|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
$13
By Scott Ritter
$17.13
$22
|
|
|
|
Brian Birke (CC BY 2.0)
|
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout —
What is needed in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon tragedy is careful reflection about what locking down an entire city means—not just for the future of urban living, but for democracy itself.
Posted on May 9, 2013
READ MORE 
|
|
What happens when you put police-minded people in charge of schools? Officials take ideas like “bulletproof whiteboards” seriously.
Posted on Apr 25, 2013
READ MORE 
|
David Barreda
|
By Alexander Reed Kelly — At least three times a week, there is one place online where readers can go for the most comprehensive coverage possible of the workings of American Empire.
Posted on Apr 20, 2013
READ MORE
|
AP/Julio Cortez
|
After the capture of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, civil rights activists and officials are disputing whether it was acceptable for police to deprive him of his Miranda rights, and whether he should be classified as an enemy combatant and denied a lawyer.
Posted on Apr 20, 2013
READ MORE 
|
ssoosay (CC BY 2.0)
|
As austerity pushed by Britain’s Tory government whittles away jobs and benefits and increases poverty and despair, many Brits are asking where the resistance is. Journalist Laurie Penny knows: “There was resistance, and it was brutally and systematically put down.”
Posted on Apr 4, 2013
READ MORE
|
moriza (CC BY 2.0)
|
The Obama administration plans to give all U.S. intelligence agencies full access to a database that contains information on the financial activity of American citizens and others who bank in the country, a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters says.
Posted on Mar 15, 2013
READ MORE
|
The Guardian
|
The world’s fifth-largest defense contractor has developed a surveillance program that predicts your behavior by tracking the movement of your smartphone and mining public data from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.
Posted on Feb 13, 2013
READ MORE
|
Live4Soccer(L4S) (CC BY-ND 2.0)
|
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
This Inauguration Day, Washington was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era—not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War. Yet the subject got remarkably little attention during the ensuing media blitz.
Posted on Feb 5, 2013
READ MORE
|
|
A look at the day’s political happenings, including sore loser Rick Santorum’s tough talk for the president and why the Republicans’ debt ceiling proposal may be a constitutional fail.
Posted on Jan 20, 2013
READ MORE
|
Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 2.0)
|
As the larger part of American culture seems ready to surrender its claim to privacy without question, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are riding like Paul Revere through the digital Massachusetts night.
Posted on Dec 29, 2012
READ MORE
|
David Orban (CC-BY)
|
By Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law —
Whistle-blowers have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar results.
Posted on Nov 30, 2012
READ MORE
|
Steffen M. Boelaars (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
|
Anna Minton took a tour of an East London housing estate that received a Secured by Design award for its “small windows, reinforced steel doors and grey, aluminium, military-style roofs. The overall effect,” she says of results that will be published in a forthcoming report, “was oppressive.”
Posted on Nov 1, 2012
READ MORE
|
Truthdig/Zuade Kaufman
|
By Gore Vidal — Truthdig was proud to be the home of Gore Vidal’s essays over the last six years. In a tribute to his legacy, we’ll be rerunning his great works. In this essay, written in 2009, Vidal wants us to accept that the U.S. is no longer a republic, no longer governed by laws—only by armed men and force.
Posted on Aug 2, 2012
READ MORE
|
Furryscaly (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
By Alexander Reed Kelly — Nicholas Merrill is tired of waiting for Congress to protect Americans’ privacy online. So he plans to force the matter by changing the way telecommunication companies do business.
Posted on Jul 24, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
In the early hours of July 10, armed SWAT officers burst through the doors of an apartment belonging to organizers of Occupy Seattle as part of an ongoing investigation into the May Day riots. Phillip Neel, one of the residents of that apartment, talks about the ordeal.
Posted on Jul 13, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
A collection of distinguished voices on the left—journalists, activists and organizers, including Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges—sued the Obama administration over the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. In interviews that occurred during or after the March court hearing, they spoke to the deep, grim causes of the deterioration of Western societies.
Posted on Jun 27, 2012
READ MORE
|
ConvenienceStoreGourmet (CC BY 2.0)
|
Two percent of the U.S. adult population in lockup; 600,000 “stop-and-frisks” in New York City; three-quarters of a million people booked as official sex offenders. Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn thinks it’s time we revisit the notion of “fascism.”
Posted on Jun 7, 2012
READ MORE
|
YouTube/wearechange
|
Police stopped and drew guns on a group of independent journalists who were driving home after covering the NATO protests in Chicago on Monday evening. Tim Pool and Luke Rudkowski, two of the best-known live streamers covering the Occupy movement, believe they may have been targeted.
|
AP/M. Spencer Green
|
Two men involved in the NATO summit protests in Chicago are being held on separate terrorism charges. One is accused of making a false threat about blowing up a highway overpass. The other is charged with discussing the making of a pipe bomb.
|
|
The 20th-century French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus once wrote: “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” For the unfortunate few deprived of the experience, a few megaphone-wielding British agitators took to the streets of London to make things clear. (more)
|
AP / Andy Wong
|
By Bill Boyarsky — A recent trip to China made me think about the way life can go on in a police state when people are much more preoccupied with economic survival than with civil liberties.
|
AP / Hossam Ali
|
A crowd of 20,000 people at a funeral for six slain protesters in the southern Syrian town of Dara’a was dispersed by police with tear gas and truncheons Saturday.
|
|
Juan Cole examines the psychological torture of accused whistle-blower Bradley Manning in light of the collapse of Tunisia’s brutal regime. The “monarchical national security state” created by George W. Bush and his cohort can abuse, torment and punish the unconvicted with the best of them.
|
Flickr / hobvias sudoneighm (CC-BY)
|
As the Salon scribe points out, it can be “quite difficult to really internalize” America’s superpower implosion, but the numbers don’t lie. Our life expectancy ranking is dropping like a rock, while we’re getting better and better at imprisoning, executing and selling guns to people. USA! USA!
|
Flickr / Union de Vecinos
|
The neighborhood of Westlake near downtown Los Angeles has been under lockdown as protests continue after the LAPD killing of a Guatemalan day laborer Sunday. Officers say the man was brandishing a knife, but one witness has come forward to say he was unarmed.
|
Collage based on photo by Flickr user bgilliard (CC-BY-SA)
|
Citing the specter of terrorism, an appeals court overturned a decision that would have forced New York City to turn over documents detailing the surveillance of demonstrators, street performers and other ne’er-do-wells who may have threatened the 2004 Republican convention ... and our national security, of course.
|
typepad.com
|
A Los Angeles police review panel comprised mostly of cops has refused to fire any of the officers involved in the 2007 May Day brutality in MacArthur Park. The city shelled out $13 million in settlements because of the melee, but the worst punishment handed down was a 20-day suspension for one cop.
|
AP photo / Matt Rourke
|
By Chris Hedges — St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
|
nyc.indymedia.org
|
Beginning Saturday with a guns-drawn assault on a protester meeting space and continuing through the weekend with raids on houses of known activists in St. Paul, Twin Cities police have arrested over 300 anti-RNC demonstrators. At least 120 of them are accused of felonies, including trumped-up “conspiracy to riot” charges.
|
Wiki Commons/Andy Miah
|
Naomi Klein points out that while repression in China is nothing new, Police State 2.0 has nothing to do with Communist ideological purity and everything to do with creating “the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald’s happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery—to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself ... an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex.”
|
Original from archives.gov
|
By Chris Hedges — A Dallas jury, a week ago, caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.
|
|
Just to put current world events in perspective, here’s a transcript of a recent speech by Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who released the Pentagon Papers to the press during the Vietnam War, about some potential developments that could severely harm our country in the not-so-distant future.
|
|
A human rights organization is suing Yahoo for assisting the Chinese government in arresting dissidents by providing information on its users. Like Google and Microsoft, Yahoo has defended the practice of handing over data to China as a necessary evil mitigated by the benefits of the Internet, crippled and corrupt though it may be.
|
|
A 21-year-old Floridian was arrested in Orlando for feeding a group of 30 homeless people. It is illegal in Orlando to feed more than 25 destitute people without a permit, which can be obtained only twice a year. As if to drive home the absurdity of the law, authorities took a sample of Eric Montanez’s illegal stew for evidence.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
A Mission on Climate Change
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
