Category: Obama Administration

The Gulag That Is Gitmo

Still under powerful neocon influence and fearing the old “soft on terror” label Congress has blocked President Obama’s efforts to close “the gulag at Guantánamo,” forcing Obama to retreat from his promise to Americans and an outraged world, as Marjorie Cohn…

Silencing Donahue and Anti-War Voices

Amid the war fever over Iraq in 2002, legendary talk show host Phil Donahue returned to television with an MSNBC program that allowed antiwar voices to speak but his corporate chieftains soon pulled the plug, a shameful moment in U.S.…

Muscling What’s Left of Democracy

The Standard & Poor’s rating agency has downgraded European countries in a move that may force the governments to crack down more on their populations and divert more money to wealthy investors, thus helping the super-rich short-circuit what’s left of democracy,…

Turning America into Pottersville

Exclusive: The Republican presidential race has taken a detour into the “class warfare” that the party supposedly despises, with Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry tagging Mitt Romney as an elitist who got rich by laying off workers. But this spat misses…

Ron Paul’s False Founding Narrative

Exclusive: Rep. Ron Paul and other right-wingers have lured many average Americans into their camp by creating a false narrative about America’s Founding, claiming that the drafters of the Constitution wanted a weak central government. But that’s not the real…

America, a Land Made for the 1 Percent

Over the past three decades, right-wing policies have diverted the wealth of America into fewer and fewer hands, and a right-wing Supreme Court has let money dominate U.S. politics like never before, challenging Woody Guthrie’s idea that “this land was made…

Herding Americans to War with Iran

Exclusive: The murder of a fifth Iranian scientist on the streets of Tehran had all the earmarks of an Israeli-sponsored assassination. The killing also worsened tensions at a moment when the momentum toward war with Iran seems unstoppable, reports Robert…

The Enduring Shame of Guantanamo

On President Obama’s second full day in office, he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, but then encountered fierce resistance from Congress, leading to a humiliating retreat underscored now by the prison’s tenth anniversary — and by renewed worldwide…

Hillary Revives Dubious Iran Charge

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…

Sarkozy Pushes Tax on Stock Trading

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…