Exclusive: New studies show that America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels. Yet, the Tea Party and other anti-tax forces remain determined to protect the historically low tax rates of the rich and…
Category: Politics
How Gates Boxed in Panetta
Departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates is winning hosannas around Washington as a straight-talking “wise man” who reined in wasteful spending. However, the reality is much different, with Gates having spoken out of both sides of his mouth in a way…
Obama’s Decent Interval on Bush’s Wars
The United States continues toward slow-motion defeats in George W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Barack Obama seeking, in essence, a “decent interval” so the losses aren’t pinned on him and the Democrats. But Lawrence Davidson asks what it…
Afghan War: No Vietnam Redux
Exclusive: Many on the American Left are furious with Barack Obama — and find nothing to praise in his gradual troop drawdown in Afghanistan. But the President’s speech may be seen, in retrospect, as an important turning point in U.S. war policy toward…
Drug War’s March of Folly
Exclusive: Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” setting in motion one of the most destructive exercises in prohibition in American history. Legal rights of citizens were trampled, countless billions of dollars were expended, violence spread…
Spain’s Challenge to Austerity
Though the anti-austerity protests in Greece have grabbed most of the international attention, a similar movement rejecting neo-liberal economics and challenging the traditional political elites has emerged in the much larger nation of Spain, as Danny Schechter observed during a…
Bob Gates’s ‘Business’ of Lying
A Special Report: As Defense Secretary Robert Gates prepares to retire in late June, he is routinely lauded as a “wise man” committed to telling it like it is, even making a frank comment this week about how “most governments…
Was Bob Gates a Success?
Official Washington loves departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates; politicians and pundits alike hang on his every word, applauding his “candor” and praising his “courageous” spending cuts. But military budget expert Winslow T. Wheeler says Gates’s record doesn’t match his press clippings.
Today’s Pentagon Papers Warning
The U.S. government has finally released the full Pentagon Papers describing how the American people were misled into the Vietnam War. The declassification comes four decades after most of the document was leaked by Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg, who today says similar…
Spain’s Growing ‘Indignation’ Protests
In protests from the Middle East to the American Midwest, people are confronting the question of whether societies should be organized for the benefit of the broad population or the wealthy elites. That question is being expressed perhaps most sharply in…