Category: Human Rights

How Crucial Is Media?

Perhaps the Right’s biggest advantage in U.S. politics is its advanced media infrastructure built over several decades and designed to reach the entire country on a variety of levels especially when it’s compared to the Left’s general neglect of a…

Contemplating the Abyss

The urgent question facing the planet is whether today’s late-capitalist era, possessed of unbridled greed at the top, can be turned to meet the needs of the world’s people or will hurtle onward to a global abyss, disrupting age-old patterns…

Death of a Two-State Solution

Israeli hardliners continue to block the compromises for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, while Jewish settlements keep expanding into land that would be part of a possible deal. Thus, the prospect for a meaningful two-state solution is dying, with dire…

Misdefined ‘Terrorism’ Hurts US POW

By definition, “terrorism” applies to attacks on civilians for political ends. But the U.S. government has revised the term to cover any attack on Americans, including soldiers fighting anywhere in the world, a misuse of the concept that is hampering…

Mitt Romney, the Bully

As a privileged preppy, Mitt Romney enjoyed humiliating suspected gays and other vulnerable people. But his bullying didn’t stop when he grew older. Instead, he applied similar tactics to make a fortune as a corporate raider, writes Marjorie Cohn.

Reflecting on Mother’s Day and War

The original idea of Mother’s Day was to promote peace so mothers would not have to suffer the grief that many American moms faced after the slaughter of the Civil War. But some of today’s most powerful women, including moms,…

Honoring a ‘Terror War’ Architect

Exclusive: In this season of graduations and the rush to bestow honorary degrees on the “great and powerful” one ironic moment will play out at Fordham University, where Jesuits are giving top billing among its honorees to White House counterterrorism…

Democracy Fights Austerity

Much of Europe has swallowed the bitter medicine of austerity on orders from conservative economic theorists, only to find that the supposed cure has made matters worse. Now, elections in France and Greece indicate that Europeans want a new approach that…

How US Hubris Baited Afghan Trap

Exclusive: Despite what Official Washington thinks it knows, the real error on Afghan policy after the Soviets left in 1989 was not the abrupt cutoff of U.S. aid but nearly the opposite, continued CIA support for the Islamist mujahedeen and…

The Rebirth of May Day’s Message

Since the rise of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, America’s rich have been on a roll, with their tax rates slashed by more than half and a concentration of both wealth and power at the top, a restoration of an…