Amid the war fever over Iraq in 2002, legendary talk show host Phil Donahue returned to television with an MSNBC program that allowed antiwar voices to speak but his corporate chieftains soon pulled the plug, a shameful moment in U.S.…
Muscling What’s Left of Democracy
The Standard & Poor’s rating agency has downgraded European countries in a move that may force the governments to crack down more on their populations and divert more money to wealthy investors, thus helping the super-rich short-circuit what’s left of democracy,…
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…
America, a Land Made for the 1 Percent
Over the past three decades, right-wing policies have diverted the wealth of America into fewer and fewer hands, and a right-wing Supreme Court has let money dominate U.S. politics like never before, challenging Woody Guthrie’s idea that “this land was made…
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…
The Enduring Shame of Guantanamo
On President Obama’s second full day in office, he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, but then encountered fierce resistance from Congress, leading to a humiliating retreat underscored now by the prison’s tenth anniversary — and by renewed worldwide…
Hillary Revives Dubious Iran Charge
U.S. hardliners on Iran keep making their case, ratcheting up the pressure for sterner and sterner action against Iran’s nuclear program. But some of the claims though accepted by the major American news media have dubious origins, as Gareth Porter…
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…
Neocons Dream Up Scary Iran Scenarios
As American neocons continue to walk the United States toward another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran, they have been laboring to come up with rationales, including alarmist scenarios of what a nuclear-armed Iran might do geopolitically,…
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…
Genesis Myth: God Doing Good
Many Christian fundamentalists impose a literal interpretation on Biblical myth, thus missing the larger moral messages and rejecting later scientific discoveries, a mistake most apparent in their reading of the Genesis creation story, as the Rev. Howard Bess explains.
‘Extremely Loud’ Awakens 9/11 Thoughts
Though a decade into history, the events of 9/11 still have a powerful tug on the emotions of Americans, especially New Yorkers whose lives were profoundly changed, as Michael Winship observed after a preview of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”
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
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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.
Keeping American Hands Off Iraq
After years of American-led sanctions followed by a U.S. invasion and long occupation, Iraq is a shattered society with sectarian tensions again on the rise, but the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland says the United States should resist the impulse to…