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  • Sorry, Census. Poverty Really Did Increase in 2009.

    Between 2008 and 2009, unemployment increased from 5.8 percent to 9.3 percent, the largest one-year increase on record (which goes back to 1948). Over the same period, the number of Americans without health insurance coverage rose by more than four million — from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009 — and low-income…

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  • Bruce Reed Appointed Biden Chief of Staff Today

    In light of his prominent role in deficit reduction and the ‘end of welfare’ in the 1990s, Reed’s appointment sends a clear — and troubling — signal about the administration’s domestic policy priorities in the years ahead. Alice O’Connor is author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S.…

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  • A Statement from Former Prisoner Omar Deghayes on the 9th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo

    Two years ago, President Barack Obama pledged to bring an end to the anomaly that is Guantánamo within a year, and to thereby restore America’s moral standing in the world. Yet today, on January 11, 2011, we are marking the beginning of the tenth year since the first prisoners were transferred to Camp X Ray…

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  • The Referendum in Sudan

    KHARTOUM, Sudan — Just days before the historic referendum on southern independence Khartoum is experiencing temperate weather and what may turn out to be a deceptive calm. In fact, everybody is either worried or excited, depending on their circumstances. Southerners are resolute that they will not accept second class citizenship in their own country, otherwise,…

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  • The End of New Deal Liberalism

    By William Greider We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must…

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  • Chomsky’s initial reaction to WikiLeaks’ latest

    I took a quick look at [“U.S. embassy cables: Hillary Clinton woos prickly Egyptians“].  It’s interesting that Israel does not appear, only Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon.  I found only one entry of any interest, in US Embassy to Clinton: “Soliman brokered a half-year-long truce last year, which Hamas broke in December, leading to the Israeli…

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  • The Katharine Gun Case

    Katharine Gun, a British former government employee, faced two years imprisonment in England for the “crime” of telling the truth. She was charged with leaking an embarrassing U.S. intelligence memo indicating that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against U.N. delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval of the Iraq war…

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  • Bush and Blair: A Partnership of Deception

    British Prime Minister Tony Blair is back in Britain now facing an ever-widening scandal involving the distortion of evidence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, but his recent trip to meet with President Bush underscores the partnership the two leaders have shared as both face growing evidence that they knowingly used faulty intelligence to…

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  • Bush in Africa: “A Cruel Hoax”?

    President Bush’s recent tour of Africa to tout his $15 billion pledge to fight the continent’s AIDS epidemic and promote trade was met with skepticism by critics who charged that his administration is attempting to mask regressive policies with staged public relations events. Bush’s trip to Africa appears to represent, more than anything else, an…

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  • Responses to Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address

    Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year, we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead. You and I serve our country in a time of…

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  • Kavanaugh “Can’t Be Trusted”

    “We watched the testimony of Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee with dismay and disbelief. His many misleading and false statements cast serious doubt on whether he should be confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

  • Will Kavanaugh Take a Lie Detector Test?

    “Kavanaugh clearly has little compulsion against lying under oath. Prof. Christine Blasey Ford has taken and passed a lie detector test. So the question becomes: Will Kavanaugh take a lie detector test?”

  • Kavanaugh’s Pattern of Lying Under Oath

    “Kavanaugh should be removed from his current judgeship “because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from [GOP Senate aide Manuel] Miranda, and each time he falsely…

  • Ten Years after Lehman: A Co-op Revival

    “The co-op tradition is also a trans-partisan consensus hiding in plain sight. Both Democrats and Republicans have sponsored recent legislation to support credit unions and expand employee ownership. Cooperative business is something that can bring us together and address the root causes of this major crisis.”

  • Ecological Disasters: Causes and Remedies

    “The disaster that ecological activists of the last half-century have sought to prevent is already vividly present. Its most dramatic expression, apart from the endlessly repeated scenes of fire, flood, parched earth, and emaciated polar bears, is the tens of millions of refugees, desperate for a place to live. Some are fleeing sea-level rise and…

  • “Climate Change Supercharging” Hurricanes

    Human-caused increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere produced an energy imbalance and its partitioning between atmospheric, ocean, cryosphere and land heat reservoirs govern how the global climate evolves. Most of the imbalance, over 90 percent, goes into the ocean and accordingly OHC [ocean heat content] provides a primary indicator of climate change, along with sea…

  • Major Attack on Syria Approaching?

    Ford recalls the Suez crisis: “The plan was for France, soon joined by the U.K., to invade Egypt on the pretext of safeguarding the Suez Canal, in hopes of precipitating the overthrow of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Tripartite Aggression, as the Arabs call it, was duly triggered on 29 October 1956, when Israel invaded.”

  • Will a Member of Congress Move to Impeach Kavanaugh?

    Graves writes that Kavanaugh should be removed from his current judgeship “because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from [GOP Senate aide Manuel] Miranda, and each…

  • “Kavanaugh Lied Under Oath About Memos I Wrote”

    “Much of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.

  • Will the Public See Incriminating Kavanaugh Documents?

    “If Booker and the other Democratic senators are serious here, they should all start sequentially releasing all prejudicial and incriminating documents against [Supreme Court nominee Brett] Kavanaugh now during the course of the hearings when they will be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause [of the Constitution]. This would include documents relating to torture…

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