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…
Israel Lobby Takes Aim Again
The Israel Lobby is taking aim at another prospective Obama administration appointee deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel’s Likud policies, ex-Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. A similar campaign of vilification was waged against Ambassador Chas Freeman in 2009, as he recalls.
Iran Appears Ready for Nuke Deal
Behind the scenes, diplomacy appears to be making slow progress toward a resolution of the Iranian-nuclear stalemate, possibly early in the new year. But obstacles remain and they are mostly in Washington, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett at RaceforIran.com.
Constitution, Human Rights, Lost History, Media, Obama Administration, Politics, Right Wing, The Bush-43 Administration
NRA Suggests a Police State
Exclusive: The irony of the NRA’s crackpot idea for protecting America’s children by dramatically expanding the use of armed guards is that the proposal would push the U.S. further down the path toward a police state, threatening the “liberties” that…
Comments About Comments
From Editor Robert Parry: Regrettably, our Nov. 20 statement regarding standards for comments did not stop the deterioration in the tone of some comments left by some readers, causing us to intervene more directly in the comment section.