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.
Kerry, a Strong Choice for Diplomacy
President Obama’s choice of Sen. John Kerry to be Secretary of State puts a former Vietnam veteran who spoke out against the war in a key U.S. foreign policy position. Kerry’s long career also suggests Obama wants the world to know…
Bankster Justice Very Much Delayed
After years of tip-toeing around the too-big-to-fail banks despite their key role in devastating the world’s economy the U.S. government has finally signaled a couple of fraud prosecutions. However, the effort is not only way too late, but way too…
Christmas Eve Freedom-Fighting in 1837
Americans often romanticize the early years of the Republic, averting their eyes from the crude racism in the U.S. Constitution and the cruel treatment of blacks and Native Americans in those decades. Overlooked are brave freedom fighters who resisted arrogant…
An Incurious ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
Exclusive: Zero Dark Thirty, the big-screen chronicling of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, has been hailed by some critics for its taut storytelling, but it fails to confront the larger questions about 9/11, including the complex history between the…
The Right’s Second Amendment Lies
Exclusive: A big obstacle to commonsense gun control is the Right’s false historical narrative that the Founders wanted an armed American public that could fight its own government. The truth is that George Washington looked to citizens militias to put down revolts and…
The Beat-Down of ‘Public Servants’
For several decades, the American Right has heaped contempt on government employees as part of a strategy to delegitimize federal regulation of the private sector, contributing to such disasters as the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the beat-down of “public servants” goes…