I have 182 fans: Become a Fan. You'll get emails whenever I post articles on OpEdNews
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges' original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists."
Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.
Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010)
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.
Monday, February 6, 2012 The Cancer in Occupy (36 comments)
Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished. If we become isolated we can be crushed. Losing the ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.
Monday, January 30, 2012 Corporations Have No Use for Borders (1 comments)
The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination.
Monday, January 23, 2012 Thank You for Standing Up (9 comments)
Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on "Jersey Shore." The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.
Monday, January 16, 2012 Why I'm Suing Barack Obama (43 comments)
This demented "war on terror" is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state.
Monday, January 9, 2012 The Gospel of the Penniless, Jobless, Marginalized and Despised (7 comments)
James Cone, perhaps the most important contemporary theologian in America, has spent a lifetime pointing out the hypocrisy and mendacity of the white church and white-dominated society while lifting up and exalting the voices of the oppressed.
Monday, December 5, 2011 Where Were You When They Crucified My Movement? (11 comments)
The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 This Is What Revolution Looks Like (26 comments)
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Friday, November 11, 2011 Chris Hedges: This One Could Take Them All Down; (24 comments)
Transcript: Chris Hedges Talks From the Heart About Occupy Wall Street excoriating unions, moveon.org... while cherishing the #OWS movement.
Monday, November 7, 2011 Finding Freedom In Handcuffs (5 comments)
This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice.
Monday, October 31, 2011 A Master Class In Occupation (8 comments)
The Occupy movement is constantly evolving as it finds what works and discards what does not. At any point in the day, knots of impassioned protesters can be found in discussions that involve self-criticism and self-reflection. This makes the movement radically different from liberal reformist movements that work within the confines of established systems of corporate power.
Monday, October 24, 2011 Occupiers Have To Convince The Other 99 Percent (19 comments)
The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has not replicated the beliefs of the New Left. Rather, it is rooted in the moral imperatives of justice and self-sacrifice. It seeks to rebuild the bridges to labor, the poor and the working class.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 Chris Hedges in Times Square (3 comments)
Occupy TVNY has this interview with Chris Hedges, who, during the major global protests on Saturday, compared Occupy Wall Street to the other movements he's covered around the world, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
Monday, October 17, 2011 A Movement Too Big to Fail (26 comments)
The liberal class, by refusing to question unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented them from merging completely with the power elite. The liberal class, which was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play. All hope lies now with those in the street.
Monday, October 10, 2011 Why the Elites Are in Trouble (11 comments)
The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished.
Friday, September 30, 2011 The Best Among Us; Join the Revolt On Wall Street or Stand On The Wrong Side of History (31 comments)
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler
Monday, September 26, 2011 Tomatoes of Wrath
In Florida, collective bargaining is illegal, one of the legacies of Jim Crow practices designed to keep blacks poor and disempowered. Today the ban on collective bargaining serves the same purpose in thwarting the organizing efforts of the some 30,000 Hispanic, Mayan and Haitian agricultural laborers.
Monday, September 19, 2011 The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Recalls Obama's Fall From Grace (6 comments)
Obama, once the glitter of power fades, will have to grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered -- his soul.
Sunday, September 11, 2011 A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe (54 comments)
The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
Monday, September 5, 2011 Libya: Here We Go Again (19 comments)
History is replete with conquering forces being cheered when they arrive, and then rapidly mutating from liberator to despised enemy. And once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East. We are recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers, all waiting for their chance to do to us what we are doing to them.
Monday, August 29, 2011 The Election March of the Trolls (9 comments)
We have to create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive. The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 Fundamentalism Kills
All fundamentalists worship the same gods -- themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.
Monday, July 18, 2011 America's Disappeared (4 comments)
Obama has no intention of restoring the rule of law. He refuses to prosecute flagrant war crimes, and has immunized those who orchestrated, led and carried out the torture. At the same time he has dramatically increased war crimes, including drone strikes in Pakistan. He continues to preside over hundreds of the offshore penal colonies, where abuse and torture remain common. He is complicit with the killers and the torturers.
Monday, July 11, 2011 Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale (11 comments)
Poor urban neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of the estimated 40,000 SWAT team assaults that take place every year, have already learned what is only dimly being understood by the rest of us -- in the eyes of the state we are increasingly no longer citizens with constitutional rights but enemy combatants.
Monday, July 4, 2011 Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President (10 comments)
If we do not sever ourselves from established systems of power, if we do not become in every action we undertake agents of rebellion, then the ecological, economic and, finally, human distortions that arise in times of confusion, suffering and collapse will overwhelm us.
Monday, June 27, 2011 The Death of Newspapers and Journalism (6 comments)
The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print who believed the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that it will be harder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public. The preoccupation with news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting will effectively marginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy established power.
Monday, June 20, 2011 This Hero Didn't Stand a Chance (2 comments)
Civil disobedience puts us in a position where we are making a risk and possibly making a sacrifice to stand up against that injustice. It also puts us in a position where with that vulnerability we see how much we need other people.
Monday, June 13, 2011 No Justice in Kafka's America (9 comments)
The state, by making us afraid, is able to justify the disease of permanent war and the silencing of those who dare to dissent. The terrible suffering we have unleashed throughout the Middle East is rendered invisible if there is no one to decry it and document it.
Monday, May 23, 2011 Why Liberal Sellouts Attack Prophets Like Cornel West (27 comments)
The decision to subordinate ethics to political expediency has led liberals to steadily surrender their moral autonomy, voice and beliefs to the dictates of the corporate state. Once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of the liberal class.
Monday, May 16, 2011 The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic (5 comments)
West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed.
Monday, May 9, 2011 Your Taxes Fund Anti-Muslim Hatred (12 comments)
News personalities, politicians, self-appointed experts on the Muslim world, and law enforcement and intelligence officials, as well as the Christian right, have successfully demonized Muslims in the United States since the attacks of 2001. It is acceptable to say things openly about Muslims that could never be said about any other ethnic group.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 On Osama bin Laden's Death (27 comments)
While I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don't in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.
Monday, April 25, 2011 The Corporate State Wins Again (4 comments)
We live in a fragmented society. We are ignorant of what is being done to us. We are diverted by the absurd and political theater. We are afraid of terrorism, of losing our job and of carrying out acts of dissent. We are politically demobilized and paralyzed. The citizen's highest hope finally becomes to be secure and left alone.
Monday, April 18, 2011 Throw Out the Money Changers (6 comments)
Once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.
Monday, April 11, 2011 Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System (35 comments)
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy.
Monday, April 4, 2011 This Is What Resistance Looks Like (21 comments)
The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species.
Monday, March 28, 2011 The Collapse of Globalization (9 comments)
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive.
Monday, March 21, 2011 The Body Baggers of Iraq (7 comments)
"War is disgusting and horrific," she said. "It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war."
Monday, March 14, 2011 Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand (4 comments)
We have tolerated the intolerant -- from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations -- and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes.
Monday, March 7, 2011 This Time We're Taking the Whole Planet With Us (5 comments)
Globalization is the modern articulation of the ancient ideology used by past elites to turn citizens into serfs and the natural world into a wasteland for profit. Nothing to these elites is sacred. Human beings and the natural world are exploited until exhaustion or collapse.
Monday, February 28, 2011 No Other Way Out (2 comments)
We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us.
Monday, February 21, 2011 Huffington's Plunder (9 comments)
Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. They are charter members of the exploitative class.
Monday, February 14, 2011 Fight for a World Without Coal (3 comments)
writer and philosopher Wendell Berry, armed with little more than a copy of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and his conscience, has been camped out for three days with a handful of other activists in the governor's outer office in Frankfort, Ky, to protest the continued blasting of mountaintops and the poisoning of watersheds, soil and air by coal companies.
Monday, February 7, 2011 Recognizing the Language of Tyranny (5 comments)
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs.
Monday, January 31, 2011 What Corruption and Force Have Wrought in Egypt (3 comments)
A new government, to maintain credibility with the Egyptian population, will have to more actively defy demands from Washington and be more openly antagonistic to Israel.
Monday, January 24, 2011 Where Liberals Go to Feel Good (13 comments)
The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. The liberal class' solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression.
Monday, January 10, 2011 Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich (9 comments)
More than a million Iraqi civilians have been killed. Nearly 5 million have been displaced from their homes or are refugees. The Mercer Quality of Living survey last year ranked Baghdad last among cities -- the least livable on the planet. Iraq, which once controlled its own oil, has been forced to turn its oil concessions over to foreign corporations. That is what we have bequeathed to Iraq -- violence, misery and theft.
Monday, January 3, 2011 "The Left Has Nowhere to Go' (76 comments)
"The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable," Nader said. "It is amazing that it hasn't happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don't."
Monday, December 27, 2010 2011: A Brave New Dystopia (13 comments)
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history.
Monday, December 20, 2010 Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail (3 comments)
The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat, the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that describes war. This faltering language of pain and atonement, even shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these veterans as they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to the White House fence.
Monday, December 13, 2010 No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted
To stand in a park on a cold December morning, to defy that which we must defy, to do this with others, brings us solace, and perhaps even peace. We will not find this if we allow ourselves to be disabled. We will not find this alone.
Monday, December 6, 2010 Happy as a Hangman (27 comments)
Those who do not carry out acts of rebellion, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, are guilty of solidifying and perpetuating these crimes. Those who do not act delude themselves into believing they are innocent. They are not.
Monday, November 29, 2010 Real Hope Is About Doing Something (7 comments)
Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.
Monday, November 22, 2010 Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion (34 comments)
We are reaching the breaking point. An explosion, unless we halt the increased pressure, seems inevitable. And what is left for those of us who cannot embrace the contaminants of violence? If the system shuts us out how can we influence it through nonviolent mechanisms of popular protest? How can we restore a civil society? How can we battle back against those who will mobilize hatred to cement into place an American fascism?
Monday, November 15, 2010 The Origin of America's Intellectual Vacuum (13 comments)
Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and promotion require them to remain silent.
Monday, November 8, 2010 A Recipe For Fascism
American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas.
Monday, November 1, 2010 The Phantom Left (15 comments)
Wall Street's looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse.
Monday, October 25, 2010 The World Liberal Opportunists Made (28 comments)
The death of the liberal class is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations.
Monday, October 18, 2010 Heroes for the Beaten, Foreclosed on, Imprisoned Masses (3 comments)
Staughton Lynd could have built an enviable career as an academic but for his conscience. His conscience led him as a young undergraduate disgusted by the elitism around him to drop out of Harvard, and tortured him when he returned to finish his degree.
Monday, October 11, 2010 How Democracy Dies: Lessons from a Master (37 comments)
There is a yearning by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They seek out of ignorance and desperation to create a utopian society based on "biblical law."
Monday, September 27, 2010 Retribution for a World Lost in Screens (5 comments)
We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. we flick on a screen and are entranced.
Monday, September 13, 2010 Do Not Pity the Democrats (10 comments)
Do not fear Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Do not fear the tea party movement, the birthers, the legions of conspiracy theorists or the militias. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter. If the hegemony of the corporate state is not soon broken we will descend into a technologically enhanced age of barbarism.
Monday, September 6, 2010 "They Kill Alex" (2 comments)
Military recruiters, who often have offices in high schools, prey on young men like Alex, who was first approached when he was 16. They cater to their insecurities, their dreams and their economic deprivation. They promise them what the larger society denies them.
Monday, August 16, 2010 Formalizing Israel's Land Grab (2 comments)
The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel's increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable.
Monday, August 9, 2010 The Tears of Gaza Must Be Our Tears (2 comments)
As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.
Monday, July 5, 2010 Freedom in the Grace of the World
We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 This Country Needs a Few Good Communists (5 comments)
Capitalism was once viewed in America as a system that had to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. And so, even as Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars and the Gulf of Mexico is turned into a toxic swamp, we do not know what to do or say. Language is our first step toward salvation. We cannot fight what we cannot describe.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 The Greeks Get It
Here's to the Greeks. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out.
Monday, May 17, 2010 BP and the "Little Eichmanns' (31 comments)
The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 No One Cares (3 comments)
Right now in Afghanistan there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors alongside 68,000 U.S. troops. There is almost a 2-to-1 ratio of private-sector for-profit forces that are on the U.S. government payroll versus the active-duty or actual military forces in the country.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 The New Secessionists
Kirkpatrick Sale, an intellectual godfather of the secessionist movement, said "Secessionists have to be very careful not to be militaristic. You can be emphatic in your secessionism, but it won't happen by carrying guns. I don't know what the tea party people think they are going to accomplish with guns."
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 Noam Chomsky Has "Never Seen Anything Like This' (20 comments)
The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies." If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election."
Monday, April 12, 2010 One Marine's "Liberty Walk' for the Rest of Us
Bell, who lives in Lansing, N.Y., is the new face of resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.
Monday, March 29, 2010 Is America "Yearning for Fascism'? (5 comments)
The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people.
Monday, March 15, 2010 Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot
The campaign against Israeli dissidents has taken the form of venomous denunciations of activists and jurists, including Justice Goldstone. It includes a bill before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which will make it possible to imprison the leaders of Israeli human rights groups if they fail to comply with crippling new registration conditions.
Monday, March 8, 2010 Calling All Rebels (18 comments)
The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.
Monday, March 1, 2010 Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama (16 comments)
The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse.
Friday, February 26, 2010 Book Review: "The Death and Life of American Journalism'
Newspapers, which engage rather than entertain, can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily.
Monday, February 8, 2010 The Terror-Industrial Complex (6 comments)
Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?
Monday, February 1, 2010 The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News (1 comments)
Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The tragedy is that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.
Monday, January 25, 2010 Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction (8 comments)
The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived.
Monday, January 18, 2010 Turning King's Dream Into a Nightmare
Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for "overcoming" racism and "fulfilling" King's dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King.
Monday, January 11, 2010 Wall Street Will Be Back for More (3 comments)
The corporation decides who has value and who does not, who advances and who is left behind. It rewards the most compliant, craven and manipulative, and discards the losers who can't play the game, those who do not accumulate wealth or status fast enough, or who fail to fully subsume their individuality into the corporate collective.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 The Pictures of War You Aren't Supposed to See (7 comments)
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers.
Monday, December 28, 2009 One Day We'll All Be Terrorists (1 comments)
The state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.
Monday, December 14, 2009 Gravel's Lament: Fighting Another Dumb War
Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped around our vast killing machine as are the press, the two main political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the inside.
Monday, December 7, 2009 Liberals Are Useless (38 comments)
I don't dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
Obama is not the problem. We are.
Monday, November 30, 2009 Addicted to Nonsense (6 comments)
Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 The New State Solution (1 comments)
The Israelis have orchestrated acute misery and poverty in the Palestinian territories over the past two decades in an effort to subdue and ethnically cleanse the captive population. They have reduced Palestinians, many of whom now live on less than $2 a day, to a subsistence level.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Afghanistan's Sham Army (2 comments)
In the end, no one benefits from this war, not America, not Afghans. Only the CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find satisfactory returns on their investments.
Monday, November 2, 2009 Opium, Rape and the American Way (9 comments)
The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia (5 comments)
Memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war.
Thursday, October 1, 2009 The War on Language (2 comments)
“Words may be little doses of arsenic,” he wrote. “They are consumed without being noticed; they seem at first to have no effect, but after a while, indeed, the effect is there.”
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Globalization Goes Bankrupt (10 comments)
The draconian security measures to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history.
Monday, September 14, 2009 Stop Begging Obama and Get Mad (9 comments)
There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about “service.” But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire (7 comments)
This is an opportunity to defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in words that describe our reality. The power elite fear these words. If these words seep into the population, if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use...
Monday, August 24, 2009 This Isn't Reform, It's Robbery (6 comments)
This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 War Without Purpose
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we "liberating"- the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 The Man in the Mirror (2 comments)
The saturation coverage of Jackson's death is an example of our collective flight into illusion. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption.
