Adam Engel: (in media res) …nobody gives a damn what authors do or do not do, outside “our crowd” of hopelessly romantic lefties…
Gary Corseri: Don’t agree with that! I don’t think we’re “hopelessly romantic lefties” and more and more Americanos are disenchanted with life here, dream of abroad-dom. Authors settling and writing about life abroad and seeing US from aerie of expatriation–could be important to spur others. It’s a venture I am considering myself within the next couple of years.
AE: Speaking of disenchantment with the odd and sundry farcical, though ultimately tragic, excesses of Empire… I just read this biography …
In Washington Dulles airport I noticed a large advertisement. I’d seen it before and not paid attention. (No doubt that’s why they saturate public space with the things.) It showed a woman’s face with the words: “A car crash in California almost took her leg. A bomb blast in Iraq helped save it.” It directed one to this website.
I’m against car crashes in California. I’m in favor of saving Dominique’s leg. But at the website what we find is a claim that her leg was saved because her orthopaedic surgeon had experience in Iraq. And I don’t mean in …
In May, JPMorgan Chase was listed as the largest bank in the world with assets at roughly $4 trillion — some $1.53 trillion of it in derivatives. This was reported a month after the announcement that the bank had posted a record first-quarter profit of $6.5 billion.
Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO and Chairman, has faced a host of scandals in relation to his management of the megabank, including the loss of roughly $6 billion through the London branch of the bank — losses that Dimon was accused of hiding. A 300-page report by the U.S. Senate, investigating the “creative accounting” …
Those of us who have been saying that the US has become a weak, or at least more ordinary power among many in the world because of its military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of its economic decline, will have to recalibrate our analysis after watching the pathetic behavior of the leaders of Russia, Germany and France under pressure from the Obama administration not to allow Edward Snowden to gain asylum in those countries or even to escape his purgatory in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
Last night, in an astonishing display of fawning obedience to the demands of US leaders, …
Mohamed Elmeshad, Cairo-based independent journalist: US and Qatar strongly backed Morsi, but with growing protests, the future of Morsi’s presidency looks dim.
They are at it again. The not so ancient regime which was the previous ancient regime has promised that refugees heading to Australia will be given their fair share of rough treatment. In case you weren’t looking at the latest bloodied news, Australia’s restored Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has decided that refugees are a matter of law and order rather than human rights, per se. In fact, the statute book can be thrown out altogether.
The populist trick here is an old attempt by the Australian Labor Party to undercut the Coalition opposition without violating a slew of …
State Surveillance has come a Long Way Since Nixon Hired Cuban Burglars
by William Boardman / July 3rd, 2013
National Security Agency (NSA) Covertly Inspects Anyone’s Private Life
How many people do you know who, hearing that the NSA was busy obliterating privacy, have reacted to the effect of: well, duh, or that’s old news, or worse: didn’t we make that legal? It’s not as though the NSA is carrying out break-ins, is it?
Forty-one years ago, on June 17, 1972, the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel evoked similar reactions along the lines of big deal, or who cares? The Nixon White House officially dubbed it a “third-rate burglary attempt,” with a secret irony that …
It is hot and humid, the last day in June. I don’t have any milk for iced coffee at home, so I head out to the nearest square before a caffeine head-ache sets in. To get some milk from the store.
I pass a stout stucco church at the foot of the Hill, hearing piano music through the windows, then head up the hill towards the nearest square, past the house of the local campus police officer who got shot and killed by one of the Boston marathon Bombers. The cops had this whole area blocked off during the big lock-and-load …
We have memories, like flashes of lightning from afar — now we see them, now we don’t. Yet, one can almost call upon them at will, these bits and pieces of our lives, once so vivid, once so real, filed forever as nostalgia. So it is for me, over fifty years after the fact. Brooklyn, circa 1955, was truly a special place. Those who did not live or come from Brooklyn told us that we were only a part of New York City — admittedly a large part, but a part. What did they know!? After all, to Brooklynites, who …
A severe and worsening shortage of electricity and gas has been crippling the economy and destroying livelihoods for years, but what will it take to get the lights back on?
As millions take to the street across Egypt calling for President’s ouster, the Army threatens to take action if Morsi fails to reach agreement with protestors in 48 hours.
South Philly’sFriendlyLounge is close enough to my door, I can crawl out of there in a brown out state of mind and still end up on my steps, curled up, if not in bed. The other day I went there to show the bartender, Don, what I had written about Camden, since Don was born in Camden, and his son, Dominic, works for ABC Bonds in Camden. Bail bonding is, without a doubt, Camden’s most steady commerce and one of its largest employers. If you want to open a small business in Camden, …
All the media bluster and folly surrounding whistleblower Edward Snowden is detracting from critical thinking that Americans must engage in and act upon. At this moment, benefits from the Snowden data dump appear to be accruing to the US government and its assorted defense related corporate interests. If the American national security apparatus is to be checked and balanced, structural changes must take place. Substance must be ascendant, form can come later.
The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been bypassed by the Cronyism of the Revolving Door. It is an inept practice hardly useful for designing comprehensive …
Those of us in positions of responsibility will need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of our children.
— Barack Obama, June 29 national radio address
I’ll admit it—I was moved several times as I watched and listened to President Barack Obama’s major speech on the climate crisis on June 25th. As much as I have been angered so many times over the last 4 ½ years since he came into office by the weakness of many of his actions and his pretty-close-to public silence on climate, it is no …
July 1 marks the first day in office for Clifford Sloan, newly appointed Guantanamo closure envoy. Shortly after his May address on counterterrorism, President Obama appointed Sloan to the Office of Guantanamo Closure in the State Department, a position that had been vacant since January. The appointment and reopening of the office is the only concrete step the President has taken concerning Guantanamo since his May speech. With over 100 of the 166 remaining prisoners on a hunger strike and over 40 being brutally force-fed, great hopes are being placed on Mr. Sloan to break the impasse.
Do you remember the brilliant ad campaign by Apple in the late-1990s? It featured the images of some of history’s greatest and most daring personalities, such as Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, among others. In this advertisement that brought the company back into the realm of the counterculture, Apple boldly reminded us to “Think Different”, and to honor those who challenge the status quo and “push the human race forward.” Is it possible for a profit-oriented corporation to really be a part of this inspiring tradition?
Now that the Supreme Court has struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, thus paving the way for gay marriages, arguments persist that the Court has become too ideological. The Court has overruled Congress and buried the histories of misery, suffering and gallant sacrifices of the Civil Rights era with not even a fitting eulogy, while at the same time opened the floodgates for same sex couples to be treated equally under the law.
Unequivocally, legal same sex couples are now entitled to claim the same 1,100 benefits as …
McDonald’s opened its first Israeli branch in October 1993. The location they chose seems trivial, but it was wise: the Ayalon Mall. Shopping malls made a late entrance in Israel. Only after the second one became a success, ((The monstrous Dizengoff Center was built from 1972 at the center of Tel Aviv destroying an historical part of the White City. Thus, shopping malls got a bad image in Israel until the second mall was opened in neighbor city Ramat Gan. Kenyon Ayalon (roughly “Shopping-Parking Ayalon”), known in English as Ayalon Mall, was inaugurated in 1985 next to Israel’s largest …
On July 4, 1776, over fifty people signed the Declaration of Independence. They were openly resisting the legal authority of the King of England. Thousands joined them. They were outlaws. They were breaking the laws of England and risked capture, prison and even death for their belief in independence, equality, unalienable rights, and liberty. They were far from perfect as slavery, the slaughter and removal of Native Americans and the exclusion of women demonstrated. But they did resist their globally powerful government.
Who are the true patriots of today? Not the flag-wrapped politicians who send other people’s children off to be …
With the Obama administration in full damage control mode over revelations of blanket surveillance of global electronic communications, new documents published by The Guardian, including the draft of a 2009 report by the NSA’s Inspector General marked Top Secret and a Secret 2007 Justice Department memo prepared for then US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, show that “a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata ‘every 90 days’.”
An unnamed “senior administration official” confirmed the existence of a Bush-era surveillance program which gobbled-up “vast amounts …
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as the exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
— John Steinbeck
A union official I correspond with (the International Vice-President of a West Coast labor union) recently shared an interesting anecdote. He said that whenever he meets someone for the first time and they casually ask what he does for a living, he answers by saying he’s a “workers’ rights activist.”
Because people are, typically, intrigued by his reply and want to hear more, he goes on to explain that his job consists of doing things like making sure retired …
Jonathan Israel's Take on Pagden's "The Enlightenment"
by Thomas Riggins / July 1st, 2013
The world today is in the grips of the irrational and anarchic system of global capitalism dominated by the United States and characterized by international economic and political disorders, wars, poverty and environmental destruction.
In order to arrive at solutions to the problems facing humanity we will have to devise methods to overcome the capitalist system of irrationality and replace it by a rational international order based on the principles of democratic control rooted in a rational approach to solving the problems of war, economic inequality and environmental degradation by means of reason (logic and science).
Universal education in the United States is under attack. A battle between private and public education has waged for centuries but in the last few decades what had been a reasonable stalemate has turned into a rout, with the forces seeking a way to monetize the education system winning major victories on all fronts. Soulless money grubbers are utilizing the public/private debate in order to line their pockets at the expense of us all, while at the same time not caring one whit about the education of future generations.
A corporate mind set which sets no value on the rights of …
Some mountaineers climb Everest simply because it’s there. And some scientists play God simply because they can. Then other independent and less well-funded scientists have to spend years doing the research that proves playing God was the wrong thing to do, only by then it is often too late. Time and again man’s actions have had disastrous and irreversible effects
His name was Ron. In the 1950s he joined the Navy. In October 1956 he found himself on a vessel sailing towards the Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia. There were other ships making for the same destination …
Lina Attalah, the Managing Editor at Egypt Independent: Millions expected to protest across Egypt demanding new elections as pro-Morsi forces stage counter demonstrations — fear that army may intervene and re-establish direct control.
It’s a tough day in the neighborhood. Slip-streaming through the great big rot of the century. Cities are burning. Youth and pensioners are rebelling. The elite and media prostitutes are flailing away. Blame-blame-blame truth tellers, whistle blowers, the people in pain. Collective PTSD. False dichotomies like Ebola. Spreading mistruths, empty visions, and one more million scams by the Chamber of Commerce-Political Mafia Group of One Thousand. Lies about the forward progression or grand world saving vision of IT, the value of on-line schools, the death of inequality.
It sounds like we are a pugnacious society, but it’s all smoke and mirrors …
America has a secret. It is not discussed in polite company or at the dinner tables of the powerful, rich and famous.
Parents do not teach it to their children. Best-selling authors do not write about it. Politicians and government officials ignore it. Intellectuals avoid it. High school and college textbooks do not refer to it. TV pundits do not comment on it. Teachers do not teach it. Journalists from the nation’s most highly regarded TV news shows, newspapers and magazines, do not report it. Columnists do not opine about it. Editorial writers do not editorialize about it. Religious …
Uncovering documented instances of torture is a challenge. That challenge grows even greater when the torture one is investigating is undertaken by agencies whose definition demands secrecy and cover up. Therefore, when I began this article by looking for instances of torture committed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s Shin Bet, I met nothing but dead ends and cul de sacs. It was only after I discovered documents unearthed by Wikileaks and various Israeli human rights agencies that I was able to proceed. The process involved is comparable to going back in time. A certain instance …
