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Recent Z Nightly Commentaries
Chomsky: Evil Scourge Of Terrorism
Apr 27, 2010
The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration.
Cook: Anat Kamm
Apr 10, 2010
What is misleadingly being called in Israel the “Anat Kamm espionage affair” is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has worshipped for decades at the altar of a security state.
Chomsky: Globalization Marches On
Apr 06, 2010
To date, growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power. The future depends on how much the great majority is willing to endure, and whether that great majority will collectively offer a constructive response to confront the problems at the core of the state capitalist system of domination and control. If not, the results might be grim, as history more than amply reveals.
Chomsky: Militarizing Latin America
Mar 24, 2010
Throughout the expansion of US Empire, Latin America retained its primacy in global planning. As Washington was considering the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1971, Nixon's National Security Council observed that if the US couldn't control Latin America, how could it expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world?" That policy has become more severe with recent South American moves towards integration, a prerequisite for independence, and establishment of more varied international ties, while also beginning to address severe internal disorders, most importantly, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering.
Cromwell: NATO's Fire Sale
Mar 23, 2010
In December, BBC news online had posted these two brief ‘balanced’ reports of the US-led killing of the Afghan...
Cook: 7 Years After Corrie
Mar 11, 2010
Seven years after Rachel Corrie, a US peace activist, was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, her family was to put the Israeli government in the dock today.
Cromwell: Gates Of Delusion
Feb 28, 2010
Since November last year, the public has been bombarded with the story of stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealing a supposed "scandal" of scientific malpractice, stupidly and lazily named "climategate". Further media frenzy erupted over an erroneous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement that 80 per cent of Himalayan glacier area would very likely be gone by 2035. Other climate-related storms in a teacup have been appearing in the corporate media almost on a daily basis. This nonsense is distracting attention from a mountain of evidence that human-induced climate change is accelerating and poses a deadly threat to civilization.
Cohen: Toxic Wastes & Haiti
Jan 25, 2010
Two decades ago, the garbage barge, the Khian Sea, with no place in the U.S. willing to accept its garbage, left the territorial waters of the United States and began circling the oceans in search of a country willing to accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash. First it went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered to protest its arrival. No one wanted the millions of pounds of Philadelphia municipal incinerator ash dumped in their country.
Cohn: Same-Sex Marriage
Jan 16, 2010
On Wednesday, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court overturned a ruling made by a federal trial judge that would have allowed limited television coverage of a trial that will decide the fate of California's Proposition 8. The trial, which is currently proceeding in San Francisco, is one of the most significant civil rights cases of our time. The plaintiffs are seeking to overturn a ballot initiative that makes same-sex marriage illegal in California.
Cromwell: Afghan Children Executed
Jan 14, 2010
Ignoring or downplaying Western crimes is a standard feature of the corporate Western media. On rare occasions when a broadcaster or newspaper breaks ranks and reports 'our' crimes honestly, it is instructive to observe the response from the rest of the media. Do they follow suit, perhaps digging deeper for details, devoting space to profiles of the victims and interviews with grieving relatives, humanising all concerned? Do they put the crimes in perspective as the inevitable consequence of rapacious Western power? Or do they look away?
Cohen: New Year's Resolution
Jan 01, 2010
For the new year, let's resolve: Don't defend Democrats when they don't deserve defending. And that certainly includes President Obama.
Cohn: Obama's Illegal War
Dec 22, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.
Cohen: Obama/GOP Alliance
Nov 29, 2009
With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it's not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.
Castro: Nobel For Morales
Oct 20, 2009
If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native and his having delivered on his promises.
Cook: A Third Intifada?
Oct 08, 2009
Tension over control of the Haram al Sharif compound of mosques in Jerusalem's Old City has reached a pitch unseen since clashes at the site sparked the second intifada nine years ago.
Cook: Israeli Police Crackdown
Sep 30, 2009
Nine months after he helped to organize protests against Israel's attack on Gaza, Samih Jabareen is a prisoner in his home in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, an electronic bracelet around his ankle to alert the police should he step outside his front door.
Cohen: Free-Market Mystique
Sep 25, 2009
No matter what the facts are, some liberal activists and leaders persist in seeing President Obama as a principled progressive reformer who lives and breathes the campaign rhetoric about "change you can believe in."
Cromwell: Existential Threat
Sep 19, 2009
On August 26, the Guardian newspaper published an article titled, 'US takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran's nuclear programme in one massive gamble.'
Cohn: Doris Brin Walker
Aug 17, 2009
Doris “Dobby†Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90. Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights. The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant victories for labor, and political activists.
Apr 29, 2010
The conservative "states' rights" mantra sweeping our country has led to one of the most egregious wrongs in recent U.S. history. New legislation in Arizona requires law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers. What constitutes "reasonable suspicion"? When asked what an undocumented person looks like, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law last week, said, "I don't know what an undocumented person looks like." The bill does not prohibit police from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to stop. It is unlikely that officers will detain Irish or German immigrants to check their documents. This law unconstitutionally criminalizes "walking while brown" in Arizona.