Truth Out
Live-Blogging the Health Care Summit: Waxman to Obama "Republicans Won't Help You"
Watch the summit live below.
Goldman Plays, We Pay
The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
HAITI EARTHQUAKE LIVE BLOG: Who to Follow and What to Read for Breaking Developments
Here is the link to Thursday's live blog. Please check the page regularly for updates.
7:45am PDT: The BBC has a disturbing first hand video report from a hospital in Port-au-Prince where, last night, injured people waiting for treatment slept amongst dead bodies.
Despite Anger Over BP Spill, Washington Might Not Act on It
Washington As the Gulf of Mexico focuses on cleaning up the mess left by the BP oil spill, the question facing the nation's capital is: Will Washington clean up its act, too?
Congress is considering stricter regulation of oil exploration, and the Obama administration has pledged to overhaul the disgraced federal agency that oversees oil drilling.
Already, however, some of the toughest proposals are facing stiff opposition from Republicans and some Gulf Coast Democrats whose constituents rely on the oil industry for jobs.
The Angry Left Needs Hugs and Kisses
The angry left is angry with Barack Obama. It's lying on the floor kicking and screaming and holding its breath. Goodness is not being accomplished. Injustice continues sort of unabated. Bad people are doing bad things. This is obviously all the president's fault. I wish. The angry left presumes that the president is in full control of the government, when he's obviously not. Even George W. Bush learned that and he was a Republican.
Obama won the election. Lincoln won the Civil War.
Homes Keep Falling Into Foreclosure as Programs Fail to Help
Washington - More than three years into the housing crisis that helped trigger a worldwide recession, the torrid pace of home foreclosures continues to tear at the core of the American dream.
New figures Thursday from Realty-Trac showed that foreclosure activity declined over the first six months of the year in nine of the 10 large metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates.
Going Where Glenn Beck Wouldn't: Defining White Culture
My facebook and twitter friend @clyde_online, a community organizer in DC, has been pestering me to define U.S. white culture. Up until now, I've demurred.
Frankly, there are other things I'd rather write about. Besides, though I'm certainly aware of the status and meaning that our civilization has managed to assign to whiteness and realize that I benefit from both, I don't personally buy into either. If it were up to me, I'd get rid of whiteness altogether.
News in Brief: Administration May Bypass Congress on Immigration Reform, and More ...
The Obama administration is considering ways to act on immigration reform without Congressional approval, reported ProPublica, including giving green cards or permanent residence status to many people living in the country with documents. Accord to a memo to Alejandro N. Mayorkas, director of the U.S.
A Movement Rises in Arizona
Three months ago, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the notorious SB 1070, a bill that put her state at the forefront of a movement to intensify the criminalization of undocumented immigrants.
Since then, activists have responded through legal challenges, political lobbying, grassroots organizing and mass mobilizations.
Strengthen Social Security Coalition Puts Both Parties on Notice
More than 60 organizations that represent more than 30 million Americans are banding together to deliver a straightforward message to politicians this fall: Don't mess with Social Security.
Greek Society Begins to Crack Under Harsh Measures
Athens - Every working day, more than a hundred people crowd around the entrance of the merchant and passenger boats' reconstruction industry, well known as 'The Zone', in the southern suburb of Attiki.
Most of them are unemployed steel workers and torch welders, who wait desperately from the early hours of the morning for an announcement of jobs offered on a daily basis on the ships that dock at the port.
Cut Tax Expenditures to Stimulate the Economy
When Federal Reserve Board Chairman Bernanke announced that the Fed was not prepared to fund additional economic stimulus at this time, the market fell, suggesting strongly that Wall Street disagrees with Republican calls to cut expenditures because deficits have gotten too large. Only when record corporate earnings were announced did the market rise.
Primer for Ed Reformers (or, It’s the Curriculum, Stupid!)
Just about everybody who’s ever been to school has a theory about what’s wrong with education. And a good many of them have a theory about what would make what’s wrong right.
BP Wants Experts to Keep Quiet; House Says No Way
BP's headache continues to get worse. In a July 29 letter to BP America's President Lamar McKay, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-California) and Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) have demanded BP's executive appear before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce by August 6. Unlike then-CEO Tony Hayward's testimony which focused on the April 20 explosion, this time Waxman and Markey are looking into a less-visible component of the BP disaster
Dallas Darling | Appeasement and the Politics of Flexibility
At the Senate Armed Services Committee, when General David Petraeus said keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight was an "enduring" mission and that the July 2011 deadline for a troop withdrawal was flexible, it reminded me of what then-U.S. President George W. Bush claimed when he first announced the preemptive wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Some within the Bush Administration claimed the defeat of Kabul and Jalalabad and Baghdad would take only three to six weeks, perhaps at the most six months.
Top Democrats Pressure White House on Afghan War as WikiLeaks Reveals Bloody Realities
The Afghan war is coming under renewed scrutiny as web surfers across the world browse through the bloody battle scenes and military follies described in the thousands of classified military reports released by WikiLeaks, and now top Democrats are finally expressing concerns over the longevity of a war that has dragged on for nearly a decade.
Gareth Porter | The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign
Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.
What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.
Alexander Cockburn | Will WikiLeaks Help End the Afghan War?
The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of "nation-building," the venality and corruption of the coalition's Afghan allies and the complicity of Pakistan's intelligence services with the Taliban would cause a wave of revulsion in the United States and among its coalition allies against the war.
David Sirota | The Deception of Real-World Inception
For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions and "Alice in Wonderland" allusions, the new film "Inception" adds something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality's authenticity -- something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie's tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong?
Henry Giroux: Youth in a Suspect Society (Audio Interview)
Allen Ruff, host of listener supported radio program, "A Public Affair" WORT, 89.9FM, Madison, Wisconsin, interviews Henry Giroux to discuss his new book, Youth in a Suspect Society.
Press play to Listen:
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