What if lawmakers put forward a federal budget plan to tax big financial institutions, enact a healthcare public option and increase spending to put millions of Americans to work on badly needed infrastructure projects? They did. You just didn’t read or hear much about it. If Paul Ryan had proposed it, you would have […]

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  In the months following 9/11, it seems Washington just couldn’t say “no” to the CIA. The agency’s budget shot through the ceiling. Suddenly the CIA not only commanded private armies, it even had a state-of-the-art air force! Between 2006-2007, the CIA drove a proxy war, mobilizing Ethiopia’s army to invade Somalia. It was perhaps […]

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Like thousands of fellow Americans, I have spent the last week listening to Pete Seeger’s recordings, poring over his many obits, and inhaling Alec Wilkinson’s wonderful short biography, The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger. With this work behind me, I offer seven lessons that those of us committed to working-class justice and […]

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  To paraphrase Desi Arnaz, American journalists “have a lot of esplainin’ to do.” How is it that in this media-marinated era, where more information is more available to more people than ever before in history, so many can be so massively misinformed? How is it that so many can ignore the cold science of […]

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You’ve got to figure that a form of government that has lasted for more than two centuries has accrued and created some mechanisms to protect its longevity, which may not be entirely a function of ideological strength and the faith of its citizenry.

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