By Conn Hallinan - 12.16.14
The pieces for a political resolution of the Syrian civil war are finally coming together, but the situation is extremely fragile, which is not good news in a region where sabotaging agreements and derailing initiatives comes easier than sober compromise. But while many of the key players have already begun backing away from their previous “red lines,” there remains one major obstacle: Turkey.
Read MoreBy STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH - 01.07.15
As the world that is interested in such matters knows, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the (redacted) 524-page Executive Summary of its 6000-page report on torture and the CIA, headed "Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations." One cannot be sure why the Chair, Sen. Diane Feinstein...
Read MoreBy Harry Targ - 01.18.15
Karl Marx in The German Ideology argued in the 1840s that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. Almost one hundred years later theorists from the Frankfort School elaborated on Marx’s idea by developing the theory of the “cultural apparatus.” German sociologist Max Horkheimer wrote:
One function of the entire cultural apparatus at any given period has been to internalize in men [and women] of...
Read MoreBy Iris Vander Pluym - January 18, 2015
I have written about the debacle known as Obamacare ever since I first started blogging, and many times since. In a nutshell, my primary objection is and always has been that it entrenches our wildly expensive, unjust, inefficient and deadly for-profit system, and forecloses any sort of bridge to transition the vast majority of Americans to a single-payer system. For-profit means just what it says: it puts health care in the business of producing profits, and not, you know, health....
Read MoreBy Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D. - 01.18.15
Introduction
The massacre in France and other “Allahu akbar!” inspired terror acts are frontal assaults on free expression. Crimes committed by “Allahu akbar!” style Islamists remind some secularists in this country of heinous acts perpetrated by their deviant Christian cousins that have bombed abortion clinic and federal buildings and otherwise committed murders in Jesus name.
Read MoreBy Michael Faulkner - 01.18.15
The article that follows was written just before the news broke of the murderous assault on the offices of the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamist terrorists. It is hoped that this column will be able to return to that event and consider its consequences and wider significance in the next posting of TPJ Magazine.
Any claim to express a view “from the left” is not as straightforward as it may appear. What is to be understood by ‘the left’? According to the tenets of the mainstream media in Britain, “the left” encompasses the Labour Party, some representatives of liberal opinion and possibly sections of the trade union movement.
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