
Colin Powell’s Mindless Obedience to the US War Machine Led to Death and Destruction
Hailed by the media as a patriot who put country first, Colin Powell put unthinking obedience to superiors above moral integrity. The world has suffered for it.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Hailed by the media as a patriot who put country first, Colin Powell put unthinking obedience to superiors above moral integrity. The world has suffered for it.

If the GOP has its way, diseases like measles and tuberculosis could make a big comeback.

The “Bad Art Friend” saga has held readers spellbound, launching a thousand debates about which of the two central figures in the writers’ feud is to blame. But maybe the real culprit is a bleak economic landscape that leads writers to fight for scraps.

Facebook has been the target of an unprecedented flood of criticism in recent months — and rightly so. But too many critics seem to forget that the company is driven to do bad things by its thirst for profit, not by a handful of mistaken ideas.

Global pharmaceutical companies sell their medications in every country around the world. But only in the US do they get away with charging the extortionate prices Americans have become familiar with.

There’s good reason to speculate that the Pandora Papers, the massive leak exposing the tax-dodging practices of the global superrich — which includes plenty of Russians and Chinese, but almost no Americans — is a CIA plant. Nevertheless, it’s a newsworthy story that deserves the attention it’s gotten.

Loretta Preska, the judge who did Chevron’s bidding in the case against activist Steven Donziger, has a history of conflicts of interest and pro-corporate rulings. And she’s not alone — corporate influence and conflicts of interest are rampant in the courts.

Yet more evidence emerges that the so-called Havana Syndrome caused by a “microwave weapon” in US diplomats and intelligence personnel was a psychosomatic illness. Maybe it’s time for national security reporters to stop letting anonymous officials make wild claims to stoke conflict and inflate their budgets.

Determined to undermine the US pandemic response, the Right is opposing vaccine mandates on the grounds that they’re an authoritarian power grab. Don’t be fooled: up until a few months ago, they backed every civil liberties–shredding measure under the sun.

A new report from a coalition of human rights groups details the horror of Israel’s apartheid-style home invasions in the West Bank — yet another revelation about the horrifying realities of what US military aid to Israel is funding.

Contrary to claims about “fascist” vaccine mandates currently circulating on the Right, the Nazis actually relaxed German vaccine mandates — and hoped doing the same for people they conquered would kill them faster.

Gavin Newsom came into office with “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” like universal health care — and proceeded to fulfill as few of them as he could. It’s no wonder he came dangerously close to facilitating a GOP power grab in a deep blue state.

Despite copious evidence of Saudi complicity in the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration and its successors have spent twenty years shielding the country’s elite from accountability while making war on an ever-growing list of other Middle East countries.

For the past two decades, the psychology of 9/11 has shaped the nation’s political landscape and thrown the world into turmoil. That era must be definitively ended.

Two decades ago, the mainstream media responded to the September 11 attacks by stacking their news coverage and pundit commentary with the country’s most belligerently pro-war voices. We are still paying for their appalling misjudgment.

Instead, the quest to avenge just shy of 3,000 civilian deaths in New York and Washington has now resulted in the deaths of at least 400,000 civilians.

Bernie Sanders, who’s fighting to pass his ambitious $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill in the Senate, spent the past weekend on the road, doing something his Democratic colleagues seldom do: selling his ideas in swing states.

With hawks thirsting for blood after last week’s ISIS attack, the Biden administration just slaughtered ten Afghans about to be resettled in the US. The tragic story is a miniature version of how the entire war has gone.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down the national eviction moratorium was a lawless power grab by an increasingly out-of-control institution.

The establishment media loved Joe Biden until he did a good thing and tried to end the war in Afghanistan. Now they’re looking for blood.