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Published in the 11/18/2010 edition of USA Today.To airline passengers: Get ready for naked insecurity.To the Department of Homeland Security: If you thought this week was bad, brace yourself for a tsunami of protests in the days ahead. This month Homeland Security has implemented a new rule calling for extremely invasive pat-downs of commercial airline…
By suddenly selling much more of the taxpayer owned stock in GM than Washington let on before Tuesday the Obama Administration has made it far less likely that it will fully recover the bailout money when the Treasury Department sells the remaining shares next year. Once again the taxpayers are kept in the dark to…
George W. Bush is on a roll—a money roll with a $7 million advance for his book Decision Points and a rehabilitation roll to paint his war crimes as justifiable mass-slaughter and torture. His carefully chosen interviewers—NBC’s Matt Lauer and Oprah Winfrey—agreed to a safe pre-taping to avoid demonstrations and tough questions. Requests for him…
November 11, 2010 President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear President Obama, The U.S. government bailout of, and acquisition of a majority share in, General Motors was an exceptional action, taken in response to exceptional circumstances. The U.S. stake in GM obviously poses novel managerial challenges to the…
Dear Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, The post-election session of Congress “is not for sissies.” It affords a historical opportunity to draw the bright lines between what you stand for and what your opposing Republicans are concretely beholden to. No more generalities or pitiless abstractions for you to tolerate. Specifically, there are two bills in…
The mid-term 2010 Congressional elections are over and the exaggerations are front and center. “A tidal wave,” “an earthquake,” “a tsunami,” cried the Republican victors and their media acolytes. Wait a minute! No more than 7 percent of the actual voters switched sides to create a 14 point spread. This amounts to about 3 percent…
It was Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, who in 1992 created the election slogan: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” For the 2010 Congressional campaigns, the slogan should have been: “It’s Corporate Crime and Control, Stupid.” But notwithstanding the latest corporate crime wave, the devastating fallout on workers, investors and taxpayers from the greed and corruption…
Here are ten questions for Tea Partiers that they want or do not want to answer. I say it this way because people who call themselves Tea Partiers do not have the same view of politics, government, Big Business or the Constitution. Their opinions range from pure Libertarian to actively furthering the privileges of plutocracy.…
The strong case that Eric Alterman’s book What Liberal Media? made in 2003 against the propaganda-style claim by rightwingers, that the mass media has a liberal bias, is an expanding understatement. Just read recent issues of The Washington Post and The New York Times to see the most extreme reactionaries getting the kind of coverage…
By Ralph Nader – This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures…