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Katie Miranda’s mirror on the media coverage of terrorism.

In the United Kingdom, profiteering water companies are raising charges in excess of inflation at a time when they are already recording high rates of profit, claiming that their profits are down because so many customers can’t pay their bills. I am not the first to point out that raising the cost of water seems an odd way to deal with the fact that people can’t afford to pay for it at the existing price, reminiscent of the old debtors’ prisons where they’d lock you away for not paying your debts, thereby making it impossible for you to earn the …

During his talk sponsored by the New American Foundation in March 2008, author Parag Khanna addressed the rising challenges facing the US’s global hegemony. According to Khanna, China and the European Union are the new contenders with the battlefield being a global ‘geopolitical marketplace.’

Aside from Khanna’s insight, one statement particularly puzzled me greatly. “Why am I talking about Europe, China, and the United States? What about Russia, what about India, what about Islam ..what about all those other powers?” Initially, I thought it must have been an error. The speaker must surely realize that Islam is a religion, not a …

A common argument, albeit without any basis in morality, against redressing injustices is that they belong to the past. Hence, African Americans have never been indemnified for the slavery their descendants suffered, and the White slave-owning descendants continue, in many cases, to prosper based in large part on the largess extracted from unpaid past labor. Furthermore, if people can stop bending themselves around the obvious and straight on acknowledge the genocide against the Original Peoples of the western hemisphere, they still likeliest will evade the killing and dispossession and justify the status quo because what happened was in the past.

However, …

What do Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, and Vladimir Putin have in common? They’ve all been reported to have used nerve gas on their own people.

In 1988, Saddam Hussein ordered a poison gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja in northern Iraq. Thousands of people are reported to have been killed and many others injured. Chemicals used in the attack are said to have included the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX.

During the protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, US police mostly used …

Cars kill — millions of humans and animals around the world every year — but do they also destroy our sense of community and solidarity that is the foundation of socialism and progressive politics?

In North America there is a strong correlation between automobile-dominated landscapes and right-wing voting patterns.

At the national level as the dominance of the private automobile increases so do votes for the likes of Stephen Harper and George W. Bush. In the 2011 election Harper’s Conservatives won almost every suburban riding in Canada’s major cities (outside of Montréal) and lost most central districts. According to American Theocracy, …

As the Cold War between the USSR and the USA drew down in the early 1990s, organizations/institutions that used to fund proxy wars—and destabilization efforts–between the two Empires became exposed. With the Cold War ostensibly over, the corrupt and illegal actions of such groups could no longer be ignored, or covered up, as the larger purpose of them was to fund the fight against the Red Menace of Communism.

One of the most notable instances of the demise of a Cold War machine was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Founded in 1972 it would survive under various …

My name is Cynthia McKinney and I served as a Member of the U.S. Congress for 12 years. During my time in Congress, I strove to make respect for human rights a central feature in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Amid minor successes, I have to say that my efforts while, broadly appreciated by many, failed miserably. That failure stems in part from the peculiarities of U.S. politics that allow policy formulation to deviate from and in many cases become diametrically opposed to the values of the people of the U.S. Sadly, what we in the U.S. …

 
Where oh where has the economy gone? 

Just looking over this tremendous fight for a fair economy, and the battle lines  shift daily. Really, what is a fair economy? One where the so-called One Percent control over 40 percent of all wealth (sic)?  Where 19 Percent then control 53 Percent of the dinero-$$$? And, you and I have 8 out of 10 USA citizens in our ranks and we have that big whooping SEVEN % (7 percent) of the collective American pie? A fair system, yep. Now take this one — as I launched months ago coming back to DV as a …

Frauds in time become historical artefacts, objects of their own worth. As projects, they may not have succeeded in attaining the brand of authenticity – but that hardly matters. Their authenticity is merely of a different sort – the fake as real, the fake as its own genuine worth. And so the fate of the Hitler Diaries, 62 volumes in all, which made such a splash in 1983 as being the actual record of a dictator’s life, have now become part of the historical record.

Earlier in the week, the forged diaries were rendered official documents of history …