Bill of Rights

For First Time, US joins Brazil and India as “Backsliding Democracy”: GOP is making US a Third World Country

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance finds this year that the United States of America has joined the ranks of “backsliding democracies,” joining India, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. The IDEA institute notes, “Democratic backsliding, namely the sustained and deliberate process of subversion of basic democratic tenets by […]

Bill of Rights

Bannon Vote: Republicans once Voted to Hold Hollywood 10 in Contempt for Making Leftist Movies but won’t act on Far-Right Plot to Overthrow Gov’t

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Anyone who knows the history of abuse in the Congress’s prerogative of subpoenaing witnesses and holding people in contempt for declining to testify is a little uneasy about the vote today to refer far-right gadfly Steve Bannon to the Department of Justice on charges of contempt of Congress. Mary Clare […]

African-Americans

We Can Have the Filibuster or Democracy, But Not Both

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | ( Otherwords.org) – The American political system is complicated, but fixing it doesn’t have to be. Voters of all stripes broadly agree on the kinds of changes they’d like to see. We need less money in politics. It should be easier to vote — early, in person, or by mail. And […]

BDS Occupied Territories

Israel is determined to Criminalize Boycott Movement, but Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream struck a blow for First Amendment

Ramzy Baroud

( Middle East Monitor) – Ben & Jerry’s decision to suspend its operations in the occupied Palestinian West Bank is an event that is proving critical to Palestinian efforts, which ultimately aim at holding Israel accountable for its military occupation, apartheid and war crimes. By responding to the Palestinian call for boycotting apartheid Israel, the […]

Bill of Rights

Torture, Wars of Aggression, Violations of Bill of Rights: Will there ever be accountability for America’s Orgy of War Crimes in the 21st Century

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com) – America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term “accountability.” This should come as no surprise. After all, there’s nothing particularly new about this. In the Bush years, those […]

Authoritarianism

How Florida’s Political “Survey” of Universities threatens Freedom of Speech

Jill Richardson

( Otherwords.org ) – Florida officials say they want to promote “intellectual freedom” — by using political surveys to target university funding. By Jill Richardson | June 30, 2021 The state of Florida just passed a law that — to put it mildly — grossly violates academic freedom. Under the new bill, recently signed by […]

Bill of Rights

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really complaining about King George, and 5 other surprising facts for July Fourth

The Conversation

By Woody Holton | – Editor’s note: Americans may think they know a lot about the Declaration of Independence, but many of those ideas are elitist and wrong, as historian Woody Holton explains. His forthcoming book “Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution” shows how independence and the Revolutionary War were influenced […]

African-Americans

If we truly honored Juneteenth, we would end the exception in the 13th amendment

Waging Nonviolence

By Emma Jordan-Simpson | – (Waging Nonviolence ) – In my inbox this morning from a major nonprofit organization that should have known better was a Juneteenth celebratory greeting: “We proudly celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery finally came to an end throughout the South — historically a monumental feat for American history and now a […]

al-Qaeda

Can Guantánamo Ever Be Shut Down? Dealing with the Forever Prison of America’s Forever Wars

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com) – The Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end. Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guantánamo’s last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, […]