George Monbiot: How to Build a Crisis

Banks and corporations are being liberated from the rule of law, and are ripping the world apart.

What have governments learnt from the financial crisis? I could write a column spelling it out. Or I could do the same job with one word. Nothing.

Actually, that’s too generous. The lessons learned are counter-lessons, anti-knowledge, new policies that could scarcely be better designed to ensure the crisis recurs, this time with added momentum and fewer remedies. And the financial crisis is just one of multiple crises – in tax collection, public spending, public health, above all ecology – that the same counter-lessons accelerate.

Neoliberalism's War on Workers: An Interview With Peter Fleming

By Dan Falcone, Truthout | Interview

Neoliberal ideologies and economic shifts are to blame for the intensifying role of work in our lives, says Peter Fleming, the author of The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself (Pluto Books, 2015).

There is no shortage of people with complaints about particular work stresses and instances of overwork, but Fleming, a professor of business and society at City University London, has made it his particular vocation to serve as one of the world's leading critics of work itself.

Worked to Death

How victims are shut out of the workers’ comp system by big bills, bad laws, and companies that will do anything but pay.

By Jamie Smith Hopkins

LANCASTER, Pennsylvania—Finding the first bit of evidence that Gene Cooper’s job damaged his brain and destroyed his health was the easy part. That only took his wife four years, eight doctors, and at least a dozen tests.

The hard part: getting his former employer to pay.

Eight years have passed since Sandra Cooper filed a workers’ compensation claim on her husband’s behalf. She prevailed after 4½ years of wrangling, when a judge agreed that chemical exposure on the job at a flooring factory was the reason Gene Cooper—a bright father of two with a quirky sense of humor—had transformed into a nursing-home patient who couldn’t speak and sometimes stared into space when his family visited. That was 2012. Sandra Cooper is still trying to get medical bills and lost wages covered today, nearly two years after he died.

Bernie Sanders: TPP 'Worse Than I Thought'

'It is clear to me that the proposed agreement is not, nor has it ever been, the gold standard of trade agreements.'

by Bernie Sanders

Now that the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has finally been released, it is even worse than I thought. It is clear to me that the proposed agreement is not, nor has it ever been, the gold standard of trade agreements.

This trade deal would make it easier for corporations to shut down more factories in the U.S. and ship more jobs to Vietnam and Malaysia where workers are paid pennies an hour. The TPP is a continuation of our disastrous trade policies that have devastated manufacturing cities and towns all over this country from Newton, Iowa, to Cleveland, Ohio. We need to rebuild the disappearing middle class, not tear it down.

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

By Jordan Michael Smith

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Full Text of TPP Released to Public... And It's Horrible

'We now have concrete evidence that the TransPacific Partnership threatens our families, our communities, and our environment.'

by Jon Queally, staff writer

It's a disaster for people, the planet, democracy, and the future of the global economy.

That was the immediate assessment of informed critics as world governments, including the United States, on Thursday morning made the full text of the controversial TransPacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) available to the public for the first time.

Though a tightly held secret throughout the years-long negotiating process, publication of the entire text (available online here) confirms the deal's many woeful inadequacies which had been gleaned from leaked drafts and public statements by those privy to its contents.

The Dark Truth in the Movie ‘Truth’

Exclusive: Almost four decades after starring in “All the President’s Men,” Robert Redford returns portraying another famous journalist in “Truth.” But the world has been turned upside down. Mainstream media is no longer the hero exposing a corrupt president, but the villain protecting one, as James DiEugenio explains.

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In spring 2004, CBS news producer Mary Mapes was doing what journalists are supposed to do – dig up facts that help the public understand important events and often make the powers-that-be squirm. She and Dan Rather, her colleague at the “60 Minutes” offspring “60 Minutes II,” had just exposed the U.S. military’s bizarre mistreatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison.

Documented with damning photos and direct testimony, the story revealed how U.S. military guards had stripped detainees naked and subjected them to sexual humiliations and severe physical abuse. The story forced President George W. Bush to claim that he was morally outraged by these practices and to demand that the implicated soldiers be court-martialed.

How the Koch Brothers Are Investing in College Brainwashing

Bill Berkowitz for Buzzflash at Truthout

By now, most conscious beings know a little something about the Koch Brothers. In a recent interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Charles Koch claimed that politically speaking, he and his brother David are “largely failures.” Thus far, despite the fact that the campaign of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker -- the brothers’ first choice for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination -- sunk like a stone, they have reportedly given $20 million to Super Pacs supporting GOP candidates. As the interview with MSNBC suggested, the brothers are no longer choosing to lead the semi-secret/semi-private lives they once professed to prefer. And, while it’s true that they are not involved in every nefarious anti-democratic initiative coming down the pike, they’ve sure got a lot of coals in the fire.

The Mega-Rich Families Who Own Our Politicians

The Supreme Court's malevolent Citizens United decision has produced an insidious platinum class of mega-donors and corporate super PACs.

By Jim Hightower

In today's so-called "democratic" election process, Big Money doesn't talk, it roars -- usually drowning out the people's voice.

Bizarrely, the Supreme Court decreed in its 2010 Citizens United ruling that money is a form of "free speech." Thus, declared the learned justices, people and corporations are henceforth allowed to spend unlimited sums of their money to "speak" in election campaigns. But wait -- if political speech is measured by money then by definition speech is not free. It can be bought, thereby giving the most speech to the few with the most money. That's plutocracy, not democracy.

A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal

Jon Schwarz

AS I READ The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.

Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.

The Sad Truth of Our Politics: It's Basically Turned into a Competition Among Oligarchs to Own Everything

It could still happen here.

By Thom Hartmann

Ben Carson’s feeble attempt to equate Hitler and pro-gun control Democrats was short-lived, but along with the announcement that Marco Rubio has brought in his second big supporting billionaire, it brings to mind the first American vice-president to point out the “American fascists” among us.

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice-president when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman president), Roosevelt had two previous vice-presidents: John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945).

Paul Krugman: Partisan Growth Gaps

Last week The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed article by Carly Fiorina titled “Hillary Clinton Flunks Economics,” ridiculing Mrs. Clinton’s assertions that the U.S. economy does better under Democrats. “America,” declared Ms. Fiorina, “needs someone in the White House who actually knows how the economy works.”

Well, we can agree on that much.

Partisan positioning on the economy is actually quite strange. Republicans talk about economic growth all the time. They attack Democrats for “job-killing” government regulations, they promise great things if elected, they predicate their tax plans on the assumption that growth will soar and raise revenues. Democrats are far more cautious. Yet Mrs. Clinton is completely right about the record: historically, the economy has indeed done better under Democrats.

The ‘Anti-Knowledge’ of the Elites

Exclusive: It’s fairly easy to spot the “anti-knowledge” spouted by the Tea Party and the Religious Right’s favorite candidates, but a more subtle form of reality-deprived “group think” pervades America’s elites though it is rarely noted in the polite circles of the mainstream media, writes Mike Lofgren.

By Mike Lofgren

In a previous piece, I described how the Republican Party and its ideological allies in the fundamentalist churches have confected a comprehensive media-entertainment complex to attract low-information Americans and turn them into partisans.

The propaganda they are fed has become so disconnected from facts, evidence and logic that it is all too easy to laugh at people operating on demonstrably — and even ridiculously — false premises, such as the notion that Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is not a natural-born American, or that the Sandy Hook school massacre was an elaborate fake designed to take away the firearms of patriotic Americans.

Time to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth

To remain within the nine planetary boundaries, nations must shed the fetish of economic growth and transition to a true-cost, steady state economy.

by Brent Blackwelder

There are physical limits to growth on a finite planet. In 1972, the Club of Rome issued their groundbreaking report—Limits to Growth (twelve million copies in thirty-seven languages). The authors predicted that by about 2030, our planet would feel a serious squeeze on natural resources, and they were right on target.

In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Center introduced the concept of planetary boundaries to help the public envision the nature of the challenges posed by limits to growth and physical/biological boundaries. They defined nine boundaries critical to human existence that, if crossed, could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes.

Why Community Banks Are Dropping Like Flies Across America

The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks.

By Ellen Brown

At over 2,300 pages, the Dodd Frank Act is the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. It was supposed to end “too big to fail” and “bailouts,” and to “promote financial stability.” But Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation authority” has replaced bailouts with bail-ins, meaning that in the event of insolvency, big banks are to recapitalize themselves with the savings of their creditors and depositors. The banks deemed too big are more than 30% bigger than before the Act was passed in 2010, and 80% bigger than before the banking crisis of 2008. The six largest US financial institutions now have assets of some $10 trillion, amounting to almost 60% of GDP; and they control nearly 50% of all bank deposits.