HBO’s new docudrama on the Wall Street crash of 2008 details the frantic government efforts to stabilize the banking system and stave off a global depression, but the program misses the systemic fraud and other crimes that were at the…
Author: Consortiumnews.com
Obama Goes AIPAC-ing
Like many American politicians before him, President Barack Obama paid his respects on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), mostly telling the powerful lobby what it wanted to hear about the greatness of Israel and the evils of its…
Obama’s Covert Clash with Pakistan
U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that American success in the Afghan War requires Pakistani help in rooting out Taliban safe havens along the border but that Pakistan is unwilling to turn against its longtime Taliban allies a conundrum that continues…
Obama’s Middle East Platitudes
President Barack Obama’s speech on a “new chapter” in U.S. policy toward the Middle East was filled with platitudes befitting a New Year’s resolution, but there is little expectation that he will follow through, especially on the hardest issues like…
Netanyahu Sets Limits for Obama
Special Report: President Barack Obama got an Oval Office lecture from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about how far Obama may deviate from Israel’s positions on Mideast peace. This public rebuke raises questions about whether Netanyahu will now try to…
Asking Obama to Protect Gaza Relief Ship
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who has signed on to participate in a new attempt to bring relief supplies to Palestinians living in Gaza, asks President Barack Obama to intercede with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow the ship,…
Perp-Walking the Wrong Banker?
The sexual-assault arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn touched off a frenzy of media coverage in New York, including repeated showing of the French banker looking disheveled in handcuffs. But Danny Schechter pines for the day when the…
Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder-2
David Halberstam won acclaim and riches from his influential book, The Best and the Brightest, about the making of the Vietnam War, especially during the Kennedy and Johnson years. However, in retrospect, the book’s narrative asserting that John Kennedy and…
Spain’s Tahrir Square
Angered by “free-market” policies that have created high unemployment and are now forcing government spending cuts, tens of thousands of Spaniards are occupying central squares in Madrid and other cities in a challenge to the country’s economic elites, as Pablo…
Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam shaped the American narrative of the Vietnam War, making it a cautionary tale about the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation…