Fanatical Jewish settlers in disputed territories are forcibly removed by Israeli police.

BY JOHN MEARSHEIMER AND STEPHEN M. WALT
Dateline: September 2, 2007
Reviewed by Max Hastings/ Timesonline

Five years ago, Atlantic Monthly commissioned two academics, John Mearsheimer of Chicago University and Stephen Walt of Harvard, to write a significant article about the influence of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy. When the piece was at last completed, the magazine declined to publish, deeming it too hot for delicate American palates. It eventually appeared in 2005, in the London Review of Books, provoking one of the most bitter media and academic rows of recent times. The authors were accused of antisemitism, and attacked with stunning venom by some prominent US commentators. Mearsheimer and Walt obviously like a fight, however, for they have now expanded their thesis into a book. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

President Castro addressing the Cuban people in Havana.

FROM OUR APPALLING HYPOCRISY ANNALS

The existence of a revolutionary socialist government with
growing ties to the Soviet Union only 90 miles away, insisted
the United States Government, was a situation which no self-
respecting superpower should tolerate, and in 1961 it undertook
an invasion of Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

BY STEVE LENDMAN
Dateline: Thursday, August 09, 2007

Marjorie Cohn is a distinguished law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego where she’s taught since 1991 and is the current president of the National Lawyers Guild. She’s also been a criminal defense attorney at the trial and appellate levels, is an author, and has written many articles for professional journals, other publications, and for noted web sites such as Global Research, ZNet, CounterPunch, AfterDowning Street, Common Dreams, AlterNet and others. Her long record of achievements, distinctions and awards is broad and varied for her teaching, writing and her work as a lawyer and activist for peace, social and economic justice. Read the rest of this entry »

BY STEPHEN LENDMAN
Dateline: Monday, August 06, 2007

Ferdinand Lundberg (1905 - 1995) was a 20th century economist, journalist, historian and author of such books as The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today; The Myth of Democracy; Politicians and Other Scoundrels; and the subject of this review - Cracks in the Constitution.

Lundberg’s book was published twenty-seven years ago, yet remains as powerfully important and relevant today as then. Simply put, the book is a blockbuster. It’s must reading to learn what schools to the highest levels never teach about the nation’s most important document that lays out the fundamental law of the land in its Preamble, Seven Articles, Bill of Rights, and 17 other Amendments. Lundberg deconstructs it in depth, separating myth from reality about what he called “the great totempole of American society.” Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

“People on the March” (quarto stato)—An idealization tableau of the working class in Italy.

Editors’ Note: This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In our view this chapter by Blum raises a perennial question, namely, who gives the US the “right” to interfere at will as if it owned the world? American exceptionalism, inculcated among the US population by ubiquitous indoctrination, is nothing more than a malignant form of collective narcissism, a runaway case of selfishness blocking a decent analysis of our own actions. How would Americans feel if a superpower many, many times stronger than the US chose to meddle in US elections to the extent we routinely have done in other countries, and even openly threaten military action if the outcome of said elections was not to its liking? Is that the way to spread democracy and build good will around the world?

As Blum himself puts it:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out …

invasions … bombings … overthrowing
governments … suppressing movements
for social change … assassinating
political leaders … perverting
elections … manipulating labor unions …
manufacturing “news” … death squads …
torture … biological warfare …
depleted uranium … drug trafficking …
mercenaries …

It’s not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.”

Chapter 2. Italy 1947-1948—Free elections: Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.{1} Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM
This is a chapter (the Introduction) from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum, 1987 edition

American troops parade in Vladivostok, Siberia, in 1918, as part of a multinational intervention force to overthrow the new Soviet government.

Our fear that communism might someday
take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.–Michael Parenti(1)

It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was “to be as rich and as wise as an American”. What happened?” (2) Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHALMERS JOHNSON \ Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 28, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58164/

Late Chilean President Salvador Allende (r) and CIA/Pentagon man in Santiago, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, later dictator of Chile for 17 years with ample Washington support. Just one of numerous crimes in the agency’s sordid history in defense of capitalism, not freedom.

This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).

The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA’s approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 billion-$48 billion or more spent on “intelligence.” This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the most serious one either. Read the rest of this entry »

BY STEPHEN LENDMAN Dateline: Thursday, July 26, 2007

Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti is an internationally known speaker and award winning author of 20 books and hundreds of articles. He’s also a noted academic having taught at a number of colleges and universities in the US and abroad.

Parenti is also one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts and social critics. He strongly opposes US imperialism, the shredding of our civil liberties, decline of our social state, and the Bush Doctrine of preventive wars on the world for predatory capitalism’s need for new markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor. Read the rest of this entry »

Mumbai slum, not the worst, by far.
A Tomdispatch Interview with Mike Davis (Part 2)

Mike Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt | May 12, 2006
TomDispatch

Victorian England under a triumphant laissez-faire…Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper; every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three – fruit and ‘sweetstuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one – filth everywhere – a gutter before the houses, and a drain behind – clothes drying, and slops emptying from the windows; … men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 1839 on St Giles Rookery

TD: It occurs to me that, in Baghdad, the Bush administration has managed to create a weird version of the urban world you describe in Planet of Slums. There’s the walled imperial Green Zone in the center of the city with its Starbucks and, outside it, the disintegrating capital as well as the vast slum of Sadr City — and the only exchange between the two is the missile-armed helicopters going one way and the car bombs heading the other. Read the rest of this entry »

BY ROBERT McCHESNEY

PAUL SWEEZY, FOUNDER OF MONTHLY REVIEW

I wrote this as a paper for a seminar in history during my first year of grad school at the University of Washington in 1984. It was a labor of love for me because it gave me an opportunity to read every single issue of Monthly Review, all of which were carefully kept in bound volumes in the magnificent UW library. I was so influenced by MR coming of age in the early and middle 1970s that I wanted to understand what sort of institution and culture could produce so much wisdom and brilliance . . . and I wanted to read all the issues from the 50s and 60s I had never seen before. I never imagined anyone would ever read it aside from my professor, Robert Burke.

For the heck of it, I sent a copy to my best friend, John Bellamy “Duke” Foster, who by then was already a periodic contributor to MR. Duke liked it and shared it with MR coeditor Paul Sweezy, who I gather also liked it. Shortly thereafter, Duke mentioned to Paul that he had been approached by Verso to write a combination authorized biography of Paul and history of Monthly Review. Duke told him it would do a good deal to expand the MR legacy. Paul’s reply: “Don’t waste your time. Leave that to someone else. You have more important work to do.” Harry Magdoff, the other MR coeditor, concurred. It is fair to say that neither Paul nor Harry were publicity hounds, and that may account for the relative paucity of material on them and on MR. Read the rest of this entry »