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This week Comcast, which is fast becoming a monolith, purchased Time-Warner Cable. Comcast claims the deal does not reduce competition because the two companies serve different areas of the country. (In another decade, the argument was used by oil giants claiming the gas stations of purchased companies did not overlap with the buyer’s). For Comcast, Time-Warner brings with it the very important New York, Los Angeles and Dallas markets. Is not size by itself power?

We are already suffering the effects of the concentration of power: Access to the internet is the fastest with fiber-optic cable all the way to …

Some books exemplify the moment they are written about. These books, through the power of their narrative, provide a contextual ambience so real the reader becomes a part of the tale being told. Some such texts that come to mind are Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The engrossed reader of these two novels cannot separate themselves from the surf or the ship of Ishmael, Queegeeq and Captain Ahab. Nor can they view Kurtz’s jungle nightmare from a distance that might allow a dispassionate response. We are with Marlow in his …

“The white is hit harder by apartheid than we are. It narrows his life. In not regarding us as human, he becomes less than human. I do pity him,” said African National Congress president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Albert Luthuli when Studs Terkel met with him in South Africa in 1963. It was almost twenty years before Studs published his book, Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession, but Terkels’ meetings with South Africans had a tone that was similar to his 1992 book. His journey preceded the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against …

In a number of my articles I have explained that the Soviet Union served as a constraint on US power. The Soviet collapse unleashed the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony. Russia under Putin, China, and Iran are the only constraints on the neoconservative agenda.

Russia’s nuclear missiles and military technology make Russia the strongest military obstacle to US hegemony. To neutralize Russia, Washington broke the Reagan-Gorbachev agreements and expanded NATO into former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire and now intends to bring former constituent parts of Russia herself–Georgia and Ukraine–into NATO. Washington withdrew from the treaty that banned anti-ballistic …

It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing …  or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being …

RT is the best English language news source available to Americans. On January 29, RT published a photo of 5 presidential appointees lying through their teeth to Congress.

All five of these Gestapo wannabes are in violation of their oath of office to protect the Constitution of the United States. They have relentlessly violated the Constitution, which makes these five, who are in charge of US intelligence and black operations, traitors to the United States. Yet, they have not been arrested and put on trial. Congress is content to sit there and listen to their ongoing lies time after time …

The protests in the western Ukraine are organized by the CIA, the US State Department, and by Washington- and EU-financed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that work in conjunction with the CIA and State Department. The purpose of the protests is to overturn the decision by the independent government of Ukraine not to join the EU.

The US and EU were initially cooperating in the effort to destroy the independence of Ukraine and make it a subservient entity to the EU government in Brussels. For the EU government, the goal is to expand the EU. For Washington the purposes are to make Ukraine …

“When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head,” Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in her heartrending testimony.

Israa (not her real name) was arrested by US and Iraqi forces in 2010. She was tortured to the point of confessing to terrorist charges she didn’t commit. According to HRW’s “No One is Safe” – a 105-page report released in February 06 – there are thousands of Iraqi women in jail being subjected to similar practices, held with no charges, beaten and raped.

In Israa’s …

In October 2012, I was with a CODEPINK delegation in Pakistan meeting families impacted by US drone strikes. Kareem Khan, a journalist from the tribal area of Waziristan, told us the heartbreaking story of a drone strike that killed his son and brother. Since then, Khan has been seeking justice through the Pakistani courts and organizing other drone strike victims. On February 10, he planned to fly to Europe for meetings with German, Dutch and British parliamentarians to discuss the negative impact drones are having on Pakistan. But days before his trip, in the early hours of the morning on February 5, …

It is the great dilemma about democracy.  Left in certain hands, it can become a beastly thing.  America’s founders, notably James Adams, were suspicious of its vulgar appeal, its tendency to succumb to tyranny.  But is that the point of it?  Like free will, its existence is bound to put us on the path to doom and depravity at certain points in time.  Such independence comes with it the power of self harm.

Enter, then, the canton system in Switzerland, a country that has managed to combine a democratic system with a good deal of paranoia and knee-jerk populism.  What matters …

Schapelle Corby – and her relationship with a very specific part of Australian opinion – has been intense.  In 2004, she was arrested at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport in possession of 4.1 kilograms of marijuana.  She was found guilty of smuggling and sentenced to 20 years.  Harsh, yes, but the Indonesian state has made no secret of stiff sentences for drug convictions.  It is also worth noting that the judge presiding over the case, Linton Sirait, had not acquitted a single one of the 500 defendants standing trial on drug charges before him.

Families do as families always do in this …

The story told in Betty Medsger’s new book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI is a tale of a government drunk on its own power, some citizens determined to end the binge, and a time when heroes were not only made in sporting venues and the movies. It is about people putting their lives on the line in opposition to an encroaching police state and the men determined to imprison those people for their opposition.

On March 8, 1971, a group of eight antiwar activists broke into the FBI filed office in Media, Pennsylvania …

In the last week there were two major examples of how people-powered media can educate and mobilize people even if the mass corporate media does not report on an issue.  We now have the ability to educate each other and tell our narrative of what is occurring.  The movement is not dependent on the corporate media.

We are in the midst of an era of media transition. The corporate media is facing tremendous financial, employee, and audience challenges. At the root of their problem is credibility.  In 2004, Gallup reported that “39% currently say they have ‘not very much’ confidence …

At first glance, there is not much similarity between the young dictator of North Korea and the Prime Minister of Australia. But over a few drinks, Kim Jong-un and Tony Abbott might find a few points of similarity. One is the idea that a public broadcaster, by necessity, broadcasts the views of the government. The authoritarian mentality, by nature, demands conformity and consistency. The instinct is not alien to the Westminster system. Eventually, if certain agencies do not tow a distinct line, the life support, usually in the form of funding, is turned off.

In democracies, nominal or …

Michael Dowdy is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is the author of American Political Poetry into the 21st Century and a chapbook of poems, The Coriolis Effect. His latest book is Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013). As well as offering, according to the publisher, the first in-depth study of the diverse field of contemporary Latina/o poetry, Michael Dowdy also presents ecocritical readings into the environmental dimensions of current Latina/o poetics.

John Wisniewski: Why did you decide to write …