All Views Articles for 2008-archive-2008
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Ira Chernus Community Organizers Press Obama for Real Change This just in: Valerie Jarrett, recently appointed White House senior adviser, and Melody Barnes, the next director of the Domestic Policy Council, will meet with 2,000 community organizing leaders at... Read more |
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John Young Our Stampede Mentality Black Friday deserves a mark like this. Or, it deserves a reputation fit for the occasion. “Day retailers get in the black.” That’s how it’s described in Business 101 terms. “Day shoppers lose their... Read more |
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Yifat Susskind From Mumbai to Washington: Now Is the Time to Renounce the War on Terror Right now, while the horror of the attacks in Mumbai is reverberating around the world and tensions between India and Pakistan are mounting, there is a crucial move that President-elect Obama could... Read more |
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Mark Weisbrot Obama Should Make a Clean Break With the Past on Latin America President-elect Obama's historic triumph was welcomed in Latin America by left-of-center governments who saw it as a continuation of their own electoral victories. Even before the election President... Read more |
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Robert Weissman Nationalize GM -- Or at Least Think About It With the U.S. government offering trillions of dollars in supports for the financial sector, it is startling to witness the casual way in which many policy makers and opinion leaders suggest the U.S... Read more |
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Stephen Zunes Maldives: Another Dictator Bites the Dust The recent ouster of the corrupt and autocratic president of the Maldive Islands, Mahmoud Gayoom, marks another victory in the global struggle for rights and democracy. Read more |
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Karyn Strickler Bail US Out of the Fossil Fuel Economy It's my turn. I want a bailout. Not hundreds of billions of dollars to the auto industry for making an inefficient, dirty product that Americans have stopped buying. Not trillions of dollars to the... Read more |
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Michael Moore Saving the Big 3 for You and Me... A Message From Michael Moore Read more |
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Concerned Citizens of India and Pakistan Mumbai Bloodbath: A Statement by Concerned Citizens of India and Pakistan This Joint Statement was released to the press simultaneously in Pakistan and India on November 30 2008. We are deeply shocked and horrified at the bloody mayhem in Mumbai, which has claimed more... Read more |
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Amitabh Pal A Shadow Falls on Mumbai I first came to know of the Mumbai terrorist attacks on Wednesday afternoon through an e-mail from the folks at the South Asian Journalists Association. Initial reports that some people had been... Read more |
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Tom Hayden Iraq Pact Challenges Antiwar Movement What does the US-Iraq Security Pact mean for the antiwar movement? It certainly may cement an American perception that the war is finally over, stranding the peace movement as public opinion turns... Read more |
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Katrina vanden Heuvel Robert Gates: Wrong Man for the Job Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq but , as he told us earlier this year, "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." So it is troubling that a man of such... Read more |
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Stanley Kutner Bush's 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy The times are unprecedented. Not since 1861 have we watched the last gasps of an outgoing administration with such anxiety. Then the nation was concerned with drift and inertia; now we watch for... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald NBC and McCaffrey's coordinated responses to the NYT story Following up on yesterday's post regarding NBC News' suppression of the "military analyst" scandal and its ongoing reliance on the deeply conflicted Barry McCaffrey: I have obtained, from a very... Read more |
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Nir Rosen Songs for the Mahdi Army One day in Iraq , a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansur district and took me to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We drove past checkpoints manned by "Awakening" militias created... Read more |
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Annie Shattuck A Message for Climate Change Negotiators: Small Farmers Key to Combating Climate Change As world leaders meet in Poznan, Poland this week to work out a foundation for a new international climate change treaty, they would do well to seek the council of some unconventional advisors:... Read more |
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Laura Flanders DC to Delhi: Only Our Missiles, not Yours. Condoleezza Rice is off to India this week, to "stand in solidarity with the Indian people " in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. The Bush administration says it shares the horror and pain of the... Read more |
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Dean Baker Paulson and Bernanke Spread the Wealth Around During the campaign, then-Senator Obama provoked a media flurry and right-wing outrage over his comment to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around." They told us that this view was... Read more |
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Robert Parry Bush Still Lies about Iraqi Inspections In what's been called George W. Bush's first exit interview, the outgoing President continues a lie that he first unveiled several months after launching the Iraq War, justifying the invasion by... Read more |
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Teresa DeCrescenzo Where's The Bailout for Nonprofits? I am a social worker, not an economist, and what I know is this: The stock market is in free fall, financial organizations are being bailed out and the Detroit automakers might yet get financial help... Read more |
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Derrick Z. Jackson Obama Needs to Bail Out Workers Having rolled out Warren Buffett and the economic wizards and Hillary Clinton and the security squad, President-elect Obama needs a press conference to roll out Joe the Plumber. No, not that Joe!... Read more |
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Lynn Bradach Ban The Cluster Bomb The U.S. should join a global treaty to curb the deadly devices. says the mother of one victim. Read more |
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Jeremy Scahill Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state... Read more |
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Marc Fisher Maryland Police Play Spies--And Look Like Fools For years, the Maryland State Police, eager to play anti-terrorist surveillance agents just like the big boys on TV, spied on suburban peace activists who may have been loud, but never posed the... Read more |
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Michael Parenti Afghanistan, Another Untold Story Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the... Read more |
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Sean Gonsalves Can You Afford to Pay Attention? If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say "journalists never report the good news" I'd be able to retire and open a bed & breakfast on the shores of Costa Rica before I hit 40. Cynical... Read more |
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Tom Andrews, Tom Andrews and Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.) It's Not Hillary, It's The Policy Stupid! The media obsession over who's in and who's out of consideration for the Obama Cabinet brings the admonition on the famous "War Room" wall of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign to mind: "It's... Read more |
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Paul Krugman Deficits and the Future Right now there's intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large... Read more |
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Susan Blumenthal and Melissa Shive AIDS: A Stigma Endures For two months, ostracized and alone, 19-year-old Marvelyn Brown slept on the gray vinyl seats of her 1996 Nissan Sentra in the parking lot of a Nashville Wal-Mart. When she visited her family, she... Read more |
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John Nichols Barack Obama's AIDS Advocacy Barack Obama has always spoken well and wisely about the challenges posed by the HIV/AIDS crisis, and about the opportunity the United States has to address them. Two years ago on World AIDS Day,... Read more |
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Deb Price It's Irrational Not To Let Gay Couples Adopt Martin Gill and his partner, licensed foster parents in Florida, were planning to move, so they told a state child placement official it wasn't a good time for them to take in two needy boys. They... Read more |
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David Sirota Obama's Post-Election Moves Make Some Wonder About "Change" For all the talk of "bottom-up" politics, Barack Obama's "movement" grants him a top-down power that no previous president had. Expect the change to — you know — change. Read more |
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Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger Getting Real on Climate Change We'll never succeed in making dirty energy too expensive. Let's make clean energy cheap. Read more |
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Steve Fraser Beyond the Bailout State: Roosevelt's Brain Trust vs Obama's Brainiacs On a December day in 1932, with the country prostrate under the weight of the Great Depression, ex-president Calvin Coolidge -- who had presided over the reckless stock market boom of the Jazz Age... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald The Ongoing Disgrace of NBC News and Brian Williams The New York Times's David Barstow, whose excellent and aggressive journalism led to the uncovering last April of the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program involving network "military analysts,"... Read more |
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Noreena Hertz Unhealthy Incomes Astonishment at a nurse being paid more than £100,000 points up an outdated idea of value Read more |
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Gregory Wright The Zero Decade: Restarting The 21st Century and Rebooting America, In The Nick of Time At the 2004 Democratic Convention, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich told the country "we can restart the 21st century" by replacing the Bush administration and Republican Congress with a... Read more |
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David Solnit Seattle WTO Shutdown 9 Year Anniversary: 5 Lessons for Today What lessons can we learn from the shutdown of the 1999 WTO Ministerial in Seattle 9 years ago today and from the last decade and a half of global justice organizing as we face today's major crises... Read more |
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David Michael Green Hope You Die Before You Get Old As a Baby Boomer, I'm sure not encouraging generational warfare in America. I have everything to lose from such a battle. On the other hand, though, as a political analyst, I can hardly believe we're... Read more |
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John Nichols Worried By Obama's Picks? Support Anti-War Groups Tens of millions of Americans will prayed for peace as they celebrated Thanksgiving Day, and they will do so many more times during the coming Holiday Season. Even non-believers will acknowledge that... Read more |
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Christine Bremer Muggli The Great Writ of Habeas Corpus It is a basic ideal of justice: No person should be locked away in prison and not allowed to seek help to challenge the illegal imprisonment. The right to challenge an unjust imprisonment is so... Read more |
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Jeffrey Smith Obama's Team Includes Dangerous Biotech "Yes Men" Biotech "Yes Men" on Obama's team threaten to expand the use of dangerous genetically modified (GM) foods in our diets. Instead of giving us change and hope, they may prolong the hypnotic "group... Read more |
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Joseph L. Galloway So Much for Letting the Free Market Rule Hear that humming sound? That's the printing presses at the United States Treasury running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, churning out an ocean of green paper to bail out the billionaire bankers... Read more |
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Kanishk Tharoor This is an Indian Atrocity – Not the West's Outrages regularly afflict the country's poor, so don't rush to conclusions just because the wealthy are the target for once. Read more |
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Neal Gabler The GOP's Joe McCarthy Gene Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or,... Read more |
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Shuja Nawaz Mumbai May Derail India-Pakistan Peace Progress Even as the civilian death toll of the Mumbai attacks climbs, fallout from these terrorist actions threatens thawing relations between India and Pakistan. The danger signals are already evident, as... Read more |
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Mohsin Hamid Bound by Sorrows: India and Pakistan Are in this Together In the rush to blame Pakistan for the terrorist atrocity in Mumbai, a dangerous mistake is being made. The impulse to implicate Pakistan is of course understandable: the past is replete with examples... Read more |
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Elaine Kamarck Look to the Internet to Fight Poverty AS PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama begins to put together his government, one question reigns supreme. How can he possibly deal with the economic crisis and the war in Iraq, and still have anything left... Read more |
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Derrick Z. Jackson This Year, Why Not Try Something Different? ONE THING I am thankful for on Thanksgiving weekend is having absolutely no desire to go to the mall. I cannot remember the last time I did so, which by extension leaves me utterly out of touch with... Read more |
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Janet Thomas WTO Reduced to Semblance of Democracy It's been nine years since the Battle in Seattle and the WTO demonstrations that rocked the free trade movement to its core. What transpired on the streets inspired the WTO's marginalized smaller... Read more |
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Sheila Samples Through a Hole in the Air Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! - Henry Wadsworth... Read more |
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Colin Beavan Christmas With No Presents One family’s daring experiment: Christmas without all the stuff. Read more |
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Danny Schechter Blaming 'the Stupids' for the Financial Disaster Thomas Friedman’s Sermon From the Mount of the NYT Op-Ed Page Read more |
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Jerome Grossman Where Is the Change? Is it too early to criticize Barack Obama for his program, his appointments, and his policies? He is not yet president but he is dominating the news and influencing markets and foreign-policy as... Read more |
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Olga Bonfiglio Women's Ordination on the Docket Again The Vatican recently threatened to excommunicate Father Roy Bourgeois for his position that women be ordained priests. This out-of-the-blue, extreme measure against a prominent social justice... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald Mumbai, the NYT's Revisionism, and Lessons Not Learned The New York Times Editorial Page, today, on poor U.S./Latin American relations: [T]he Bush administration did enormous damage to American credibility throughout much of the region when it blessed... Read more |
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Amy Goodman Media Silence Doesn't Mean All's Well in Gaza As President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Read more |
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Jonathan Steele This is No SOP. It Is A Vote To End The Occupation of Iraq Two victories in a single month. Amid the encircling economic gloom, it's hard to believe we deserve such good news. First, of course, Barack Obama's election win. And now Iraq's unexpected deal with... Read more |
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Deena Guzder Why the Attacks in India Should Surprise Nobody Most Americans were shocked to learn that coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India's commercial capital on Wednesday evening. After all, India is not Iraq or Afghanistan or... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald The Obama Administration, Guantánamo, and Restoring America’s Standing Last week, Barack Obama was interviewed by Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes and the following exchange occurred: Read more |
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Pat LaMarche Lame Ducks on Thursday's Menu Well, it's that time again. It's time to pause and think of all the things for which we are truly grateful. I would be remiss if I did not state, no matter how obvious, that for which I feel... Read more |
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Michael Winship Michael Pollan's Food for Thought The writer and activist Michael Pollan has no interest in becoming Barack Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, thank you very much, even though there are a lot of people who think he'd be perfect for... Read more |
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John Friedrich Thanksgiving Prayer for all the Children We've traveled to Iowa to spend Thanksgiving with our families. As we sat down to our first dinner the other night, our two year old daughter Rosie had us join hands and led us in a prayer. "Thank... Read more |
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Bill McKibben Multiplication Saves the Day In my last column for the magazine I wrote about numbers. Now I'd like for us to do some math. Read more |
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Christopher Cooper Drinking Heartbreak Motor Oil And Bombay Gin Sunday, after the rain. Another big, sprawling, wind-wracked tropical deluge midway through the penultimate month of this extraordinarily wet year. November and warm beyond expectations, and we will... Read more |
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Paul Rosenberg Bipartisanship And Truth Glenn Greenwald repeats his citation of this passage from a NYT story: Read more |
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Sarah van Gelder and Doug Pibel Be Happy Anyway "The pursuit of happiness." It's so American that it's in our Declaration of Independence, where it's listed alongside life and liberty as an inalienable right. But how successful have we been in... Read more |
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Robert C. Koehler The Ghosts of Desert Storm Seventeen years and three wars later, the ghosts of Operation Desert Storm - the cancers, the chronic headaches and dizziness, the fibromyalgia, the ALS and so much more that have stalked returning... Read more |
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Susan Lenfestey Corporate Turkeys in DC Get Thanksgiving Reprieve What a wild Thanksgiving we're. . . enjoying. Emotions are soaring and plunging right along side the Dow Jones - one day's peak over Obama's historic election gives way to the next day's valley over... Read more |
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Steve Hendricks Thanksgiving We Can Believe In Seven years before Tisquantum (Squanto, to most of us) helped the Pilgrims recover from their disastrous first winter in America, he was kidnapped by an English cod fisher and fur trader who was... Read more |
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Leo Hickman Edible Playgrounds and Political Vegetables From school playgrounds to digging up the lawns of the White House and Downing St, there are many wasted spaces where we could be inspiring people to grow their own food Read more |
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John Buell Moving American Politics off Dead Center Conventional wisdom holds that political success lies in finding the center of popular opinion, which remains moderate to conservative. Coming from a media that have consistently failed to anticipate... Read more |
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Ray McGovern Kafka and Uighurs at Guantanamo “There is no right to due process for an alien who is not here,” insisted the 44 th Solicitor General of the United States, Gregory G. Garre, proudly representing the President of the United States... Read more |
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Daryl Kimball Change Nuclear Weapons Policy? Yes, We Can For nearly 40 years, American presidents have expressed their intention to fulfill the U.S. obligation under the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue "effective measures relating to... Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt Custodians of Empire The Obama national security "team" -- part of that much-hailed "team of rivals" -- does not yet exist, but it does seem to be heaving into view. And so far, its views seem anything but rivalrous... Read more |
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Tom Gallagher MoveOn – Fan Club or Force? I'd gone to a couple of MoveOn anti-Iraq War events in the past, but it wasn't until last week that I actually attended my first MoveOn meeting. The past events seemed modestly successful, but left... Read more |
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Dan Rosenblum At Last, It Begins: Real, Substantive Debate on 2009 Climate Legislation Before President-elect Obama's cabinet is named -- even before we know who the next Senators from Minnesota or Georgia will be -- jockeying for position on 2009 climate legislation is well underway... Read more |
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Stephanie Wall An Open Letter to Sen. Kennedy Dear Sen. Kennedy, Numerous newspaper articles detail your hard work on a health plan for submission to President Obama in January. Health care was one of the two leading domestic issues (the other... Read more |
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Frida Berrigan Weapons Come Second Can Obama Take on the Pentagon? Read more |
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Irene Khan Neither Violence Against Women Nor Poverty Are Inevitable As women around the world come together to celebrate the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, violence against women remains endemic in many forms, in all societies. Read more |
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Pierre Tristam Lavishing Billions on Old Technology While True Innovation Is Scorned It wasn't that long ago that Ford could give its stockholders a 215 percent return on investment in just three years. That's the three years between the company's introduction of the 2.5-ton Explorer... Read more |
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Jeff Biggers Dear Al Gore: Speak Against the Rape of Coal River Mountain Dear Al Gore: Two months ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, you declared that, "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right... Read more |
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Marjorie Cohn Guantánamo Justice After Seven Years Since the Bush administration began transporting men and boys to Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, it has tried to prevent them from presenting their cases before a neutral federal judge. Indeed, the... Read more |
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Rev. John Dear With Jon Sobrino at the SOA Protest Thousands of us gathered this weekend for the annual funeral procession at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, there to call for the close of the notorious "School of Assassins," where the U.S. trains... Read more |
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George Monbiot One Shot Left The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation. Read more |
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Nick Turse 'We Killed Her… That Will Be With Me the Rest of My Life' Lawrence Wilkerson's Lessons of War and Truth Read more |
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Norman Solomon The Ideology of No Ideology On Friday, columnist David Brooks informed readers that Barack Obama's picks "are not ideological." The incoming president's key economic advisers "are moderate and thoughtful Democrats," while... Read more |
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Andrea Becker The Slow Death of Gaza The collective punishment of Gaza's civilian population is illegal. But international law was tossed aside long ago Read more |
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Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh Bailouts Dwarf Spending on Climate and Poverty Crises The financial crisis is only one of multiple crises that will affect every country, rich and poor alike. There's also the global poverty crisis. Tens of millions of people across the developing world... Read more |
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Dave Lindorff Idiots and Bailouts It's a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it's through, and... Read more |
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Danny Schechter All the Talk of a Depression Is, Um, Depressing Economy Still Sinking As Obama Announces New Team and Plan Read more |
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Gary Younge Americans Have Never Felt So Excited, and Yet So Depressed As the nation basks in the warm glow of Barack Obama's win, its wealth and power are perched on the edge of a precipice Read more |
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Mary Munson There Ought to Be a Law to Protect Animals On Nov. 12, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Navy's right to use sonar that can be fatal to dolphins, whales and other marine mammals. The case was a challenge to the use of high-intensity... Read more |
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James Carroll What the Pirates Say The word "pirate" has come into the news for the first time in memory, as raiders armed with grenade launchers and grappling hooks take over vessels headed through waters off Somalia for the Suez... Read more |
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Cesar Chelala President Obama's Challenges on the Poverty, Health Front An important aspect of President-elect Obama's message throughout his campaign was the need to attend to the needs of the middle class. But, as Ralph Nader correctly points out, the poor in America... Read more |
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David Michael Green What to Do When Your Party Sucks Progressives are gonna have a lot of fun and satisfaction over the next two, four and eight years – although with each passing day and appointment, it doesn't appear as though much of it is going to... Read more |
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Editorial The Price of Our Good Name Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power. The list of abuses that President-elect Barack Obama must address is long: once again... Read more |
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Neal Peirce Maybe It Takes a Community Organizer to Lead a Country Barack Obama's history in grass-roots organizing got its first real blast of national attention from the Republicans. Rudy Giuliani, keynoting the GOP's convention in St. Paul, provoked a wave of... Read more |
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Robert Fisk Kabul 30 Years Ago, and Kabul Today. Have We Learned Nothing? 'Terrorists' were in Soviet sights; now they are in the Americans'. Read more |
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Jon Weiner Hillary's Big Ethics Problem: Bill What guidelines should govern Bill Clinton's future activities if Hillary becomes Secretary of State? Recent events suggest that at least two are necessary: no more favors for human rights violators... Read more |