War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
- Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
- The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
- Ending Republican Control Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership
- Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?
- We Need to Know How Corporate Democrats Made President Trump Possible
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Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran
When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions — but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.
Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.
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Obama and Anti-War Democrats
Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run, it could boomerang.
As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no." In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.
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Words and War
It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.
Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration’s current supplemental bill is military…
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The March of Folly, Continued
To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things — how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession — and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names…
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A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman
There are many reasons progressives will mobilize behind the campaign of Marcy Winograd, who announced on Monday that she'll challenge incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman in the 2010 Democratic primary.
Some will speak of Harman's pro-war record. Some will recall her support for warrantless wiretapping, followed by her irony-free indignation when it turned out that NSA snoops had taped her own phone conversations. Some will recount Harman's long public silence after being briefed on torture by the US government…Read the full column. -
We Need a Green New Deal
In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.
And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.
Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren't getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies…
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Political Straight Talk with Norman Solomon & Peter B. Collins
The second part of the interview on the Joan Kenley Show.
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Obama: Beyond Savior or Trickster
As President Obama enters his fourth month in office, two tendencies among progressive-minded Americans seem most hazardous to the political health of the country. The gist of one approach is that Obama can't do anything seriously wrong; the other is that he can't do anything seriously right.
Among the tendencies, the first is more widespread and more dangerous. All kinds of atrocious policies — from Lyndon Johnson's war on Vietnam to Jimmy Carter's midterm swerve rightward to Bill Clinton's neoliberal measures such as NAFTA, "welfare reform" and Wall Street deregulation — were calamities facilitated by acquiescence or mild dissent from many left-leaning Democrats…
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Norman Solomon & Peter B. Collins on the Joan Kenley show
"Our 24/7 media cycle is dominated by opinionated news pundits and an
onslaught of celebrity or person-of-the-moment headlines. Do we create
a false reality from false information? How do our reactions impact our
lives – personally and collectively – from politics to war to the
economy to our planet’s very survival?Not afraid to challenge media
spin with their own brand of truth-telling, Peter and Norman share
their wisdom on how to best navigate through all the noise."