Dave Lindorff's Posts

A new study reported by TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff in the May issue of American Banker magazine details how the mission of microlending has gotten off...

My mother died last Thursday at the age of 89. Her death, fortunately coming peacefully after she suffered a stroke during her sleep, followed a long mental decline caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m sure the Veterans Administration is relieved. They won’t have to pay her...

Has the "land of the free and home of the brave" decided to roll over and concede defeat to terrorism?

George Bush's “war on terror,” supinely backed by a cowed Congress of Democrats and Republicans, re-introduced torture to the American playbook, finished what Bill Clinton...

Occupy Wall Street’s dynamic grass roots movement is quiescent and may or may not return. Its respite or demise is due to a combination of deliberate and apparently nationally directed police violence and federal, state and local government spying, as well as to its own lack of...

I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, but something definitely stinks about this whole Boston Marathon bombing story.

From what we’re reading about the case, the FBI had for at least two and possibly as many as five years been investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old...

The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple...

What’s wrong with the Obama administration’s proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a “chained” CPI?

Let’s start with the fundamental problem: Social Security...

The history of third parties in America is pretty dismal. The system is rigged against them, for one thing. But equally problematic is the lack of focus that leads to infighting and splits whenever a third party is created.

A great answer to this would be to create a third...

Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman.

In Norway, meanwhile, a court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, a...

Updated Monday, March 11
 

Thanks to the courageous action of Private Bradley Manning, the young soldier who has been held for over two years by the US military on trumped-up charges including espionage and aiding the enemy, we now have solid evidence that the...

I’m fed up with the trashing of the Baby Boom generation.

Sure you can find plenty of scoundrels, freeloaders, charlatans and thugs who were born between 1946 and 1964, but you can find bad and lazy people in every generation. In fact, the so called “Greatest Generation”...

Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner, who is fast becoming something of a folk hero in his one-man challenge to the LAPD, one of the nation’s biggest and baddest police departments.

Dorner, a three-year police veteran and...

If the Constitution is to have any relevance, and if America is to remain a free society, then there is really no alternative: there must be a bill of impeachment drawn up and submitted in the House, and there must at least be a hearing on that bill in the House Judiciary...

For a masterpiece in cognitive dissonance, just look to the foreign editors and the managing editor of the New York Times, who managed to run two closely related stories making opposite points in Saturday’s paper without referencing each other at all.

The first,...

There were no memorable lines in President Obama’s second inaugural address. Certainly nothing like Franklin Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which was in his first inaugural, or like John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask...

The all-out assault on Social Security has begun.

The set-up for the big battle was the Fiscal Cliff charade. That hyped drama in the last days of December was a moment of truth for the Democratic Party and for President Barack Obama to make it clear whether they were...

New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy...

This article originally appeared on the website of PressTV
 

Most Americans, their minds focused at the moment on the tragic slaughter of 20 young children aged 5...

(This article appeared initially on the website of PressTV)
 

The US is on the way out as a hegemonic power.

That is the primary conclusion of a...

I went out today and checked on my palm tree. It’s a small thing: the trunk is only about a foot from the ground, with the palmate fronds spreading out from the upper part. New fronds appear as compressed blades sticking up from the center. They have a kind of fuzz on them, like...

It is amazing to watch politicians trying to weasel their way around their promises. President Obama is providing us with a good illustration of the art.

During the latest presidential campaign and in the final televised debates, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden...

During the Vietnam War, which US forces fought from 1960 through 1974, and which cost the lives of several million Southeast Asians and 58,000 Americans, eight American journalists died. Not one of them was killed by American fire.

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were...

There is a delicious irony to the story of the crash-and-burn career of Four-Star General and later (at least briefly) CIA Director David Petraeus.

The man who was elevated to the ethereal ranks of a General Eisenhower or Robert E. Lee by swooning corporate myth makers...

Okay, the etch-a-sketch vulture capitalist who would have given us four years of that smarmy missionionary-at-your-door smile, was thankfully sent packing by the voters, and Barack Obama gets four more years in the White House.

It was less an election than a contest...

I, for one, can’t do it.

As much as I loathe the Republican Party and its standard bearer, the incredibly smarmy shape-changing one-percenter and serial prevaricator Mitt Romney, I cannot bring myself this Nov. 6 to vote for the re-election of President Barack Obama, the...

We know that there isn't much "Hope" for "Change" -- at least for progressive change -- should President Obama win a second term as president.

Even when he had the chance, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress during the first two years of his presidency,...

Six children were attacked in Afghanistan and Pakistan this past week. Three of them, teenaged girls on a school bus in Peshawar, in the tribal region of western Pakistan, were shot and gravely wounded by two Taliban gunmen who were after Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old girl who...

Sometimes it takes a small tragedy to call attention to expose a much bigger one.

The small tragedy happened when Nicholas Ivie, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot dead on a dark night in rough terrain along the border with Mexico in Arizona, a state that has been...

President Obama was was painful to watch at the debate on Wednesday night.

Time after time, he allowed Mitt Romney to make fraudulent statements or empty statements without slapping the Republican presidential candidate down.

When Romney talked about the allegedly...

There is a simple answer to the refusal of the Two Party-Controlled Presidential Debate Commission's refusal to include third party candidates in its three debates: An alternative televised debate that would include the third party candidates, and that would air right after the...

The United States never misses an opportunity to castigate other countries for “uncivilized” behavior, and certainly there is enough of that to go around almost anywhere you look in the world. But there’s plenty of it here in the U.S. too.

Just consider the case of Terry...

The situation in the Middle East has reached a dangerous point, to be sure, but there are also signs that a sea change may be taking place here in the US which could herald a whole new relationship between the US, Israel and the rest of the Arab and Islamic world.

The...

This article was first published on the website of PressTV

Just looking at the video images of the two conventions -- the Republican one last week in Tampa, Florida...

Police brutality is in the news, thanks to the widespread availability of amateur video and the omnipresence of security cameras.

We've seen scene after scene of police beating the crap out of, and even shooting and killing unarmed or minimally dangrous students, women, old...

GOP presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as noted in ThisCantBeHappening! yesterday, is probably stonewalling demands that he release his 2009 and earlier IRS filings because they could expose to the...

If you want to know how moribund the Democratic Party is, how completely owned by Wall Street the president is, and how sick our national politics have become, just consider Social Security.

The president, earlier in his term, convened a “blue ribbon” panel, supposedly...

We’ve all heard it said by our teachers when we were in school, we’ve all heard it said by politicians, including presidents: “Democracies don’t start wars.”

And yet we have had the decades-long American war on Vietnam, the Reagan invasion of Grenada, the LBJ invasion of...

This article first appeared on the website of PressTV.
 

The Obama re-election campaign and the Democratic Party and their backers, like the...

Back in 1976, I co-founded, with some Los Angeles colleagues, a feisty little alternative weekly called the L.A. Vanguard. About two months after we launched it, I got tipped off about a program by the local phone companies, Pacific Telephone and GTE, in which they had...

ThisCantBeHappening! lost a valued friend Friday night with the death, from cancer, of Alexander Cockburn, 71. Alex and his comrade-in-arms Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch magazine have helped our struggling little online left alternative newspaper mightily by...

Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington, DC’s public schools, has made a career for herself by inflating her resume, dodging responsibility, and trashing teachers. Now, two years after leaving her DC post under a cloud after the mayor who appointed her, Adrian Fenty,...

 
Salmonella, anthrax, hazardous material, militia, attack
 

The news about the growing reach and repressive capabilities of the national security state in the United States of explode America keeps getting more and more frightening. Bombs...

Let me preface this column by saying that I don’t think all conservatives and right-wingers are stupid. In fact I have some right-leaning friends of a libertarian bent who are really smart, and a lot of fun to argue with. They may have an unquestioning faith, bordering on...

Looking on the bright side, the Supreme Court has ruled that something that President Obama has done is definitively not unconstitutional.

That’s probably the best that can be said of the 5-4 decision by the High Court today in upholding the ironically named Affordable...

Reading, watching and listening to the mainstream media in America, it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between journalism and rank propaganda. Consider the coverage of the French parliamentary election currently underway.

Most Americans who read newspapers...

My wife and I live on a 2.3-acre plot of forested land in a pre-Revolutionary house with a run-down old barn. When we first moved here, there was a rather large set of grassy areas, one in front of the house, another behind the kitchen, a large field in the back, behind the barn, a...

It seems pretty clear by now that the three young “domestic terrorists” arrested by Chicago police in a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily basis in Afghanistan, are the victims of planted evidence -- part of the police-state-...

The Iranian military must be enjoying the latest spectacle of Pentagon waste and bungling.

Only a few weeks ago, the US attempted to ramp up the pressure on Iran by deploying to the Persian Gulf at the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, just across the gulf...

The Senate is currently deadlocked on taking action to prevent the interest on new Stafford guaranteed student loans from rising on July 1 from 3.4% to 6.8%, with Democrats saying they want to “pay for” keeping the current “lower” 3.4% rate by closing a loophole that allows some...

As we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this November, it is time to make it clear that the current president, elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations...

A little over a month ago, back on March 19, at 3:00 in the morning, the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, which runs two aging GE nuclear reactors along the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, had an accident. As much as 15,000 gallons of reactor water contaminated with five...

I've often wondered why so many innocent people who are shot by police end up dead.

Granted that police officers spend a fair amount of time training with their service revolvers, and are thus likely to be better shots with a pistol than your average gun-owner. But even so...

(This story appears in full in The Nation's online edition, where it originally appeared.)

More than ten years ago, Pedro Rodriguez, a talented...

If you want to know where the real government of the United States is located, just check out one of the documents received by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in response to their Freedom of Information Act...

The sorry state of American journalism is on full display in the coverage by the corporate media of the ongoing crisis surrounding Iran’s nuclear fuel program.

The leaders of both Israel and the U.S. have publicly threatened to attack Iran -- Israel saying it could do so...

The US stock market jumped up today on word that the number of new unemployment applications fell to the lowest level in four years.

Sounds good, right? It's meant to sound good, but if you look at the number, and if you think about what it really means, it's...

I just received an object lesson into how easily we Americans are able to compartmentalize our principles and our sense of basic human decency.

My father, David Lindorff Sr., who is 89 (and an occasional contributor to ThisCantBeHappening!), recently took a bad...

It’s a relief to know that President Obama’s “preferred” solution to dealing with disagreements with Iran is diplomacy, as he said yesterday in an interview on NBC TV, but at the same time, it’s profoundly disturbing that he is simultaneously saying that, as an...

Let’s see now. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who oversees both the FBI and the CIA, is warning that Iran’s leaders have “changed their calculus” and, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “now appear willing to conduct an attack within the US.”

...

The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of the war...

I wouldn’t want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being convicted of being an American spy.

Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who grew up in Michigan, is being...

According to news reports, 15-year-old eighth-grader Jaime Gonzalez, who was shot and killed yesterday by police in his middle school in Brownsville, TX, was hit at least...

It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire....

Even as President Obama and War Secretary Leon Panetta announce the supposed “end” of the Iraq War, a US “covert war” against Iran, as the National Journal put it in a December 4 article...

Almost 30 years to the day of the fateful shooting incident that led to his incarderation, the decision has finally been announced: There will be no execution of African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who in 1982 was convicted and sentenced to death in a highly-controversial...

Word that the Los Angeles Police, who sent in 1200 officers in riot gear to violently rout a few hundred Occupy Movement demonstrators from their LA encampment last week, had earlier sent 12 undercover young officers into the peaceful occupation camp to spy on the activists should...

The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have...

New York -- The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in...

The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.

Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago...

The real story of the Penn State child abuse scandal and coverup is not Joe Paterno or Penn State, or even the abuse of children, as vile as what happened to them is. What it’s about it the lack of basic freedom for workers in the United State of America to speak out.

On...

Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”

The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly...

With Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence of death now formally vacated, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week not to consider an appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney of a Third Circuit Court panel’s ruling that that sentence had been unconstitutional thanks to flawed...

Here’s a prediction: Seth Williams, the district attorney of Philadelphia, will decide not to seek to reimpose the death penalty on Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world-famous journalist, former Black Panther and condemned prisoner who has spent the last almost 30 years of his life on...

This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street's general assembly:
 

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel...

Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the police of...

The first thing that needs to be said to the heartless boneheads who, at the last Republican presidential debate, cheered at the idea of letting a hypothetical 30-year-old cancer victim who hadn’t bought health insurance die, is that this is no mere hypothetical situation. The...

When you are the New York Times, or in this case, one of the only real liberal columnists working for the Times anymore, there are apparently some things you just cannot mention.

How else to explain how a seemingly intelligent economist like Paul Krugman...

 
Some 35 years ago, when I was just an aspiring journalist settling into life In Los Angeles, a venerable alternative journal, the Free Press, died. This paper, which had chronicled the Beat Era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the '60s Counter Culture, much like...

My wife Joyce and I were renting a car for the week this morning at a Hertz office just outside Philadelphia. There was a line of people either waiting to pick up a vehicle, or to return one.

The harried clerk behind the counter -- the only guy in the office -- was...

Glenn Greenwald has just written that President Obama, by playing a leading role in pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the whole kabuki-theater drama over the debt ceiling, and the alleged crisis of...

It is part of America’s state religion, the Free Market fundamentalist religion that is accepted as gospel by all leading politicians, by the “brain trust” that sets goverrnment economic policy, and by the supposedly hard-nosed analysts who convince American investors where to put...

Today is the anniversary of the day that the nation’s founders, gathered in Philadelphia a few miles from my house (which as it happens had already been standing for about 28 years old at the time), at great personal risk, signed the Declaration of Independence, with its...

Let me state from the outset: I have no problem with soldiers who inflate or embellish their war stories, any more than I am bothered by anybody who likes to spice up the tale of a youthful exploit.

It’s different though, when exaggerations our outright fictions are...

It was just as recently as a year ago that the authorities in politics, business and academe were stating boldly and confidently that the nation's economy was on the mend, and that there was no chance of a backslide into recession again.

Take Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan...

In his latest speeches on the Middle East, President Obama, both at the State Department and at the G8 meeting in France, has pledged billions of dollars in economic aid to Middle Eastern countries, drawing a direct connection between the unrest and demonstrations that brought...

A new Gallup Poll conducted for USA Today earlier this week reports that a majority of Americans (52%) say that they would prefer a...

According to the brief announcement made by President Barack Obama last night, the operation in Pakistan by US Navy SEAL special forces was a well-planned hit job.

“They took care to avoid civilian casualties,” the president said of the top-secret night-time raid by...

I am 62 and have just reached the age where I could apply for Social Security retirement benefits. Of course, I’d be crazy to do that and collect some $700 a month for the rest of my life, when I could keep working and wait until I’m 70 and get $2000 a month.

But the point...

America’s wars came home today in the mail, with a letter from the Selective Service. Enclosed was my son Jed’s draft card, just a week ahead of his 18th birthday.

The card, which unlike the ones in my day, comes in technicolor, arrived along with a glossy brochure...

Here's a new song I just wrote (to the old blues number, "Black Cat Bone""

To hear it, just go to my MySpace music site, and click the play button.''

If you want to sing...

President Obama’s criminal launch of an undeclared and Congressionally unauthorized war against Libya may be compounded by the crime of spreading toxic uranium oxide in populated areas of that country.

This is latest concern of groups like the...

It seems rather silly now, doesn’t it, all the US concern about terrorism?

The nuclear crisis in Japan, which continues to worsen, threatens to become a total multiple meltdown, combined with the perhaps even more disastrous explosion and fire in one or several spent fuel...

The people of Afghanistan know who was flying the two helicopter gunships that brutally hunted down and slaughtered, one by one, nine boys apparently as young as seven years old, as they gathered firewood on a hillside March 1. In angry demonstrations after the incident, they...

The dramatic and inspiring occupation of the Wisconsin Statehouse in Madison by angry public workers and their supporters over the past few weeks is an exciting preview of what we can expect to see in the halls of Congress before long, as right-wing forces, funded by corporate...

Check out Dave's interview on KPFA, San Francisco, by clicking Flashpoints on KPFA

The 12-minute interview starts at 18:54 minutes into the story, so you can just slide the button to the right.

To hear Dave interviewed on Canadian...

Talk about getting caught in a Big Lie.

So desperate has been the US effort to get the US government killer Raymond Davis sprung from police custody in Lahore, Pakistan following his execution-style slaughter of two Pakistani intelligence operatives in broad daylight in a...

...

The mystery surrounding Raymond A. Davis, the American former Special Forces operative jailed in Lahore, Pakistan for the murder of two young motorcyclists, and his funky “security” company, Hyperion-Protective Consultants LLC, in the US continues to grow.

When Davis was...

It is pathetic and even laughable to hear American leaders, and the leaders of the other Western democracies in Europe, cautioning that Egypt’s revolution needs to move slowly, as they call for a “transition” government that would be gently guided to elections by the very man, Omar Suleiman,...

 
I never expected to find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin, but I’ve got to admit that the woman nailed it regarding President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Asked to comment on it, she said it had a lot of “WTF moments.”

That’s exactly what I found...

 
If President Barack Obama had announced this week that he was appointing Japan’s Takanobu Ito, president and CEO of Honda, to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, one can imagine the shock wave that would go through the American body politic. A foreigner!--and one from...

Hear the whole interview at WPKN's syndicated program Between the Lines

...

At the local YMCA today, I ran into a boy who was a childhood friend of my son's. As my kid goes to a public arts high school in Philadelphia outside of our local school district, I don't see much of his old grade-school friends any more. This boy, who used to be over at our house years ago at...

Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans’ assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paperwork, American companies have also...

There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.

Far be it from mem with a daughter of my own, and a wife, to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently...

Let’s just assume for the sake of argument--though I believe the claim to have been completely bogus--that the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury and all of the Bush and Obama economic advisers and Congressional leaders in late 2008 and early 2009 genuinely feared that shutting down and...

Are you one of the millions of Americans flying this Thanksgiving weekend? Are you thinking about joining the national protest to opt-out of being run through an airport X-ray scanner?

If you’re worried about the alternative--getting groped by TSA screeners at the checkpoint--you might...

Cleck here for the first half of a two-part interview of Dave Lindorff by Dori Smith, host of "Talk Show Nation," a...

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God must love veterans; He makes so many of them.

We just finished "celebrating" Veteran’s Day earlier this month, complete with the usual parades and the show of flags, but it’s worth remembering that Nov. 11 wasn’t always a day for blindly glorifying the...

Many Americans simply assume that the government and politicians lie when they are talking about things like cutting taxes, or eliminating waste. But somehow, we tend to believe official government reports about things like economic “growth” or unemployment rates, or even cost-of-living...

On Canada's Freedomain Radio, an interview by Stefan Molyneux:

"As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral...

A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information...

The American Revolution, for all the pious talk about freedom and the Rights of Man, was at bottom simply a matter of people not wanting to pay their taxes. It was about rank self interest, and it was a powerful movement.

That rank self-interest could spark a new revolution--hopefully...

There are calls in this election season for establishing a moratorium of some sort on home foreclosures, and a number of large banks have even voluntarily stopped, at least until after Election Day, on foreclosing on houses. That’s fine as far as it goes, but what about the millions of homes...

If you have been feeling uneasy about having to be X-rayed by a Transportation Security Administration goon who can look under your clothes every time you fly, consider this: at least you can say no, and agree to be subjected to an old-fashioned full-body search.

No opt-out for...

US-led forces in Afghanistan sure did a bang-up job this week at promoting the concept of Western “democracy.”

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the puppet intelligence agency of the Afghan government, between them, arrested and held three journalists. Rahmatullah...

The surprise disclosure that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, through its state Homeland Security Agency, along with a number of local police departments in the state, have been employing a private Israeli security company with strong links to Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force to spy on law-...

It’s no surprise that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress are trying to claim that the recession (which they blame on Bush and Cheney) is over and that the economy is slowly returning to health thanks to their efforts at economic stimulus. At least those highly dubious claims...

It’s time for us progressives to stop playing defense on Social Security.

We’ve watched the retirement system suffer years of attacks by conservatives and by class traitors in the Democratic Party. We have seen the retirement age raised since 1983 from 65 to 67, and the cost-of-living...

New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, in his column today, is right to expose the attacks on Social Security as being the work of right-wing ideologues eager to destroy a government program that works, backed by cowardly Democrats who want to show their fiscal “...

Wall Street lobbyists may have successfully managed to emasculate most of the important parts of the financial reform bill just passed by Congress last month, but one part of that 2000-page act, which establishes as bounty for whistleblowers who expose corporate financial wrongdoing to the...

The White House’s initial response to the release of 92,000 pages of raw reports from the field by US forces in Afghanistan for a period from 2004-2009--that it was a threat to national security and to the lives of American troops--was as predictable as it was farcical.

These documents...

Updated July 19, 3:45 PM EST
It is time to ask why on earth the Obama administration and the Coast Guard are allowing BP to continue keeping a tight lid on the top of the run-away, damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico. Leaks from the sea floor are appearing and growing in...

If you want to avoid facing a tough prosecution for malfeasance, be a banker, not a biker.

That appears to be the lesson of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, where the lead story was about...

Looking at the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, where the results of the greed of corporate executives at BP, TransOcean and Halliburton, not to mention the greed of paid-off regulators in the Minerals Management Service and the members of the House and Senate who took dirty money to water...

Just days before we celebrate the 224th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from a colonial overlord on the other side of the world, Congress approved the allocation of yet another $33 billion in funds to support America’s attempt to occupy and run, on the other side of the...

As the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew out ever more toxic oil and methane into the sea, and as floating toxic sludge, by the millions of gallons, starts destroying the wetlands across the American Southeast, the dead hand of President Ronald Reagan is at work, making sure...

What does it say about the the American government, its president, and its military today, that the the largest military/intelligence organization in the history of mankind has launched a global manhunt for Julian Assange, head of the Wikileaks organization...

(From the AARP Magazine, May/June 2010 issue)

The true cost of American wars is much higher than what is spent in Supplemental Appropriations each year. It is also the cost of permanent medical care for the troops who are sent overseas to kill and who come home maimed...

Like the cop who batters someone senseless at a demonstration and then accuses the victim of “banging his head against my baton,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the victims of Israel’s brutal military assault on a peace convoy to Gaza of attacking Israeli soldiers. An...

Even as BP’s blown well a mile beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush forth an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea, and the fragile wetlands along the Gulf begin to get coated with crude, which is also headed into the Gulf Stream for a trip past the Everglades...

President Obama claims to have learned a lesson from the disastrous blowout of British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico: a “cozy relationship” between the agency that regulates oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service, and the oil industry, he charges, allowed companies to drill...

With British Petroleum spewing more than 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico in what could be an ecological cataclysm,  it is useful to look at the hypocrisy of the energy companies when it comes to an even worse crisis threatening life itself on the planet--rapid climate change...