“INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-ISRAELI?” New U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had his appointment held up on such “insufficiency” charge but now, on a trip to Israel, he seems to be establishing his sufficiency bones. In presenting a large deal for U.S. arms shipments to Israel, he says that the deal is a “clear signal” to Iran [...]
JIM CROW GOES TO PALESTINE. Israel is practicing against its Palestinian minority the same repressive apartheid-maintaining measures that kept blacks in “their places” (literally) in the U.S. in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. The walls that attempt to separate Jews and Muslims are the equivalent to the “red lining” in [...]
BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A TEMP JOB? While unemployment rates in the U.S. have shown some improvement, with less than 9% of the work-force unemployed on a “given day,” this measure of unemployment masks the fact that over 13% of workers and their families will face a period of non-employment during some part of [...]
ISRAEL RUSHES TO “PUNISH PALESTINIANS FOR THEIR “ATTACK ON ZIONISM.” Tensions already high in the region after the brutal but short-lived battle in Gaza, Israel steps up its campaign of harassment against Palestine by taking unprecedented steps to “punish” them for last week’s historic UN vote to partially recognize a Palestinian state. Israel [...]
President Obama’s presumptive choice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in his second term is in the middle of a partisan storm stirred up by angry Republican lawmakers over her role in the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans. But others argue that the Libya incident and her role in disseminating information about [...]
THE U.S. IS ENGAGED IN PLENTY OF “NATION BUILDING”; IT’S JUST NOT THE AMERICAN NATION THAT ITS GOVERNMENT IS BUILDING. Nick Turse notes the stark contrast between rhetoric and reality in President Obama’s words that the U.S. is not interested in “nation building” abroad but in “freeing resources” from investment in foreign development to [...]
THE POOR IN AMERICA: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. In what Mike Whitney calls the “lousiest recovery of all time,” the U.S. economy has recovered from the recession of 2007 in only one respect: in booming profits in the stock market and elsewhere on Wall Street. Meanwhile unemployment remains high, real wages [...]
DOES ISRAEL HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST? Let’s put that another way, says Patrick Higgins; does “murderous settler-colonialism” have a right to exist? The current Israeli raids on Gaza provoke this question. Higgins compares the Jewish settler movement in the middle east to the process of white settlers “winning the west” from native Americans. [...]
“THIRD WAY” IS WALL STREET’S WAY OF PROMOTING SOCIAL SECURITY PRIVATIZATION AND AUSTERITY. The “Grand Bargain” between Democrats and Republicans which faces America at the brink of the “fiscal cliff” is being supported by Third Way, a “liberal-centrist think tank” which promotes the Wall Street agenda. William Black notes that “Third Way” is neither [...]
WHEN LOCAL NEWSPAPERS DIE, CAN THE DEATH OF COMMUNITY CITIZENSHIP BE FAR BEHIND? This question is addressed by Jessica Bruder in a feature article in the Christian Science Monitor. Her article is keynoted by a mournful style New Orleans funeral on the occasion of the drastic reduction of newspaper publication in favor of more [...]
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