Inauguration 2017 Special Coverage w/ Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader & More
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Special coverage in the Trump Era
From Public Citizen's Corporate Presidency site: "44 Trump administration officials have close ties to the Koch brothers and their network of political groups, particularly Vice President Mike Pence, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney."
Dark Money author Jane Mayer on The Dangers of President Pence, New Yorker, Oct. 23 issue on-line
Can Time Inc. Survive the Kochs? November 28, 2017 By Jane Mayer
..."This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?"...
"Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America" see: our site, and George Monbiot's essay on this key book by historian Nancy MacLean.
Full interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer March 29, 2017, Democracy Now! about her article, "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer Exploited America’s Populist Insurgency."
Democracy Now! Special Broadcast from the Women's March on Washington
The Economics of Happiness -- shorter version
Local Futures offers a free 19-minute abridged version of its award-winning documentary film The Economics of Happiness. It "brings us voices of hope of in a time of crisis." www.localfutures.org.
What's New?
May 05, 2009
Current analysis of US policies of torture
Torture: An Author and a Resister
1 May 2009, by Ann Wright
..." As a Bush administration political appointee Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, Jay Bybee, a Mormon, wrote one of four torture memos released last month. Bybee's August 1, 2002, 20-page memorandum laid out in excruciating detail the interrogation techniques he was authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use on al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah."...
read full article here (link)
From Truthout link above: Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army Reserves veteran who retired as a colonel. She was a US diplomat, who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somali, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Mongolia and Afghanistan, where she helped reopen the US Embassy in December 2001. She has traveled to Gaza twice in the past three months and will make her third trip in May 2009. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."
Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye
What Bush Willed to Obama and the World
30 April 2009, by Karen J. Greenberg
"...what I've resisted for five years, since the first Abu Ghraib revelations in the spring of 2004, I now find sadly indisputable. The supposed moral exceptionalism of the most powerful nation on Earth is no more. In its action-packed eight years, the Bush administration ensured that the United States would be the most ordinary of abusing, torturing nations.
"Through perverse language, a twisting of the law, and an immersion in the precise details of implementing torture techniques, the United States renounced its position as the leader of the global human rights movement. Abandoned by the country it long considered its greatest ally, that movement now teeters at the edge of its grave. That's what the torture memos and the present media uproar over torture really mean."
read full article here
From Truthout: Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor of The Torture Debate in America. Her most recent book is The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. To catch an audio interview in which she discusses the Bush administration "torture memos," click here.