BY SUSAN ROSENTHAL July 07, 2007

Times of transition are very difficult.

In good times, people are more open to new ideas and more willing to organize. The fight for civil rights of the 1950s fed the anti-war movement of the 1960s. Both fueled movements for workers’ rights and for women’s, gay and Black liberation. As millions of people moved into struggle, there was widespread belief that we could change the world. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SUSAN ROSENTHAL Dateline: July 21, 2007

Alienation and dissociation reinforce each other to create a cycle of social powerlessness. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, a worker ponders this dilemma.

“The more a person is on the receiving end of orders, the more the person’s got to think he or she is really somewhere else in order to keep up self-respect. And yet it’s at work that you’re supposed to ‘make something’ of yourself, so if you’re not really there, how are you going to make something of yourself?” Read the rest of this entry »

Nader, a tireless crusader for an America that might one day live up to its promise.

Who Will Confront the Unprecedented and Unconstitutional Concentration of Executive Power?

BY RALPH NADER

The rogue regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — so widely condemned for its unconstitutional, criminal Iraq war, its spying on Americans illegally, its repeated illegal torture practices, its arrests and imprisonment of thousands in this country without charges and its
pathological secrecy and corporate corruption — still has not felt the heat of the 800,000 practicing lawyers and their many bar organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering what a repugnantly amoral opportunist Chris Matthews is, he got off easy with Jon Stewart, who remains a voice for serious morality camouflaged in comedy. Stewart is to be commended for not being afraid to tackle these systemic topics. But being, after all, a corporate media figure, his is indeed a highwire act and the men behind the curtain, the top corporadoes, could easily tire of his jabs at the system and suddenly pull the rug from under him.

BY GREG MITCHELL

If you have ever bemoaned the turn Matthews — a former newspaperman — has taken in recent years, you have to check out what happened on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night. Matthews called it “the worst interview ever.”

(October 03, 2007) — You may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when TV gasbag Chris Matthews was a respectable hard news reporter. He worked in Washington, D.C. for the San Francisco Examiner from 1987 to around 2000, and also wrote columns for the San Francisco Chronicle and others. But if you have ever bemoaned the turn his career took as an interviewer/talk show host – or if you just hate the inside-the-beltway mentality of many of our leading press and TV pundits – then you would have loved Jon Stewart’s dismantling of Matthews on “The Daily Show” last night (Oct. 2, 2007). Read the rest of this entry »

Milton Friedman, best known for his free-market fundamentalism, and accordingly eulogized when not downright canonized by establishment apologists, was a shameless enemy of the people. Blessed with the kind of obscenely long life that apparently befits all scoundrels (dead at 94; Reagan at 84; Ed Bernays, 104) this contemptible mystifier of social science and intellectual prostitute for the plutocracy lived long enough to preside over criminal applications of his fraudulent “economic science”, most notably in Chile, where his vulturish “Chicago Boys” created a model of capitalist “development” with the usual lopsided traits of a nation deeply divided in terms of wealth distribution and political power, with the poor, of course, bearing the brunt of Friedman’s “free society.”

BY STEVEN LENDMAN
Dateline: Thursday, October 04, 2007

AN ERA ENDED on November 16, 2006 when economist Milton Friedman died. A torrent of eulogies followed. The Wall Street Journal mourned his loss with the same tribute it credulously used when Ronald Reagan died saying “few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.” Economist and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called him a hero and “The Great Liberator” in a New York Times op-ed; the UK Financial Times called him “the last of the great economists;” Terence Corcoran, editor of Canada’s National Post, mourned the “free markets” loss of “their last lion;” and Business Week magazine noted the “Death of a Giant” and praised his doctrine that “the best thing government can do is supply the economy with the money it needs and stand aside.” Read the rest of this entry »

Aznar and Bush, two men who should answer before a new Nuremberg court for deliberate crimes against humanity, beginning with the launching of unprovoked wars. Bush, Cheney, and their criminal neocons are still at it, of course, now plotting some pretext to attack Iran.

BY PHIL ROCKSTROH

“We must become the change we want to see.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

“In any case, I hate all Iranians.”
–Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary to Defense Secretary, Robert Gates

How many times do we, the people of the US, have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of propaganda and militarism before we shout — enough! — then shutdown the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate it out of town? It is imperative the nation’s citizens begin to apprehend the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited by a populace with such a slow learning curve. Read the rest of this entry »

Vacant-brained Fred Thompson and his GOPer trophy wife. One of the most baffling things about evil is that it often assumes attractive packages.

BY MATT TAIBBI | Dateline: Sep 24 2007

I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous. It is 12:07 p.m. on Sunday, September 9th, in Manchester, New Hampshire, just outside a restaurant called Chez Vachon. Thompson has just served up another mumbling, noncommittal tour through a packed diner of breakfasting locals, sitting glumly through the requisite this-sure-is-great-coffee shot. Then, once the needed photos are banked, the lumbering B-list character actor — who plays a video called “The Hunt for Red November” at every campaign stop and sells buttons that, in an unsettlingly McLuhanian twist, pimp him as the “Law and Order candidate” — tries to make a quick beeline back to his bus. But a cheeky local TV reporter shouts at him before he can reach the door. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iranian President at the United Nations.

COMMENTARY By Jerry Mazza /•\ Online Journal Associate Editor | Dateline: Sep 26, 2007 // Fraternal crosspost

The Ahmadinejad visit to New York provided the media and its associated political class with yet another feeding frenzy to exercise their well developed talent for high-handed hypocrisy. Obviously it helps when the target is long preceded by and shrouded in obstinate ignorance and consequent confusion in a culture where history is only of peripheral interest, and where vociferous Zionism has a de facto chokehold on almost all critical institutions—from Congress to the media, and certainly academia. It also doesn’t help matters much that the Iranian leader—like most US imperial targets—is scarcely adept at juggling the symbols of American propaganda, and is often quite skilled at shooting himself in the foot. Like many smaller-power leaders who stand in defiance to probably the most hypocritical empire on record, they do not seem to fully understand the importance of communicating clearly and forthrightly with the US public above and through the curtain of thick distortions certain to be deployed by the corporate media and professional politicians (two sides of the same coin). And therein they miss fine opportunities to neutralize at least some of the poison being continuously spread around by these agents of imperial propaganda as they character assassinate the leaders and cultures marked for eventual physical attacks. It’s high time these leaders made an effort to understand and master this very special but essential language that could—up to a point—lessen the probabilities of such an attack.—Eds.

Read the rest of this entry »

BHL, a man of strong opinions and a very high opinion of himself.

BY BERNARD HENRI-LEVY

[from the February 27, 2006 issue of The Nation]
REPUBLISHED AS A PUBLIC SERVICE

Editorial Caveat: Who is this diagnostician for the American Left?: In French and US establishment journals, Bernard-Henri Levy, or BHL, as he is commonly known, is one of the best-acclaimed “philosophes” and authors in France today. But when it comes to Henri-Levy, surely probably one of the great “poseurs” and leftist apostates on the world stage, such accolades are to be taken with a huge lump of salt. Indeed, a new biography by French journalists Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte is the first in a series of seven acerbic critiques of BHL to be released in the coming years and marks an unprecedented attack on the high-profile academic. Read the rest of this entry »

Giuliani—as phoney as a man in drag.

BY BILL CURRY | Dateline: September 24, 2007 The Huffington Post

Rudy Giuliani is slipping, if not quite sliding away. In early polls he led Hillary Clinton and every Democrat and was pulling away from the Republican pack, having benefited much from John McCain’s gracious decision to set himself on fire.

Back then the smart money–and it’s a wonder they still call it that– fretted that Hillary was ‘unelectable’. Today she beats Rudy in every poll. Among Republicans he’s again in a dead heat, this time with B-list TV celebrity Fred Thompson. Read the rest of this entry »