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General Buchanan,

You have it within your power to set the sentence for Bradley Manning.

I am a former military officer having served two tours of duty in Vietnam. I recall my oath of office to uphold the Constitution. It is not an oath to support any particular group of people, or a gang of criminals exercising authority outside Constitutional boundaries. What kind of country would we live in if political and military leaders could do what they wished while suppressing public information and without legal restraint? Bradley Manning has, in my opinion, bravely risked his life and freedom as a …

What enduring image bespeaks hallowed American exceptionalism – greatness fortified by immigrant labor – than Melting Pot? “Come, you poor, tired, huddled masses: acclimate, pitch in, and enjoy your share of Yankee treasure.” And scattered voyagers en masse exploited New World opportunities, by choice (fabled settlers, immigrants), indenture (poor whites), slavery (black, Native American, others) or conquest (southwest Hispanics).

Who said functional melting pots need volition or equivalence in transport or starting gates?  Drafted armies coalesce just like musicians at a jam session. Prosperity did (and does) bless scores of immigrants, some fat cats commanding wealth beyond dreams of avarice (a …

With the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship already under siege over the treatment of refugees in detention camps, deaths in custody, and the abandonment of the principals of the UN Convention on refugees in regards to boat people, another disturbing aspect of the department’s handling of its portfolio is emerging with the recent appointment of VFS Global as the sole processing partner of visa applications for entry into Australia.

This appointment process of VFS appears to have been undertaken very quietly without the usual press releases accompanying a major policy decision. The lack of transparency in this agreement is dubious …

Papers arrived: The Law. Prose of imperative be-ribboned in fey grammar.  Trickle-down discourse barked in the language of command; written, copied, distributed as far and wide as the global jurisdiction of Their rockets.  Even the same old same is not the same as it was – or seemed.

Watch the News. See Their SWAT teams bust erstwhile “hard-working, law-abiding” citizens — who still assume, poor saps, that as “citizens” crammed into the warped belly of this Trojan Horse, they’re “entitled” to some godforsaken damn thing or other — America! America! America! (said with a straight face).

Shoot ‘em and abuse ‘em unto …

Just recently, in late July, Wells Fargo surpassed the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) as the world’s largest bank by market capitalization. This followed Wells Fargo reporting a 19% increase in profits over the second quarter as the bank has been busy consolidating the housing market while other big banks have retreated from it. Wells Fargo had amassed a share of almost 40% of the U.S. mortgage market by early 2013.

Now, let’s put this in context with the company’s other recent activities.

Wells Fargo, which acquired Wachovia in the wake of the financial crisis, controlled roughly 28.8% of …

A holding company is the people you give your money to while you’re being searched.
— Will Rogers

Everybody talks about capitalism but nobody has done anything about it, recently. Except maybe for Richard D. Wolff, in a long interview with David Barsamian, resulting in a book called “Occupy The Economy: Challenging Capitalism.” That may make sense because in the last couple of years we’ve occupied just about everything else.

A strange thing happened on the way out of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt actually saved capitalism by trashing it. Well, not entirely. Roosevelt enacted legislation to hobble the destructive tendency of capitalism’s …

Recently Simon Blackburn, the well known British philosopher, reviewed Knowing Right from Wrong, the new book by Kieran Setiya, in the TLS [“Taliban and Plato” TLS July 19, 2013]. The essay deals with Setiya’s attempt to defend ethical realism (objective moral knowledge is possible) which Blackburn rejects in favor of ethical pragmatism (useful moral knowledge is possible). I think neither of these positions are tenable and the best way to approach ethics is from a Marxist perspective.

Blackburn begins with Plato’s position in the Republic: the Good can only be understood by those intellectually elite philosophers who rule …

IPS — Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.

Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.

The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a July 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply …

When the Occupiers took an interest in moving San Francisco’s money into a city-owned bank in 2011, it was chiefly on principle, in sympathy with the nationwide Move Your Money campaign.  But recent scandals have transformed the move from a political statement into a matter of protecting the city’s deposits and reducing its debt burden.  The chief roadblock to forming a municipal bank has been the concern that it was not allowed under state law, but a legal opinion issued by Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now overcome that obstacle.

Establishing a city-owned San Francisco Bank is not a …

When I left Gaza for the first time on my own, twenty some years ago, I was warned of a notorious officer who headed Egypt’s State Security Intelligence at the Rafah border. He “hates Palestinians,” I was told.

My friends and neighbors in Gaza warned me not to greet him with ‘Assalamu Alaikum’ – peace be upon you – if that particular officer were to be on duty on that day. Yes, the officer also hated any reference to Islam, even the very greeting.

When I entered the mukhabrat office, I was startled by his presence. He was a very large, clean-shaven …

The headline juxtaposition boggles the mind. You have, “Detroit Files Largest Municipal Bankruptcy in History” on one day. Then you have “Detroit Plans to Pay For New Red Wings Hockey Arena Despite Bankruptcy ” on the next.

Yes, the very week Michigan Governor Rick Snyder granted a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to declare the Motor City bankrupt, the Tea Party governor gave a big thumbs up to a plan for a new $650 million Detroit Red Wings hockey arena. Almost half of that $650 million will be paid with public funds.

This is actually happening. City services are being cut …

Over fifty years ago, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite (1956), in which he described how the “command posts” of U.S. society had become interlocking, intertwined–and interchangeable. This cadre of elite-managers and investors not only utilized the federal government for their interests, but periodically occupied the actual executive positions in the government (and/or military) from which policies favorable to their interests could be more directly implemented.

Even then, back in the Fifties, this was certainly not a new phenomenon in the U.S. For instance, a century ago, oil/finance mogul Paul Mellon “served” as Treasury …

Settlers enjoyed a seeming free permission: to dispossess natives at will of all the best land, turn them out of traditional fishing locations, disrespect elders, women, children and religion, leave whole communities without political representation and punish men for breaking laws which they could have no means of knowing existed. It was inconceivable that all this change could happen overnight without violence. Instead, there was the greatest imaginable violence: genocide.

— Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening

The charge of genocide in the colonial-imperialistic dispossession of the Original Peoples of Turtle Island, in particular the northern landmass designated Canada by the dispossessors, is …

The rich get richer; the poor get children.

— Author unknown

During 2012, in the United States, a strange thing happened. For the first time in history, fewer white babies were born than the total of black, brown, yellow, red and beige babies. Another first for that group of little white privileged squalling brats was that fewer of them were born than there were old white geezers who died. Blame that, if you will, on our immigration policy — uncertain and hesitant as it is — or perhaps cite the demographic contraceptive fact that as people …

I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it.

The film’s contention is that Assange is a natural-born egotist and, however noble his initial project, Wikileaks ended up not only feeding his vanity but also accentuating in him the very qualities — secretiveness, manipulativeness, dishonesty and a hunger for power — he so despises in the global forces he has taken on.

This …