The last American combat brigade in Iraq has left the country, so the Pentagon announced this week. The 40,000 personnel from 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division began crossing into Kuwait August 19. The US combat mission in Iraq — Operation Iraqi Freedom – is scheduled to end on August 31. The least credible human [...]
On August 7 and 8, the Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) traveled to San Francisco to record and preserve narratives from west coast-based original witnesses to and participants in the 1970 Kent State shootings. My sister Allison Krause was one of the four students killed at Kent State and our tribunal has provided an opportunity [...]
I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today [...]
One of Barack Obama’s campaign slogans as he ran for President two years ago was, “The change we need.” Unfortunately, for those in the Federal Criminal Justice System, this change has proven to be the opposite of the what they needed. To date, President Obama has not pardoned anyone, has not reduced a single Federal [...]
by Ralph Nader
The Obama Administration’s treatment of its current majority ownership of bailed out General Motors and its standoffishness toward the pioneering but troubled ShoreBank, a community bank based in Chicago, are lessons in how the Big/Bad fare in Washington, D.C., as compared with the Good/Small. Having shed its bad assets and abandoned its common shareholders, the [...]
It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian lean ings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker, struck down California’s ban on gay mar riage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the [...]
This economy has a destination for sure, but it’s not in the direction where all eyes are trained in moist hopefulness: that glimmering horizon of longed-for growth. You will not get that kind of growth — the kind that increases the overall wealth of the organism in question. A few people will make more money [...]
There is nothing more sincere than a guitar. A few simple chords, plucked or picked one note after the other at a gently swaying tempo summon reflexive feelings of trust, comfort, love, and hope. This elemental musical style works for the lullaby and the love song, the meditation and the memorial. Few musical tasks are [...]
Whatever their crime or sentence, prisoners should not be legitimately fearful of choking to death on their own vomit every time they climb onto their prison bunks. But this is a daily worry for federal prisoner Paul Shook. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, known colloquially as the BOP, has devolved from its small, exclusive “Club [...]
The hope of the brave soldier who sent 92,000 secret US documents to Wikileaks was that their disclosure would prompt public revulsion and increasing political pressure on Obama to seek with all speed a diplomatic conclusion to this war. The documents he sent Wikileaks included overwhelming documentary evidence — accepted by all as genuine, of: [...]
