History is of little use to the New York Times because reporting with a historical perspective would mean having to discuss the history of Israel’s decades-long goal of exterminating the Palestinian people as a nation or the history of U.S. interventions around the world that leave little doubt that America is a global [...] read more »

For more than a year the U.S. economy has been reeling from the housing and credit crises, but now it’s staggering from the blow of rising energy and food prices. The impact of $4-a-gallon gasoline is rippling outward as Americans cut spending of all sorts. Every month it seems as if another major economic sector hits the skids: first it was housing and construction, then automobiles and airlines, then tourism and, finally, back to housing with the implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. read more »

Eight things we need to do prevent Oil Shock read more »

Despite roaring inflation, one thing is becoming cheaper: your life. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided that when doing a costbenefit analysis to issue life-saving regulations, a “statistical life” should be worth $6.9 million, instead of the previous $7.8 million. read more »

Unless you live in a bubble, like George Bush, who expressed total surprise in February when a reporter told him gas was nearing $4 a gallon, you’ve been socked hard in the pocketbook by rising prices. It’s most evident at the supermarket-according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of a gallon of milk [...] read more »

While pundits have excoriated Senator Barack Obama for his years long relationship with Wright, Senator John McCain has largely escaped scrutiny as he embraces ministers who have made inflammatory remarks about Islam, Jews, women, Catholics, gays and pretty much anyone who is not a white evangelical Christian. read more »

Unless you live in a bubble, like George Bush, who expressed total surprise in February when a reporter told him gas was nearing $4 a gallon, you’ve been socked hard in the pocketbook by rising prices. read more »

Scanning the enormous body of literature about the Iraq War, one theme consistently emerges, as captured by the title of a new history of the conflict by Jonathan Steele, a roving foreign correspondent for the London Guardian: Defeat. read more »

Despite copious grumbling on the left, the Bush administration has secured one impressive victory in Iraq: it will leave a raging war there (and another in Afghanistan) for the next administration. read more »

Here’s where things get nutty. An unregulated market, totaling a breathtaking $45 trillion, grew up as banks, hedge funds, brokers and insurers sold these swaps back and forth. It’s pure gambling, where buyers and sellers often do not hold the underlying debt. read more »

In another life, Rudy Giuliani’s only brush with public notoriety would have been in an orange-jumpsuited, shackled perp walk for setting fire to a dog. An unstable bundle of petty vindictiveness and sadism, complemented by vampirish hairdo and grin, he instead brushed the heights of power. But that’s now all unraveled with his failed presidential bid. read more »

Barack Obama’s campaign has soared on his rhetoric of “change.” Many people have responded favorably, apparently tired of the disastrous Bush presidency and leery of restoring a divisive Clinton one. But how much change does Obama really represent? He says he won’t accept contributions from lobbyists or political action committees — even though he has. Obama raised more than $80 million through the first nine months of 2007, and it’s not coming from bake sales. read more »

Issenberg adroitly describes the globalized bluefin economy, but he’s over his head discussing economics, saying deficit when he means surplus, arguing a strong Yen makes Japanese exports cheaper, when the exact opposite is the case, and misdating the NA SDAQ market crash of 2000. He also misses the latest development. With bluefin prices rising because of a growing Russian and Chinese appetite for sushi, the Japanese are turning to less expensive substitute sushi meats such as smoked deer and raw horse. Absurdly, Issenberg downplays the environmental impact, writing, “No one knows enough about tuna populations and behavior to squarely place blame for overfishing,” and speculating that the crash in tuna hauls may be because bluefin have “wisened up” to fishing methods. read more »

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told Seymour Hersh, “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq… It’s doubling the bet across the region.” Hersh writes that this amounts to a “new strategy” termed a “redirection.” It’s bringing “the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.” He adds, “A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.” This is the situation in Iraq. read more »

Bloomberg’s plan will curtail civil liberties and impose fees unequally while doing little to aid the very mass transit that his administration is allowing to languish. This is not a plan New York needs. read more »

Long before intelligence was manufactured about non-existent Iraqi WMDs, Exxon was involved in a plan to muddy the issue of global warming. In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a major backer (CEO Lee Raymond was a two-time chairman of API), argued in a memo that if it could “show that science does not support the Kyoto treaty” then U.S. negotiators would not have to make concessions on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. read more »

The earth has heated up dramatically in the past, notably some 55 million years ago when sea surface temperatures in the Arctic reached a balmy 73 degrees. Not that this was a day at the beach. The resulting changes in oceanic chemistry caused a mass extinction. What’s different about this epoch is that we are committing ecocide to sustain consumer capitalism. read more »

Increasingly, organic produce is being shipped thousands of miles from Mexico, Central America — and possibly China in the future — as the Wal-Martization of organic food takes hold, pressuring prices and health, safety and labor standards downward. And it means adding to global warming by relying on a petro-economy to grow, process and transport organic food from around the world. read more »

Mother Jones states Sallie Baliunas and fellow physicist Willie Soon published an article in 2003, “partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute,” that came to the conclusion “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” read more »

Literally hundreds of books have been written about the Iraq War, dozens by reporters, more than a score of military histories, and at least a half-dozen both on the reconstruction debacle and the Kurdish question. read more »

Like the Giuliani-era’s infamous broken window policy of arresting on the notion that minor infractions such as public drinking or setting off fireworks were gateway crimes to general mayhem, the NYPD deploys maximum force against the smallest demonstrations to keep the larger public in check. The police thinking is that if a minor unauthorized protest were allowed to take the streets, then the door would be opened to mass dissent. The only demonstration allowed is the cattle-pen variety that isolates the protest virus from the body politic. read more »

For almost four years, Western oil companies have waited at the altar for Iraq, eager to get their hands on its proven reserves of 115 billion barrels. Iraq has the third-largest reserves in the world behind Canada and Saudi Arabia, but this just scratches the sand. read more »

Counter-recruitment is the key because the Bush administration’s future war plans are dependent upon increasing the size of the military (which the Democrats support almost without exception, too). Hampering recruitment would is the most effective way to attack the Iraq War, and one of the best ways to engage in one-on-one organizing. It can also, over time, build the type of success that can generate a groundswell. read more »

t’s the M.O. of occupiers throughout history, and the United States is no exception. It may seem perplexing to the public, which just voted for an end to the Iraq War, that the Bush administration is now going to escalate the war by increasing the troop levels. But escalation was also the hallmark of U.S. policy during the Vietnam War. read more »

U.S. military deaths in Iraq topped 3,000 last month read more »

There is no such thing as “the Iraqi Shia”; rather there is a religious community intersected and divided by class, kinship and regional and geographic factors. read more »

All one needs to know about the Democrats’ position on Iraq is that they’ve caught the John Kerry disease: They’ll oppose the war before they vote to continue supporting it. read more »

We cheer the techno porn on innumerable televison shows that drool over our high-tech killing machines, but we don't want to see the results of a cruise missile or F-15 strike. read more »

It’s important that we seek out the stories of others as well, those we don’t know, in order to understand both the individual loss and the collective loss they represent. It is the essence of the solidarity Brad and many others have given their lives for. read more »

Book Review Of In The Belly Of The Green Bird: The Triumph Of The Martyrs In Iraq By Nir Rosen / Free Press, 2006 and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq By Thomas E. Ricks / The Penguin Press, 2006 read more »

After Sept. 11, there was a moment where one could imagine an intelligent response: Instead of bombs and belligerence, the United States could have used discussions and development to address the root causes of terrorism. But that was too much to expect of the American Empire. read more »

Like the United States, South Africa and Australia, Israel is a classic settler state. Its foundational ideology is Zionism, which developed as both a secular political movement and ideology in the late 19th Century to create either a “national homeland” for Jews or a “Jewish state.” read more »

There would be no need for a U.S. military presence in the Middle East today if not for the oil. Israel’s role is to keep the Arab nations divided and eliminate any threat to its regional dominance. That’s what it did in ’67 against Egypt , in ’82 against Syria and in ’81 with the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Israel’s history from 1948 also negates the myth of “Israel the victim.” With the exception of the ’73 war it has been the aggressor every time. read more »

In many ways, the campaign seems a replay of the Iraq War: attack a reactionary Middle East regime with vast oil reserves over the issue of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, pressure or bribe other countries and international institutions to join in, talk diplomacy but place intolerable conditions that doom any negotiations, and all the while prepare for war. read more »

Les Roberts, the study’s lead author, concluded, “that over 80 percent of violent deaths were caused by U.S. forces.” read more »

A grueling counterinsurgency rages in a corner of Al Anbar province. And, there is no sign the G.I.s will leave anytime soon. read more »

Dems Are Not The Answer With President Bush’s poll numbers plumbing new lows and two-thirds of Americans having soured on the Iraq War, all the talk is of withdrawal. But that’s all it is: talk. By constantly intoning “withdrawal,” the Bush administration has lulled many Americans into thinking that the war is winding down. Yet work continues [...] read more »

With gas prices breaking the $3 barrier, it seems that the oil age is coming to an end. The notion of “peak oil,” – that geological constraints will force a decline in crude oil production – is the apocalyptic flavor of the moment. Any number of websites, books, organizations and discussion groups warn that the post-carbon [...] read more »

read more »

The great failure of the armed Iraqi resistance has been its inability to forge a national struggle. read more »

The transit workers strike was a monumental victory. Abandoned by their international, with the staggering weight of the political establishment, the judiciary, the corporate press and much of the public against them, the TWU faced down threats of jail and massive fines, plus warnings the union would be busted, and won. read more »

After Rep. John Murtha’s revelation that the U.S. Army is on the verge of falling apart, it’s clear that 2006 will be a make-or-break year for the U.S. occupation. read more »

There arguments for continuing the occupation are by now familiar: U.S. credibility will be damaged, terrorists emboldened, the region destabilized. Never mind that all these have already come to pass precisely because of the Iraq war. read more »

“It’s a war of attrition,” added Marine Maj. Nicholas Visconti. “They’re not trying to win. It’s just like in Vietnam. They won a long, protracted fight that the American public did not have the stomach for.” The latest gimmick to defeat the insurgency is the constitutional process, but it’s only sharpening the sectarian lines by enshrining “federalism.” The proposed constitution allows for the Kurdish north and Shiite south to break off with the bulk of Iraq’s oil wealth, leaving Sunni Arabs (and millions of poor Shiites) in the center with little more than sand and 138,000 heavily armed U.S. troops. read more »

In both Gulfs, the Bush administration gave little thought to the consequences. Iraq was war on the cheap; New Orleans was lost for the want of a few million. This fiscal year, the Bush administration offered only 15 percent of the Army Corps of Engineers’ request for $27 million to reinforce the levees surrounding Lake Pontchartrain. read more »

In the age of the Patriot Act, the RNC protests last summer were undoubtedly historic. The display of massive public dissent was a victory for all participants. Organizers count as successes that the dissent broke through the media bubble and the fact that small guerrilla-style actions harassed Republican delegates allπ week. In terms of changing power relations, however, the protests fell short. read more »

The London bombings were a fitting exclamation point to the grotesque selfindulgence on display at the G-8 summit. George Bush, Tony Blair and company spent the meeting repackaging the tired, old international aid shell game as salvation for Africa: recycling previous aid (which often arrives in the form of subsidies to Western corporations) and shaving off a mere $55 billion in non-performing loans when the continent is saddled with more than $300 billion in debt. read more »

“It’s state-sponsored civil war,” says journalist Dahr Jamail, describing the sectarian conflict engulfing Iraq. From the beginning of the occupation, most observers agreed that while civil war was a distinct possibility between Kurds and Sunni Arabs, a Sunni-Shiite conflict was highly unlikely because of factors such as nationalism, high rates of intermarriage and the moderating influence of Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. read more »

Depending on who’s counting, there are hundreds or even thousands of “alternative” English-language periodicals. Many are dense academic journals that require an advanced degree just to unpack. But hundreds are popular or general interest publications worthy of a wide audience. This is the first installment of a new column highlighting some of the more intriguing offerings. read more »

Leave it to the Bush administration to fulfill the dream of Islamic holy warriors. It is uniting Muslims across the world in anti-American hatred. The latest grievance is the reports of U.S. prison guards desecrating the Koran at Guantanamo. The White House thought it had flushed the story by getting Newsweek to retract it on a technicality, but the controversy prompted a flood of evidence that U.S. forces use desecration of religion as a weapon of war. read more »

Making Americans care about genocide committed in their name is no easy task. But it may be the only way to prevent a future Vietnam or Iraq. read more »

Comic books started morphing into “graphic novels” decades ago, but political versions are of a more recent vintage. They came of age with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and at their best add a dimension to politics that is incapable of being captured solely by words. read more »

Having opened the gates of hell in Iraq, the Bush Administration is diving right in. White House and Pentagon officials say they plan to reconquer rebel towns in the “Sunni Triangle” following the U.S. election. read more »

The precursor to torture is first to dehumanize the subject. In the U.S. prison system, for example, inmates are described as “animals,” “savages” and “predators,” implying that whatever happens to them is okay because they’re not really human. The New York Times noted that the torture in Iraq – the use of hoods, stripping and parading prisoners, forcing them to wear women’s underwear – is “routine” in U.S. prisons. read more »

The contrasting reactions in the Western media, generally approving of one illegal occupier killing a religious figure versus unleashing an extreme verbal barrage to decry four dead soldiers of fortune protecting another illegal occupation, highlights the growing clash of civilizations. After September 11 commentators rushed to deny that the attacks signified a war between cultures and religions. And they were right, at least then. Grand historical conflicts don’t start overnight; they are a step-by-step descent into the abyss that one is only aware of when the last light of reason is extinguished. read more »

read more »

Human Rights Watch examined 14 of the biggest cities around the nation. It concluded “police brutality is persistent in all of these cities; that systems to deal with abuse have had similar failings in all the cities; and that, in each city examined, complainants face enormous barriers in seeking administrative punishment or criminal prosecution of officers who have committed human rights violations.” read more »

We knew in one sense he was right: you take your life into your hands when you go two wheels against four. You have nothing but a plastic helmet for your noggin, and flesh and bone are pitted against tons of glass and steel hurtling by. read more »

The British empire was forced from Iraq twice in the last century. Clearly, America isn’t doing much better. Understanding why and what’s likely to happen is a different matter. read more »

”The mainstream media is largely ignoring that there is a housing crisis in the city and dismisses rent regulation as an outdated socialist relic.” read more »