The U.S. presidential campaign is now in full swing. (In truth, it never actually ends; the savage grasping and grappling among damaged souls seeking their brief season of domination and death-dealing goes on daily without respite.) In the months to come, we will be subjected to an ever-growing, ever-roaring flood of rhetoric about the unique, unquestionable, divinely ordained goodness of America. (And how the “other side” would destroy or demean this precious moral specialness.) This rhetoric will come both from the radical, society-shaking extremists laughingly called “conservatives” in our fun-house political system, and from the reactionary defenders of elite wealth

Now what’s that little baby doingDressing up in banker’s clothes?— Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings Many people have commented on the Congressional vote to codify the authoritarian powers asserted by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, i.e., the arbitrary, unchallengeable power to declare anyone on earth — including American citizens — an “enemy of the state” and incarcerate them, indefinitely, outside of due process, in military custody. There is, at this writing, an outside chance that Barack Obama might possibly veto this “enabling decree” — but only on the grounds that to accept Congressional approval of these tyrannical powers might

On Wednesday — the day before Britain’s unions launched the largest strike the country has seen in almost 90 years — the UK’s coalition government finally removed its mask of ‘moderation’ and showed its true, ravenous face. The government’s economic honcho, George Osborne — a young, smirking, smarmy upper class twit who makes George Bush look like Will Rogers — announced yet another round of savage cuts that will batter and cripple the lives of the poor, the vulnerable, the young, the sick, and ordinary working people. It is all part of a relentless program of “austerity” that is ostensibly

Who are these comrades who died like the dry leaves?The radio tells me they are just deportees …..  

Taking down the dribbling idiocies of Thomas Friedman is, of course, like shooting dead, bloated fish mired in utter, immovable stillness on the surface of a barrel full of thick, congealed liquid. Even so, as this gormless goober continues to serve as one of the most respected and representative voices of our gooberish overlords, it remains a salutatory exercise to pull out the shotgun now and again and point it, once more, into the festering barrel. Belen Fernandez at the LRB blog performed this yeoman service for us this week, in a short piece reprising some of Friedman’s latest and

I am glad to see the renewal of interest in “vulture funds,” where predatory elites buy up bits of the debt of impoverished nations from various creditors – at pennies on the dollar – then use the courts of the ‘developed,’ ‘civilised’ world to force the debtor to cough up the full amount, plus punitive interest payments. The Guardian is running a series of articles on this heinous practice (here, here, here, here, here, here and here), and CounterPunch has a good piece as well. I wrote about vulture funds back in 2007. This was one of the many posts

 I had the pleasure and privilege of doing an interview with Cindy Sheehan on her radio show not long ago. She is, of course, one of the original modern ‘Occupiers,’ having “occupied” public space outside the fake dude ranch of George W. Bush (and other spaces) in the heroic attempt to force the twerpish little errand boy of empire to explain why America was waging aggressive war in Iraq — a war that took the life of Sheehan’s son, and shocked her into the life of dissent and activism that she carries on, bravely, today. The interview can be heard