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By Gore Vidal
$17.95
By Norman G. Finkelstein
$23
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No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Titmuss A D (Sergeant)
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It turns out America hasn’t cornered the market on reprehensible politicians. The mayor of Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city, just said the 200,000 female slaves who were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during World War II were part of a “necessary” system.
Posted on May 13, 2013
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Delivering the keynote speech at the Celebrate Life forum in Iowa over the weekend, former Arkansas governor and current Fox News host Mike Huckabee claimed that abortion has become “this incredible Holocaust of our own in America.”
Posted on Feb 25, 2013
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A doctor inspired by the movie “Lincoln” has spurred Mississippi to become the final state to officially ratify the amendment that abolished slavery in the U.S., 148 years after the fact.
Posted on Feb 18, 2013
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AP
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By Bill Blum — Just when you thought the debate over gun control couldn’t get any more twisted, the old claim has been revived that slavery might not have lasted so long in America if black people had been granted the right to bear arms at the outset of their arrival in the new world.
Posted on Jan 29, 2013
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — As Southern whites sink into economic and cultural despair, more and more are retreating into a fictional past. They ignore Confederate atrocities in a desperate effort to restore what they view as a lost paradise.
Posted on Jan 28, 2013
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The covering over a painting of a slave performing fellatio on a white man has been removed at the Newark Public Library after much controversy; foreign universities are struggling to compete with elite American ones in the online education market; meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal has revealed that the National Counterterrorism Center has been given massive amounts of authority to surveil Americans via datasets. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jan 23, 2013
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including the House vote on the fiscal cliff deal Tuesday night and President Obama marks the 150th anniversary of one of the most famous presidential proclamations. (UPDATED)
Posted on Jan 1, 2013
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Signe Wilkinson —
Posted on Nov 27, 2012
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AP/Arkansas Secretary of State, Lori McElroy
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From defending slavery to advocating for the killing of disobedient children, there’s been a lot of crazy talk by some GOP politicians in the state of Arkansas recently.
Posted on Oct 11, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including Mitt Romney makes a major foreign policy speech and a Republican lawmaker defends slavery.
Posted on Oct 8, 2012
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In an urgent and informed discussion on race relations spanning America’s early history to the stop-and-frisk policies of the present, author, historian and New York Public Library research director Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad tells Bill Moyers how the nation’s laws were written to control black Americans.
Posted on Aug 21, 2012
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Photo by Les Chatfield (CC-BY)
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Soliciting a modern day slave to write about modern day slaves? Great concept for an improv comedy sketch. Although it might seem sad, and funny, it’s exactly what an advertiser on a media job board has done.
Posted on Aug 1, 2012
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Photo by Gage Skidmore
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including a top Obama administration official facing a contempt vote, a new birther conspiracy and “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart takes on Fox News (yet again).
Posted on Jun 20, 2012
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Jon Rawlinson (CC-BY)
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By John Donnelly —
Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin suggest in their new book, “Tinderbox,” that colonialists’ aggressive trade practices opened new travel routes in central Africa that helped spread a disease rooted in a dense forest to the world beyond.
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Flickr / tinou bao (CC-BY)
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — Charting the demise of racism by the rising number of interracial marriages is probably not the most reliable indicator that it’s ending. Wouldn’t the elimination of disparities in income, employment, health care, education, crime, punishment and family structure be more accurate indicators?
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Can President Obama take advantage of the egalitarian sentiment let loose in the country by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations? The best response comes not from polls but from history.
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Amazon’s warehouse has brutal working conditions; women are beginning to take over the workforce; meanwhile, a website and app have been developed to tell you how many slaves are working for you. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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Mr. Fish
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In his latest self-revelatory essay, our resident genius cartoonist tells a tale of triumph over the oppressive forces of consumerism—or at least the security chief at Barnes & Noble. Call it an origin story, as this incident freed the author to fully become the inimitable Mr. Fish.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart.
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By William Pfaff — What do you call it when a country’s elites exploit its people and resources for profit abroad?
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Flickr / fauxto_digit (CC-BY)
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A Virginia fourth-grade textbook falsely claims that “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks” during the Civil War. The author of the book relied heavily on a pro-Confederacy group she found on the Internet.
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By Ruth Marcus — To hijack the horrors of the Holocaust and slavery in the service of a political campaign demeans the candidate and, worse, dishonors the victims. Decency demands that some comparisons be off-limits.
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"Scars of a Whipped Slave" / National Archives
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By Eugene Robinson — Slavery wasn’t just “a bad thing,” as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour recently said in dismissing it. Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and the revisionists behind Confederate History Month should be ashamed.
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In this episode of “Pat Robertson Explains It All,” our host takes to the Christian airwaves to help everyone make sense of Tuesday’s gigantic earthquake in Haiti. Needless to say, it’s news to us that the Prince of Darkness had a hand in the matter, but Robertson assures his nodding sidekick that it’s the truth.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Forgive me if I am neither shocked nor outraged at Harry Reid’s comments about Barack Obama’s skin. What I would find stunning is evidence that his assessment was anything but accurate.
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By Terrence McNally, AlterNet —
One writer spent four years inside the world of modern-day slavery, an industry that produces huge profits and countless wasted lives.
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cartercenter.org
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Former President Jimmy Carter has made human rights an ongoing focus of his life’s work, and his position on the issue recently compelled him to sever his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after being affiliated with it for six decades. Carter, in a recent piece for The Observer, complains that higher-ups in the denomination haven’t changed their sexist ways.
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Flickr/Murky1
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On Thursday, the Senate adopted a resolution that apologizes for the evils of slavery on behalf of the people of the United States, and “acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery, and Jim Crow laws.” The resolution does not, however, offer any form of reparation for the descendants of slaves.
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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President Obama decided not to break with White House custom this Memorial Day and sent a wreath to honor the fallen Confederate soldiers who wanted nothing to do with the Union. But he also started a new and long-overdue tradition by honoring the hundreds of thousands of black Americans who fought against the South.
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AP photo / Nam Y. Huh
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By Chris Hedges — Israel and the United States will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. It’s times like this President Obama would do well to heed the sermons of his former pastor.
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Two recent books show how a man of reason and conservative temperament and a man of passion and radical disposition joined together, even before either knew it, to end slavery.
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By Amy Goodman — The first African-American elected president of the United States recently visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves. Alice Walker told me: “Even when they were building it, you know, in chains or in desperation and in sadness, they were building it for him.”
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By Ellen Goodman — There was symbolism as well as sadness in the passing of Barack Obama’s grandmother. When we’re young, we think change is a 100-yard dash. As we get older we think it’s a marathon. Eventually we see a relay race.
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L.A. Theatre Works
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Just in time for Election Day, actors David Strathairn and Paul Giamatti are resurrecting the formidable historical figures of Abraham Lincoln and his rival for the Senate in 1858, Stephen A. Douglas, respectively, in L.A. Theatre Works’ production of “The Rivalry,” Norman Corwin’s play about the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.
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Amanda Jone’s father encouraged her to vote. That wasn’t always an easy feat in Texas, but she did her best, paying poll taxes to vote for FDR and others. Now the 109-year-old daughter of a former slave has voted for the man who could become the first black president and she says, “I feel good about [it].”
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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guardian.co.uk
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Former Secretary of State and current dance sensation Colin Powell graced the stage of a London hip-hop concert “in celebration of African culture.” The song he sang and danced to? A Nigerian hit about people spending money gleaned from U.S. Internet scam victims.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass Thursday in a venue different from his customary surroundings, leading a service at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium on the latest stop of his American tour.
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Clothing companies and the consumers who buy their products tend to feign ignorance when it’s revealed that those products are a bargain because they were made by 10-year-old slaves. That’s certainly the case with Gap, which says it was unaware of the sweatshop in New Delhi, India, where children were recently found toiling under deplorable conditions to create clothes bearing the Gap Kids logo.
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By Ellen Goodman — During World War II, the Japanese army enslaved and raped 100,000 to 200,000 young women. By denying this atrocity, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and others have brought shame back to Japan.
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whdh.com
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The Rev. Al Sharpton is descended from a slave once owned by Strom Thurmond’s family, according to genealogists working on behalf of The New York Daily News. Sharpton called the revelation “probably the most shocking thing in my life.”
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chanad.weblogs.us
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After paying roughly $2,000 each for work in the Persian Gulf, a group of Sri Lankan migrant workers was taken to Iraq, where they survived a month of imprisonment until they managed to contact the U.N. The International Organization of Migration says worsening conditions in Iraq have encouraged such abuses by labor recruiters.
Posted on Feb 6, 2007
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virginia.edu
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Stopping short of a full-blown apology, Virginia’s House of Delegates voted unanimously on Friday to issue a statement of “profound regret” over the state’s role in the slave trade, “the historic wrongs visited upon native peoples” and “all other forms of discrimination and injustice….”
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When Republicans push good programs, we like to take notice. This is a great example. GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa wants to establish an office in the IRS that will specifically go after sex traffickers—to get them off the street and free their prey from lives of sexual slavery.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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