'…a major destabilizing influence'
The Western nations and especially the United States awoke today to a new world. After decades of hearing US politicians boastingly describe the US as the “exceptional nation,” justifying its repeated violation of international law with invasions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, El Salvador, and …
Continue reading “Welcome to the New ‘New World Order,’ Not Like the Old ‘New World Order’”
The latest events in Ukraine have demonstrated the ugly but effective operation of Mutual Assured Destruction — the frightening and incredibly costly state of affairs in this world that arrived in 1949. That was when the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear bomb, just four years after the US exploded the first three in …
Continue reading “Don’t Be Too Mad about MAD. Somehow, It’s Kept Us from a Nuclear War for 77 Years”
This article is published in Salon.com, which assigned it. Last August with a chaotic evacuation by air of the last US troops in Afghanistan, President Biden effectively ended one of the country’s most embarrassing and pointless wars, leaving that battered land fully in the control of the Taliban — the same dogged AK-toting …
Continue reading “US Wants a New War or at Least Public Fears of One”
Sometimes the hypocrisy of the US government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, it just too much to let pass. The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a …
Continue reading “How Can the US Accuse Any Nation of Violating ‘Rules-Based International Order’?”
(This artidle was written for The Edge, a publication of Ithaca College’s Park Center for Independent Media.) One of the biggest blacked-out stories of 2021 surely has to be the news, on November 16, that the Pentagon once again had abysmally failed to pass an audit, despite the best efforts of 1,200 top-flight Wall Street …
Continue reading “The Pentagon Fails Its Fourth Consecutive Audit”
We have two examples of economic systems and of individual scientific workers and business people doing what they do that offer a instructive illustrations of why the US is so screwed up, and why it doesn’t have to be that way. The first is the extraordinary new (if unfortunately named) James Webb telescope heading rapidly …
Continue reading “Capitalism and the Profit-Motive Didn’t Create the James Webb Space Telescope”
To hear the podcast of the author speaking about and elaborating on this article in the Nation magazine, in an interview by Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener, click here. The interview begins at the 14:10 point in the podcast. In April 1950, three months before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested as Soviet atomic spies, FBI director …
That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021. Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw …
The shooting death by Los Angeles Police of 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who died in a changing room of a Burlington Coat Factory store in a North Hollywood mall while with her mother trying on a dress for her coming 15th birthday celebration, is an atrocity beyond comprehension. I don’t care what kinds of excuses are …
Ever since the 9-11 attack on the US, people here had this mantra that 9-11 “changed everything.” It’s a gross overstatement of course. The country has been moving steadily into becoming a “national security” state since President Harry Truman launched it with the creation of the CIA and the National Security Agency. Since then, …