Articles

BY DAVE LINDORFF Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students. CC BY-SA 2.5 Author Salman Rushdie, 75,  one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, was gravely wounded at he Chautauqua Insitute in upstate New York last Friday in a brutal onstage stabbing by an American-born Islamic zealot who, likely motivated by the fatwah issued against Rushdie in 1989 by Muslim Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then leader of the theocratic Islamic state of Iran stabbed the author multiple time before he could be restrained. The attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, arrested at the scene, is a California-born child of Lebanese immigrant parents whose address is Fairview New Jersey. He has been charged with attempted murder and assault and, after pleading not g...

BY ANDREA MAZZARINO Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, boards a C-17 aircraft at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 30, 2021. Photo: US Army, Master Sgt. Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett. The American military is now having trouble recruiting enough soldiers. According to the New York Times, its ranks are short thousands of entry-level troops and it’s on track to face the worst recruitment crisis since the Vietnam War ended, not long after the draft was eliminated. Mind you, it’s not that the military doesn’t have the resources for recruitment drives. Nearly every political figure in Washington, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, invariably agrees on endlessly a...

BY EVE OTTENBERG “The End of the Road.” Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. With far-right kooks in GOP-controlled state legislatures backing drastic electoral alterations, we could have a real mess come November. The goal, in states like Texas, could be to override a popular vote that goes against what rightists want. In other words, stealing the election. If that happens it will usher in no mere political change in degree in the Exceptional Empire, but a change in kind. The last vestiges of democracy will vanish out the window, because such a development would not be a one-off, but would likely instead herald a new dystopian normal, as many have noted, and I’ll add my voice to the threnody. An entrenched oligarchy is already so passe. Something new is wanted by fanatics on the right. Th...

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by Matt Palmer. Could somebody please get an extension ladder to help Senator Schumer down from the ceiling? He’s stuck in the rafters in a high-pitched note of self-congratulation whilst spraining his elbow as he awkwardly and repeatedly tries to pat his own back, screaming over and over again “the greatest climate legislation of all time!” Compared to what? Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in a deadly chokehold, and they’re not about to risk voting for anything that smacks of help for ordinary Americans. Pl...

BY RICHARD E. RUBENSTEIN Photo by Colin Lloyd For some time, people who analyze social conflicts have been watching the growth of political and cultural polarization in the U.S. with more than a little trepidation.  At present, the bookshelves and airwaves are filled with talk of a possible armed conflict between elements of the nation’s far-right “Red” and left-liberal “Blue” tribes.[1]  What gives this scary analysis more credibility than it might otherwise have is not only the proliferation of weapons in America (over 400 million guns in a population of 330 million), but the increasingly sharp polarization of institutions originally designed to resolve civil conflicts nonviolently – in particular, political parties, government offices, elections, and courts. ...