Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

"This is the World You've Inherited"

The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

By CHARLES R. LARSON

Four years ago--in the spring of 2005, when you were still in a state of euphoria about beginning your college studies in the fall--your world was one of vast possibilities and expectations.  George Bush had recently begun his second term as president, determined to use his political capital, as he referred to it, to shape the world in his vision.  People were closely divided about the war in Iraq, not as opposed to it as they would soon become.  The results of the dot.com collapse were beginning to recede; the stock market was chugging nicely along.  Seniors in the graduating class of 2005 were cautious about their employment prospects, which the job search firm Monster described as the best in five years.  Many graduates were hopeful they would be rewarded with high-paying jobs, especially if they had strong grade point averages and graduated from prestigious colleges or universities.  Those with lesser qualifications also anticipated better prospects than their peers had in the previous four years

What a difference four years can make.  Sadly, it didn’t take long for a downward spiral to begin that brought us to where we are today: a considerably different environment than the one facing your predecessors who graduated in the years beginning in 2005.

As you were moving in the your dormitories and getting ready for the fall 2005 semester, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and brought George Bush to his knees and catalyzed the eventual collapse of the neo-con philosophy that had guided his administration during its first term.  I’m certain that you remember the horrifying images of the victims of the hurricane late that summer.  Some of you were no doubt involved in the arrangements to make certain that university students in New Orleans were able to continue their studies at other institutions.

The United States has not fully recovered from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. President Bush’s popularity began to take a sudden nose-dive.  In late September of 2005, some of you may have participated along with several hundred thousand others in the anti-Iraq war protest in Washington, D.C. What has been particularly encouraging for me has been the slow but gradual awakening of your generation’s political consciousness, culminating with the election of Barack Obama.

This awakening has been impressive, particularly given the political situation in America for most of your lives.  Though you were only eleven or twelve years old at the time, you must have heard hush-hushed remarks from your parents about the way Bill Clinton disgraced himself in office and, in effect, made it impossible for Al Gore to win the 2000 presidential election.  But mostly, your political consciousness has been molded and shaped during George Bush’s eight years, most of them as a failed President.

At the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, we had a balanced budget; we were not at war; people were beginning to pay attention to the environment and global warming seriously.  Moreover, American was highly regarded in the community of nations all around the world, not hated has we were soon to become once George Bush established his foreign policy that other countries were either with us or against us.  It is difficult to believe that so many things could go wrong for America so quickly.

Unfortunately, that is the world that you—as you graduate with your B.A. or B.S.—have inherited.  It is both your burden and your challenge.

It does not help that in the mad scramble for money pursued by so many people in the past few years (bankers, stock brokers, hedge fund managers, mortgage sellers, and house flippers) your university did not serve you well at the same time.  Tuition costs have grown disproportionately to the cost of living.  Many of you are saddled today with student loans that will take you years to pay off, especially given the collapsing job market.  Worse, many of your degrees are of questionable value, taught by professors who become as comfortable in their positions as the men and women in finance who were rewarded for losing billions of dollars for the corporations that employed them.

You may question what I mean.  If you have a newly-minted degree in economics, you may wonder why your professors appeared to have little or no awareness of the impending economic collapse.  Why did they fail to mention this possibility--the worst since the Great Depression--in the economics and business courses you took from them?  What sheltered academic economists so that they had no clue about the approaching mortgage collapse?  If you have just earned your degree in journalism, you might ask why your professors silently watched the American media enable the Bush administration’s policies on torture, or on financing and planning for the war, or Katrina, or on budget priorities in general.

It’s easy for me to make these remarks, you say, as someone who teaches English and not business or economics or journalism.  Well, I believe that the humanities have failed you also, especially in regards to ethics and morality.  More specifically, those of us who teach English have ignored your urgent needs to write better.  I have taught long enough (fifty years) to observe a steady decline in the writing skills of almost all students at virtually every level of the educational system—but especially during the past decade or so of grade inflation and feel-good philosophies promoted by educators to nurture students’ self-esteem.

Remarkably, almost all of you who are graduating today—no matter what your major—will complete your degree with a B+ grade point average or higher.  At some institutions, and in some disciplines, rarely is a grade below an A- given to any student who completes a course.  And yet surveys indicate that many of you do little or no work outside of the classroom, assuming that you do attend classes.

Were you truly challenged by your higher education?  Did you write papers that asked you to grapple with ideas and not simply borrow from the Internet?  Did your professors carefully read your papers and challenge you with their comments?

What I am suggesting is that your professors rarely gave you the grades you deserved but, instead, enabled most of you to assume that you are hard-working original thinkers, brilliant students who were deeply immersed in the disciplines they supposedly taught you.

So this is where you find yourself today: with a stunning grade point average from a first-rate institution, an impressive résumé (because of all your carefully chosen extra-curricular activities and internships), heavily in debt, and with few prospects for a high-paying job.

What can you do?  What must you do?

The generation before you—yes, your parents’ generation—because of its complacency, its self-serving interests, its inability to mind the ship, has created a perfect storm that you must now weather.  The national debt alone is so large that I fully understand why you might want to bury your head in the sand, as your elders have mostly done, and hope that we will somehow muddle through.

But these are not typical times that you have inherited.  You questioned your professors little during the last four years, but that policy can no longer continue for the freshmen who will enter universities this coming fall.  As for you, you are going to have to keep the heat on our newly-elected popular president, and on every other elected leader in the United States.  America is going to have to become accountable for all of its policies--especially economic ones--or we are doomed to a horrendous national decline.

And you are going to have to get involved in a way you probably never considered when you began to pursue your undergraduate degree four years.  Fortunately, there is a new mood of optimism in the country and there are still safe harbors where you can begin: Teach for America, the Peace Corps, and any number of non-profits (including many international ones) that are crying out for your assistance.  You might also consider teaching English overseas in one of the countries where English is rapidly becoming the preferred second language: Japan, China, or Korea.  If your interests are international, consider taking the exam for the Department of State or other government agencies that place people overseas.

In your personal life, no matter what you do, you are going to have to scale down your expectations and learn how to live frugally, while at the same time connecting to other people and their needs which may be much worse than yours.

Americans have always prided themselves on helping others—not just other Americans but people around the world who, historically, have not been as fortunate as most of us in the United States.  As an old African adage goes, a human being is only human because of other people.  The same is true of countries: a nation is only a nation because of other countries.

The world urgently needs you.  Fortunately, you can make a difference.

Charles R. Larson is a Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.

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