Depleted uranium
It’s dirty, and it’s deadly. When you coat a shell with it, it slices through armored plating as if it was cheese, turning tanks, buildings and bomb shelters into exploding incinerators. It causes cancer among people who breathe its dust, or touch it. It causes horrible birth defects among the babies of pregnant women who breathe it or touch it. It causes a host of chronic ailments and sicknesses among returning troops.
The madness of King George and his court
The imperial obsessions of the Bush administration have come under increasing clinical examination. In the process the fog of war propaganda spread on radio and TV by journalistic courtiers is beginning to lift. For more and more, the impending war with Iraq has nothing to do with eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or promoting democracy, or fighting terrorism.
Which way will Mississippi go?
As a young child growing up in Chicago I enjoyed the stories from my friends about their summer vacations in Mississippi. I wondered why my parents refused to let me visit there. Once I saw a story in the Chicago Defender with frightening photographs of a lynching in Mississippi. My desire to visit vanished. My first visit to Mississippi and the “New South” was in 1996.
Lies, obfuscation and plagiarism
Lies, obfuscation, denial, hyperbole and now outright plagiarism characterize the U.S. right-wing-led push to war against the people of Iraq.
We Charge Genocide: The cry rings true 52 years later
Just over half a century ago, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson, two giants of the struggle for African-American equality, delivered to the United Nations a petition titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.”
The January unemployment numbers
It’s been said that two swallows don’t make a spring. But that didn’t stop The New York Times writer who hailed the 0.3 percent decline in the official unemployment rate last month as the “first signs” that the labor market is “healing.”
Feminist response to State of the Union address
George Bush’s State of the Union speech was the public kickoff of his taxpayer-funded public relations campaign to convince an increasingly skeptical public that all is well – or will be if we just put our faith in him and believe.
The same thing is happening
Ryo Kumasaka, one of the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were rounded up and forced into U.S. concentration camps during World War II, worries that history may be repeating itself.
(Some) heroes recognized at last
Let’s hear it for heroes. Not the fantasy “super-heroes” depicted in action movies, but real-life workaday Americans who risk their careers and reputations to take a principled stand for what’s right.
Bush can be defeated
The alleged key elements of President Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy have been recently revealed. The president apparently intends to emphasize the war against terrorism and homeland security. For many, this was no surprise since it has been clear since Sept. 11, 2001, that the war against terrorism is as much about moving a domestic right-wing political agenda as it is about fighting terrorists.
