All Views Articles for 2011-view-2009
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Robert Parry Cheney’s Unintended Admissions Political memoirs are usually self-serving affairs, mixing rationalizations with score-settling. But Dick Cheney’s In My Time may become the new standard for this sorry genre, made even worse because... Read more |
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Zoe Weil iSchool? Why There's No Technological Fix to Ailing Education iPads for Kindergartners is Not a Good Idea Read more |
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Phyllis Bennis All the Countries the US is at War with after 9/11 September 11 Remembered, US at War Against the World, and the Ongoing Campaign Against Israeli Occupation. Read more |
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John Nichols US Supreme Court Blocks Rick Perry From Executing Man 'Based on the Color of His Skin' Texas Governor Rick Perry uses his state’s reputation for killing without question to gain applause for his presidential bid from Tea Party audiences that cannot contain their bloodlust. Read more |
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San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Rising Poverty Reflects Diminishing American Dream Even Americans who have become numbed by the monthly release of perpetually pessimistic unemployment numbers - a "jobless recovery" is the ultimate oxymoron - should be jolted by the release of the... Read more |
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Glen Ford High Stakes Testing in Schools: Who’s Cheating Whom? Corporate school privatizers feign disgust with teachers that cheat the standardized tests. But big business theft of public education is by far the greater sin. Read more |
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Paul Krugman Free to Die Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial... Read more |
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Jonathan Jones Photographing the Great Depression, Then and Now Dorothea Lange's stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary Read more |
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Kumi Naidoo World Peace Must Start with Environmental Justice For the past week, the world has reflected on the tragedy of 9/11 and the consequences of that fateful day. To my mind, we talk more about security than peace now. And we ignore the role that... Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt Oil Wars? Not a Chance Way back then, the signs out on the streets read: "No Blood for Oil," "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" and "Don't trade lives for oil!" Such homemade placards, carried by deluded antiwar... Read more |
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Michelle Chen In a Precarious Revolution, Libya’s Endgame Is Only Beginning Across Tripoli, revolutionaries have perched themselves on a dangerous dream. Author Khaled Darwish reflected in a recent New York Times dispatch from the capital’s battered streets: Read more |
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Frances Moore Lappé The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities Editor's Note from The Nation: Frances Moore Lappé's essay below kicks off The Nation's forum on the food movement. Raj Patel , Vandana Shiva , Eric Schlosser , and Michael Pollan have contributed... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald Major Discovery: A Purpose of the War in Afghanistan The Washington Post today describes the failure of regimented programs in Afghanistan to reintegrate Taliban teenagers ("Taliban" (alt.: "Terrorist") means "any Afghan who fights against the presence... Read more |
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Timothy Wise US Trade Policy: Moving Backwards in the 21st Century Three years into the Obama Administration, progressives have no shortage of complaints about the president’s economic policies, which seem very much at odds with Candidate Obama’s soaring rhetoric... Read more |
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Peter Singer Can We Increase Gross National Happiness? The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for two things: high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, and its policy of promoting “gross national happiness” instead of... Read more |
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Mary Bottari On Lehman Day, Elizabeth Warren Runs Against “Wall Street’s Favorite” Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren announced that she was running against Scott Brown for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts on the eve of the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse. For many,... Read more |
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Conn Hallinan Libya, Oil, and the New Scramble for Africa Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the right-wing Heritage Foundation , one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? Read more |
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David Dayen Democrats Bicker on American Jobs Act Weekly unemployment claims spiked up again today, and the NY Fed’s survey of regional manufacturing, a key indicator of the economy, was down sharply relative to expectations. This is a crisis time... Read more |
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Ann Wright Instead of Attacking WikiLeaks, Fix What It Exposed Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was right when he suggested that the WikiLeaks revelations were “embarrassing” and “awkward.” But his assessment — and that of so many other government officials... Read more |
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Karen Dolan Serving US Poor a Cold Cup of Bitter Tea It seems the only federal monies the right wing in this country likes to see spent is for state-sponsored executions and subsidies for corporations and the wealthy. Read more |
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Matt Taibbi The $2 Billion UBS Incident: 'Rogue Trader' My Ass The news that a "rogue trader" (I hate that term – more on that in a moment) has soaked the Swiss banking giant UBS for $2 billion has rocked the international financial community and threatened to... Read more |
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Michael T. Klare America and Oil: Declining Together? America and Oil. It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin. As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other. Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness... Read more |
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Ellen Brown Banking for California's Future Wall Street's not cutting it: California's legislature voted to do a feasibility study on establishing a state-owned bank. Read more |
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Tereza Coraggio Panama: Free-Trade Tax Haven "Panama is the sink where the dirtiest money is laundered," writes Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens . Unfortunately, it is also... Read more |
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Ramzy Baroud Taking on Turkey: Israel’s ‘Dangerous’ Game The UN Palmer Report, which largely exonerated Israel for murdering nine unarmed Turkish civilians in international waters on May 31, 2010, seemed in some ways like the last straw. Prior to its... Read more |
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John Nichols Elizabeth Warren Runs Against a DC That's 'Rigged for Big Corporations' Elizabeth Warren is running for the United States Senate for the right reason and with the right message. Read more |
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Robert Scheer Obama's Economic Policies: One Betrayal Too Many It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. Read more |
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Yves Engler, Bianca Mugyenyi PARK(ing) Day: Reclaiming Our Streets from Our Cars On Friday activists and artists will be celebrating PARK(ing) Day in hundreds of cities around the world. Read more |
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John Atcheson The Fall of the United States We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling… the United States. --Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Monkey Trial. Welcome to the late great United States – a country in... Read more |
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Robert C. Koehler The Theology of Armageddon The woo-woo nuttiness of it all defies the imagination, beginning with the idea of a course in “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Nuclear ethics? Does that mean no... Read more |
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Medea Benjamin, Charles Davis The Congressional 'Supercommittee': Debt Panel or Death Panel? When it comes to government handouts, there's no bigger welfare queens than the Pentagon and the legions of mercenaries and weapons manufacturers profiting from America's half-dozen ongoing wars and... Read more |
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Donna Smith Whack-a-Mole (or a Poor Person) for Pleasure, Profit and Power The front page of the New York Times this morning said it all for me. Right column: 2.6 million more join the ranks of the poverty-stricken in America . Read more |
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Sandra Steingraber In the Fight Against Fossil Fuel Addiction, Bring What You Can The Heinz Award and What I Plan to Do With It Read more |
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Justin McKeating Explosion at Marcoule: Nuclear Industry Spin Hits Overdrive The first and most important thing to remember about Monday’s explosion at the Marcoule nuclear facility in southern France is that one man was tragically killed and four others were injured. Our... Read more |
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Katherine Sciacchitano Rank-and-File Economics: Fighting for a Wage- and Job-Led Recovery Riddle 1: When is a recovery not a recovery? Answer: When profits are at record levels, corporations are sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and unemployment is still at 9.2% and rising. Riddle 2: When... Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt Campaign 2012 as a Classic Conflict-of-Interest Story If I hear one more radio or TV journalist or pundit tell me what Mitt Romney must do, I think I’ll scream. Election 2012 is still 14 months away and yet the nattering commentators, the Iowa straw... Read more |
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Robert Reich How to Create More Jobs By Lowering Wages: Texas and America Perry and Romney can duke it out over who created the most jobs, but governors have as much influence over job growth in their states as roosters do over sunrises. Read more |
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Bernie Sanders Is Poverty a Death Sentence? The crisis of poverty in America is one of the great moral and economic issues facing our country. It is very rarely talked about in the mainstream media. It gets even less attention in Congress. Why... Read more |
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John R. MacArthur Some Liberals on to Obama's Betrayal of Liberalism As a self-proclaimed independent journalist normally content to attack politicians from outside the establishment, I’ve found it very lonely criticizing Barack Obama these past three years. Before... Read more |
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John LaForge Anti-Nuclear Activist, Bonnie Urfer, Fights Crime in Sentencing Statement Bonnie Urfer, 59, of Luck, Wis., is being sentenced in federal court in Knoxville, Tenn., today, even though she’s been in federal custody ever since her May 11 trespassing conviction. Read more |
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Paul Harris The Decline and Fall of the American Middle Class The heart of our political malaise is that the middle class, so long a powerhouse of US prosperity, is being crushed as never before Read more |
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Jim Hightower Let's Get Real On Jobs You know what's wrong with the American economy, Bucko? You, that's what. Read more |
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Michael Winship A Decade of Memorials Squandered A long time ago, I helped produce for public television an annual year's end interview with New York City Mayor Ed Koch. We always shot it in a private room at Windows on the World, the restaurant on... Read more |
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Nathan Schneider Who Will Occupy Wall Street on September 17? When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for “20,000 people” to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for... Read more |
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Amy Goodman Troy Davis and the Politics of Death Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical... Read more |
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Nora Barrows-Friedman Gaza Children’s Images of War Censored Under Pressure from US Israel Lobby Pro-Israel organizations pressured an Oakland children’s museum to cancel an upcoming exhibition of drawings made by Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. Read more |
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Ralph Nader Obama's Pipeline Quagmire It was the most extraordinary citizen organizing feat in recent White House history. Over 1200 Americans from 50 states came to Washington and were arrested in front of the White House to demonstrate... Read more |
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Peter Rothberg How to Help Troy Davis This is the fifth time I've blogged since 2007 about what I consider Troy Davis' wrongful imprisonment. Davis has been on death row in Georgia for more than 19 years for the murder of a police... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald Turkey: How a Normal, Healthy Government Behaves Relations between Israel and Turkey have become increasingly strained ever since Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara last year, shot and killed 9 people aboard (8 Turkish citizens and 1 American... Read more |
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Mary Elizabeth King Breaking the Silence on Race Desmond King and Rogers Smith, writing in The New York Times of our current bipartisan silence on matters of racial equality , argue that the economic calamity of the United States is also a racial... Read more |
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Mike Davis How Obama Became the Curator of the Bush Legacy What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall Read more |
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Robert Parry CNN Panders to the Tea Party CNN, which likes to boast that it’s America’s non-ideological cable news network, revealed in its Republican presidential debate collaboration with the Tea Party Express the hidden political reality... Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt An Economic 9/11 On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this country was once again focused 24/7 on a single disaster that tore up one field in Pennsylvania, destroyed part of the Pentagon, and took down three... Read more |
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Diane Ravitch School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international... Read more |
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Curtis Ellis Reject Free Trade Pacts So much for bipartisanship. President Obama unveiled his jobs agenda before Congress, and Republicans really like the part of it voters hate the most. Read more |
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Bob Doppelt Ecological Woes Linked to Inequality What do consumer debt, the national debt and ecological debt have in common? Read more |
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Dean Baker Does President Obama Want to Impose a Crushing Burden on Our Children? Sorry deficit fanatics, this one has nothing to do with the cost of the stimulus or the deficits run-up during the Obama years. We're talking real money here. We're talking about plans to raise the... Read more |
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Harvey Wasserman Can We Stop the Next Fukushima Times 10,000? The horrible news from Japan continues to be ignored by the western corporate media. Read more |
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Dean Baker Thomas Friedman Thinks the Tea Partiers Are Extremists of the Left Thomas Friedman is once again orthogonal to reality. In his column today he urges a “grand bargain” where the Republicans abandon extremists of the right and agree to tax increases and Democrats... Read more |
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Mark Vorpahl Longshoreman's Union Rises to the Challenge Anyone who still believes that U.S. workers and the labor movement are incapable of mounting a struggle against the conditions that the economic crisis is forcing on us has not been paying attention... Read more |
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Josh Eidelson Fired for Organizing a Union Companies dump workers for union activity all the time, and they often get away with it. Read more |
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Jeff Biggers Arizona's AG says Ethnic Studies "Must Be Destroyed" Speaking on a public panel in Phoenix on Saturday, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne invoked the infamous words of warfare by Roman statesman Cato and called for the destruction of Tucson's Ethnic... Read more |
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Timothy Wise, Kevin Gallagher The False Promise of Obama's Trade Deals '21st-century' trade deals proposed by the Obama administration won't help American workers – and will hurt foreign ones Read more |
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Laura Carlsen Drug War Madness In 1936, a church group commissioned a film "to strike fear in the hearts of young people tempted to smoke marijuana." But it was not until the 1970s that Reefer Madness — billed as “the original... Read more |
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James Gustave Speth Beyond Growth: Creating a Unified Progressive Politics The U.S. political economy is failing across a broad front – environmental, social, economical, and political. Deep, systemic change is needed to transition to a new economy, one where the... Read more |
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Paul Krugman Europe's Impeccable Disaster On Thursday Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank or E.C.B. — Europe’s equivalent to Ben Bernanke — lost his sang-froid. In response to a question about whether the E.C.B... Read more |
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Madeleine Bunting Somalia is Paying a Colossal Price in the War on Terror In the past three months, 150,000 people have arrived in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya. About 80% of them are women and children and many have walked 100km to reach the sprawling, crowded... Read more |
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Ted Rall The Truth About 9/11 Truthers Why Does the US Government Create Paranoia? Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald We Refuse to Live in Fear! President Obama, in his weekend radio address to the nation : They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear . ABC News , yesterday : Read more |
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Paul Buchheit Go Berserk, Young Man And young woman, of course. You're being cheated by a free-market system that is out of control. Consider that a single individual (John Paulson) made enough money last year to pay the salaries of... Read more |
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Steve Fraser, Joshua Freeman Message to the Unemployed: Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You America's Reserve Army of Labor Marches Through Time Read more |
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Gareth Porter The Terrorism Issue That Wasn’t Discussed In the commentary on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the news and infotainment media have predictably framed the discussion by the question of how successful the CIA and the military have been in... Read more |
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Chris Hedges A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out... Read more |
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Ahmed Rashid And Hate Begat Hate LAHORE, Pakistan IN their shock after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans frequently asked, “Why do they hate us so much?” It wasn’t clear just who “they” were — Muslims, Arabs or simply anyone who was not... Read more |
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Pierre Tristam Since 9/11: A Reckoning As I write this the families of 9/11 victims are reading at Ground Zero the names of the 2,973 killed there and at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. It takes about five hours. The verbal memorial,... Read more |
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Christian Science Monitor Editorial Sept. 11, 2011: Ten Years After the Attacks (Written Sept. 17, 2001) How it could have been. Read more |
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David Suzuki Al Gore's '24 Hours of Reality': Reality Show Worth Watching Most reality TV has little to do with the real world. But here’s an online show that will reflect what is happening in and to our world: 24 Hours of Reality will feature 24 presenters in 24 time... Read more |
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Patrick Cockburn Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate Read more |
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Mark Weisbrot Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11 "We support your war of terror," proclaims Borat to a cheering crowd of Americans in a stadium, in the popular Sacha Baron Cohen film. The crowd apparently thinks he got the preposition wrong, but... Read more |
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Michael Gould-Wartofsky America the Amnesiac: On Remembering to Forget on September 11 Never forget. For ten years now, we've repeated the magic words, the gestures, the rituals. Today, of course, we can hardly forget to remember: to return to that luminous Tuesday morning, when the... Read more |
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Randall Amster Millennial Math: 9+11=1984 It’s been a decade since the day that changed everything -- or at least, the one that finally laid it all bare. Over the years, I’ve tried to confront it, rewrite it, debunk it, historicize it, mock... Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and WikiLeaks A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks' latest release are -- yet again -- wildly overstated and without... Read more |
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David Krieger Ten Years, Ten Lessons September 11, 2001 was a traumatizing day for the United States. The photographs of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers are still haunting, and the senseless loss of life is still... Read more |
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Eric Hansen Tar Sands Protest: 'When Ordinary People do Extraordinary Things' Crisis clarifies our deepest beliefs and affections, our spirituality. In turn, these moments of great clarity prompt ordinary people to do extraordinary things -- and historic changes happen. Fifty-... Read more |
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Steff Yorek Many Things to Mourn on September 11 I was few minutes late for work on September 11, 2001. Just as I left the car the radio reported that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I commented that there must... Read more |
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Michelle Chen Ten Years On, Sick Ground Zero Workers Still Without Proper Care This weekend, the public will mourn a site of loss, recasting the painful memories and haunting fears that still hover over the aftermath at Ground Zero. But the people who worked and breathed that... Read more |
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Chip Pitts The Legacy of 9/11: An Institutionalization of Terror at Home and Abroad Responding to terror perpetrated by 19 men with box-cutters a decade ago, the US government has now put hundreds of millions of innocent Americans into countless military, intelligence, and law... Read more |
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John R. MacArthur The Sad Legacy of Sept. 11 Americans were failed by their leaders before Sept. 11, and in the 10 years since Read more |
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Ray McGovern Bird-Dogging Torturers in NYC As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, many ex-Bush administration officials who approved torture in the “war on terror” and botched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are back in the spotlight taking... Read more |
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Michelle Chen Scant Room for Equity in Obama’s Talking Points on Jobs President Obama's jobs speech before Congress last night struck an uncomfortable balance between the art of the possible and the sophistry of defeatism. Read more |
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Robert Jensen Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11 Ten years ago, critics of America’s mad rush to war were right, but it didn’t matter. Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks... Read more |
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Jesse Hagopian Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti: Neoliberalism Off the Richter Scale Two Days before the earthquake, my one-year-old son and I accompanied my wife to Haiti for an HIV training course she was to conduct. Read more |
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Jon Walker Obama is Coming to Cut Medicare I don’t want to be entirely cynical about President Obama’s jobs speech yesterday. Some of the ideas in his proposal, like the money to fix up old schools, are great. He is finally at least putting... Read more |
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson The Troy Davis Case: Will America Execute Another Innocent? Barring a last minute stay of execution by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles in a last ditch hearing scheduled for September 19, accused Savannah, Ga. cop killer Troy Anthony Davis will be... Read more |
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Chris Kromm Should the Poor Be Allowed to Vote? Last week, right-wing pundit Matthew Vadum created a stir when he argued that -- as his piece at American Thinker is titled -- " Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American ." Here's how the piece... Read more |
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David Sirota Growing Up: Why Schools Need to Teach 9/11 Kids must learn the complex truths about the attacks to combat the Islamophobic myths they've grown up with Read more |
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Pierre Tristam Obama’s Job Jig: Pin-Up to GOP Voodoo If America’s 14 million unemployed had their own state, The Economist tells us this week, they’d form the fifth-largest one in the union, right behind Florida and ahead of Illinois. If you include... Read more |
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Katha Pollitt The Poor: Still Here, Still Poor What ever happened to poor people? Even on the left, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s Poverty Tour was an exception. Mostly, the talk is of the “middle class”—its stagnant wages, foreclosed houses,... Read more |
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Janine Jackson Major Media: Whistling Past the Wreckage of Civil Liberties Watchdogs slept through a decade of rollback Read more |
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Frida Berrigan A Pie for Peace: Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 Chance to Reflect, Bake, Resist September 11, 2001 was my friend Diana’s 30th birthday. I planned on meeting her at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station after work. Instead I walked across the Manhattan Bridge in a cloud of ash... Read more |