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CONTACT: Brenda Bowser Soder, Human Rights First
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New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases

For Immediate Release: January 20, 2011

Washington, DC – In response to news reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will soon lift the current ban on bringing new charges in the nation’s flawed military commissions system, Human Rights First President and CEO Elisa Massimino issued the following statement: Continue reading →

I’ve decided to post this very revelatory piece on Matt Miller again, as reminder of the New Democrats and what they really stand for and advocate.

Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the melancholy voice of one asylum patient. “There is no longer any past for me,” the inmate relates, “I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why?”   It is a strange moment of existential despair—one brought on by the loss of the past—in a chapter filled with despondency, not least James’s own. “There is no longer any past for me . . . I walk, but why.”   It is not at all strange that an absent past would prove disorienting, but it is peculiar in the midst of Varieties, in which history seems always to be getting lost in the search for the eternal: “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” James insists, remains unaltered “by differences of clime or creed.”  The mystical classics have “neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, . . . they do not grow old.”  Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. Continue reading →

Palestinians are well within their rights to bring the issue of Israeli settlements and their illegality before the United Nations Security Council. Our decision to do so follows both Israel’s refusal to cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, and America’s failure to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and existing agreements. The United States should support such a move, not block it. Continue reading →

Thank you, Matt Duss

About This Book

• About the Authors
• Reviews

This book examines “the great contraction” of 2007–2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline.

Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits.

Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes.