BY WILLIAM BLUM \ DATELINE: August 10, 2007
Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life
Simulpost at author’s site: www.killinghope.org
On several occasions I’ve been presented with the argument that contrary to widespread opinion in the anti-war movement and on the left, oil was not really a factor in the the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq. The argument’s key, perhaps sole, point is that the oil companies did not push for the war.
Responding to only this particular point: firstly, the executives of multinational corporations are not in the habit of making public statements concerning vital issues of American foreign policy, either for or against. And we don’t know what the oil company executives said in private to high Washington officials, although we do know that such executives have a lot more access to such officials than you or I, like at Cheney’s secret gatherings. More importantly, we have to distinguish between oil as a fuel and oil as a political weapon. Continue reading ‘The Anti-Empire Report: Separation of oil and state’
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. Continue reading ‘Reviewing Marjorie Cohn’s “Cowboy Republic”’
BY JOHN NICHOLS
THE NATION \\ Dateline: 08/08/2007 John Nichols
Dennis Kucinich may well be just about the only honest and principled representative in the entire US Congress. Some comment on the entire US professional political class.
When the AFL-CIO organized a presidential debate at Chicago’s Soldier Field, leaders of the labor federation quietly went out of their way to make sure that Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich would be on the stage. Continue reading ‘Kucinich Helps the AFL-CIO Prove a Point’
BY CHIP BERLET
Originally at The Public Eye - Vol. 18, No. 3
Introduction
John Calvin (Jean Cauvin), the main architect of one of protestantism’s most severe sects, and moral inspiration for New England’s Puritans. The curious thing is that while Calvinism, in general, provided a big legitimacy boost to capitalism, the Puritans hewed to a doctrine that had much more in common with old Catholic doctrine in regard to commerce.
Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes. Behind this trend is the momentum of 250 years of a strain of religious philosophies brought to our shores by Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonial settlers influenced by a Protestant theology called Calvinism. Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply common sense. Continue reading ‘Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration’
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} Continue reading ‘How the CIA Meddled in Italy’s Postwar Elections’
Courtesy is one thing, but did Pelosi have to applaud so…enthusiastically?
NOTE from CJO editors: When it happens, Americans won’t be able to say they didn’t get enough warnings. The lights are being shut off in this nation, one by one, while most of the public remains glassy-eyed, glued to the latest idiocy performed by one of the innumerable decadent movie starlets of this patethically self-indulgent culture. And as the Constitution gets torn asunder, piece by piece, don’t count on that old hypocritical whore, the corporate media, or the US Congress, to sound the alarm. If anything, given their abject careerism, incurable stupidity, and disconnection from the realities that define life for most people, they can be counted on to compound the problem by serving as propaganda megaphones for the tyrants in the making. Here’s some of the accumulating signs that catastrophe is imminent unless we serve notice to the usurpers in Washington that the American people will not allow the Constitution and what remains of our democracy to be buried under a wave of manufactured pretexts. Continue reading ‘Sliding Toward Tyranny by Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement’
BY CHALMERS JOHNSON [Tomdispatch.com]
Posted on May 17, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51975/
In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. Continue reading ‘Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?’
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. Continue reading ‘Reviewing Michael Parenti’s “Democracy For the Few”’
