New York City Mayor Bloomberg, speaking before last Sunday’s gay rights parade, tried to defend his position supporting the NYPD’s massive stop and frisk program directed against minority (mostly Black and Hispanic) youth. His remarks were so out of line that the New York Times wrote an editorial (7-2-13) criticizing his “loopy logic” and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (Dem. N.Y.) was moved to say his comments “were sad, disrespectful, hurtful, and quite unfortunate.”
The mayor dismissed the concerns of the minority community that they were being disproportionately stopped by the police and were, in fact, being harassed by the department. The …
When Hamas and Fatah representatives met in Gaza on June 04, there was little media fanfare. In fact, neither party expected much attention to their ‘unity talks’ aside from the occasional references to ‘national reconciliation’, ‘building bridges’ and the ‘obstacles’ along the way.
And since then, there was yet more proof that the Gaza talks were another futile exercise to breathe unity between political factions that were never united to begin with, nor possess the minimal requirement of a shared political platform, let alone vision.
Ample analysis has been offered by way of anchoring the Hamas-Fatah split to a specific …
On this 4th of July, while many Americans were celebrating the country’s Independence Day, rallies were held nationwide to counter the massive violation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment by the NSA. The campaign ‘Restore the Fourth’, spearheaded by a grassroots, non-partisan group of Internet activists emerged about a month ago in light of the mass surveillance revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It launched protests in over 100 cities across America. Reddit, Mozilla and others staged the largest online protest since SOPA.
Citing the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, the campaign demands the United States …
During the past few months, dozens of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members have been murdered and their offices sacked and burned. The police openly refuse to protect them. Rather than ordering the opposition to drop their demand that Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, resign, and negotiate reasonably with his government, the army gave him a Hobson’s Choice: resign or be ousted. As General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi announced the army’s coup Wednesday, President Mohammed Morsi released a video on the president’s website denouncing the ouster. “I am the elected president of Egypt. The revolution is being stolen from us.” Minutes …
In the American justice system, even when a prisoner is not sentenced to be executed, the bureaucrats of the U.S. Justice Department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons still have extra-judicial ways of making sure a politically-targeted prisoner will die in jail.
This is a recent example, when Kathleen Kenney, general counsel for the Bureau of Prisons, informed the husband of a 73-year old woman who is dying of cancer that her request for “compassionate release” was denied because her “health is improving… she does not present circumstances considered extraordinary and compelling… at this time.”
That is what Washington attorney Kenney wrote, without apparent …
Progress and Poverty is an economic classic which has been suppressed in the US owing to its subject matter: the elimination of poverty and economic inequality by restoring The Commons. Internationally George’s economic theories are regarded as comparable to those of Marx, Keynes and Galbraith. Despite being the third most famous American in 1879 (after Edison and Mark Twain), George’s work remains largely unknown outside of Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Up until a month ago, I would have called myself a Marxist. Since reading Progress and Poverty, I have converted to Georgism.
The abortion debate in Texas—and throughout the country—has dead-ended: pro-life v. pro-choice, saving the unborn child v. protecting the rights of the mother, responsibility v. freedom. Every encounter leaves each side more dug in.
As the Texas Legislature takes up abortion bills in its second special session, we can deepen that debate simply by recognizing the complexity of the issue, which usually is plowed under in the short-term goal of passing or defeating a particular bill. That’s politics, but beneath are deeper questions.
I am a firm supporter of abortion rights for women. So, let’s take that side first. By framing the …
America’s Independence Day Viewed Through A Lens From 1986
by William Boardman / July 4th, 2013
What would the Fourth of July be without nostalgia?
In the nostalgic spirit of the Fourth of July, here are some of the things that seemed important 27 years ago, at least to the editor of the Progressive:
— President Reagan was promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative, a theoretical missile defense system referred to as “Star Wars” that continues to cost billions of dollars a year (well past $100 billion total, no one really knows how much) without useful accomplishment for the nation. Reagan promised that the program would make nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete.”
— Military spending continued to remain larger and …
Why don’t I quit my job at Harvard and come and intern in your office and answer the phones or do whatever you want?
— Samantha Power to Senator Barack Obama, 2005
Before Samantha Power is buried in shrill hysteria by the fantasy-obsessed GOP, it might be a good idea to recognize that she is a poor choice to be U.N. Ambassador not because she will aid Washington’s enemies with her preoccupation with “human rights,” but because she will continue anti-human rights policies that earn us enemies we needn’t ever have had in the first place. Ho hum. What else is …
During WW2 everyone who went to the movies saw newsreels of Il Duce, der Fuhrer, Panzer Divisions, and, of course, the courageous men (and some women) in our armed forces fighting for freedom and democracy. It was a controlled media production, often put out by the Office of War Information or any studio with correspondents overseas. All had been pro-war efforts and even when things were going badly, the news was sanitized the best it could be.
Vietnam changed things as the embedded journalists started to see real opposition to the war coming from the front itself. People complained in the …
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 …
