Here's the short answer – the costs are open-ended, the prospects suck, but the Bush Administration is still hell-bent on spending over $10 billion per year and compromising our national security in the process.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel

One Israeli anti-settlements activist puts it like this: "A settlement is never just a fortified group of red-roofed villas on the top of an occupied hill.... A settlement also means Israeli soldiers.... It means checkpoints, and roads connecting it with other settlements and with Israel itself. A road is not just land: it is an ever growing ‘security belt’ on both sides of it, belts of Palestinian fields and buildings swept by Israeli bulldozers.... The function of those ever-expanding by-pass roads is not only to serve the settlers but to cut off Palestinian towns and villages from one another, to cantonize the territories and split the Palestinians into minimal separate units..."

MJ Rosenberg

If popes and priests and rabbis and imams had ever been seriously interested in ending global misery of the masses, ending war and violence, they would have done so long ago. Lord knows they are big enough and powerful enough and peopled enough, and they have siphoned off enough money from people of all economic strata and circumstances to have created world prosperity. But instead they have existed on creating misery. They are the leeches on world societies. They write the books, religious texts etched in stone, blessing the poor while fleecing them into wandering destabilized upheavaled desperate homelessness.

Carolyn Bennett

The Ludlow Massacre’s tiny monument off I-25 in Southern Colorado is easily missed if you don’t know where to find it. Though the nearby coal mine garnered international attention in 1914 after a government militia slaughtered union organizers there, the minimalism of the memorial is predictable. History books venerate Rockefellers — the union-busting mine owners — and disregard agents of progress like the labor movement.

David Sirota

John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers, including David Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzales, are also liable for war crimes under the US War Crimes Act. They were an integral part of a criminal conspiracy to violate U.S. laws. In US v. Altstoetter, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for advising Hitler on how to “legally” disappear political suspects to special detention camps. The United States charged that since they were lawyers, “not farmers or factory workers,” they should have known their technical justifications for circumventing the Hague and Geneva Conventions were illegal.

Marjorie Cohn

On the same day the Pentagon's commander in Iraq told the Senate that new troop withdrawals could not considered for months, Secretary of Veterans Affairs James B. Peake told two Democratic senators that his department will not help injured veterans at VA facilities to register to vote before the 2008 election.

Steven Rosenfeld

Why are AIPAC and rightist attack groups like CAMERA (the Orwellian-named Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) alone in the U.S. political arena as "advocates" of Israel's interests? Why isn't there a liberal pro-Israel lobby, one that promotes United States involvement in achieving a two-state solution? As of today the answer to that question is: There is such a lobby.

Gershom Gorenberg

When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation. Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation.

Gideon Levy

One way to end needless American wars is to give those who make such policies a very personal reason for some serious and sober second thought. The next president should re-sign us up to the International Criminal Court, push for Senate ratification, and rip up all the bilateral exemption agreements. Then it might be time for an arrest or six to be made. What did you say is George Bush's address in Crawford?

David Michael Green

Scientific controversy exists only when the jury of relevant experts is out on whether a new finding meets the standard of evidence. The debate and evidence gathering still are in process. A manufactroversy is when someone motivated by profit or ideology fosters confusion in the public mind long after scientists have moved on to the next set of questions. Think tobacco and lung cancer. Think Exxon and global warming. Now think Ben Stein and evolution.

Valerie Tarico

Remember the old story about Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787? A woman asks him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a republic or a monarchy?" Recall Franklin's answer: "A republic, if you can keep it." John Yoo is the fellow who, at the first sign of trouble, gave it away.

Brian Morton

Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans - but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

Paul Krugman

Five years ago, when American forces quickly dismantled Iraqi society, liberal as well as conservative pundits announced that it was up to our forces to restore "stability" - as if the Iraqis themselves had wrought the chaos from which we were to rescue them. Though the American military did most of the destabilizing in Iraq, this historical fact was set aside in favor of the hoary myth that America is invariably a force for good, uniquely dedicated and qualified to bring order out of chaos around the world.

Ira Chernus

President Bush has tried to give the impression that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost of the war that we provide in our new book may be exaggerated. We believe that it is in fact conservative. Even the president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a cost so far of $600 billion.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes

This week kicks off the Trinity Broadcasting Network's thrice-annual festival of greed, the "Praise-A-Thon," which features some of the biggest names in televangelism taking to the airwaves to beg viewers round-the-clock to give money to TBN -- a non-profit organization that lavishes its executives with enormous salaries and perks, and sits atop over $300 million in assets. In TBN's world, your gift to the network represents your obedience to God because it's really God's money, and if you keep it for yourself you're disobeying God.

Sarah Posner

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you're talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the GAO documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved.

Robert Scheer

Had Peace Now not published reports from time to time, it is doubtful anyone would have been aware of the continuing construction in the settlements. One might have assumed from the declarations by Ehud Olmert's government that construction had been suspended and that efforts were being made to reach a peace agreement to include withdrawal from most of the West Bank. From the complaints by the settlers' leadership as well, one might have concluded that there was a freeze on building and that the settler youth were really and truly homeless.

Haaretz Editorial

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

Paul Krugman

For 30 years, so-called centrist Democrats, anxious to shed any scarlet mark of liberalism, have eagerly sought consensus and accommodation with conservatives, largely by adopting their creed of small, cheap government—government that would fuel the private sector. Thus the seduction of “deregulation” and the accompanying creed of “privatization.” How and why they abandoned a faith that had served them and the nation so well and for so long is a mystery.

Stanley Kutler

99.9 percent of the people are being manipulated and cannibalized by a tiny but powerful minority. It is the interests of this powerful minority that are served by government and it is their interests that are defined as the national interest or as national security; and it is hardly benign. Robbing the poor to pay the rich causes irreparable harm to the victim.

Charles Sullivan

A historic document from the 124,000-member American College of Physicians certifies the medical value of marijuana. In a landmark position paper released in February, these distinguished physicians are saying what many of us have been arguing for years: Most of our laws have gotten it wrong when it comes to medical marijuana, and it's time for public policy to get in step with science.

Dr. Jocelyn Elders

Of the nearly 40 million who fear going hungry, an estimated 11 million-plus Americans occasionally miss meals, according to the USDA. They include many adults in a family who sacrifice their own portions to ensure their children are fed. Throughout the United States, a startlingly raw form of poverty has entrenched itself within the bottom tier of the economy.

Sasha Abramsky

In today's climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward. Perhaps the momentum of such a project could carry the nation past the limits of FDR's reforms, especially if there were a popular upsurge that demanded it. A candidate who points to the New Deal as a model for innovative legislation would be drawing on the huge reputation Franklin Roosevelt and his policies enjoy in this country, an admiration matched by no President since Lincoln.

Howard Zinn

This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.

Stanley Fish

The U.S., Great Britain and Israel are turning portions of the Middle East into a slice of radioactive hell. They are achieving this by firing what they call "depleted uranium" (DU) ammunition but which is, in fact, radioactive ammunition and it is perhaps the deadliest kind of tactical ammo ever devised in the warped mind of man.

Sherwood Ross

Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself.

Gore Vidal

Obama called on all Americans to recognize that even though the United States has experienced progress on the racial reconciliation front in recent decades (Exhibit A: Barack Obama), racial anger exists among both whites and blacks, and he said that this anger and its causes must be fully acknowledged before further progress can be achieved. Obama did this without displaying a trace of anger himself.

David Corn

With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What's more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach. And we could have provided basic home weatherization for about 1.6 million existing homes, reducing energy consumption in these homes by 30 percent.

Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier

3/18/08

Homeowners’ associations, which enforce bans on clotheslines at thousands of residential developments across the country, say the rules are needed to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values. But in an age of paper over plastic, as people try to take small steps to protect the environment, more residents are chafing at the restrictions.

Jenna Russell

3/17/08

These new Winter Soldiers look so young to me. They are my son's age. My daughter's age as well. The last time young soldiers like these tried to get Americans to listen they were ignored. And that can't be allowed to happen again. The message of Iraq Veterans Against the War came through clearly in every tortured testimony. This is an illegal war. It has cost us our peace of mind. The longer we are there, the more of us will be injured. Bring our troops home now.

Penny Coleman

There's an absurd contradiction at the root of the Church's new emphasis on social sins. Of its more damaging enduring doctrines, the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has left generations of women in desperate straits. Human rights organizations for years have implored the Church to sanction birth control. Instead, the Vatican has continued to systematically condemn it. Given the easy availability of birth control (and abortion) to wealthy women in rich countries -- and the lack of sexual education, family planning resources, or access to abortion in poor Catholic countries -- wouldn't that be considered contributing to the broadening divide between rich and poor? Wouldn't the Church be guilty of its own mortal sins?

Liliana Segura

We now know from yesterday's Wall Street Journal article that the spying Bush has been doing through the National Security Agency since early 2001 has included vast computer sweeps of not just internet and phone activity, but also bank and credit card transactions. These are sweeps of ordinary everyday people, with computers looking for odd transactions, or for codewords, or for transactions involving specific targeted organizations or addresses.

David Lindorff

Every horror movie has that “Oh Shit!” moment, when the hero or heroes are huddled in some creepy hideout, and suddenly something happens that tells you that the monster is just around the corner, or just about to attack. In “Jurassic Park” it was the pulsing ripples in a cup of water, heralding the arrival of a T-Rex. In “Jaws” it was the deep bass music, letting you know that a monstrous shark was about to attack.

David Lindorff

I was in Gaza in 1993 after the Oslo peace accord was signed. It was as if, after years of suffocation, Palestinians and Israelis could breathe. But Oslo, in the hands of former Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, was strangled and thwarted. Peace eludes us in Palestine, Israel and Iraq not because people do not want peace but because we are governed by moral and intellectual trolls.

Chris Hedges

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

Farah Stockman

Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a “journalist” on TV so candidly describe their real function.

Glenn Greenwald

They can't sell fiscal responsibility, they can't sell "values," they can't sell competence, they can't sell small government, they can't even sell the economy. All they have left to offer is this sad, dwindling, knee-jerk patriotism, a promise to keep selling world politics as a McHale's Navy rerun to a Middle America that wants nothing to do with realizing the world has changed since 1946.

Matt Taibbi

Despite lip service to "judicial restraint" Scalia has been waging a war against consumer product regulation as well as protections for workers, at both the state and federal level. As long ago as 1982, movement icon Antonin Scalia, then a University of Chicago law professor, warned members of the fledgling Federalist Society to shed such myopic nostalgia. Conservatives' underlying goal, he said, is "market freedom."

Simon Lazarus and Harper Jean Tobin

What are we to make of a lover of democracy who called whites in the American South "the advanced race," entitled to prevail politically even if they were numerically inferior, and who even left the door open to using violence toward that end? Heck, for that matter, what can be said of someone so culturally perceptive that he could write, "The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music."

David Michael Green