Since 2007, at least 75 registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials have appeared on cable news broadcasts “with no disclosure of the corporate interests that paid them,” according to a report in the March 1 issue of The Nation magazine. Many of these people are “paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests,” writes the magazine’s Sebastian Jones, a freelance reporter after a four-month-long probe.
February 28, 2010 | Filed under
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Raising troubling comparisons to tactics employed by Josef Stalin and right-wing Latin American dictatorships, the U.S. government has created a “hit list” of Americans abroad marked for murder. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Feb. 3, the U.S. may, with executive approval, target and kill American terrorist suspects, Inter Press News Service reported.
February 11, 2010 | Filed under
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The Obama administration’s pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates “a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy.” The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct “full spectrum operations throughout South America” and to “expand expeditionary warfare capability.”
February 2, 2010 | Filed under
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Now that one of every four Americans gets the news online, a communications authority wonders if the White House is still able to control the news. “The transformation of media has not only undermined the imperial institutions of the mainstream media; it has undermined the imperial Presidency,” writes Ken Auletta, a media authority, in the January 25th The New Yorker.
January 31, 2010 | Filed under
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The “largest lie,” wrote hisorian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that “everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’” “This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”
“There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,” writes Thomas Johnson in the current “Foreign Policy” magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word “None.”
December 29, 2009 | Filed under
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The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans. Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C. says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008. For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for defense in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.
December 23, 2009 | Filed under
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The total number of Americans shot dead each year is three times that of all U.S. troops killed in Iraq in six years of fighting. There is rage in our hearts; there is war in our streets. A big factor in the homicide rate is the availability of guns. In a typical year, guns are responsible for two of every three murders. There are 238 million privately-owned firearms in the United States.
November 17, 2009 | Filed under
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Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in federal and state prisons. Thousands of other pot users and sellers are confined in local jails. But the public is starting to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two political scientists say.
November 12, 2009 | Filed under
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Washington has been negotiating secret and “highly sensitive understandings” with Pakistan to “provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports. “The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.
November 8, 2009 | Filed under
World |
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