Another Free Speech Fight: Do Critics of Israel Have a Right to Be Heard?

Here we go again: Pro-Israel zealots in New York were threatening the funding of Brooklyn College.

The reason: Jewish Voice for Peace's New York City chapter was co-sponsoring an event at Brooklyn College, February 7, at...

There is one subject that most politicians avoid: talking about the media. Most spend most of their time positioning themselves for media attention because most seem to need and rely on media visibility.

The media provides their political oxygen and, hence, explains why they spend so much time spinning...

New York, New York: Long live the middle class now that it has survived the fiscal cliff and been "saved."

President Obama is basking in the glory of having averted the deepening of a crisis that is more structural than political and hardly resolved.

The markets are cheering, it...

New York, N.Y.: A year into his presidency, Barack Obama began to plan his reelection bid. Having assessed the lessons of 2008, it was clear that grassroots mobilizations would be essential to assuring a turnout the next time around.

I made a film on that political campaign, exploring how...

As Americans prepare to go to the polls, the airwaves are littered with paid advertising of the crassest and most manipulative kind. Political issues packaged by ad agencies are flooding the arena of politics with nasty negative ads.

So far, the two parties and their backers have spent a...

Is This Incident A Retaliation Because A Bank Official Made A Disparaging Comment About U.S. Hostility To Iran?

JOHANNESBURG -- On the surface, it looked like a simple game of "Gotcha," when New York Bank regulators blew the whistle on London's Standard Chartered Bank for laundering money. The fact that...

Cape Town, South Africa: Nelson Mandela was released from prison 22 years ago. He has been "free" ever since. At the same time, I sometimes feel as if I became his prisoner--imprisoned by the work I have been doing enthusiastically in service to the struggle he led ever since the...

There were two recent American elections that spoke to the power of incumbency. Despite corruption charges, the venerable Black Democrat Charles Rangel, now in his 80s, was re-elected to Congress by his Harlem constituency.

Orin Hatch, a cranky conservative Republican beat back a challenge to his Senate seat from...

Cape Town, South Africa: When I came to South Africa, I thought I was escaping the way our news programs are totally dominated by political coverage even though the election is months away and everyone knows none of this polling and hyped-up speculation matters until October.

The fight between the...

Earlier this year, I was in Tehran for a conference on Hollywood's power and impact. It was called "Hollywoodism," featuring many scholars and critics of the values and political ideologies featured in many major movies with a focus on the way Israel (aka "the Zionists") are continually portrayed as if...

Having just finished producing an investigative TV series on Who Rules America, inspired, in part, by the argument that sociologist C. Wright Mills made 50 years ago about how a small group of the rich and powerful run things, I was wondering how I would feel spending a night with...

New York, New York: In theory, American elections traditionally get going after Labor Day, but, as we can see by the daily overkill media "coverage," polls and constant reporting about who has raised what -- to the degree that anyone really knows in the age of Super PACs -- that...

Hail Caesar! The circle of those of us crusading for a jail-out of banksters, and not another bailout for them is widening, Our newest Commissar of Condemnation, Charles H. Ferguson, director of the film Inside Job is in the house with a new must-read book, Predator Nation, that documents and...

Foreign correspondents have always been revered within journalism. That's why covering Iraq or other wars are assignments so many reporters cultivate. Many see them as a ticket up the media pecking order.

Being "under fire" promise excitement, danger and -- let's face it, on TV -- precious "face time." Going...

I keep thinking of that clear April night 100 years ago when the unsinkable HMS Titanic steamed towards New York. It was actually on its way to dock just a few blocks from where I live at what are now the Chelsea Piers. There was a sense of optimism abroad...

New York, New York: It's easy to understand why presidents, politicians and the military love robots. They don't talk back. They follow orders. You press a button and they do what they are told. They are considered so efficient, and so lethal.

These modern killing machines represent science fiction...

Our Own Stand Your Ground Message, 1894

...Let the winds lift your banners from far lands
With a message of strife and of hope:
Raise the Maypole aloft with its garlands
That gathers your cause in its scope....
...Stand fast, then, Oh Workers, your...

Here We Go Again in The Battle for The "Soul" of Occupy; Fear of Co-optation Leads to Self-Destructive Polemics

Perhaps my problem is that I live in too many worlds at the same time, while many political eras live in me.

That may be why I responded so negatively...

Every year I trek down to a nondescript office building near Wall Street with a bag full of receipts and a belly full of anxiety.

When it's tax time, I always hope for the best but... I also had an accountant who I trusted to keep me on the up...

March seems to be leaving us like a lamb, although "March Madness" is still in effect, as college basketball marched into "The Final Four."

It is safe to predict that more Americans are paying attention to the action on the courts than the tired rhetoric and electoral mash-up where another...