All Views Articles for 2016–08-23-dear
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CJ Werleman The American-Made Catastrophe in Yemen While US officials condemn Russian war crimes in Syria, the US-Saudi coalition in Yemen is committing the same - but the media is silent Read more |
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Ali Gharib What Tim Kaine Actually Got Wrong About the Iran Nuclear Deal During the Veep Debate Fact-checking the fact-checkers: Hillary Clinton didn’t help to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program because the talks weren’t about eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program because Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapons program at that time to eliminate. Read more |
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Glenn Greenwald U.S. Admits Israel is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime: Weeks After Giving it $38 Billion Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak explicitly warned in 2010 that Israel would become a permanent “apartheid” state if it failed to reach a peace agreement with Palestinians that creates their... Read more |
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Dror Ladin ACLU Lawyers Will Get to Question Ex-CIA Officials in Torture Case In a critical step towards accountability, a federal judge has ordered that former high-ranking CIA officials will have to sit for depositions in the lawsuit against the two psychologists who... Read more |
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Gyasi Ross Native Americans Need Hillary to Actually Be An Ally Against the Dakota Access Pipeline Ok, let’s state the obvious: Trump is bad for Native Americans. He’s bad for all people of color, really. He wants to stop Muslims from coming into this country, deport 11 million Mexicans, and put a... Read more |
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James Hansen 4 Reasons the Paris Agreement Won’t Solve Climate Change Many hail the Paris agreement —set to cross the threshold this week to come into effect—as a panacea for global climate change . Yet tragically, this perspective neglects to take into account the... Read more |
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Robert C. Koehler The Politics of Fear “This politics of fear has actually delivered everything we were afraid of.” Well, OK, let’s think about these words of Jill Stein for a moment, as the 2016 presidential race enters, oh Lord, its... Read more |
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Deborah Burger How to Cut Drug Prices? California Can Set a Model With Prop. 61 Despite all the disgust with pharmaceutical price gouging and the public shaming of CEOs like Heather Bresch of EpiPen infamy and “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, we’ve yet to see any concrete steps to... Read more |
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Robert Parry Dangerous New ‘Group Think’ for War with Syria/Russia Official Washington has a new 'group think' that is even more dangerous than the one that led to the Iraq War. This one calls for U.S. escalation of conflicts against Syria and nuclear-armed Russia. Read more |
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Mark Schuller Hurricane Matthew in Haiti: Looking Beyond the Disaster Narrative Well-meaning people have either emailed or texted me over the past couple of days, with some variant of “how are things going in Haiti?” Short of people’s prayers, and the question, “is everyone you... Read more |
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Alli McCracken Are U.S.-Saudi Relations Finally Souring? Pressure from human rights organizations like Oxfam to victims of the 9/11 attacks are helping erode the bond between these old political allies, but the results of this election season could squander our chance at change. Read more |
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John Russo, Sherry Linkon ‘Rich Enough To Forget My Name’: Springsteen, Trump and the Democratic Party If Democrats and the media had listened to the people whose lives Springsteen sings about, they might understand where their white working-class voters have gone. Read more |
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Isaiah Poole Amid “Men Yelling Indistinctly” At VP Debate, Shards Of Substance The vice-presidential debate Tuesday night was rated by some commentators as generating more heat than light. At times, that certainly seemed true when watching Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike... Read more |
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Ezra Silk The Climate Emergency and the Election: A Pathway to WWII-Scale Mobilization This week I will turn 28, and thoughts of the future are weighing heavily on my mind. Clinging to the idea of a relatively stable future, people encourage me to get real, grow up, and focus on myself... Read more |
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Jake Johnson 'Either We Destroy War or It Will Destroy Us': Happy Birthday, Philip Berrigan In 1997, at the age of 73, Philip Berrigan, accompanied by five others, arrived at the shipyard of Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. It was early — just past four in the morning — and there was much... Read more |
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Andrew Crocker, Mark Rumold Yahoo Email Surveillance: the Next Front in the Fight Against Mass Surveillance In a bombshell published Tuesday, Reuters reports that, in 2015, Yahoo complied with an order it received from the U.S. government to search all of its users’ incoming emails, in real time. There’s... Read more |
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Ted Gup Another Deadly Drone Mistake: At What Point Do We Say Enough? It was an obscure item last week that drew little media attention. An apartment building in Afghanistan’s remote Nangarhar province was apparently hit by an American drone strike, killing at least... Read more |
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Robert Borosage Why Is This Election So Close? It’s the populism, stupid. Read more |
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Trevor Timm Yahoo May Have Let the Government Spy on Emails. Now Will We Embrace Encryption? Not only would this likely violate the fourth amendment; giving the NSA or the FBI a backdoor into a tech company’s innards could let hackers in too Read more |
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Mobashra Tazamal If US Victims of Terror Can Sue Saudi Arabia, Can Victims of American Terrorism Sue the US? The 9/11 bill's passage - and the rejection of another to halt arms sales to Saudi - should raise questions about what is really motivating politicians Read more |
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Joel K. Goldstein Why the Vice Presidential Debate Matters Tim Kaine and Mike Pence have only one chance to audition for a job that has grown increasingly more important. Read more |
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Katrina vanden Heuvel How to Get Justice After the Wells Fargo Scandal Wells Fargo’s abuse of its customers — its employees opened some 2 million accounts and credit cards for depositors who may not have wanted them — has sparked deserved outrage. Sen. Elizabeth Warren... Read more |
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Alexander Zaitchik No, Hillary, Young Voters Aren't Naive. The System Doesn't Work for Them Clinton thinks Bernie Sanders supporters, who live in their ‘parents’ basements’, don’t know any better. That’s a dangerous blind spot Read more |
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Bill Bigelow Support Indigenous Rights: Abolish Columbus Day The movement to abolish Columbus Day and to establish in its place Indigenous Peoples Day continues to gather strength, as every month new school districts and colleges take action. This campaign has... Read more |
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Bernie Sanders Four Reasons to Say "NO" to Donald Trump Too much of the media is looking at this presidential race as if it were a “Dancing With the Stars” contest, a World Series or the Super Bowl. It’s not. As people well know Hillary Clinton and I had... Read more |
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Andrew Bacevich What We Talk About When We Don’t Want to Talk About Nuclear War Donald and Hillary take a 'No-First-Use' pledge on relevant information Read more |
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Ramzy Baroud Israel’s Nuclear Man: Shimon Peres, A Brand without Substance Former Israeli Prime Minister and President, Shimon Peres, was a very successful brand. He was presented to the world as stately, wise, a relentless advocate of peace , and a sane voice amidst a... Read more |
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Michael Winship La Guardia’s the Name and Boy, Could We Use Him Now Like Donald Trump, Fiorello La Guardia was supremely self-confident and brash, and loved publicity. But unlike Trump, this Republican backed up his big talk with action and genuine concern for his constituents. Read more |
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Salil Shetty Tackling the Global Refugee Crisis: Sharing, Not Shirking Responsibility On September 19, 2016, the United Nations General Assembly collectively, and spectacularly, failed the 21 million refugees of this world Read more |
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Nozomi Hayase WikiLeaks, 10 Years of Pushing the Boundaries of Free Speech “To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is… that’s what marks us off from the stones and stars.” These are words spoken by Mario Savio, the... Read more |
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Robert Parry Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia? The U.S. propaganda war against Russia is spinning out of control, rolling ever faster downhill with a dangerous momentum that threatens to drive the world into a nuclear showdown Read more |
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Michel Paradis What’s Driving the Passion Behind JASTA? In all the debate over the Justice Against Sponsored Terrorism Act (JASTA), the hardest argument to ignore has been from the victims of the September 11th attack. The moral and political clout of... Read more |
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Chris Hedges In Latin America, The Empire Strikes Back A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin... Read more |
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John Nichols Dopey Donald Trump Can’t Figure Out Why AFL-CIO Members Aren’t Showing Up at His Rallies The Republican nominee is discovering that running on “the most anti-worker, anti-union platform of any party in the history of the United States” might turn off union members. Read more |
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Conn Hallinan US Diplomacy and Interventionism in the Age of Endless War Is the United States on the verge of enshrining humanitarian intervention as a bedrock principle of foreign policy? Read more |
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Joanne Lin, Carl Takei Homeland Security Must Stop Using Private Prisons for Immigration Detention. Here’s How to Do It. This August, the Justice Department made history when it announced that the Bureau of Prisons would curtail — and eventually end — its use of private prisons. As the Justice Department noted, this... Read more |
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Christopher Stokes One Year After Kunduz: Battlefields Without Doctors, in Wars Without Limits Today, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is remembering one of the darkest moments in its history. On 3 October 2015, U.S. airstrikes killed 42 people and destroyed the MSF trauma hospital in Kunduz,... Read more |
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Paul Buchheit Three Reasons a New President Won't Help America. One Way She or He Could. There are at least three major American failures that are too entrenched in our society to undergo change with anything less than an FDR-type effort. Corporations Continue to Ignore Their... Read more |
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Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Obama Warned to Defuse Tensions with Russia, Avert Wider War in Syria Veterans of the intelligence community call on president to defuse growing tensions with Russia over Syria by reining in the demonization of President Putin and asserting White House civilian control over the Pentagon Read more |
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Karen Greenberg Liberty Is Security: The Lesson Not Drawn From 9/11 How government overreach does not keep us safe Read more |
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Jake Johnson If Nature Is Sacred, Capitalism Is Wicked In his remarkable study When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten recounts a meeting he attended ahead of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil... Read more |
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Robert Reich The Real Scandal of Trump Paying No Taxes According to the New York Times , Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 tax returns – which could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for 18 years. The... Read more |
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Rick Salutin Does Anyone Know Who Really Won That Debate? In politics, we tend to see what we want or need to. You’re looking for an outcome, yearning for it. Read more |
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Marjorie Cohn Trump's Blindness Toward Slavery, Jim Crow Donald Trump’s remarkable comments about American blacks never being worse off demonstrated a stunning ignorance of or callousness toward the grotesque evils of slavery and Jim Crow Read more |
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Natasha Lennard Five Years After the Brooklyn Bridge Arrests, the Occupy Wall Street Worth Remembering Occupy Wall Street didn’t begin for me on September 17, 2011. I was there when Zuccotti Park was first claimed by activists and the encampment began, but I didn’t see much potential that first day on... Read more |
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Bill Blum A Crippled Supreme Court Awaits an Election in Which Hillary Clinton Is the Lesser Evil As the Supreme Court begins its new term on Oct. 3, an old adage comes to mind. It was first penned by the satirist Finley Peter Dunne in 1901. Purged of its original Irish brogue, the saying... Read more |
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Chuck Collins Trump Was Born on Third Base The stories politicians tell about their successes matter—including the ones they omit. Read more |
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Steven Singer You Can’t Be Anti-Opt Out and Pro-Democracy Our lawmakers have a problem. This summer they doubled down on one of the most anti-democratic mandates in the federal repertoire yet they claim they did so to protect states rights. Here’s the... Read more |
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Ben Case Why the National Anthem Protests Can’t be Silenced Since Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, began sitting for the national anthem during the National Football League’s preseason, national anthem protests have surged into the... Read more |
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Peter Certo Clinton’s Surprising Debate Stumble on Trade Bad trade deals created the social rot Trump is exploiting today. Why does Hillary defend them? Read more |
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Guy Taylor TTIP May be Dead, But We’re Still Facing TTIP by the Back Door The architects of the current wave of trade deals have embarked on a desperate ploy to salvage something from the death of their flagship treaty. Sacrificing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment... Read more |
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Michael Butler Why is the U.S. Big Pharma lobby Sponsoring a Conference on the Future of Health Care in Canada? Over the past two days a major health care summit has occurred in Ottawa at the Chateau Laurier Hotel. The summit, titled “A New Health Accord for All Canadians,” is a partnership between the Canada... Read more |
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Adam Johnson Big Papers Want Foreign Companies, Not War Crime Victims, to Sue US The editorial boards of the US’s four most influential newspapers joined President Barack Obama in opposition to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a bill that makes suing Saudi Arabia... Read more |
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Winona LaDuke Slow, Clean, Good Food In an impressive fossil fuels travel day, I left the Standing Rock reservation and flew to Italy for the International Slow Food gathering known as Terra Madre. A world congress of harvesters,... Read more |
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Christopher Brauchli New Best Friends Sticks and stones can break my bones But words can never hurt me. A child’s reply to a taunt It was a truly heart-warming couple of days-the rapprochement of two former bitter rivals, one of whom, in... Read more |
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Kathy Kiely Doing What the Feds Won’t on Corporate Political Disclosure A tiny Washington nonprofit is trying to do what Congress and the SEC won't. Read more |
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Ray McGovern Russia-Baiting and Risks of Nuclear War 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 Read more |
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Shaun King Here is How We Will Boycott Injustice and Police Brutality in America Last Thursday, I wrote a column on the need for us to add a serious, creative, long-term, nationwide economic boycott to our strategy on how to combat police brutality, racial violence and systemic... Read more |
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Jay Walljasper How to Make City Streets More Friendly A bottom-up St. Paul project changes how people feel about their city Read more |
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Nomi Prins Jail Wells Fargo CEO and Chairman John Stumpf! Stumpf's actions were not merely "unethical" — they were criminal. And in the current system, he'll not only get away with it, he'll profit more than handsomely. Read more |
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Lornet Turnbull How Oregon Became the Easiest Place to Vote in America Charles Tso is an urban planner who moved to Portland, Ore., from California more than a year ago. An avid biker, the 26-year-old doesn’t own a car and seldom drives. So when he went to his local... Read more |
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Murray Dobbin 'The World Must Jettison Neoliberal Ideology': A Globalization Wake-Up Call If recent mainstream economic reports are to be taken seriously, some of the big brains managing global capitalism these days are starting to lose faith in their neoliberal ideology . Some come close... Read more |
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Roger Bybee Don’t Believe What You Read: People Really Do Care about Free Trade President Barack Obama is apparently dead set on a last-minute passage of the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership t h a t would e n h a n c e t h e p o w e r o f gigantic g l o b a l c o r p o r... Read more |
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Carl Pope 18 Reasons Why We Must Invest in America's Infrastructure In Monday's debate , Hillary Clinton pledged to spend $275 billion investing in America's infrastructure. Donald Trump doubled down, promises lots more. On Tuesday the Senate failed to pass a bill to... Read more |
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Jim Naureckas When Is Direct Military Intervention Not Direct Military Intervention? “President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria,” the New York Times asserted in an editorial ( 9/29/16 ) about “Vladimir Putin’s Outlaw State.” That’s a peculiar... Read more |
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Kenneth Pennington We Need Small Donors to Halt the March to Plutocracy Presidential candidates can’t just attend intimate gatherings with America’s richest to raise money. Bernie Sanders showed that another way is possible Read more |
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Kevin Martin US at the Crossroads: Start a New Nuclear Arms Race? Or Address Climate Change and Human Needs? What if I have little time left? How should I spend my time? Most people face these questions in terms of their own lifespans. But what if the subject of these sentences changes from “I” to “we?”... Read more |
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Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan Striking Prisoners Are Bending the Arc of the Moral Universe Closer to Justice Grass-roots organizing, the hard work of building movements, can be grueling. Pay is often low or nonexistent. Success is never assured. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe... Read more |
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Sonali Kolhatkar Ten Things That Should Have Come Up During the Debate But Didn’t It seems as though we dread elections in the United States. Over several past races, only 50 percent to 60 percent of eligible voters have cast their ballots. More and more Americans are tuning out... Read more |
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Alastair Crooke How the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists The West blames Russia for the bloody mess in Syria, but U.S. Special Forces saw close up how the chaotic U.S. policy of aiding Syrian jihadists enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS to rip Syria apart Read more |
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Dean Baker Economists Keep Getting It Wrong Because the Media Coverup Their Mistakes Most workers suffer serious consequences when they mess up on their jobs. Custodians get fired if the toilet is not clean. Dishwashers lose their job when they break too many dishes, but not all... Read more |
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Dave Johnson The Missed Opportunity On Trade – And What We Must Do Next The candidates discussed “trade” for a few minutes during the first presidential debate on Monday. Once again the opportunity for a meaningful dialogue on an important issue slipped away. Where do we... Read more |
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Josh Bivens Freeing Corporate Profits from Their Fair Share of Taxes Is Not the Deal America Needs There’s obviously plenty to criticize regarding Donald Trump’s claims and characterizations about the problems facing the U.S. economy during last night’s debate. But one thing that stuck out clearly... Read more |
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John Feffer The Lost Language of Integration Has society let go of the belief that disparate communities can be brought together for a common goal without one absorbing the other or both tearing each other apart? Read more |
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Jeff Bryant Elizabeth Warren Clarifies The Charter Schools Debate Are charter schools a “progressive” idea for education? Some progressive sources would have you think so, but other progressives have challenged that framing. This week, Massachusetts news outlets... Read more |
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Robert C. Koehler The Debate: They Both Bombed It Painful, stupid, trite . . . America! There was more than one loser in the big debate, but that’s no surprise. I hardly expected any issues of substance to get serious air time, let alone intelligent... Read more |
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Donna Smith The Human Calculus: Political Futures vs. Human Life on the Colorado Ballot Not long after I moved back to Colorado in early 2013, I met a young, up and coming state legislator named Crisanta Duran. She was awarded the Health Care for All Colorado “Health Care Hero” award... Read more |
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Jeremy Brecher Dakota Access Pipeline and the Future of American Labor As United States Energy Transfers Partners began building the Dakota Access Pipeline through territory sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the tribe began an escalating campaign against the... Read more |
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Nomi Prins Trump's Future Piggy Bank, Our Country? How Trump’s conflicts of interest could become ours Read more |
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Jake Johnson Movements, Not Presidents: The Nationwide Fight Against Neoliberalism Just months after becoming president of the United States, Barack Obama met with some of the world's most powerful executives. It was a time of crisis : The economy was wavering dangerously in the... Read more |
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Stephen Zunes Millennial Apathy and a Possible President Trump Despite the widely recognized shellacking of Donald Trump by Hillary Clinton in Monday night’s debate, polls show that the presidential race remains surprisingly and disturbingly close. There are a... Read more |
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Sarah Jaffe Standing Firm at Standing Rock: Why the Struggle is Bigger Than One Pipeline For indigenous people, the fight to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline is about reviving a way of life. Read more |
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David Morris Memo for Armchair Strategists: Four Key Factors for Election Day The system indeed is rigged, but that doesn't mean there won't be a winner Read more |
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Kevin Gosztola Letter From CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Details Federal Prison’s Scandalous Treatment Shadowproof Editor’s Note: Concerned with the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ failure to provide medical treatment and their indifference toward CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s heart problems,... Read more |
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Frances Moore Lappé, Adam Eichen The Presidential Debate Missed the Biggest Issue Getting money out of politics gets bipartisan support, so why not go for a mandate? Getting money out of politics gets bipartisan support, so why not go for a mandate? Read more |
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Ben White Shimon Peres: Israeli War Criminal Whose Victims the West Ignored Shimon Peres, who passed away Wednesday aged 93 after suffering a stroke on 13 September, epitomised the disparity between Israel’s image in the West and the reality of its bloody, colonial policies... Read more |
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Jim Hightower Laboratories of Democracy and the Mad Scientists of the Right In a 1932 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted that the benefit of America's federal structure is that "a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a... Read more |
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John Russo, Sherry Linkon Hillary Clinton Needs To Declare the Trade War Lost She'll have more credibility if she doesn't try to convince voters they're better off than they are. Read more |
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Michael Winship A Good Night for Hillary Clinton Worries that Trump would bulldoze his opponent into submission were unfounded. Read more |
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Adam Johnson Lester Holt Asks Zero Questions About Poverty, Abortion, Climate Change Presidential debates do as much to illustrate corporate media priorities as they do to showcase the candidates. They provide a snapshot into what the media, in this case represented by NBC ’s Lester... Read more |
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Ed Kilgore Hillary Clinton Won the First Debate. What If That Doesn’t Move the Polls? So, after immense anticipation and much back-and-forth argument over the standards for judging the candidates’ performance, the winner of the first presidential debate of the general election was not... Read more |
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Karen Hansen-Kuhn Seeds of Corporate Power vs Farmers’ Rights We need to start tilting the playing field back in favor of farmers and the environment. Read more |
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Robert Parry Clinton Toned Down Her Hawkishness Hillary Clinton’s strongest point in Monday’s debate may have been what she didn’t say, as she avoided a return to her hawkish rhetoric that has alienated many anti-war Democrats Read more |
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Katrina vanden Heuvel Trump’s Falsehoods on Election Rigging Are at Odds With Reality Even before he walked onto the debate stage Monday night at Hofstra University, Donald Trump was complaining that his first head-to-head contest with Hillary Clinton was not fair. “The system is... Read more |
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Nick Turse Killing People, Breaking Things, and America's Winless Wars Win, Lose, or Draw: How U.S. Special Operations Command details dismal U.S. military record Read more |
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Tom Engelhardt War to the Horizon... It's the American Way It’s the timing that should amaze us (were anyone to think about it for 30 seconds). Let’s start with the conflict in Afghanistan, now regularly described as the longest war in American history. It... Read more |
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Adam Parsons Standing in Solidarity for a Humanity Without Borders Much has been made of the basic unfairness in how responsibility is shared between nations for ameliorating the refugee crisis. But the real question is the level of economic sharing that is needed to deal with its root causes, when the international response continues to be woefully inadequate. Read more |
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Juan Cole The Presidential Debate That Did Not Really Happen Regular readers will know that in my view the 2016 presidential election did not happen. Likewise, the first debate between the two candidates did not take place. There was no debate as the word is... Read more |
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Peter Van Buren Does Free College Threaten Our All-Volunteer Military? Does free college threaten our all-volunteer military? That is what writer Benjamin Luxenberg, on military blog War on the Rocks says. But the real question goes deeper than Luxenberg’s practical... Read more |
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Michael Winship The Tracks of John Boehner’s Tears The former speaker of the House left Capitol Hill last year, but not for long. He's back as a star player for the lobbying industry and making a ton of cash. Read more |