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The Moral Force of OWS is Tackling the Devastating War on the Poor

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Frances Fox Piven - Nov. 07 (News Analysis) - We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. ... The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

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Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn't Work

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Steve Fraser, Joshua B. Freeman, - Sep. 12 (News Analysis) - In the coming years, might we see the return of a basic American horror at the phenomenon of joblessness? And might it drive Americans to begin to ask deeper questions about the system that lives and feeds on it? After all, we now exist in an under-developing economy. What new jobs it is creating are poor paying, low skill, and often temporary, nor are there enough of them to significantly reduce the numbers of those out of work. The 99ers are stark evidence that we may be witnessing the birth of a new permanent class of the marginalized.

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BPing the Arctic?

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Subhankar Banerjee - May. 25 (Special Report) - If you’ve been following the increasing ecological devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about -- and protest -- Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.

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The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Michael T. Klare - May. 20 (Opinion) - Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil , a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we're entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.

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A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won't): In Washington-Speak, "Palestinian State" Means "Fried Chicken"

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

chomsky.info - By Noam Chomsky - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders -- with "minor and mutual modifications," to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.

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An American World of War

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt & Nick Turse - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - So, let's pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are: the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth. Let's peer into the future, and consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010. Here are 10 questions, the answers to which might offer reasonable hints as to just how much U.S. war efforts are likely to intensify in the Greater Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia, in the year to come.

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Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Bill McKibben - Dec. 06 (Opinion) - the Copenhagen talks that open this week, almost no matter what happens, will be a disaster. Because climate change is not like any other issue we’ve ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face -- adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics. Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet.

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Red Snow Warning

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward, - Sep. 14 (Special Report) - Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

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Measuring Success in Afghanistan

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - The problem was that none of the official metrics managed to measure what mattered most in Vietnam. History may not simply repeat itself, but there's good reason to look askance at whatever set of metrics the Obama administration manages to devise. After all, as in the Vietnam years, Obama's people, too, will be mustering numbers in search of "success"; they, too, will be measuring "progress." And those numbers -- like the Vietnam era body counts -- will have to come up from below (with all the attendant pressures). By the time they reach Washington, they are likely to have the best possible patina on them.

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Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Juan Cole - Jul. 28 (Special Report) - Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.

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Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Ann Jones - Jul. 17 (News Analysis) - Fixer is the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan -- so good it's hard to imagine a better one. It's all jagged edges, blurs, and disconnects, catching as it does both the forbidding emptiness of the land and the edginess of war-weary Afghans. One long segment, apparently showing the inside of Parenti's shawl as he conceals a camera from potentially hostile villagers, seems the visual correlative of the feeling that unsettles all outsiders from time to time in this country: the sense of being completely in the dark. In 2006-2007, as the Taliban surged back with kidnappings, murders, bombs, and jihadi suicide attacks, this is how Afghanistan felt. It's the feeling that still drives Hesco sales in the capital.

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Too Big to Fail

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - In nature, nothing is too big to fail. In fact, big is bound to fail. To understand why that's so means stepping away from a prevailing set of beliefs that holds us in its sway, especially the deep conviction that we operate apart from nature's limits and rules.

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Is This Last Gasp for the Israel Lobby and the Neocons?

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Dreyfuss - Mar. 16 (News Analysis) - Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared? Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel lobby's Waterloo. Let's recap. On February 19th, Laura Rozen reported at ForeignPolicy.com that Freeman had been selected by Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, to serve in a key post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC, the official in-house think tank of the intelligence community, takes input from 16 intelligence agencies and produces what are called "national intelligence estimates" on crucial topics of the day as guidance for Washington policymakers. For that job, Freeman boasted a stellar resumé: fluent in Mandarin Chinese, widely experienced in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and an ex-assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. A wry, outspoken iconoclast, Freeman had, however, crossed one of Washington's red lines by virtue of his strong criticism of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Over the years, he had, in fact, honed a critique of Israel that was both eloquent and powerful. Hours after the Foreign Policy story was posted, Steve Rosen, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched what would soon become a veritable barrage of criticism of Freeman on his right-wing blog.

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The Afghan Scam

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Ann Jones - Jan. 12 (Special Report) - the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it "liberated," Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They're all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.

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Body Count Nation

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Englehardt - Jan. 07 (Opinion) - Looked at another way, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars to date (but sure to be in the multi-trillions when all is said and done), Bush's mad "global war" simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a small fry.

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Who Are the Taliban? The Afghan War Deciphered

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Anand Gopal - Dec. 10 (Special Report) - Almost every suicide attack and kidnapping is attributed to "the Taliban." In reality, however, the insurgency is far from monolithic.

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Wrecked Iraq What the Good News from Iraq Really Means

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Michael Schwartz - Oct. 27 (Investigative Report) - In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land.

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The Pentagon's Stealth Corporations

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Nick Turse - Jun. 25 (Special Report) - Then there's a select group that are masters of the universe in the ever-expanding military-corporate complex, regularly scoring more than a billion tax dollars a year from the Department of Defense. Unlike Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, however, most of these billion-dollar babies manage to fly beneath the radar of media (not to mention public) attention. If appearing at all, they generally do so innocuously in the business pages of newspapers. When it comes to their support for the Pentagon's wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are, in media terms, missing in action. So, who are some of these mystery defense contractors you've probably never heard of? Here are snapshot portraits, culled largely from their own corporate documents, of five of the Pentagon's secret billion-dollar babies:

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Uranium Frenzy in the West

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward - Jun. 20 (Special Report) - The giant mining conglomerate, Phelps Dodge, recently acquired the mineral rights to national forest land in Colorado for just over $100,000. The company expects to extract $9 billion in molybdenum from the land. If, to speculators, the prospect of mega-profits is like sex, the Mining Act of 1872 has always been their Viagra. To add insult to injury, the Act makes taxpayers responsible for any clean-up of the land after the mining companies are through extracting its mineral wealth.

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Tomgram: Why We Can't See America's Ziggurats in Iraq

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By tom englehardt - Jun. 16 (Special Report) - by now, billions have evidently gone into single massive mega-bases like the u.s. air base in balad, about 60 miles north of baghdad......

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The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Michael Klare - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - A viable long-term approach to actual energy security would not favor one particular source of energy -- in this case, oil -- above all others, or regularly expose American soldiers to a heightened risk of harm and American taxpayers to a heightened risk of bankruptcy. Rather, an American energy policy that made sense would embrace a holistic approach to energy procurement, weighing the relative merits of all potential sources of energy.

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Shocking Bush 'Pep Talk' to His War Cabinet on Iraq: 'We Are Going to Wipe Them out!'

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt - Jun. 02 (News Report) - "Kill them." Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's memoirs contain a transcript from a bloodthirsty and over the top private speech by Bush.

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Noam Chomsky, Terrorists Wanted the World Over

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt, Noam Chomsky - Feb. 26 (Opinion) - On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden." Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world." The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters).

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Making Iraq Disappear

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt - Feb. 20 (Opinion) - When it comes to those who make the media decisions at home, however, they have practically clamored for the Bush administration to put them in a coffin-like box and saw it in half. Thanks to their news choices, Iraq has for months been whisked deep inside most papers and into the softest sections of network and cable news programs. Only one Iraq subject has gotten significant front-page attention: How much "success" has the President's surge strategy had?

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The War against Women Never Ends

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Ann Jones - Feb. 17 (Special Report) - And here's a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the "post-conflict" era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do. So I'm writing to you, here in "post-conflict" West Africa, from an active war zone. I'm writing from the heart of the war against women and children.

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