My old Moscow Times colleague, Matt Taibbi, has this to say about Occupy Wall Street: I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street …  there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don’t give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make

Thomas Jones, at LRB, says what I wanted to say about the exit of the plutocratic goon Silvio Berlusconi from his post as Italian prime minister: At last Berlusconi has said he’ll step down. It should be a good day for Italian democracy. Except that – assuming he really does go – Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister will have been finally driven from office not for corruption, croneyism, tax evasion or colluding with the mafia; not for the conflict of interests between his media empire and his political position; not for having presided over years of economic stagnation, rising

Hugh Roberts’ new article in the London Review of Books is the best story I have yet read about the war of regime change in Libya. It is meticulously detailed, rich in context — historical, cultural, political — carefully measured and soberly expressed. The article should be read in full — anyone who cares at all about a deeper understanding of these events would be foolish to miss it — but I want to highlight just one aspect: the deliberate falsehoods — fanned by the media, including many “progressive” voices — which were used as a justification for the Western

Greece is the canary in the coal mine of modern hyper-capitalism. Throughout the “developed” world, elites and political leaders are following the same path, using a self-created financial crisis to institute a radical destruction of free societies and create an authoritarian “managed democracy” in their places. But the extremist measures being imposed on Greece are producing a furious reaction — and a recasting of old political realities in new forms — that could also prove to be a harbinger of the future. Costas Douzinas gives this analysis in the Guardian: Greece is split in two. On one side are politicians,

The ACLU has just released documentation of the rampant sexual abuse of female immigration detainees at the hands of our enlightened guardians. The latter include the Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison company that has parlayed its insider poitical connections to become one of the nation’s largest profiteers of human suffering. This news brought to mind a story I wrote awhile back on the origins of prison profiteering and one of its founding fathers, Lamar Alexander. Unfortunately, this was one of the stories that were completely destroyed in the many hack attacks on this website. So I thought I