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 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. 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 »

BY DAVID WALSH

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, would have seen no difference between his methods and objectives and those of the neocon cabal in power.

CLASSIC ARTICLES | Originally published April 22, 2003
The presentation of an illegal invasion of a foreign country as a “preventative” or pre-emptive war did not originate with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld.

The ongoing US aggression in the Middle East raises the most serious questions about the role of the mass media in modern society. In the period leading up to the invasion, the American [corporate] media uncritically advanced the Bush Administration’s arguments, rooted in lies, distortions and half-truths, for an attack on Iraq. It virtually excluded all critical viewpoints, to the point of blacking out news of mass anti-war demonstrations and any other facts that contradicted the propaganda from the White House and Pentagon. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PETER CHAMBERLIN

We the People have “freedom of the press,” but we do not have a free press.

We have a right to speak out and to assemble, but we don’t know what to say, or where to say it. The Internet is opening a path for us to change these deficiencies.

The Internet will replace the mainstream media, if the First Amendment survives the ceaseless assault being waged upon the Constitution in the name of facilitating the “war on terror.” The overlooked ideology of the Internet is an extremely patriotic American nationalism, driving a free market of truth, mixed-in with freely expressed opinions and ideas. The Internet is the only source of actual “news,” in our land of the corporate media. Read the rest of this entry »

BY AMBROSIA BIERCE

With this contribution we continue our exploration of scatological mysteries in everyday life, suggested by our resident pop anthropologists. For further reading on our everyday scatological challenges, see: INTER FECES ED URINAM

We’ve all been there but don’t like to admit it. We’ve all kicked back in our cubicles and suddenly felt something brewing down below.

As much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the WORK POOP is
inevitable. For those who hate pooping at work, following is the
Survival Guide for taking a dump at work. Read the rest of this entry »

What the use of Nuclear Weapons really means
BY FRANCESCA CAIGATTI
Picture taken of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

It is beyond my comprehension how our president or any world leader can loosely and irresponsibly talk about nuking ANYONE on this planet, as has become so popular these days. The first time I heard words to that effect out of our president’s mouth I thought that alone was grounds for removal from office because it indicated a serious lack of understanding about what he was talking about … or, even worse, that he did know and would do it anyhow. And here he is seven years later, still acting as if nuking somebody is actually a choice. Did/does he understand what nuclear bombs DO? He is certainly not speaking for the American people when he threatens half the world with the use of these weapons! Read the rest of this entry »

BY RALPH R. ACAMPORA
July 22, 2007

The story many Long Islanders have followed during the past few weeks of an escaped steer on the North Fork whose notoriety landed him a refuge away from the abattoir gets more perplexing the more you think about it. From a strictly agribusiness point of view, of course, the fugitive livestock presented only the problem of recapturing an ornery investment before its due harvest. Bad cow - get back into the pen. Read the rest of this entry »

BY EZRA KLEIN | Dateline: July 19, 2007

Poster for Jacques Tati’s Hulot, the hero of VACANCES DE M. HULOT, who at one time epitomized the French idiosyncratic vacationer | Originally posted at THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

How come Americans don’t take a month off every summer, even though we’d like to? Blame it on individualism.

The most astonishing revelations in Michael Moore’s Sicko have nothing to do with healthcare. They’re about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JOHN STEPPLING
Dateline: July 2007

Inpolite, infantile question: With so many American supermen of Scots-Irish ancestry, I don’t understand how the Irish don’t control the world already…

“There is an underscoring of collective anxiety in this film, everyone, from ordinary citizen to wonk- defense specialist, all seem nervous….even before anything jumps off. It is portraying a culture of deep almost bottomless anxiety…”

I have this three-week break before I go to Norway, and my girlfriend is already there, and school is over, so I have a lot of time on my hands……which is my excuse for going to see Die Hard 4 yesterday. Now, on the heels of your very good post on Arts and Entertainment, and our dissection of the pathogenics of *24*, I think a quick glance at the Bruce Willis franchise is in order. Read the rest of this entry »