Our bold Saudi allies, using US weapons and guidance, struck another blow for freedom in Yemen this weekend, slaughtering 44 civilians including mourners at a funeral for people killed by the Saudis’ enemies. The US is currently helping the extremist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, terrorist-supporting, head-chopping Saudi tyrants “restore” a former Yemen leader who took power in a single-candidate election. Because, as we all know, spreading freedom and democracy is the only reason we are involved in the Middle East. That’s why we’re working with the Saudi tyrants to overthrow the Syrian tyrant with the help of the religious tyrants of ISIS

(UPDATED BELOW.) The Kim Davis gay marriage license case is a completely manufactured scandal, designed precisely to produce the current result: a “martyr” jailed for her beliefs, exciting media frenzy and fueling profitable fundraising and grassroots recruitment for ideological agitators. The actual issue is quite simple, and doesn’t involve “religious freedom” at all. But there is something more sinister going on behind these Kentucky conniptions. Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis swore an oath — before God — to “faithfully execute the duties of my office” when she took the post. These duties now include issuing same-sex marriage licenses, in line

In the Atlantic, Matt Ford probes the works of William Bradford, the controversial (and now dismissed) West Point professor whose berserker visions of unhinged state terror, at home and abroad, in the “war against Islamism” give General Buck Turgidison (“I’m saying no more than 10 or 20 million killed, tops!”) a run for his money. After a thorough examination of the views Bradford has been teaching the nation’s future military leaders, Ford ends in puzzlement at how this situation arose in the first place. But surely there is no mystery to that. Bradford believes that all those who are guilty

So Bernie Sanders wants a “kinder, gentler” program of extrajudicial drone killings. Well, isn’t that nice? Isn’t that “progressive”? He’ll “try” to “limit” the number of children blown into pieces by joystick commandos 10,000 miles away watching a computer screen. What hope, what change! Oh well, he’s just doing what anybody has to do to climb that big ole greasy pole of power. As long as he sticks with the Terror War program, the elite will be glad to let him pursue domestic “reforms” that they can easily block, dilute or co-opt — just as they’ve done with the eagerly

As the old joke goes, “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or another variant: “America will never forgive blacks for slavery.” Oppressors and abusers (and the beneficiaries of past abuses) often project their own guilt, self-loathing and dehumanization onto their victims, then hate them for being evidence – the living (or dead) proof – of the abusers’ moral rot. So it is with the rich and the poor, as a new story at Alternet demonstrates. Tana Ganeva’s story focuses mainly on a Facebook page, “Third and 33rd (and Beyond),” put up by “residents of Murray Hill and

I have of late been much pestered with electronic message from an outfit called the “Centre for Policy Studies.” It styles itself the “leading independent think tank in Britain” — and it probably is as rigorously independent and open-minded as any gaggle of titled lords, Big Money poobahs, reactionary academics, epic tax-dodgers, Murdoch moochers and imperialist cheerleaders gathered in an institution co-founded by Margaret Thatcher can be. I have actually had occasion to meet one of these ponderous grandees — a one-time Murdoch minion who also served faithfully as a mouthpiece for Moloch at several other ritzy rightwing rags before

I read this book a few years back: Worse Than Slavery, by David Oshinsky. An eye-opening read for anyone interested in the genuine history of these deliberately divided United States. After I read it, I sat down and wrote the piece below, which is, of course, still relevant today — as it has been all-too-relevant these past 150 years. As I said, this was written about nine years ago, but I just musicked it upduring our most recent days of rage and grief: https://soundcloud.com/chris-floyd/sons-of-the-south      

*This is an edited version of my latest Counterpunch Magazine column.*  We are living in a world gone through the looking glass when the most strident, unequivocal — even scatological! — denunciations of capitalism and its discontents are coming from … the Bishop of Rome. While Bernie Sanders pushes centrist notions as “radical” reforms and Britain’s so-called Labour Party tries to recover from the defeat of Michael Dukakis — sorry, Ed Milliband — by kowtowing even more abjectly to corporate power (and demonizing the only leadership candidate not bending the knee to Big Money), Pope Francis is out there literally

“You love your freedom; we love it too. That’s why we took it, so we can guard it for you. We’ll keep it safe, locked in the vault; every Fourth of July you can take it for a walk….”