By Harry Targ - 06.08.14

Energy can be used as a weapon. You don’t have to go further than the headlines today to see that’s true….We’re doing this to become better war fighters.” (Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, quoted in “Purdue, Navy to Unite on Energy Research,” Lafayette Journal and Courier, May 9, 2014).

At a public assembly celebrating a formal agreement endorsed by the United States Navy and Marine Corps and Purdue University, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and President Mitch Daniels extolled the virtues of future research collaboration.

By Harry Targ - 05.11.4

Marge Piercy wrote poetically in a recent issue of Monthly Review, Who has little, let them have less. “The hatred of the poor, is it guilt gone rancid? That the rich have so much and still conspire to steal a baby’s medicine, a woman’s life, a man’s heart and kidney….If they could push a button, if they could war on the poor here at home as they do abroad directly with bombs instead of legislation, think they’d hesitate?”

By Harry Targ - 04.13.14

The experience of increasing poverty, economic marginalization, and the rise of political reaction against workers, unions, women, people of color, the right to vote, and basic dignity for the 99 percent has stimulated mass mobilizations in protest over the last two years. From Arab Spring, to protests all across the Midwest in defense of worker’s rights, to the Occupy Movement, anti-racist campaigns in Florida and elsewhere against so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws, and the Moral Majority mobilizations inspired by fight backs against the suppression of voter rights, working people are on the move.

Harry Targ 02.20.14

Sixty years ago, in March, 1954, National Security Document 5412 was distributed to President Eisenhower’s National Security Council by the Central Intelligence Agency recommending the adoption of a program of covert operations so that:

“U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident and if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include…propaganda; political action; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups,...

By Harry Targ - 02.09.14

Global Economic Context      

Looking at the last third of the twentieth century, Canadian economist James Davies, in a study prepared by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, wrote “income inequality has been rising for the past 20 to 25 years and we think that is true for inequality in the distribution of wealth.” In 2,000 the study showed, the top 1 percent of the world’s population accounted for 40 percent of the its total net worth, with the bottom half owning 1.1 percent. Edward Wolff, another economist...