Glen Ford brings the heat, and the truth, about one of the most important — and unreported — stories of our day: the shackling of Detroit. Over the past year, we have seen the citizens of a major American city openly, ‘legally’ stripped of the right to govern themselves and forced into a form of indentured servitude in order to enrich a small predatory elite whose own machinations had driven the city to ruin. It is an extraordinary — and sickening — spectacle. Detroit is now under the control of an unelected “Emergency Financial Manager,” Kevyn Jones, forcibly imposed by

Something of a follow-up to the previous post, with co-reportage by Mark Floyd.

Something from another side of life, away from the poison of politics. What the hell — times is hard, right?

Just a reminder: this is the true nature of the bipartisan, militarized “security state” now headed by the progressive Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. When you support the Laureate — however “savvily” and “critically” — when you support the system — hoping to “reform” it from within — this is what you are supporting. From the Guardian: The last time I saw my mother, Momina Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my children’s clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a traditional sweet made of milk. … The next day, 24 October 2012, she was dead,

1. Clancy Lives!Take heart, you fans of slam-bang super-spy adventure stories! Tom Clancy is not dead; he lives on in the pages of the Washington Post, channeled through the airport-thriller prose of Barton Gellman — one of the small coterie of media custodians doling out dollops from the huge archive of secret NSA documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Drawing on that archive of what should be shocking, empire-undermining revelations, Gellman and his co-authors last week penned a story that is, in almost every respect, a glorification of state-ordered murder: a rousing tale of secret ops in exotic lands, awesome

Just got back from an epic journey through the old Confederacy to carry out a final, filial duty, and I recollected this piece from days gone by, days before the filial became so final. I want to revel with the dead and goneDown there where life itself becomes a song….    

Here is my most recent column for the print version of CounterPunch, which was published last month. *** As we all know, the use of chemical weapons is the most heinous crime that can be committed by a brutal, aggressive government: a brazen act of state terror, an offense against all humanity. Those who perpetrate such actions put themselves beyond the pale; indeed, they rank themselves with Hitler himself, as a succession of America’s highest officials has pointed out in recent weeks. And that’s why the details of the infamous chemical attack in the Middle East resonate with stark moral

“Thanks for a nation of finks” — William BurroughsAs the days and weeks go crawling by, bringing now and then another little drib, another little drab of revelations from the storehouse of secrets that Edward Snowden pried loose from the National Security Agency, the story turns slowly but surely from one of scandal and outrage bidding fair to trouble the well-cushioned bottoms on the seat of power to a dimmed, drained subject of “debate” amongst powerful insiders. Indeed, we are now told by the dolers of the dribs that “debate” was the sole purpose of the exercise in the first