Category: Politics

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…

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…

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…

NYT ‘Clarified’ Santorum’s ‘Black’ Quote

Exclusive: Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum is denying his slur about “black people” and “somebody else’s money” with absurd claims that the recordings of his quote aren’t accurate, now getting a sympathetic hearing from a New York Times reporter, writes…

Is Iran-Nuke Fear Realistic?

As U.S.-Iran tensions gain a dangerous momentum with an Iranian court just giving a death sentence to an alleged CIA spy neocon-dominated Washington has jumped on the bandwagon toward war. But the Independent Institute’s Charles V. Peña says the underlying…

Fleecing the Angry Whites

Exclusive: Subtly and not so subtly, Republican presidential contenders are playing the race card again, hoping to win over the votes of angry whites by implicitly blaming the shrinking of the middle-class on preferential treatment of blacks and other minorities,…

How Propaganda Targets Iran

America’s Founders saw press freedom as a key check on government dishonesty, but today’s media has become a powerful ally of official lies by funneling sophisticated propaganda especially in support of war, as Lawrence Davidson notes about the hysteria over Iran.

Occupying Fears About Iran

In an election year, as many U.S. politicians compete to out-macho one another over fighting a new war with Iran, there is little self-reflection on whether the American side bears its own share of guilt in this troubled bilateral relationship, as…

US Political News Is a Fool’s Game

U.S. political journalists love to cover the horse race of presidential politics focused on polls and gaffes while usually obscuring the nation’s actual problems and how the candidates and their proposals relate to this real world, as Danny Schechter notes.