White Flight and Segregation. Nearly 50 years ago, after a string of race-related riots in cities across America, President Lyndon B.
Johnson commissioned a panel of civic leaders to investigate the underlying causes of racial tension in the country. The result was the Kerner Report, a document that castigated white society for fleeing to suburbs, where they excluded blacks from employment, housing, and educational opportunities. The report’s famous conclusion: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Much of America would like to believe the nation has changed since then. Robert Reich: America is headed full speed back to the 19th century. The right has f***ked up minds: Meet the researcher who terrifies GOP congress. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a wide range of thinkers, both secular and religious, struggled to make sense of the profound evil of war, particularly Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
One such effort, “The Authoritarian Personality” by Theodore Adorno and three co-authors, opened up a whole new field of political psychology—initially a small niche within the broader field of social psychology—which developed fitfully over the years, but became an increasingly robust subject area in 1980s and 90s, fleshing out a number of distinct areas of cognitive processing in which liberals and conservatives differed from one another.
“A malign force in American history”: Why you should be terrified of the Supreme Court. Throughout his years as a national politician and in the White House, President Barack Obama has had many antagonists and foes: John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor and John Boehner come to mind.
But despite their greater public profile, one could argue that none of these men have been quite as formidable a source of opposition and frustration as the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Indeed, the closest Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, ever came to destruction was not in the House or in the Senate. It was behind the closed doors of the justices’ chambers, where it survived in 2012 by just one vote, and where, due to King v. Burwell, the latest case against Obamacare, it finds itself imperiled once again. America’s not a force for good: The truth about our most enduring — and harmful — national myth. We didn’t know who we were till we got here.
We thought we were something else. —Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (1974) “I didn’t know there was a bad war,” George Evans recalled. 4 numbers that prove America’s economic model is broken. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
There’s something perversely wrong with a society that creates $30 trillion in new wealth while putting six million more children on food stamps. The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this. The super-rich keep building up their own numbers, as quietly as possible. And our leading members of Congress have little need for numbers, except for budget cuts and the strings of zeros at the end of their campaign contributions. But numbers have the power to reveal the dramatic fall of the middle class over the past 35 years.
Abolish the death penalty!: Here are 8 good reasons why. “Fascism is rising in America”: The Koch brothers and the depressing demise of democracy. As the American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Well, it it may well on our doorstep. And the oligarchs are plotting their final takeover by using their economic dominance to capture governmental power – specifically, the governmental power which sets the rules for the very marketplace that provides the oligarchs with such massive wealth. Once the American corporate barons own the institutions that are meant to regulate them, it’s game-over for both rational capitalism (including competition) and for democracy. Last week, at David and Charles Koch’s annual winter meeting near Palm Springs, California, it was announced that the Koch Brothers’ political organization would spend close to $900 million on the 2016 election.
In 2010, Citizens United v. The Adrian Peterson Beating and the Christian Right’s Love of Corporal Punishment. Commander Glenn Evans is said to have infamously shoved his pistol in a suspect’s mouth, but Rita King’s story is far more terrifying.
Evans has already cost the city $250,000 and hasn’t been fired—he’s been promoted. At times, attorney Patrick Morrissey has trouble getting a hold of his client. A homeless woman named Rita King for years has roamed some of the roughest neighborhoods on Chicago’s south and west sides, but the dangers she has faced on those streets are nothing compared to the beating she allegedly took two years ago at the hands of one the city’s highest ranking cops: Commander Glenn Evans. “Straight-up propaganda”: Fox News, charlatans, conspiracy theorists and the religious fanatics endangering democracy. An epidemic of craziness seems to have swept over the American political landscape.
This is of course a problem not just for Americans, but for people all around the world. It remains the case that most people think of the United States as the world’s leading democracy. The “American Sniper” cultural moment: How Iraq became the new Vietnam. So you want to see a rah-rah, gung-ho war movie this weekend, right?
One that combines convincingly chaotic video-game-style action scenes and a misty-eyed reverence toward American troops? One that portrays our recent military campaigns in the Middle East as a noble, heroic and misunderstood crusade to save civilization? Well, I’ve got the movie for you. No, no – I don’t mean that one. Even if you haven’t yet seen “American Sniper,” which continues to rack up huge box-office numbers and inspire endless thumbsucking “think-pieces” from the commentariat (yes, mea culpa), for sheer jingoism and pro-war revisionist propaganda it cannot compete with “Alien Outpost.” Evangelicals’ racist “purity” culture: What’s really behind Huckabee’s Beyoncé slur.
In an interview promoting his recent book about American Christian political identity, Mike Huckabee commented that he doesn’t understand how Barack and Michelle Obama let their daughters listen to Beyoncé.
He told ABC that he doesn’t think Beyoncé is wholesome, referring to Biblical ideas about holiness, saying, “what you put into your brain is also important, as well as what you put into your body.” Huckabee, a white man, seems to take particular focus on Beyoncé, stating in his book that it seems her husband, Jay Z, has crossed the line from husband to pimp in “sexually exploiting her body.” I want you to hold that moment in your head for a minute – a white man calling a black man a “pimp” and criticizing a black female singer for being too sexual in her music.
Let’s talk about history. In the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma,” there’s a particularly poignant moment when clergy and people of faith from across the country respond to the call to come march in Selma, Alabama. 10 Questions for Conservatives Now that the Republican Party -- the conservative voice in mainstream U.S. electoral politics -- has attained the most thoroughgoing control of Congress that it has enjoyed since 1928, it's an appropriate time to take a good look at modern conservatism.
Conservatives have performed some useful services for Americans over the course of U.S. history. Alexander Hamilton placed the nation's financial credit on a much firmer basis during the late 18th century. Determined to make knowledge available to all Americans, Andrew Carnegie funded the development of the free U.S. public library system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the early 20th century, Elihu Root and other conservatives played key roles in the establishment of international law.
Also, in the mid-20th century, Robert Taft staunchly denounced the peacetime military draft, arguing that it smacked of a totalitarian state. “No civilization would tolerate what America has done” It seems police can get away with anything: choking men who have surrendered; shooting unarmed teens; knocking pregnant women to the ground. While the issues involving race, civil rights and the relationship between law enforcement and communities are essential for examination and correction, few are talking about how all of this fits into the larger pattern of America’s cultural decline and decay. America has become a society addicted to violence and indifferent to the suffering of people without power.
Two Docs Got $80 Million to Develop Torture Tactics. The United States government paid two military psychologists $80 million to develop torture tactics that were used against suspected terrorists in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In 2002, two former Air Force psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, became the masterminds of the CIA’s torture program, according to a new report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The two men, identified in the report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, devised and performed torture tactics - including waterboarding and mock burial on some of the CIA’s most significant detainees. Related: 10 Things to Know About the CIA’s Black Budget The report noted that neither of the men had previous experience as professional interrogators, nor did they have “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.
" Arabs Are the Michael Browns of Israel. Many critics thought construction of a canal across Nicaragua never would begin. Now that it’s about to, they ask how it will end—and some are asking for guns to stop it. TOLESMAIDA, Nicaragua—A hundred or so people have gathered under the intense midday sun at the main crossroads in this village on the south-westerly edge of majestic Lake Nicaragua. Everybody hates Americans: My life abroad as the maligned Other. A Citizen's Plea In his Farewell Address, President George Washington pleaded with his countrymen to give the republican government they had created a chance to work. There Is No Suspense: SCOTUS Has Already Decided to Kill Obamacare Unless you found the end of Rocky IV to be a surprise, you do not need your popcorn.
There is no drama, no suspense. You also do not need to be a legal scholar, know anything about the U.S. Constitution, nor reference legislative history or precedents. Cornel West was right all along: Why America needs a moment of clarity now. America’s virulent racists: The sick ideas and perverted “science” of the American Renaissance Foundation. The American Renaissance Foundation is an extremely conservative right-wing organization that also publishes a monthly magazine of the same name, American Renaissance (AR). Cornel West: “The state of Black America in the age of Obama has been one of desperation, confusion and capitulation” Paul Krugman shines spotlight on America’s superrich, takes another huge swing at David Brooks.
The big “middle class” rip-off: How a short sale taught me rich people’s ethics. Noam Chomsky—Infuriating and Necessary. You don’t have to buy Chomsky’s ideas wholesale to recognize that his often outrageous critiques of American democracy and capitalism usually hit their targets. It is a testament to Noam Chomsky’s brilliance and bravery that despite his soft spoken manner and quiet personality, he manages to inspire fiery passion in millions of activists around the world, curiosity and conviction from students on nearly every college campus, and hatred from angry nationalists wearing red, white, and blue blindfolds.
In Texas Textbooks, Moses Is a Founding Father. The White House wants to turn foreigners fighting for ISIS and other militant groups into global pariahs. Football culture’s ugly allure: My high school tale of love and longing. Someone wrote that football is a sublimation of the urge for violence, so that football itself is a symbolic reenactment of war. 45 Million Americans Still Stuck Below Poverty Line: Census. “They refuse to admit they were wrong”: How nightmare prosecutors pervert American justice. American warmongers’ fatal conceit: The massive insecurity behind their calls for blood.
Race, Repentance and Reparations in America The Fury in Ferguson and Our Forgotten Lessons From History Patriots don’t torture: Why excusing it is an American catastrophe. The Stealing of America By the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress Millennials Move Even Further More Left of Center Less Divided than We Look It Can Be Done: Negotiate an End to the Siege in Gaza 'We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education' La religión no tendrá impacto en las elecciones de EE.UU. revela una nueva investigación. Cómo la desigualdad asfixia a EE.UU. - BBC Mundo - Noticias. Gloomy Americans foresee a downhill slide to 2050: Associated Press Business News.
Spionage-Jahresrückblick 2013. The FBI media burglars and civil disobedience. The New Civil War: Who Is to Blame? The Roots of Our Political Dysfunction. Are Working Amerians Serfs or Citizens?