US politics

(By Ellen Cantarow) For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking” — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have […]

Climate Change

Rep. Cathy Rodgers Exemplifies GOP: Benefit from Gov’t yourself, Deny Benefits to Others

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in giving her response to President Obama’s State of the Union message exemplified everything wrong with today’s Republican Party. Ms. Rodgers spoke of being the first in her family to go to college. She also said she came to Washington “To grow the working middle class, not the […]

History

La Follette’s Anti-Imperialism is Still Controversial at the Wall Street Journal

contributors

(By Richard Drake) On 11 January 2014, Lewis Gould reviewed my book, The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion, in The Wall Street Journal. One of the chapters in particular, “La Follette Discovers the Middle East,” inspired claims and charges by the reviewer that I answered in a letter published by […]

Barack Obama

Why Pres. Obama wants to Raise Minimum Wage: 49 mn Americans Food Insecure

Juan Cole

(Via PRNewswire) The State of Hunger in America: Feeding America Issues Annual Report (via PR Newswire) CHICAGO, Jan. 27, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — In connection with President Barack Obama’s . . . annual State of the Union address, Feeding America has issued its annual “State of Hunger in America,” assessing the prevalence of food insecurity and… […]

Barack Obama

Dovish SOTU: Obama will Veto AIPAC Iran Sanctions, Pledges Afghanistan Wind-Down

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) President Obama’s State of the Union address addressed some key foreign policy issues–Afghanistan and Iran above all– though it was primarily aimed at domestic issues, and mainly at those where executive orders and policy might make at least a marginal impact. Opinion polls show that US public support for the Afghanistan War, […]

Africa

Using up Everything Fast: Extractive Capitalism, Sealing and Muslim Slaves in Latin America

contributors

(By Greg Grandin) The Two Faces of Empire Melville Knew Them, We Still Live With Them By Greg Grandin A captain ready to drive himself and all around him to ruin in the hunt for a white whale. It’s a well-known story, and over the years, mad Ahab in Herman Melville’s most famous novel, Moby-Dick, […]

Barack Obama

The Human Cost of Income Inequality in America

Juan Cole

BBC: “What does Income Inequality mean for Americans?”

Climate Change

Top Ten Ways GOP could avoid “War on Women” Label

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Mike Huckabee objects to the charge that the Republican Party is waging a war on women. The GOP obviously is increasingly a party of angry white men. It suffers from a significant gender gap, which helped elect Barack Obama twice. Huckabee wants to just wish all these realities away. But in the […]

al-Qaeda

Gates worries Pakistan Violence blocks Polio Eradication, But is CIA Partly to Blame?

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done an amazing job in targeting diseases for eradication, and the world is very close to getting rid of polio altogether, in part because the Gates in recent years have given their support to the effort, which began in 1988. Cases have fallen 99% since […]