(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 […]
US Economic Policy in Afghanistan Doomed it: From Dogmatic Privatization to Neglect of Rural Sector
(By Graciana del Castillo via The Boston Review) . . . The promises made by President Bush in April 2002 to help rebuild Afghanistan in the tradition of the Marshall Plan created high expectations among the Afghan population after the rout of the Taliban and the Bonn Agreement of December 2001. But despite costly international […]
330 US drone strikes in Pakistan recorded in Leaked official document
(By Alice K. Ross) The Bureau is today publishing a leaked official document that records details of over 300 drone strikes, including their locations and an assessment of how many people died in each incident. The document is the fullest official record of drone strikes in Pakistan to have yet been published. It provides rare […]
La Follette’s Anti-Imperialism is Still Controversial at the Wall Street Journal
(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 […]
Don’t Break up Syria: WW I-Style Imperial Divide & Rule is a Failure
(By Christopher Dekki) Since the beginning of this terrible conflict in Syria, I have been closely listening to people’s reactions to the violence and devastation occurring there. What is astonishing is how quickly Syria transformed from a place of relative obscurity to a topic of constant discussion among so many. Even more astonishing, the solutions […]
US Pivot to Asia Should Deploy Soft Power, not the Marines
(By John Feffer) In a future update of The Devil’s Dictionary, the famed Ambrose Bierce dissection of the linguistic hypocrisies of modern life, a single word will accompany the entry for “Pacific pivot”: retreat. It might seem a strange way to characterize the Obama administration’s energetic attempt to reorient its foreign and military policy toward […]
NSA sucks up Phone App data from Google Maps to Angry Birds
(By Andrea Germanos) As part of their arsenal of spying tools, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, are sucking up personal data leaked from smartphone apps, according to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. One of the apps the NSA and GCHQ used to gather data is the popular game […]
Using up Everything Fast: Extractive Capitalism, Sealing and Muslim Slaves in Latin America
(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, […]
Is Iran Back? Foreign Policy after the Nuclear Deal
(By Paul Rogers) Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif with EU High Representative Catherine Ashton at the EU+3 and Iran talks, November 2013 Summary If Iran and the P5+1 succeed in negotiating a robust agreement on the nuclear issue, then Iran will be less preoccupied with rebalancing its relationship with antagonistic western powers and its role […]
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