The challenge of poetry in a time of professional euphemism is to reconnect words to reality, a nearly subversive concept in an age when rich investors and bottom-line executives have been transformed into “job-creators.” Martin Espada is one poet who has…
Category: Lost History
Mitt Romney’s ‘Blood Money’
The U.S. press corps has been solicitous toward Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital with “fact-checkers” even insisting that Romney isn’t accountable for its actions while he was still the CEO. But almost completely out of the frame is how…
Dick Cheney: Son of the New Deal
From the Archive: As Republicans and the Tea Party seek to dismantle the New Deal’s social contract, one of their heroes, Dick Cheney, concedes that his personal success traces back to the federal government’s intervention against the depredations inflicted on Americans…
An Israeli October Surprise for Obama?
Special Report: A pressing foreign policy question of the U.S. presidential race is whether Israel might exploit this politically delicate time to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites and force President Obama to join the attack or face defeat at the polls, a predicament…
Hiroshima and Historical Truth
On the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians at the Smithsonian tried to present a truthful accounting of that U.S. decision-making but were stopped by right-wing politicians led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich who insisted on…
The Know-Nothings Ride Again
In 2012, the political descendants of America’s Know-Nothings demonstrated that they had seized control of the Republican Party, which for much of the past six decades has held the White House and looks to reclaim that immense power again, as…
America’s Plutocratic Traditions
Some voters are in disbelief that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to reduce them even more on the rich. But government strategies favoring the rich date back to the origins of…
More US Soldiers Die in Vain
From the Archive: One year ago, 30 U.S. soldiers many from SEAL Team 6 died when a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, deaths that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern said, tragically, were in vain. Though the war has faded from view, the killing…
A Map’s Inconvenient Truth
The charge “anti-Semitism” is thrown around loosely by defenders of Israel as a way to discredit legitimate criticism and sometimes even the expression of inconvenient facts as happened recently regarding a map showing the steady erosion of Palestinian land, writes Lawrence…
Romney’s Revolutionary War Bungle
Exclusive: Mitt Romney tries to impress the Tea Partiers with his love of the Founders, but the ex-Massachusetts governor writes that the Revolution began in April 1775 with the British capturing Boston by sea, rather than the Minutemen driving the…