(UPDATED BELOW) Mark Ames has a follow-up to his story on Pierre Omidyar’s extensive links with the rightwing extremist Narendra Modi who now controls India. (I wrote about and excerpted Ames’ original story here.) As Ames pointed out in the first story, Omidyar’s support for Modi was rewarded with a vow by the candidate to open up India’s lucrative e-commerce market to foreign corporations and techno-oligarchs — like Omidyar. Now, Ames reports, Modi has made good on his promise. One of his first acts in power has been an order to draw up guidelines for cracking open Indian e-commerce to

India is now in the hands of Narendra Modi — a lifelong member of an unabashedly neofascist paramilitary group. His chief claim to fame is presiding over the wanton slaughter of more than 2,000 Muslims as a provincial chief minister — and getting away with it. A staunch neoliberal as well as a neofascist, he is preparing to unleash the by-now standard “shock doctrine” tactics of the pernicious neoliberal cult on the whole country: unrestricted corporate rapine aided by a heavy-handed, all-surveilling militarist state, waging war on the poor — and the very notion of a common good. What is

Here’s my latest column for CounterPunch magazine. I usually wait until it’s been out for awhile to post it here, but as the story in question is already fading from public consciousness (as all blazingly important stories tend to do in a matter of days — or hours, or minutes — in what Gore Vidal aptly termed the United States of Amnesia), I thought I’d put it up a little earlier this time. *** Can you see me? Can you see me? I’m holding up a sign. It’s a sign expressing my outrage at an atrocious event in a country

You thought that battle was in the pastThought you’d left that carcass lying in the grassYou thought that fever had grown stone coldYou thought that dragon was weak and oldBut uh-uh, honey: he’s got eternal youth.No, you can’t slay the serpent, and that’s the truth…In days that have seen unabashed religious fascists take control of the world’s largest democracy (with copious support from certain “dissident”-supporting oligarchs; more on this later), far-right parties making breakthroughs all across Europe (including the first postwar victory for a neo-Nazi party in Germany, of all places), the continuing backward march of America’s militarized, brutalizing, uncaring

In the crinkled, crumpled little walnut that constitutes America’s political discourse, the question of Libya has been reduced to the petty, bitter political wranglings over “Benghazi,” where American officials were killed in a FUBAR of covert ops and clueless incompetence. (Then again, covert ops and clueless incompetence are the M.O. of American foreign policy in general, so it’s hard to see what’s particularly ‘scandalous’ about the Benghazi incident. This deadly combination kills innocent people all over the world on an almost daily basis.) Indeed, the hyper-partisan focus on Benghazi actually reflects the thoroughly bipartisan nature of America’s fubarish foreign policy.

What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses! What are their names? We don’t know! What did they do? We don’t know! Are they civilians? We don’t care!This could be the catechism of the America’s drone death squads that rain death and destruction on defenceless people from the skies of Pakistan, month in, month out, year after year. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research

(Updated below) As we all know, Glenn Greenwald recently revealed that he is saving the biggest revelations from the Snowden NSA archive until last, likening his journalistic process to a fireworks show a that builds up to a grand finale. This is, of course, the very opposite of any kind of actual journalism, which leads with the most important information first. The traditional method would seem even more imperative in this case, as we are dealing with material which exposes vast crimes and deeply sinister actions by a tyrannical government. Greenwald himself has incessantly told us how important this material

The only article I ever had published in The Nation involved the offspring of a powerful politician trading on his White House connections to advance his private fortune. The piece was written 12 years ago, as the Enron scandal was breaking. (And boy, doesn’t that seem several centuries ago now, looking back over the vast flooded plains of blood and ruin that our bipartisan elites have bequeathed us since then.) It was a short article, dealing with the key role that the accounting firm Arthur Andersen had played both in the unfolding Enron morass in 2002 and the murky political

The events unfolding in Ukraine are extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous. They are made even more dangerous by the unending slagheap of lies and propaganda being used to shape the shifting, chaotic situation on the ground into a narrative that serves the narrow and ruthless agenda of the Potomac Empire and its factotums in the European elite. I’ve written here previously of the growing ugliness of the Putin regime in Russia. But what we are seeing played out among the knowing liars of the Washington power structure and their willing executioners in the Western press has nothing to do with the