February 2012
50 posts
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Bill McKibben: Why Not Frack? | New York Review of Books
What is the effect of this surge of gas on national and global efforts to cope with climate change? Though New York and other states will make their decisions on drilling largely on the basis of local effects, this may be the most important question of all, since the implications will extend far beyond the borders of particular geologic...
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Rebecca Solnit: Mad, Passionate Love — and Violence | TomDispatch
Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a...
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David Carr: Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth | The New York Times
During a point in history when our government has been accused of sending prisoners to secret locations where they were said to have been tortured and the C.I.A. is conducting remote-controlled wars in far-flung places, it’s not a good time to treat the people who aid in the publication of critical information as spies.
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Bradley Manning defers plea after being formally charged with aiding the enemy | The Guardian
Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of being the source of the biggest leak of US state secrets in history, was on Thursday formally charged with aiding the enemy, during the first day of his court martial. If found guilty, he faces a maximum sentence of life in military custody with no chance...
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Kelefa Sanneh: Party Crasher | The New Yorker
To see Ron Paul on the Republican debate stage is to be reminded that the Party’s libertarian streak is so thin as to be almost invisible. During the debates, when he warns against threatening Iran, or calls the war on drugs “a total failure,” or observes that “rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often,” he seems like a man competing...
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Rick Perlstein: Why Obama Needs to Change to Win | Rolling Stone
Objectively, this stuff is insanely extreme. But it is not being reported as extreme. That’s the point. Instead, the media, doing what the media does, is merely reporting it as one pole in an ongoing, organic debate. Contraception is now “controversial.” It will remain so, forever and ever; these things never go back –...
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Andrew Leonard: There is no ethical smartphone | Salon
Right now, it’s a loser’s game to try to find a more ethical smartphone. Everything and everyone is compromised. But it’s a winner’s game to figure out how to use what we’ve got to bring progressive change. We have computers in our pockets that not only connect us more easily and effortlessly to information about what’s going on in the rest...
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Andrew Bacevich: Scoring the Global War on Terror | TomDispatch
So what tentative judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT? Operationally, a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once called “the dark side,” with implications that few seem willing to explore. Strategically, a war informed at the...
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Two justices suggest Citizens United ruling should be reconsidered in Montana case | Washington Post
Two Supreme Court justices suggested Friday that the court reconsider its controversial 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending in elections.
The suggestion came as the court blocked a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign...
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What K-Thug Said
Paul Krugman: Pain Without Gain | The New York Times
Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts...
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Jeremy Scahill: Washington’s War in Yemen Backfires | The Nation
The October drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes. “I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for Al Qaeda, because those operations gave Al Qaeda...
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Andrew Haldane: The Doom Loop | London Review of Books
The continuing backlash against banking, as evidenced in popular protests on Wall Street and in the City of London, is a response not just to the fact that the world is poorer, as pre-crisis riches have turned to rags, but to the way these riches were privatised, while the rags are being socialised. This disparity is nothing new. Neither, in...
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Paul Tassi: You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You | Forbes
The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe...
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Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire | truthout
This is not to say that the Right proceeds about its work while renouncing confusion or mystification. Just the opposite: in defending “capitalism,” the leaders of the latest conservative uprising don’t really bother with the actually existing capitalism of the last few years, even though capitalism’s particulars have made for scary headlines on the...
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Robert Scheer: Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us | Truthdig
Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple’s China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.
At the heart of...
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Ahmed Rashid - Security vs. Reconciliation: The Afghan Conundrum | NYR Blog
After eleven years of war, the Taliban’s public declaration that they will hold talks with the United States in Qatar is a major breakthrough for the political process, for Afghanistan’s internal stability, and for progress toward relative peace that will be needed by the US and NATO in 2014 before they can exit...
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Libyan militias accused of torturing detainees | The Guardian
Armed militias now rule much of Libya, Amnesty International has warned, accusing them of torturing detainees deemed loyal to the ousted regime of Muammar Gaddafi and driving entire neighbourhoods and towns into exile.
Amnesty International quoted detainees as saying, “they had been suspended in contorted positions; beaten for...
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Noam Chomsky: “Losing” the World | TomDispatch
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled Failure by Design. The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based. There is no failure for the...
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Kelly McEvers: The Crackdown | Washington Monthly
How the United States looked the other way while Bahrain crushed the Arab Spring’s most ill-fated uprising.
A great companion piece to this outstanding documentary Al Jazeera broadcast last year.
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Chris Hedges: Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless | Truthdig
Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the Israeli-occupied territories and Syria....
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John Sifton: A Brief History of Drones | The Nation
But the real issue is the context of how drones kill. The curious characteristic of drones—and the names reinforce this—is that they are used primarily to target individual humans, not places or military forces as such. Yet they simultaneously obscure the human role in perpetrating the violence. Unlike a missile strike, in which a physical or...
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The Obama explainer, explained
I haven’t cross-posted anything from my “actual” political blog for a while but I thought this one was appropriate. James Fallows got his twelve-thousand words in The Atlantic to explain the first term of the Obama administration. Now here’s my two-thousand word (or so) response. The link at bottom will show you to the rest of the piece at the Minneapolis Examiner....
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Peter Van Buren: Silent State | TomDispatch
There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste, fraud, and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of what’s at stake.
Think of those victims of retaliatory...
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What K-Thug Said
Paul Krugman: Severe Conservative Syndrome | The New York Times
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives...
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Andrew Hacker: We’re More Unequal Than You Think | New York Review of Books
Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner looming over America’s economy, drawing dollars from its bottom to its upper tiers. Using US Census reports, I estimate that since 1985, the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent, including a growing tier now taking in $1...
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Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces | The New York Times
WASHINGTON — As the United States turns increasingly to Special Operations forces to confront developing threats scattered around the world, the nation’s top Special Operations officer, a member of the Navy Seals who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, is seeking new authority to move his forces faster and...
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Charlie Brooker: The true value of money – or why you can’t fart a crashing plane back into the sky | The Guardian
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story, or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of...
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Arun Gupta: iEmpire | AlterNet
New research goes beyond the New York Times to show just how disturbing labor conditions at Foxconn, the “Chinese hell factory,” really are.
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Matt Stoller: The big banks win again | Salon
Settlement or no, the housing crisis isn’t going away. The entire mortgage market at this point is backstopped by the government, and even so, housing prices are sliding. The roughly one trillion dollars of underwater mortgages and the destruction of the rule of law in the private mortgage market need to be dealt with, one way or another. And they...
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Bradley Manning to face formal trial on February 23 | The Guardian
The formal trial stage in the case of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning will begin on February 23, the US military has announced, when the soldier will be arraigned on all 22 counts relating to the largest leak of state secrets in American history.
Manning will be transferred on that day from his current imprisonment at Fort...
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Peter H. Stone: Democratic operatives seeking million-dollar checks for super PACs | Center for Public Integrity
Five Democratic super PACs are reaching out to party mega-donors, in a fledgling effort seeking $1 million to $10 million contributions, now that President Barack Obama has blessed the outside spending group working to get him re-elected.
Discussions among the five super PACs are...
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Patrick Cockburn: The death of the American dream in Afghanistan | The Independent
America’s wars launched in the aftermath of 9/11 led Washington to overplay its hand disastrously. This was not so obvious at the time as it is now. At first sight, both wars looked easy because they were against feeble, isolated enemies, unpopular in their own countries. But successful invasion is very...
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Andrew Cohen: The Torture Memos, 10 Years Later | The Atlantic
On February 7, 2002 — ten years ago to the day, tomorrow — President George W. Bush signed a brief memorandum titled “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees.” The caption was a cruel irony, an Orwellian bit of business, because what the memo authorized and directed was the formal abandonment of...
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Michael Tomasky: Willard Mitt Romney | New York Review of Books
George Wilcken Romney, the former automobile executive who became the centrist Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, was considered a presidential possibility leading up to the 1964 election. Moderate Republicans around the country were getting awfully nervous about this Goldwater fellow and seeking out plausible alternatives....
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Henry A. Giroux: Book Burning in Airzona | truthout
Arizona is but one example of how, at the current moment, what goes into American culture, what is aired in the media, and what is taught in both public and higher education is being intensely policed by right-wing fundamentalists in all sectors of society. What this points to is a war being waged aggressively against immigrants, youth and those...
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Gabriel Sherman: The End of Wall Street As They Knew It | New York
After surprisingly successful financial reform, public vilification, and politics that have turned against them, the Masters of the Universe are masters no longer.
Not a terrible piece by Sherman about Wall Street since Dodd-Frank. But you’ll have to endure a few incredibly tone-deaf quotes from anonymous bankers that...
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Aaron Bady - David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words | The New Inquiry
It is in this sense that Graeber’s book is actually not a “big book” at all. It isn’t a history of human civilization or even a manifesto about economics, but rather a deconstruction of the terms through which we have learned to think about what human civilization, history, and society are and are supposed to be...
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With restrictions gone, ‘1 percenters’ dish millions, alter race for White House | McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Forget about the poor, the unemployed and the sinking middle class participating in the democratic process.
The race for the presidency is increasingly being bankrolled by “1 percenters” — those among the richest of Americans.
Year-end campaign finance reports show...
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S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks | The New York Times
By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example,...
Why We Got Ayn Rand Instead of FDR | Thomas Frank →
In different times, TARP might have become the rallying point of a revitalized Left. After all, the bailouts were clearly of a piece with the misbehavior that had come before: the deregulation of the banks, the bonus culture, the wrecking of the supervisory state. Business-friendly conservatives had been behind each of these, and then business-friendly conservatives had knitted together the...
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Glenn Greenwald: ACLU sues Obama administration over assassination secrecy | Salon
So Obama can go on TV shows and trigger applause for himself by boasting of the Awlaki killing. He can publicly accuse Awlaki of all sorts of crimes for which there has been no evidence presented. He can dispatch his aides to anonymously brag in newspapers about all the secret evidence showing Awlaki’s guilt and...
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Frank Rich: Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney? | New York
Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote,...
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Mark Binelli - Scott Olsen: Casualty of the Occupation | Rolling Stone
The projectile that struck Olsen fractured his skull and left him in critical condition. More crucially for the narrative, Olsen turned out to be a 24-year-old ex-Marine who’d survived two tours of duty in Iraq. For a movement supposedly without leaders, this sort of compelling personal story was enough to make him an...
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Elizabeth Drew: Can We Have a Democratic Election? | New York Review of Books
Citizens are now faced with evidence of the growing power of organized moneyed interests in the electoral system at the same time that the nation is more aware than ever that the inequality among income groups has grown dramatically and economic difficulties are persistent. This is a dangerous brew. Political power is...
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Marc Parry: Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics | The Chronicle
Jonathan Haidt is occupying Wall Street. Sort of. It’s a damp and bone-chilling January night in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The 48-year-old psychologist, tall and youthful-looking despite his silvered hair, is lecturing the occupiers about how conservatives would view their ideas.
...
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Rights Groups Oppose Smaller Arms Transfer | IPS News
WASHINGTON, Jan 30, 2012 (IPS) - The decision by the administration of President Barack Obama to approve limited transfers of military equipment to Bahrain is coming under renewed fire by human rights and pro-democracy groups here. The groups, as well as a number of lawmakers who have opposed renewed arms transfers to Bahrain, are demanding...
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Ari Paul: The Return of Inequality | Boston Review
Getting people to talk about inequality is just a beginning. The chronically unemployed masses with student debt, the working poor, and the family facing foreclosure want results. Having an amorphous movement without specific demands has fostered this discussion, but when the GOP nominee debates President Obama, OWS should flag policy issues to...
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Chris Hedges: Corporations Have No Use for Borders | Truthdig
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were...