Special Report: Donald Trump claims the U.S. presidential election is “rigged,” drawing condemnation from the political/media establishment which accuses him of undermining faith in American democracy. But neither side understands the real problem, says Robert Parry.
In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan depicted neoliberal or “free market” capitalism as the ideal system, a dogma that extends to the present despite its horrific failures and other options, says Sam Ben-Meir.
Exclusive: As guilty as Saudi Arabia may be over 9/11, the broader guilt is shared by generations of U.S. officials who coddled Saudi extremism and cooperated in building a jihadist movement for geo-political gain, writes Daniel Lazare.
Exclusive: The propaganda war on Russia is spinning out of control with a biased investigation blaming Moscow for the MH-17 tragedy and angry exchanges over Syria, raising the risks of nuclear war, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
The U.S. news networks are building up the suspense for the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but odds are it will be another hyped-up TV disgrace, say Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment and its mainstream media operate with a pervasive set of hypocritical standards that justify war crimes — or what might be called a “normalization of deviance,” writes Nicolas J S Davies.
Exclusive: Donald Trump’s pro-police-state acceptance speech must have appealed to many Americans, boosting him in the polls, but another secret to his success may be that he is a 2.0 reboot of Ronald Reagan, says JP Sottile.
America surely has problems, but the Republican Right tends to ignore its role in causing them and now – under President Obama – exaggerates how bad the situation is, writes former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren.
The Reagan administration inadvertently created Al Qaeda by arming the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s, then George W. Bush’s Iraq War gave rise to ISIS. So, one might draw a lesson about overusing military force abroad, says Ivan Eland.
The U.S. mainstream media avoids the word “coup” when a disfavored leader is ousted, but the silence around Iran’s 1981 coup also may have served Ronald Reagan’s political self-interest in keeping secret his own “coup,” as Mahmood Delkhasteh reflects.
