In These Times back issues from June 2008:
Tilting at Media Windmills?
Jun 01, 2008; ... IN APRIL, THE news media began a predictable turn to "image scandals" in the presidential campaign. And then it got worse. ABC's instantly scandalous April 16 "debate"-moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (who looked like newsmen, only smaller)-prompted an outpouring of ...
JUST THE FACTS
Jun 01, 2008; ... 85 Number of U.N. member nations that consider homosexuality a crime. 58 Years since the founding of the Mattachine Society, the first modern gay-rights organization. 5 Years since Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality. 0 Number of openly lesbian, ...
QUID PRO QUO
Jun 01, 2008; ... THE QUID: Imagine that you're a real estate developer in south Florida who owns 4,000 acres of land just east of a major highway, and that you could really benefit if the federal government would fund a nearby interchange. Thing is, persnickety local officials and whiny environmentalists ...
letters
Jun 01, 2008; ... Don't bash Barack I was disturbed to come across a short piece by Cassandra West in your April issue ("Yes, We Can ... Do What?"). The main point of this article is certainly unobjectionable: We should demand a bit of steak with our sizzle, some specifics beyond the slogans. On ...
CORRECTION
Jun 01, 2008; ... The May cover art was inspired by the logo of the Union of Union ...
Axle of Evil
Jun 01, 2008; ... Drastic wage cuts drive UAW members to picket American Axle & Manufacturing FOR MORE THAN TWO months, 3,600 United Auto Workers (UAW) members have walked picket lines in Detroit, Three Rivers, Mich., and upstate New York. The strike at American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM), a major ...
The Push to Privatize PEMEX
Jun 01, 2008; ... HALLIBURTON IS LICKING its chops at the prospect of Mexico's state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos going private. Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, withstood a tsunami of privatizations of formerly state-owned companies in the late 1980$ and '90$. But now, with probusiness President Felipe ...
FAUX PHILANTHROPY
Jun 01, 2008; ... A new campaign aims to stop Starbucks' use of public interest for private profit. Early this year, the Truth About Ethos formed after a group of self-proclaimed Starbucks junkies in Denver agreed that the company is shortchanging the public with its bottled-water division Ethos ...
Supreme Court OKs Racial Profiling
Jun 01, 2008; ... EITHER RACIAL PROFILING is odious and unconstitutional, with personal and social consequences for communities of color-or it's not. On April 23, the U.S. Supreme Court, without any dissent, decided that it was not. The ruling obliquely, but forcefully, slammed the courthouse door on any ...
New Jewish Lobby Counters Neocons
Jun 01, 2008; ... ON APRIL 15, after 18 months of planning, a new progressive Jewish lobby called J Street was launched as a counterweight to the increasingly conservative American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). There is no physical J Street in Washington, D.C., but the name conjures up K Street, the ...
Red State, Green Campaign
Jun 01, 2008; ... THIS ELECTION YEAR, one of the greenest campaigns is being run not in blue Massachusetts or California, but in bright-red Oklahoma. State Sen. Andrew Rice (D-Oklahoma City) is challenging incumbent Sen. James Inhofe (R), 74. Congress' most vocal denier of global warming, and is doing so ...
appall-o-meter
Jun 01, 2008; ... 0.7 Hard Times for Bankers Thanks to the global credit crisis, banks have been forced to cut back on amenities long enjoyed by executives. The German finance titan Deutsche Bank-hard hit by its exposure to subprime mortgages-has issued a memo to its senior execs, ordering them to clear ...
snapshot
Jun 01, 2008; ... A Tibetan activist shouts slogans from the back of a police vehicle following his arrest during an anti-Chinese demonstration in front of the Chinese Embassy ...
A Kinder, Gentler Torture
Jun 01, 2008; ... WHILE STAYING AT his inlaw's village in Afghanistan in December 2001, Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi, my client at Guantánamo, knew little of Bush and Cheney. Later, when vigilante thugs turned him over to the Northern Alliance for an American bounty, Al-Ghizzawi knew nothing of Donald ...
The Vendetta Against Black Men
Jun 01, 2008; ... DESPITE THE RISE of Sen. Barack Obama, black men remain in the bull's-eye of governmental repression and police brutality. The government is currently re-trying six black men who have already faced two hung juries in a case accusing them of planning to blow up both the Sears Tower in ...
Fox News' Criminal Pundits
Jun 01, 2008; ... THE SENSATIONALIST MEDIA inquest into Sen. Barack Obama's associations has cheapened the national debate. It has also exposed the hypocrisy and double standard of the conservative media. Fox News, which has championed this "guilt by association," questions Obama's fitness for office ...
Obama Not Feelin' the Love from Smiley
Jun 01, 2008; ... NOW THAT SEN. Barack Obama has taken care of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Tavis Smiley appears to be the next black contender for an '08 smackdown with the presidential candidate. But this time, black folks are taking care of it on their own. Obama's April was a month full of stormy ...
Piling it High
Jun 01, 2008; ... The sewage sludge industry meets the light of day NANCY HOLT, A RETIRED nurse from Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across ...
WHY DEMOCRATS WON'T STOP THE WAR
Jun 01, 2008; ... THE NATIONWIDE OPPOSITION TO the Iraq War is based on a host of populist impulses. Some people hate it because they think lives are being sacrificed to pursue the oil industry's agenda. Some despise it because, without a military draft, the US. casualties-4,000-plus and counting-are ...
No Strings Attached?
Jun 01, 2008; ... How U.S. funding of the world press corps may be buying influence DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS LIKE the "Pentagon Pundits" fiasco have been exposed and decried. Mainstream media outlets hired high-ranking military officers to provide "analysis" about the war in Iraq. Turns out they had ...
Mexico's Ghost Towns
Jun 01, 2008; ... The other side of the immigration debate ZACATECAS, MEXICO-CERRITO DEL AGUA, population 3,000, has no paved roads-either leading to it or within it. No restaurants, no shopping malls. In fact, the small town located in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas has no middle schools, high ...
Winning the White Working Class
Jun 01, 2008; ... Obama needs its support, but this key constituency has yet to commit FORT WAYNE, IND.-TOM LEWANDOWSKI, a former General Electric factory worker, heads the central labor union council in this northeastern Indiana city of a quarter million people. Once an industrial powerhouse, Fort Wayne ...
Does the E.U. Hate You?
Jun 01, 2008; ... Despite popular myth, anti-Americanism in Europe isn't on the rise IN EUROPE, AS IN nearly everywhere else in the world, the image of the United States has taken a severe battering during the Bush years. Survey after survey shows that negative feelings toward America and U.S. policies ...
The Cho Show
Jun 01, 2008; ... Margaret Cho knows how brutal Hollywood can be. In 2000, in her critically acclaimed onewoman comedy show, "I'm the One That I Want," Cho, 39, chronicled the struggles of her shortlived 1994 ABC sitcom "All-American Girl." The project nearly destroyed her. Network executives hired weight ...
Main Street Squeeze
Jun 01, 2008; ... Main Street Squeeze Pick your metaphor for the current state of American workers: Are they squeezed? Caught? Crunched? Three new books-by two top-notch national journalists and a leading progressive economist-exploit these images to convey how average Americans are losing out in ...
Errol Morris' Myopia
Jun 01, 2008; ... FILM Errol Morris' Myopia FILMMAKER ERROL MORRIS has grown famous and revered as the pioneer of what could be called interrogatory cinema-documentaries that do not merely document but probe into mysterious matters with the intention of uncovering their unknown truths. (The idea ...
Sam's Club Politics
Jun 01, 2008; ... BOOKS Sam's Club Politics ON A RECENT episode of the NBC comedy "30 Rock," the cutthroat corporate executive Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, needed some "cool Republican celebrities" to headline his John McCain fundraising dinner. To his dismay, Democrats had cornered the ...
art space
Jun 01, 2008; ... War in Focus -Focus on War Los Angeles-based curator Dane Jensen has combined the work of nine combat photographers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and created a compelling photo exhibition. "Eye of the Storm: War Through the Lens of American Combat Photographers," opens Memorial ...
Atheism's Unholy Trinity
Jun 01, 2008; ... BOOKS Atheism's Unholy Trinity LAST SPRING, CHRIS Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, flew to California to see some atheists about God. Over the course of two debates-one in Los Angeles, the other in Berkeley-Hedges sparred ...
By the Sewers of Babylon
Jun 01, 2008; ... OH, THE HUMANITY! Oh, the gastronomy! Europe and the United States are suffering a tragic shortage of buffalo mozzarella-the soft pillows of cheese beloved by gourmands the world over. The crisis follows the discovery that the Mafia has long been dumping dioxin-laden garbage throughout ...
Hillary for Class President
Jun 01, 2008; ... I FIRST ATE COOKIES AT Hillary Rodham's house on Wisner and Elm in 1960. Were they her now-famous, chocolate chip cookies? Perhaps. But whether this is the recipe for the cookies I ate doesn't matter. The main dish that Hillary served, even back then, was politics. I had first met ...