Category: Constitution

Making the Economy ‘Scream’

Exclusive: In the past when the CIA targeted a troublesome government, a key part of the strategy was to make the economy “scream” to get the people ready for regime change. This tactic now appears to have come home to roost in the…

The Koch Brothers’ ‘Samson Option’

Exclusive: The fiscal crisis in Washington is not simply a threat to economic and government stability, as serious as that is. It is a premeditated scheme to carve out a new constitutional structure that gives the Koch Brothers and other right-wing…

Surveillance State Takes Offense

President Obama proclaims his love of “transparency” but has an odd idea what the word means. He generally defines it as sharing some information with Congress and the Courts but keeping the public in the dark and punishing those who ask…

Feinstein’s Phony Excuse for NSA Spying

After 9/11, the excuse for missing clues was too much data trying to sip from a fire hose but with the priority now excusing NSA spying, the metaphor is for more data you can’t find a needle in a haystack…

How Shutdown Hurts National Security

The Republican-induced shutdown of the federal government underscores the Right’s populist contempt for the nation’s democratic institutions. But the fiasco also has undercut America’s standing in the world and thus undermines U.S. security and global leadership, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul…

Playing Chicken with Food Safety

The U.S. Constitution empowers the federal government to “provide for the general Welfare,” but free-market ideologues have distorted the Founding document’s plain language to fit their desires, including their new demands that food-safety rules be gutted, as Michael Winship explains.

The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Exclusive: With the U.S. government shutdown and a threatened credit default, Tea Party Republicans are testing out a new system of national governance in which they get their way or else. But is this the beginning of a new Jim Crow era of…

‘Gun Rights’ of Domestic Abusers

The right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court has put the supposed right of Americans to carry their firearms of choice over the safety of individuals who are potential victims of gun violence. That pattern may be tested again in a case to…

America’s Government by Extortion

Exclusive: By forcing a U.S. government shutdown and threatening a first-ever credit default Tea Party Republicans are creating a new constitutional system which lets a determined white minority impose its will on the diverse American majority by inflicting so much…

Why Right’s Lemmings Don Suicide Vest

Exclusive: The government-sabotaging fervor of the Republican Right likened by one GOP congressman to “lemmings with suicide vests” can only be understood from inside the right-wing bubble where a distorted view of the Constitution prevails and actual democracy is disdained, writes…