Category Archives: Analysis

Donald Trump’s assault on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is an assault on the national sovereignty of the United States. By bolloxing up the postal system to interfere with voting in this year’s election and a reliance on voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has done more than severely damage a critical national infrastructure. The U.S. Post Office is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as a protected government service. The Postal System is not a business and was never meant to be one. It is a service provided by the federal government to its citizens. Continue reading →

How much do America’s big-time corporate CEOs make? Such a simple question, right? Not quite. Economist Larry Mishel has been working to get the answer right—for decades. And now Mishel, a former president and currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, has just released his latest take on the corporate pay universe, a set of newly revised stats that track the past half-century of executive compensation. Continue reading →

A national political nominating convention, as the Democrats have just completed, is, to be sure, a mutual admiration event. A steady stream of speakers led to the finale with the acceptance speech by the presidential candidate, Joe Biden. But the Convention has another declared purpose: to show the country what the Democratic Party stands for and the future it wishes to shape for the American people. Continue reading →

And so it begins again, the never-ending, semi-delusional, train-wreck of an election cycle in which the American people allow themselves to get worked up into a frenzy over the misguided belief that the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president. Continue reading →

Skyleigh Heinen, a U.S. Army veteran who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety, relies on the Postal Service for timely delivery of her meds to be able to function. She was one of thousands of Americans from all walks of life who spoke out recently to demand an end to a forced slowdown in mail delivery. Continue reading →

Should Trump fail to carry the Electoral College, Noam Chomsky admonishes, “he could send Blackshirts out in the streets… preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.” Continue reading →

As one of our most august Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin would tell Donald Trump to go fly a kite. And hope for a major electrical storm. Then Ben would advise Trump to keep his mitts off our post office. Continue reading →

“HUGE breakthrough today,” crowed Donald Trump on twitter as he announced the new peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The deal makes the UAE the first Gulf Arab state and the third Arab nation, after Egypt and Jordan, to have diplomatic ties with Israel. But the new Israel-UAE partnership should fool no one. Though it will supposedly stave off Israeli annexation of the West Bank and encourage tourism and trade between both countries, in reality, it is nothing more than a scheme to give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights.
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“The Caucasus is Ground Zero in the New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”
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The release of a report by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), billed as the Donald Trump administration’s “dedicated center for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda, cites the Strategic Culture Foundation in Russia, Canada’s Global Research Center, and other online publications as “proxy sites” for Russian intelligence and the Russian Foreign Ministry. The State Department’s report is titled, “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and it is not much different than the series of reports issued by the State Department’s “International Information Program” in the mid-2000s that were used to debase U.S. journalists and authors critical of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney neo-conservative wars of choice. Those diatribes, like the recent one masquerading as a “special report,” were written on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime and represent a squandering of money. Continue reading →

In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly predicted the outcome of presidential elections stretching back to 1984. Continue reading →

How’s pandemic life been going for you? If you work in America’s health care industry, that depends. That totally depends. Continue reading →

The landmark Gilens & Page study in 2014, which was the first study anywhere to examine the data to determine scientifically whether or not a given government is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, studied the U.S. data, and found conclusively that it’s a dictatorship. The U.S. is controlled by its six or seven hundred billionaires (the study identified America’s ruling class as only “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests”, but the people who own the controlling interest in over 90% of that and hire their lobbyists and fund the careers of the winning politicians are simply America’s billionaires, the U.S. oligarchy or “aristocracy”). After that landmark 2014 study, other reports came forth, all adding further confirmation to its findings. Continue reading →

Donald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Nazism and Adolf Hitler. After neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump called them “fine people.” Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, wrote that one of the only books Trump kept readily available was a compendium of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. According to Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, Donald Trump was raised in a household of constant racist and anti-Semitic words and deeds. Continue reading →

Tensions between the United States and China are rising as the U.S. election nears, with tit-for-tat consulate closures, new U.S. sanctions and no less than three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the seas around China. But it is the United States that has initiated each new escalation in U.S.-China relations. China’s responses have been careful and proportionate, with Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly asking the U.S. to step back from its brinkmanship to find common ground for diplomacy. Continue reading →

When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda confirmed last December that the court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’ Continue reading →

WASHINGTON—Unless Congress acts, acts fast, and acts the way the Democratic-run U.S. House wants it to act, millions of people will fall off a cliff—financially and otherwise—after Friday, July 31. Continue reading →

Federal agents poured into Portland, Oregon, this month to crack down on anti-racism protests. They beat up peaceful protesters and fired impact munitions at demonstrators, seriously injuring one of them. They drove around the city in unmarked vans pulling people off the street. Continue reading →

Are any of the grand brains in administration of Donald Trump—or possibly a future Joe Biden presidency—thinking systematically about the costs of containing China; i.e., waging a Cold War against a nation of 1.4 billion people or actually fomenting a hot conventional war in the Western Pacific? It’s madness made worse by the fact that Trump, Biden and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are using tired tropes reminiscent of the language of that was employed during the USA vs USSR Cold War that saturated the consciousness of the American people and its Western European comrades. Continue reading →

This is a wake-up call. Continue reading →

On July 12, 2020, fighting re-erupted between the ex-Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, this time an Azerbaijani Major General was killed, its Foreign Minister was fired, followed by a threat by the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense to blow up Armenia’s nuclear power station. As the fog of war lifts, we can fill some of the puzzle pieces with better-established facts. Continue reading →

In an article in Foreign Affairs in March, titled “Why America Must Lead Again,” Joe Biden claimed that “the world doesn’t organize itself,” and promised to “put the U.S. back at the head of the table” among the nations of the world. But the premise that the world can only organize itself under the direction of the United States and Biden’s ambition to restore the U.S. to such a dominant position at this moment in history are out of touch with global reality. Continue reading →

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s. Continue reading →

Since Hugo Chavez established Bolivarian social democracy in 1999, four US regimes—from the Clintons to Trump—sought to eliminate what they consider the “threat” of a good example. Continue reading →

Useful ways to pass the quarantine time: Since April, in response to the pandemic, I’ve been involved with a series of Zoom webinars examining a number of issues through the lens of COVID-19. So far, we’ve covered everything from mental health and addiction and recovery to the search for a vaccine. Continue reading →

Don’t think that the president of the United States is a racist, catering to the worst elements in American society? Trump’s racism is a matter of record and every supporter, business tycoon and apologist knows this is a fact. He is as close to an American dictator that the United States has had in modern history; Benito Mussolini, to be exact, mixed with a with a sprinkling of the Adolf Hitler’s philosophy. Trump’s racism extends to corporate boardrooms, financiers and others who have gotten rich off his tax cuts and the trillions doled out by the Federal Reserve to salvage US business during the pandemic of 2020. Continue reading →

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected. Continue reading →

Hardly anyone—Jewish or otherwise—believes that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) genuinely cares about the welfare of Christian, Muslim, and other non-Jewish minorities in the Middle East. Continue reading →

The U.S. State Department annually publishes an extremely biased report on human rights around the world. Conveniently, the report omits one of the most systemic violators of human rights on the planet. Under Donald Trump, the United States has graduated from systemic human rights violator to human rights pariah, as witnessed by recent murders and assaults by police of innocent people on the streets of America. Although the United States has historically been more than willing to criticize the human rights policies of other countries, including in the venue of the United Nations, it has bristled at attempts to have brought forth in the international body its own human rights outrages. Continue reading →

The system is rigged. Continue reading →

The use of false flag operations designed to crush democracy and create tyranny has a long and sordid history. Arguably the most notorious and effective one took place in Berlin with the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler was named Chancellor by an anxious capitalist elite threatened with a workers revolution. The very next day President von Hindenburg stripped the German people of core freedoms protected under the Weimar Constitution and thereby opened the legal door for the Nazi reign of terror. The empowered Nazis, who were the actual arsonists, successfully laid blame on anti-fascists, particularly Communists, and began a bloody campaign of persecution and extermination of all opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich. Within weeks some 10,000 German anti-fascists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Yet anti-fascist resistance continued both inside the Third Reich and in exile. Among the most effective of the early anti-fascist organizations was the Paris-based “International Struggle Against War and Fascism” and its widely distributed publication “ANTIFAschisticheFRONT”, which demanded the downfall of the brown-shirt arsonists in its September 1933 edition. That did not happen, and internal Nazi terror systematically degenerated into total war by 1939 when a series of false flag operations along the German-Polish border were used to justify the invasion of Poland. Continue reading →

On June 1, President Trump threatened to deploy active-duty U.S. military forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in cities across America. Trump and state governors eventually deployed at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the country. In the nation’s capital, Trump deployed nine Blackhawk assault helicopters, thousands of National Guard troops from six states and at least 1,600 Military Police and active-duty combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, with written orders to pack bayonets. Continue reading →