Corporate and financial elites have largely succeeded in seizing the current economic crisis of their own making to ram through attacks on social programs they’ve always despised. With the politicians and the Supreme Court in their pockets they apparently believe that now is their time to contort the institutions of American society into a...
So the Senate seat that John Fitzgerald Kennedy won by defeating the incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, and then passed on to his brother, Edward Moore Kennedy, in 1962 has fallen to a Republican far more rightwing than Cabot Lodge. It’s partly Ted Kennedy’s fault for not cultivating an obvious heir. It’s...
Among the thousands of contributions to his country that Edward Kennedy made throughout the course of his 46-year career in the United States Senate one episode that stands out to me is his role in exposing the human costs of the American war in Vietnam. In early January 1968, just prior to the Tet...
First let me state the obvious: the May 7, 2004 “Special Review” on interrogations from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Inspector General is a heavily redacted document. Pages and pages of the report, titled “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003),” are either completely blackened out or mostly so. As a historian with a...
Walter Cronkite was the kind of television news anchor that simply no longer exists. Yes, he was on board with Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam in the early years, which reflected the bipartisan consensus of the time, but by 1968, when the Tet Offensive laid bare all of the savage illusions of that catastrophic...
“Ripples of Hope” in Egypt
It took decades of inaction, repression, and neglect to produce the mass demonstrations we’re seeing in Egypt. The only real surprise is that something on this scale didn’t happen years earlier. The gospel of deregulation, privatization, and coddling ruling elites with tax breaks and subsidies, while starving the workers and the poor of basic...
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