U.S. hardliners on Iran keep making their case, ratcheting up the pressure for sterner and sterner action against Iran’s nuclear program. But some of the claims – though accepted by the major American news media – have dubious origins, as Gareth Porter reported for Inter Press Service.
As Wall Street bankers and hedge funds deploy powerful computers in “high-frequency trading” – siphoning off capital meant for productive purposes – one counter-measure would be a “financial transaction tax” to discourage the practice and raise needed revenue, a plan gaining traction in France, reports Jeff Cohen.
As American neocons continue to walk the United States toward another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran, they have been laboring to come up with rationales, including alarmist scenarios of what a nuclear-armed Iran might do geopolitically, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
As U.S.-Iran tensions gain a dangerous momentum – with an Iranian court just giving a death sentence to an alleged CIA spy – neocon-dominated Washington has jumped on the bandwagon toward war. But the Independent Institute’s Charles V. Peña says the underlying assumptions deserve more scrutiny.
Exclusive: Subtly and not so subtly, Republican presidential contenders are playing the race card again, hoping to win over the votes of angry whites by implicitly blaming the shrinking of the middle-class on preferential treatment of blacks and other minorities, reports Robert Parry.
America’s Founders saw press freedom as a key check on government dishonesty, but today’s media has become a powerful ally of official lies by funneling sophisticated propaganda especially in support of war, as Lawrence Davidson notes about the hysteria over Iran.
In an election year, as many U.S. politicians compete to out-macho one another over fighting a new war with Iran, there is little self-reflection on whether the American side bears its own share of guilt in this troubled bilateral relationship, as Winslow Myers observes.
U.S. political journalists love to cover the horse race of presidential politics – focused on polls and gaffes – while usually obscuring the nation’s actual problems and how the candidates and their proposals relate to this real world, as Danny Schechter notes.
After years of American-led sanctions followed by a U.S. invasion and long occupation, Iraq is a shattered society with sectarian tensions again on the rise, but the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland says the United States should resist the impulse to return militarily.
Exclusive: Though voicing “serious reservations” about encroachments on civil liberties in a military authorization bill, President Obama signed the law anyway to avoid a nasty veto fight with Congress. But ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern says courage, not timidity, is what’s needed at such moments.
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