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Freedom Summer’s 40th Anniversary

This summer marks the fortieth anniversary of several extraordinary events in American history – which the national media and, more curiously, the African-American political establishment have largely ignored.  These events fundamentally reshaped America’s political landscape regarding the politics of race.

In the summer of 1964, about one thousand, mostly white college students traveled to Mississippi as volunteers, assisting civil rights workers there to register thousands of African Americans to vote.  Among their number was Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 2000.  The effort, termed “Freedom Summer,” captured the imagination of the nation and the world at that time. 

Why Mississippi?  To understand the symbolic significance of this voting rights campaign, one had to appreciate this southern state’s unique position as the paramount site for white racism in America for more than a century.

Bush's hole-in-head nuke cronies re-open door for terror apocalypse

George W. Bush's big-money backers at Ohio's infamous FirstEnergy electric monopoly are re-opening the door for a nuclear apocalypse by terror or incompetence (whichever comes first). In classic Bush style, they are trashing public oversight as they go.

The Akron-based FirstEnergy blacked out the entire northeast a year ago, resulting in at least $10 billion in losses to the public. No criminal charges have been filed, though the company has reportedly paid tens of millions in civil suits and has been under grand jury investigation for a wide range of issues.

FirstEnergy's top management, starting with President Anthony Alexander, has poured huge sums into Bush's campaign coffers. Before last year's blackout FE big wigs hosted a fundraiser with Vice President Dick Cheney, raising a reported $600,000.

How Dick Cheney Got Away With $35 Million Right Before the Govt Launched a Probe into Halliburton

It’s obvious that no mainstream news reporter has the gumption to seriously question Vice President Dick Cheney’s ethics when he was chief executive of Halliburton, the oil-field services company that is currently embroiled in a scandal with the Pentagon due to its questionable accounting practices related to its work in war-torn Iraq.

Pity those journalists because this is the stuff Pulitzer’s are made of. What’s even more remarkable is that there’s reams of documents in the public domain showing how Cheney cooked the books when he was CEO of Halliburton, which makes the vice president look like Ken Lay’s twin brother. The evidence is beginning to collect dust. To tell the story of how Cheney’s Halliburton used accounting sleight of hand to fool investors all you need to do is connect the dots, which is what this story will do.

Let’s start with a bit of old news. A couple of weeks ago Halliburton agreed to pay a $7.5 million fine to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe related to a 1998 change in the way Halliburton accounted for construction revenue.

Before the war...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Remember what it was like just before the war? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- Colin Powell told us to the pound how many tons of this, that and the other -- Saddam had a reconstituted nuclear program, he had numerous ties to Al Qaeda, and he was an imminent threat.

        As the president put it, we couldn't afford to wait until the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud.

        "To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ... .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect."

No jobs?

The Results of Ten Years of Prosecution of Corporate Crimes

The most abhorrent thing found during my research has been the discrepancy between the effects of prosecution of those who have stolen from the federal and state governments versus those who have stolen from individuals or other corporations. The most disconcerting fact is that many of the corporations that have been convicted of anti-trust violations, fraud, environmental crimes, as well as campaign financing fraud are still in business. Many of the corporations are thriving, because they were able to claim their fines and criminal penalties as "net loss" and avoid tax liability. Others, the ones I call most devious, used a calculated bankruptcy claim to avoid payment of the penalties imposed. And, other devious corporate executives simply changed the name of their corporation and avoided the public forum as well as the civil and criminal obligations directed by the courts.

To address the discrepancy, I would like to differentiate between the types of settlements involved. In most of the cases brought against corporations for defrauding state or federal government agencies (including military), there were monetary reimbursements for the amount

Dominionists Stage Weeklong Occupation At Columbus City Hall

The recent occupation of Columbus City Hall grounds by Operation Save America was an unprecedented event, both for the city and OSA. Never in the history of this group, as far as we can determine, have they taken over such a public space for six days, twenty-four hours a day. In doing so they demonstrated exactly what we had written about them months before: that more than simply an anti-abortion and anti-gay group, they are, in the words of director Flip Benham, out to "kick the table over in the name of Jesus Christ and take over."

Fortunately for the rest of us, it isn't quite that simple. OSA, or as it was originally named, Operation Rescue, has long used abortion as a tactical vehicle, to give legitimacy to its underlying, dominionist purpose. By focusing on a matter of intimate, personal decision making, where personal preferences vary greatly across society, and then using their position as a method of gaining moral and political legitimacy, they, and similar organizations, have long used abortion as something of a proxy so as to receive a hearing in American secular society.

A Global Perspective on Defeating Bush

This article was co-written with Jeff Cohen

The U.S.-centric nature of American politics often affects the U.S. left. It's hard to get out of USA mindsets long enough to grasp the global implications of decisions made here at home. Yet the effects of U.S. government policies are so enormous across the planet that some people have suggested -- with more than a little justification -- that every person on Earth should get to vote in U.S. presidential elections.

On the international left, no one has more credibility as an unwavering opponent of U.S. foreign policy than Tariq Ali. Raised in Pakistan, he was a leader of Britain's Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 1960s, and is now a prominent London-based writer and an editor at New Left Review. His recent books include "Bush in Babylon" and "The Clash of Fundamentalisms." As progressives in the United States try to make sense out of the current presidential campaign, Ali's perspective on the global significance of Bush's electoral fate deserves serious consideration.

"I travel a great deal, all the continents, and I think

Nice, polite, calm...

KANANASKIS, Alberta -- Make that a big Canadian, "Oh dear." These nice Canadians, whom George W. Bush once managed to triumphantly identify as "our most important neighbors to the north" are famous for their reticence. Canada, Land of the Understatement. I once proposed their national motto should be: "Now, Let's Not Get Excited." Not that I would ever generalize. I attribute their commendable phlegm to being too cold to waste much energy and regular ingestion of oatmeal.

        Nice, polite, calm, reserved, chock full of common sense and living next to us -- what a fate. For them, it's like having the Simpsons for next-door neighbors. A few years ago, during the height of our national meltdown over Monica Lewinsky, a host on the Canadian Broadcasting Co.'s evening news program began an interview by gingerly asking me, "So, having another of your little psychodramas down there, eh?"

Polluters reach the line in the Red Desert sand

It's time to draw a line in the sand of Wyoming's Red Desert. The White House is proposing to let some of their biggest campaign contributors in the oil, gas and coal industries drill more than 1500 wells across a wilderness that was once a famous passageway for the Pony Express - the Jack Morrow Hills in the Red Desert in Wyoming. The Hills are also home to North America's largest antelope and desert elk herds and the site of rare prehistoric rock art painted over 2,000 years ago.

I wish I could tell you that this proposal is just about drilling in one place, but it's not. It's a trial balloon to test our strength. If the polluters can get access to an area as historically and ecologically sensitive as the Jack Morrow Hills, they'll know that with enough political pressure and campaign donations, they'll be able to drill, mine, and log just about anywhere – even in national monuments.

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