As the American Right loses credibility from the Tea Party to the neocons there’s a chance for the reassertion of rationality, a new respect for empirical evidence and disdain for propaganda. Perhaps most importantly is the recognition of the grave threat from climate…
What Hagel Could Give Obama
With the “fiscal cliff” partly solved and partly delayed, President Obama may now turn his attention to filling his national security team for the second term, including whether to face down neocon opposition to Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel for Defense…
Consortiumnews’ Fund Drive Extended
From Journalist Robert Parry: Because our year-end fund drive got started late and because we are still far short of our modest goal of $25,000 we are extending the time frame for donations through next weekend.
A 2012 Look-Back at Consortiumnews
The year 2012 was an important one for the United States as it faced a presidential election, issues of war or peace, and the choice of extreme right-wing economic theories or greater political pragmatism. Here is a selection of stories…
Tea Party Extremism and the ‘Cliff’
With a late-night vote, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a partial plan negotiated by the Senate and the White House to avert the “fiscal cliff,” but most House Republicans voted no, with Tea Partiers continuing to flaunt their nihilistic extremism, as ex-CIA…
The Scandal at FreedomWorks
The Tea Party sold itself to millions of Americans as a movement driven by principle and a rejection of the petty corruption that is part of Washington’s business as usual. But a key Tea Party organization has descended into exactly…
How America Became an Empire
Exclusive: Director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick offer a major reexamination of modern American history in “The Untold History of the United States,” which has many strengths amid a few shortcomings, writes Jim DiEugenio in this first of a two-part…
The Fallacy of Arming Up
Easy civilian access to powerful weapons is a recipe for greater domestic violence, just as an over-emphasis on military force leads to more wars, a conundrum that requires a greater commitment to both arms control and systems for resolving disputes peacefully,…
War Spending and the ‘Fiscal Cliff’
The short-term danger of the “fiscal cliff” may be resolved either before or after the New Year, but the longer-term threat to the Republic is the never-ending demand from the Military-Industrial Complex for more and more money to finance war…
How FBI Monitored Occupy Movement
The FBI and other federal agencies coordinated with banks and local authorities in reacting to the Occupy Movement, which was put in the category of a domestic terrorist threat despite the group’s advocacy of nonviolence, Dennis J. Bernstein reports.
At Year’s End, the ‘News’ Fails
The end of the year brings reflection on what happened in the past 12 months and what lies ahead. But these retrospectives usually offer no more context and often less than the thin gruel of news as the events played out,…
Help Us Finish Our Fund Drive
From Journalist Robert Parry: Nothing is more vital to a democratic Republic than honest information about important national topics and that is what Consortiumnews.com has concentrated on providing, now into our 18th year. But we can’t do our part without…
In Case You Missed…
Some of our special stories from November, assessing the meaning of Election 2012, reporting on the sudden fall of a fabled general, and exposing crucial history from the Kennedy-Nixon era.
Bending to Military Contractors
Regarding the “fiscal cliff,” a consensus is forming in Official Washington that a top priority must be elimination of automatic Pentagon “cuts,” with the word “draconian” much tossed around. But the planned reductions are really quite modest, as the Independent…
Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome
From the Archive: With Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s death on Thursday and the declining health of ex-President George H.W. Bush an era of war and intrigue is coming to an end, a time of resurgent U.S. imperialism that saw this warrior seeking peace and the…
The Larger Question of Chuck Hagel
Exclusive: The up-in-the-air nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Defense Secretary has become a test of whether the Israel Lobby can still shoot down an American public servant who is deemed insufficiently passionate regarding Israel, a test that now confronts…
Hagel and the New McCarthyism
Since Chuck Hagel’s name was floated as possible Secretary of Defense, the former Republican senator has been subjected to vilification to blacklist him from public service, a new form of McCarthyism that replaces suspected leftist sympathies with insufficient support for…
The Price of Revolutionary Illusions
Exclusive: A number of Americans on the Right and Left embrace fantasies about fighting some glorious revolution in the future, requiring them to maintain arsenals of weapons today, even if the cost of their violent illusions is the brutal murder of children…
Learning from Endless War
The backdrop of the Newtown massacre and similar slaughters across America is how frequently the U.S. government opts for violence to settle problems around the world, a message that might influence a troubled individual with access to a gun, says Laura…
America’s Frontier Mentality
Much as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once opined that the sanctions-related deaths of Iraqi children was “worth it,” many Americans seem to believe that the periodic slaughter of children at home is just the price for their “liberty” to own…