31 Articles

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.

Monday, July 6, 2009
The Crooks Get Cash While the Poor Get Screwed
(2 comments) The desperation is palpable. People don't know where to turn. Benefits are running out. More and more people are out of work. "You see things getting worse and worse," he says. "You see people who wonder how they are going to eat & take care of themselves and their kids. You see people starting to do anything to get food, to hustle or rob, to go back to doing things they do not want to do. Good people start doin' bad things

Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free
(10 comments) The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
(2 comments) We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The American Empire Is Bankrupt
(20 comments) This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency [1]. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Monday, June 8, 2009
Hold Your Applause
(5 comments) ...these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009
War Is Sin
(6 comments) We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
"Clean" Energy and Poisoned Water
(4 comments) The New York City watershed lies within the Marcellus Shale. This watershed provides unfiltered water to more than 14 million people in New York City, upstate New York, Philadelphia and northern New Jersey. It is the largest unfiltered drinking water supply in the United States. And if the federal government does not intervene swiftly, it could become contaminated.

Monday, May 18, 2009
The Disease of Permanent War
(16 comments) Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering--including our own--is the price

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Becoming What We Seek to Destroy
The corrupt and unpopular regimes of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari are impotent allies. The longer they remain tethered to the United States, the weaker they become. And the weaker they become, the louder become the calls for intervention in Pakistan. During the war in Vietnam, we invaded Cambodia to bring stability to the region and cut off rebel sanctuaries and supply routes. Tactics. Killing fields.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Buying Brand Obama
(10 comments) Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different.

Thursday, April 23, 2009
Where's Rev. Wright When You Need Him?
(6 comments) "Barack Obama knows full well that he risks nothing by disrespecting African Americans at will,"wrote Glen Ford, the executive editor of The Black Agenda Report. "Across the Black political spectrum, so-called leadership seems incapable of shame or of taking manly or womanly offense at even the most blatant insults to Black people when the source of the affront is Barack Hussein Obama."

Friday, April 17, 2009
Israel's Racist in Chief
(18 comments) It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet.

Monday, April 6, 2009
Resist or Become Serfs
(12 comments) Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can only find part-time jobs, is not 8.5 percent but 15 percent. A sixth of the country is now effectively unemployed. And we are shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash. The New York Times' consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 year before

Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Obstruction of Justice
(7 comments) The trial of Al-Arian is a cause celebre in the Muslim world. A documentary film was made about the case in Europe. He has become the poster child for judicial abuse and persecution of Muslims in the United States by the Bush administration. The facts surrounding the trial and imprisonment of the former university professor have severely tarnished the integrity of the American judicial system.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout
(2 comments) Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless...

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism
(8 comments) The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "Tell me "how" you seek and I will tell you "what" you are seeking." [I]t is by recovering these moral questions, too often dismissed or ignored in universities and boardrooms across the country, laughed at on the stock exchange, ridiculed on reality television as an impediment to money and celebrity, that we will again find it possible to be whole.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction
(10 comments) A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
It's Obama's War Now
(22 comments) This is the text of a talk by Chris Hedges that will be read at anti-war gatherings to be held by The World Can't Wait in New York's Union Square, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Louisville, Chicago and Berkeley on March 19 to protest the sixth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning
(74 comments) Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat. It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
What Price Hollywood?
(2 comments) We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society, our gods are often celebrities. Religious belief and practice are commonly transferred to the adoration of celebrities. Our celebrity culture builds reliquaries and shrines to celebrities the way Romans built them for divine emperors, ancestors and household gods. We are a de facto polytheistic society.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Peace is in the Eye of the Beholder
(5 comments)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Lost in the Rubble
(16 comments) I often visited Nizar Rayan, who was killed Thursday in a targeted assassination by Israel, at his house in the Jabaliya refugee camp when I was in Gaza. His four wives and 11 children also were killed. Rayan's sons, according to their father, strove to be one thing: martyrs for Palestine.