All Views Articles for 2011-view-2011
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Danny Schechter 'Monetizing' Electoral Politics: TV Networks Are Out to Sell, Not Tell Already the projections are in—not for who is going to win the election in 2012---but for how much it is likely to cost. Public Radio International concludes: “Campaign spending in the 2012 US... Read more |
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Mazher Ali Let's 'Make Them' End the Great Recession We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy. Read more |
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Brian Tierney Unions End the Biggest Strike in Years—but the Battle for Verizon Workers Continues The nation’s longest and largest strike in the age of austerity ended this weekend. But the labor standoff continues as 45,000 Verizon landline technicians and customer service employees on the East... Read more |
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Karen Greenberg Crisis of Confidence: How Washington Lost Faith in America’s Courts As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus. The event that “changed... Read more |
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Bill Quigley, Davida Finger Katrina Pain Index 2011: Race, Gender, Poverty Six years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. The impact of Katrina and government bungling continue to inflict major pain on the people left behind. It is impossible to understand what... Read more |
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Kevin Gosztola US Park Police Seek to Intimidate Oil Pipeline Protesters A major two-week action involving daily sit-ins at the White House against the granting of a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline began Saturday. Just over seventy people were arrested. The... Read more |
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Beth Wellington The Myth of Mountaintop Removal Mining Big Coal says it's a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both. That's a Big Lie Read more |
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Olivier De Schutter, Gaëtan Vanloqueren The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable. Read more |
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V. Noah Gimbel The Pain in Spain As the sun rose on August 2, Spanish authorities destroyed the tent-village that had come to symbolize what some participants have called the Spanish Revolution. The ruling Socialist Party, via the... Read more |
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Malcolm Harris The Get Lost Generation Ask a headline writer at any paper of record and they’ll tell you that today’s young people are “The Lost Generation.” They tend to use this label as if Hemingway and Fitzgerald hadn’t stumbled their... Read more |
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Michelle Chen Fixing Schools: A Smart Plan for Jobs Politicians love to talk about how to “fix” the education system, from imposing standardized tests to shuttering “failing” schools. But they've been ignoring a big, basic fix for the nation's schools... Read more |
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Ronnie Cummins Beyond Frankenfoods and Toxics: OCA’s Ten Reasons to Buy Organic Organic foods and products are the fastest growing items in America's grocery carts. Thirty million households, comprising 75 million people, are now buying organic foods, clothing, body care,... Read more |
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Michael Winship How Washington Could Create Jobs Right Now I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank... Read more |
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Eva Galperin Want Public Safety? Don't Disable Cell Phones In response to outrage over last week's shutdown of cell phone service in four San Francisco stations on rumors of a planned protest, BART officials have repeatedly claimed their decision was... Read more |
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Christopher Brauchli Elections and Evolution The progress of Evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin. Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt An Obituary for Change in Washington Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground... Read more |
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Ray McGovern Lemmingly, We Roll Along When soldiers die, the politicians who sent them to their deaths typically use euphemisms and circumlocutions — like “lost,” “fallen,” or “ultimate sacrifice.” On one level, the avoidance of blunt... Read more |
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Salena Tramel Latest Attacks Bring Fire and Fear to Gaza Soon after shameful attacks killed six in southern Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that militants would pay “a very heavy price.” And then his warplanes proceeded to pound civilian areas with... Read more |
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Gary Houser Tar Sands Chance for Revitalized Climate Movement at 11th Hour? Setting Aside Differences, Seizing the Moral High Ground Read more |
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Christine Ahn Naval Base Tears Apart Korean Village “The land and sea isn’t something you bought,” explained Kang Ae-Shim. “Why are you selling something that was there long before you were born?” Read more |
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Dave Murphy Politics, Farmers and Change: The End of Rural America This week President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about " jobs and economic security " in rural America. Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald A Prime Aim of the Growing Surveillance State Several weeks ago, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen examined the case of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old copyright reform advocate who was arrested in July, after allegedly uploading academic... Read more |
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Glen Ford British Jealous of America’s Savage Police A Black Agenda Radio commentary Read more |
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Yolanda Pierce Why Persecute the Poor for Being Poor? Raquel Nelson's conviction for causing her own child's death by jaywalking shows America's indifference to the cost of poverty Read more |
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Ramzy Baroud US-Arab Disconnect: Revolutions Restate Region’s Priorities As the Arab Spring continues to challenge dictators, demolish old structures and ponder roadmaps for a better future, the US remains committed to its failed policies, misconceptions and selfish... Read more |
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Andre Francisco How to Make the Super Congress Open and Accountable The last thing we need is an all-powerful congressional committee allowed to make crucial spending decisions without the scrutiny of an engaged citizenry and press. Read more |
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Sharif Abdel Kouddous Egyptians Defend Viral Video Activist Charged in Military Court Asmaa Mahfouz is one of Egypt’s most prominent activists. The 26-year-old helped co-found the influential April 6 Youth Movement in 2008 that helped pave the way for the revolution through years of... Read more |
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Bill McKibben This Is Getting Exciting The climate movement's biggest civil disobedience action ever is about to take Washington by storm. Read more |
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Ruth Conniff Wisconsin Recalls: Ds 2, Rs 0 These races can legitimately give ordinary citizens hope for democracy. But make no mistake what we are up against: The hijacking and looting of our society by wealthy, well organized corporate... Read more |
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Tim Karr BART and the New Era of Censorship I have spent most of the week poring over news stories, blogs and commentary on last week’s decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to shut off cellphone service to quash planned protests on its... Read more |
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David Bromwich Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency The Saved and the Sacked Read more |
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Sarah van Gelder Want Jobs? Rebuild the Dream Van Jones is leading a national mobilization to rebuild the middle class—through decent work, fair taxes, and opportunities for all. Read more |
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Michelle Chen Washington’s Anti-Regulatory Crusade, and Why Your Job Hasn’t Killed You Yet On the campaign trail, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is spreading the gospel of Perrynomics —a magical job-creation formula based on minimal government regulation of industry, combined... Read more |
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Juan Gonzalez Verizon Workers, Management Dig in for Decisive Labor Battle; 'This Is No Ordinary Strike' On the 10th day of the most important labor fight in America, striking Verizon worker Alexandra Camacho stood on a streetcorner in downtown Brooklyn and vowed to stay out as long as necessary. "They... Read more |
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Jake Olzen Occupation Nation? Sí, Se Puede! Bayard Rustin, long-time organizer and activist involved in the peace, civil rights, economic justice, gay rights, and African movements, envisioned a coalition of African-Americans and civil rights... Read more |
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Bruce Dixon Deported 1 Million, Separated Countless Families Since 2009, to Latinos Obama Is the Bait and Switch President In 2008, Latinos delivered a whopping two thirds of their vote to the candidate of Hope and Change, to Barack Obama, who opposed the building of border walls who spoke out against the politics of... Read more |
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Mark Weisbrot This Disastrous 'Debt Crisis' Myth The real risk of a new recession in the US and Europe comes not from debt, but by strangling growth with a fiscal tourniquet Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt The Pentagon Riding High China just launched a refitted Ukrainian aircraft carrier from the 1990s on its first test run -- and that’s what the only projected "great power" enemy of the U.S. has to offer for the foreseeable... Read more |
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Steven Hill Europe's Quiet Revolution The overarching challenge in the world today is: how do we advance the institutions and practices capable of enacting a desirable quality of life for a burgeoning global population of 6.5 billion... Read more |
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Ray McGovern Did Tenet Hide Key Info on 9/11? With few exceptions, like some salacious rumor about the Kennedy family, the mainstream U.S. news media has shown little interest in stories that throw light on history — even recent, very relevant... Read more |
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Linh Dinh Looting Frenzies: Thinking about the Federal Reserve while Nursing a Cheap Beer Hey, let’s go into McGlinchey’s, the cheapest bar in Center City. When I first entered this place in 1982, I was only 18, so to make myself look somewhat legal, I wore an old man jacket, bought at a... Read more |
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Robert Reich How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a... Read more |
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Lucinda Marshall Have an Individual Health Insurance Policy and Pre-Existing Conditions and You Want to Move? Good Luck With That I recently moved from Louisville, KY to the Washington, DC area. When you move, a certain amount of hassle is to be expected with such things as phone and cable service, getting new license plates,... Read more |
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Adam Ma'anit Oil Spill Exposes Shell's Ticking Timebomb The Gannet Alpha spill in the North Sea is a stark reminder of the dangers of ageing rigs and oil company PR Read more |
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Amy Goodman San Francisco Bay Area’s BART Pulls a Mubarak What does the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco have to do with the Arab Spring uprisings from Tunisia to Syria? The attempt to suppress the protests that followed. In our digitally... Read more |
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Bill McKibben A Watershed Moment for Obama on Climate Change Ain’t eBay grand? For $10 you can buy a sack of 50 assorted Obama ’08 buttons, and that’s what I’ve been doing. If you look closely, you might see them this weekend on the lapels of some of the... Read more |
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Amy Kroin AT&T Accidentally Tells Truth, Shoots Self in Foot Free Press and other opponents of the AT&T–T-Mobile merger had reason to cheer last week when a damning document AT&T filed with the FCC was accidentally posted on a public site. Read more |
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Robert Scheer The Biggest Little Hypocrite in Texas It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. The persistent appeal of the mythology of Texas as a model for the... Read more |
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Kristina Kallas, Akila Radhakrishnan Why Is the U.S. Waging War on Women Raped in War? Mandatory sonograms , forced lectures by doctors, humiliating permission slips from abusive husbands, paternalistic opinions from Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, uneducated and patently stupid... Read more |
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Jeff Biggers Profile in Courage: On Frontlines of Arizona Crisis, Mexican American Studies Director Sean Arce Teaches Nation an Enduring Lesson As Tucson Unified School District students returned to the classroom yesterday, the towering role of one education innovator is being championed by a broad spectrum of local students, parents,... Read more |
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Naomi Klein Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police... Read more |
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Thomas S. Harrington Ballots and Democracy: Big Media Is Just Not That Into It Last Saturday, we witnessed what has been regularly touted as one of the first big events of the 2012 campaign for the White House: the Iowa Straw Poll. The results of the poll were the following:... Read more |
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Medea Benjamin, Charles Davis Iraq Withdrawal? Don’t Take It to the Bank Since coming to Washington, Barack Obama has won a Nobel Prize for Peace, but he hasn't been much of a peacemaker. Instead, he has doubled down on his predecessor's wars while launching blatantly... Read more |
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Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg Warren Buffett’s Call: A Tax Policy for the Common Good Warren Buffett is calling. We need more wealthy folks to speak up for the common good. Read more |
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John Nichols FDR Went to Wisconsin to Battle 'Economic Royalists,' But Obama Avoids the State and the Fight President Obama is interrupting his long vacation to bus across the battleground states of the Midwest this week , on an officially “non-political” journey that his aides obviously hope will renew a... Read more |
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Gary Houser Tar Sands a Turning Point to Save Life? Historic Action to Stop Pipeline That May Push Climate Crisis Beyond Human Control Read more |
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Michael Nagler, Stephanie Van Hook Why Racism Doesn’t Die This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the... Read more |
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Amanda Hitt Truckers Play a Key Food Safety Role Many roads pave the way from farm to table. Read more |
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Chris Hellman How Safe Are You? What Almost $8 Trillion in National Security Spending Bought You The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly... Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt Terrror, American-Style Back in October 2003, when I posted Noam Chomsky’s “Cuba in the Crosshairs” at TomDispatch, I wrote: “Those of us of a certain age are unlikely to forget ‘the most dangerous moment in human history... Read more |
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Brendan Fischer ALEC: Facilitating Corporate Influence Behind Closed Doors Through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), corporations pay to bring state legislators to one place, sit them down for a sales pitch on policies that benefit the corporate bottom line... Read more |
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Thomas S. Harrington Tribalism Is Dead, Long Live the Tribe A month or so back, Americans gathered together with friends and family to celebrate the Fourth of July. Had an anthropologist from another planet been on hand to observe the event, she would have no... Read more |
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Norman Solomon Democrats Must Push Back The negative trends in the Nation's Capital are mostly due to extreme GOP ideologues in Congress. But they've been enabled by too many Democrats who keep giving ground while Republican leaders refuse... Read more |
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Jim Hightower Illegal Foreclosure Epidemic Robo-signing foreclosure paperwork is a federal crime, but no bank or banker has even been charged. Read more |
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Jeff Biggers Dear Soledad: Appalachian Leaders Respond to CNN's Blair Mountain Special on Mountaintop Removal With a mounting death toll and a 40-year rap sheet that marks it as our nation's most urgent health and humanitarian crisis , mountaintop removal mining is hardly a new issue. Read more |
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Dean Baker President Obama Joins the Cult of Economics Deniers President Obama has abandoned evidence-based economics to return the US to growth in favor of the politics of deficit-cutting Read more |
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Donna Smith How Many Dead Children for Profit? On the right is a photo of a dead child from Pakistan, Syed Wali Shah, 7, that Michael Moore’s site featured when showing the continued prospects of civilian deaths attributable to U.S. Read more |
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Martin Lukacs Canada's PR Work for Tar Sands: Dirty, Crude and Oily Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a... Read more |
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Matias Ramos Diplomas vs. Deportation Maryland is one of a handful of states helping young undocumented immigrants obtain a college education. Read more |
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Joel Federman The World Should Be Watching Tahrir Square Global media coverage of news from Egypt over the last week was focused on the trial of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It ignored--or gave only footnote status to--a more important... Read more |
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Subhankar Banerjee BPing the Arctic, Again — Fast Tracking Shell’s Dangerous Drilling One of the riskiest and most destructive extreme energy oil exploration projects on the planet is moving toward implementation without scientific understanding or technical preparedness — Shell’s oil... Read more |
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Paul Harris Matt Damon for President? In US Politics, They Have Seen Crazier Scripts The line between Hollywood fame and political power is often blurred, so suggestions that the liberal actor might run can't be dismissed Read more |
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Michelle Chen Famine Devastates Somalia in the Shadow of US Domination The famine in Somalia is a human tragedy on an unimaginable scale. But the loss of life depicted in the news reports masks other losses: there is the loss of shame—by the warring factions whose... Read more |
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial If US is Serious About Debt, There's a Single-Payer Solution If America truly is serious about dealing with its deficit problems, there's a fairly simple solution. But you're probably not going to like it: Enact a single-payer health care plan. See, we told... Read more |
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John Rehill The London Riots: Put on Your Seatbelt Main Street Dateline London: Over 1,200 arrested; 16,000 police, and the violence just moves to other towns. Children as young as 9 years old are being arrested by police. Prime Minister David Cameron says, "If... Read more |
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Brigid Delaney Hallelujah! We are Busting Out of Our Cocoons Dare we finally say good riddance to the Age of Atomization? AS FAR as trends go, this one was benignly vile. Cocooning - coined in the late 1980s, coming of age in the '90s and sticking around in... Read more |
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Caroline Arnold Silver Oaks and the Power of Predatory Capitalism Last month eviction notices to residents of Silver Oaks Place on the east side of Kent destroyed, in one swift blow, a 30-year old community of 250 senior citizens in their late 50s to early 90s... Read more |
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Michael Winship Big Business Has Been Very Very Good to Mitt Romney As the noted philosopher and rock and roll irritant David Lee Roth once said, "Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it." Read more |
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John Nichols Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It's Called 'Medicare for All' The essential vote on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that ruled that the individual-coverage mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform is unconstitutional did not come from a... Read more |
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Connie Schultz Are You Angry Enough to End a War? Keep cool, Daniel Webster once said. Anger is not an argument. Wise advice, but it sets an impossible standard if we reflect on the loss of 30 Americans in a single incident in Afghanistan. Perhaps... Read more |
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Mark Engler The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin The picket lines are up. This past weekend 45,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers... Read more |
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Robert Naiman To Live Within Our Means, Let's Leave Iraq Like We Promised The Senate and the Roman People have declared that the U.S. government is spending too much money. We have to live within our means. Difficult choices lie ahead. We can't do everything anyone might... Read more |
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Michelle Chen Target Comes Under Fire Around the World he retail giant Target is under fire from all sides, for union-busting at home and labor violations overseas. The reports that have come out in the past several weeks highlight a continuum of cruelty... Read more |
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Medea Benjamin Does Your Congressperson Represent You – or Israel? In this time of economic austerity, when jobs are being slashed and Americans are fearful about their future, the Congressional recess is the time for our elected representatives to be home in their... Read more |
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David Michael Green The Grubby Species Nobility is a bitch, and a real seductive one at that. I’m capable of some serious cynicism, but these days I kinda wish I had a lot more of it. I kinda wish I had born and raised in a more cynical... Read more |
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Peter Hart Drones in Pakistan: Equal Time for Killers? The New York Times has a long piece (8/12/11) looking at the question of how many civilians in Pakistan are killed by CIA drones. The agency doesn't even speak about the program on the record, except... Read more |
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Victoria Collier, Ronnie Cummins The Icebergs Cometh: Retaking USA Titanic Before the 2012 Elections In the wake of a super-nova of exploded hope in President Obama, a power vacuum is now spinning in our political universe. A desperate need to fill the void (lest it someday be filled with a babbling... Read more |
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Ameen Izzadeen Sandcastles of Capitalism Crumbling Karl Marx must be both happy and sad — happy because capitalism is crumbling and sad because it is not happening the way he thought it would in a revolution of the proletariat. When socialism, albeit... Read more |
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David Morris S&P Says Microsoft More Creditworthy than US Government Two days after Standard and Poor’s downgraded US government bonds, David Llewellyn-Smith, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald noted , “We now face the ludicrous circumstance in which the United... Read more |
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Ralph Nader Ray Anderson: Enlightened CEO and Environmentalist He took his position as the founder and CEO of Interface, the world's largest modular carpet manufacturing firm, and made environmental history that is extending into many sustainability commitments... Read more |
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David Sirota Collateral Damage in the War on Anonymity From warrantless wiretapping to ever-present surveillance cameras, our world is right now in the midst of a long war on anonymity. Read more |
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Curtis Roosevelt The Absent Commander-in-Chief: Who's in Charge Here? During World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt was commander-in-chief, I observed the president quite closely. I once joined him and Admiral William Leahy (first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)... Read more |
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Josh Ruebner Robbing Peter to Pay Israel Nearly 20 percent of the constituents of Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. Read more |
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Eva Galperin British Prime Minister Does a 180 on Internet Censorship After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security. In a speech... Read more |
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Noel Ortega The Tea Party Downgrade: Gambling America’s Future on Wall Street Securing our future means looking for real solutions to our economic woes, not looking to Wall Street. Read more |
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Phil Rockstroh Life in an Age of Looting: "Some Will Rob You with a Sixgun and Some with a Fountain Pen" As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in... Read more |
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Clive Stafford Smith The Civilian Victims of the CIA's Drone War A new study gives us the truest picture yet – in contrast to the CIA's own account – of drones' grim toll of 'collateral damage' Read more |
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Brian Evans The Ugly Business of Lethal Injection Attorneys trying to prevent the cruelty of a botched execution are challenging states' efforts to conduct experiments on their clients with new execution drugs. Read more |
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Kathy Kelly More Lost By the Second It’s a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I’m ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I’m recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh... Read more |
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Nathaniel Tapley An Open Letter to David Cameron’s Parents Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron, Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality? Read more |