In his excellent memoir of 1920’s and 30’s Berlin, Defying Hitler, German historian Sebastian Haffner recounts an experience he had as an apprentice lawyer. He describes the reading room of the Kammergericht, Berlin’s large, imposing law building at the time. Haffner recalls the proud satisfaction he felt to be working among professionals in the beautiful
Where are the professors? The students are in the streets, but where are the professors? The people of Ferguson, of Baltimore, of Cleveland are in the streets, but where are the professors? The Bill of Rights has been traduced and eviscerated, and where are the law professors? Mainstream news is a product of the Pentagon
More than eight years after the market crash of 2007-08, no bank or mortgage company executive has faced criminal charges for fraudulent activities that resulted in millions of foreclosures and the Great Recession. Just as no General Motors executive will see the inside of a jail cell for the deaths of hundreds of car-owners who
As the scales of the American criminal justice system continue to tilt against the interests of defendants, developments in Louisiana’s Orleans Parish threaten to pull us back to the days before Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court case that established the constitutional right of indigent defendants to court-appointed counsel. The American Civil Liberties
The rulers of the earth are now gathered to determine our fate. It should be abundantly clear to anyone in America who has been paying attention for the past fifteen years that no one in Davos, Switzerland, has our best interests in mind. One need not subscribe to any implausible conspiracy theory to recognize the
Now things are different. They are worse. More people are out of work, more middle income families are closer to living in poverty than they ever imagined they could be, wages have not only stagnated but decreased in real terms while profits for the large banks and corporations have soared, and the world’s wealth has
The world’s elite—the billionaires and CEO’s and the heads of state who serve them—are gathering this week for the World Economic Forum, their annual working holiday in Davos, Switzerland. Among this year’s attendees are Bill Gates, General Motors Chairwoman and CEO Mary Barra, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Benjamin Netanyahu, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and 2,500
It is no surprise that the federal government is a participant in the Flint, Michigan, water debacle. After the close support the administration of President Barack Obama provided the state’s government throughout the Detroit bankruptcy proceedings, the allegiance of the feds to the monied interests of Michigan at the expense of its residents is clear.
Demand is down. Prices are down. Wages are down. The markets are down. And money, that half-fictitious substance, is largely to be found in the parasitical financial markets in the form of debt. These are ominous signs. In a fact-filled article published on the World Socialist Website (WSWS), journalist Barry Grey lays out in plain
Flint is the future. The catastrophic human damage inflicted on the impoverished Michigan city is the result of forces and decisions that we will see replicated in urban areas throughout the country. Thousands of children exposed to irreversible lead poisoning. Ten residents whose deaths from Legionnaire’s disease are almost certainly attributable to the toxic water