Monday, 28 October 2013 10:30 Truthout | link to article and comments We read in the aftermath of the government shutdown and near default on the country’s sovereign debt that the US Chamber of Commerce is clutching its pearls. “We are going to get engaged,” said a mouthpiece for the chamber. “The need is now more than ever…
Category: Articles
The Authoritarian Seduction
Friday, 28 June 2013 on Truthout Link to article and comments The Gallup organization has released yet another dog-bites-man opinion poll which found that Americans’ confidence in Congress has fallen to a record low of 10 percent. This result is a continuation of a decades-long trend of declining approval ratings for Congress, and is justifiable based on…
The NSA Affair: A Symptom, Not a Cause
Posted June 14 on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments Any person of normal intelligence could have surmised long ago what the latest headlines about the National Security Agency purport to expose: that the government was engaged in massive surveillance involving the American public; that the surveillance far exceeded any reasonable interpretation both of the…
American Exceptionalism: Alibi of a Nation
Posted June 14 on Truthout. Link to article and comments Whenever a public figure bloviates about American Exceptionalism and the country’s purported heavenly mission, one is reminded of the quip attributed to Bismarck: that divine providence looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America. Accordingly, one is always on the lookout for anyone…
Christiane Amanpour Shills for U.S. Intervention in Syria
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments Having once misled the public during the year prior to the invasion of Iraq, the media appear to be reprising that role in order to lend an air of inevitability to potential U.S. military intervention in Syria. Exhibit A is the appearance of Christiane Amanpour on The Daily…
Is War Good for the Economy?
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments The 1960s comedy show Laugh-In included an occasional sketch in which co-host Dan Rowan played a comic general whose tag-line was “war is good for business!” In an ironic echo of that skit, an April 27 Washington Post story delivers the same message: “A steep slowdown in defense spending tied…
Crackpot Realism and the Education of David Stockman
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments In a previous article I examined sociologist C. Wright Mills’ thesis that American foreign policy in the post-World War II era has been dominated by the crackpot realist. Briefly, Mills held that our foreign policy elites evince a groupthink, endlessly reverberated in the echo chamber of modern…