The majority also said they believe they won't be better off five years from now.
A global survey out Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos shows that over half of respondents believe capitalism in its current form does “more harm than good.” Continue reading →
Or… everyone pays the Piper
In emulating the American economic raison d’etre, China has attempted to develop its unique capitalist model while ignoring that it too will soon suffer the same fate for the same reason: Unsustainable debt. When examining the recent realities of Chinese banking and finance over the past year it seems the steam that president Xi Jinping touts as powering the engine of his purported economic miracle of a master-planned economy is only a mirage, now almost completely evaporated before his eyes. Continue reading →
‘Across the political spectrum, there is near consensus among these economists that a single-payer system would save money.’
A comprehensive new study that reviewed nearly three decades of existing analyses shows implementation of a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All could dramatically reduce costs in the United States, with savings likely experienced in the first year and definitely over the longer term. Continue reading →
Throughout his military command of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force, the late Major General Qassem Soleimani ensured that Iran had as its disposal an intricate network of military proxy forces, sympathetic Shi’a Islamic faithful, and armed wings of foreign political and religious allies prepared to respond to an American and/or Israeli military attack. With the Donald Trump administration’s assassination of Soleimani and Iraqi Shi’a militia leaders, all of whom were popular in Iran and Iraq for helping to defeat the Saudi/Israeli-supported Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian retaliatory network established by Soleimani stands at a hair-trigger response to the U.S. premeditated murders. The network of Iranian proxies and allies crafted under Soleimani’s guidance—mostly non-state actors but with a few state players—will be Soleimani’s everlasting legacy in future history books on the Middle East and strategic warfare. Continue reading →
From 2017-2018, the agency approved 69 new pesticide products containing an ingredient the EPA recognizes as a “known” or “likely” carcinogen. Continue reading →
‘Industry wants you to think universal healthcare is too expensive. In reality, it's our current system that's a wasteful, unsustainable disaster.’
Insurers and healthcare providers in the United States spent a staggering $812 billion on paperwork and other administrative burdens in 2017 alone, bureaucratic costs that could be dramatically reduced by switching to a single-payer system like Medicare for All. Continue reading →
A shadowy tech firm with deep ties to Israeli intelligence and newly inked contracts to protect Pentagon computers is partnering with Lockheed Martin to gain unprecedented access to the heart of America’s democracy.
Election Day 2020: 32 Americans dead, over 200 injured, martial law declared and the election itself is canceled. While this horrific scenario seems more like the plot of a Hollywood film, such was the end result of a recent simulation examining the preparedness of U.S. officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Secret Service against “bad actors” seeking to undermine the upcoming presidential election. Continue reading →
The reported plan targets the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which has been called the Magna Carta of environmental legislation, and could hasten approval of pipelines like the Keystone XL.
The Trump administration was again accused of moving to attack the environment and wildlife in response to reports that the White House is moving to gut a five decade-old law referred to as the Magna Carta of environmental legislation. Continue reading →
By killing top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, American and Israeli leaders demonstrated the idiom ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’ Continue reading →
It was less than five years ago that U.S. troops in Iraq were coordinating with Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and members of his elite Al Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacks on the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq. The Al Quds Force is the foreign expeditionary arm of the IRGC. Continue reading →
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, joined grassroots progressives Wednesday night in demanding that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hold a “full and fair trial” following the House’s historic vote to impeach President Donald Trump. Continue reading →
HAVANA, Cuba, December 17, 2019—Gloria Minor had been preparing her AirBnB in Havana for years, investing every penny her sister sent her from Miami in repairing and refurbishing her apartment. With President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro re-establishing relations five years ago, Minor was sure the expected flood of U.S. visitors would make her business flourish. It did—until Donald Trump came along. Now her business is down 50 percent. “I feel like the bride who prepared everything for the wedding, but the groom ran away and stiffed me,” she said. Our CODEPINK 50-person delegation to Cuba, staying in private homes, is hearing similar stories over and over again. Continue reading →
‘Donald Trump and his advisers know that this will kill people, and they do not care. Every current and future Social Security beneficiary must band together to defeat this horrific proposal, or else all of our earned benefits will be next.’
Activists are working to raise public awareness and outrage over a little-noticed Trump administration proposal that could strip life-saving disability benefits from hundreds of thousands of people by further complicating the way the Social Security Administration determines who is eligible for payments. Continue reading →
‘The jury—Senate Republicans—are going to coordinate with the defendant—Donald Trump—on how exactly the kangaroo court is going to be run.’
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News Thursday night that while he has “no choice” but to hold a trial if the House votes to impeach President Donald Trump, that does not mean the process will be in any way impartial. Continue reading →
‘When it came to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Trump felt the nation's finances were firm enough to give up more than $1,500,000,000,000. When it's time to spend a fraction of that to help poor people eat, that's when the well has supposedly run dry.’
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it has finalized a plan to tighten punitive work requirements for food stamp recipients, a move that would strip nutrition assistance from an estimated 750,000 low-income people by mid-2020. Continue reading →
‘There is nothing he hates more than important people laughing at him.’
Hours after video surfaced of world leaders appearing to mock him at a cocktail function the night before, President Donald Trump on Wednesday cut short his visit to the 2019 NATO Summit in London with a parting shot at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, one of the people caught on tape ridiculing the U.S. leader. Continue reading →
‘The program's become less progressive,’ said Jim Roosevelt, a former Social Security Administration official and grandson of FDR.
The benefits of Social Security, a program designed to help vulnerable and low-income people, have since the 1980s become increasingly skewed toward the wealthy due to demographic shifts and soaring inequality, according to a new report. Continue reading →
As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Iraqis were mourning 40 protesters killed by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the beginning of October. Human rights groups have described the crisis in Iraq as a “bloodbath,” Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will resign, and Sweden has opened an investigation against Iraqi Defense Minister Najah Al-Shammari, who is a Swedish citizen, for crimes against humanity. Continue reading →
‘I see decisions made every day that cost the American public billions of dollars a year for bogus reasons’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday asked voters to question why U.S. politicians and pundits only consider the cost of government programs when those programs help the public and least fortunate—and ignore price tags on policies that benefit the most wealthy and powerful. Continue reading →
The recent coup d’état in Bolivia that overthrew President Evo Morales was not merely a standard right-wing putsch aided and abetted by the US Central Intelligence Agency but also placed into power politicians affiliated with a rising fundamentalist Protestant movement in Latin America that can be termed “Christo-fascist.” Many of the far-right and out-of-the-mainstream Protestant sects that have gained power in Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, and, now, Bolivia have decried traditional Roman Catholicism in Latin America as heretical to their religious ideology and even pro-Communist. As for mainstream Protestant religions, the fundamentalist sects view them as hopelessly liberal, as well as heretical. Continue reading →
In cahoots with the Trump regime, Britain is killing Assange slowly for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism the way it’s supposed to be. Continue reading →
I am writing from Bolivia just days after witnessing the November 19 military massacre at the Senkata gas plant in the indigenous city of El Alto, and the tear-gassing of a peaceful funeral procession on November 21 to commemorate the dead. These are examples, unfortunately, of the modus operandi of the de facto government that seized control in a coup that forced Evo Morales out of power. Continue reading →
The nuclear industry’s violent assault on democracy in Ohio has taken a surreal leap. It could seriously impact whether Donald Trump will carry this swing state—and the nation—in 2020. Continue reading →
And not just on digital platforms but on your regular local station.
Okay, let’s be clear. The ad we took in this past Friday’s edition of The New York Times and an accompanying essay asked that PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, do the right thing for the American people, the people PBS was created to serve. Continue reading →
Why we took out that ad in The New York Times
The House of Representatives has announced that public hearings in the impeachment inquiry will begin on Wednesday, November 13. We believe that for the sake of the nation, public television should not only broadcast them live as they happen but repeat them in primetime so that Americans who work during the day have a chance to watch and judge for themselves Donald Trump’s guilt or innocence. Continue reading →
The hideous treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues and many observers are citing his case as being symptomatic of developing “police state” tendencies in both the United States and in Europe, where rule of law is being subordinated to political expediency. Continue reading →
A year ago, the corporatists and anti-socialist militarists in the Donald Trump administration appeared ecstatic over the electoral successes of neo-fascism in Latin America. Jair Bolsonaro, a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler and who is nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics,” sat in the presidential palace in Brazil; billionaire right-winger Sebastian Pinera had, once again, become president of Chile; and Lenin Moreno, the one-time leftist and progressive ally of former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, had invited the US military back into his country and made common cause with the Lima Group, an anti-Nicolas Maduro bloc subservient to Washington. Continue reading →
The infamous gestapo-style assault on an Ohio anti-nuclear referendum is now headed to the Ohio Supreme Court. Continue reading →
Eric Emerson Schmidt is the former chief executive officer of Google (2001-2011) and of Google’s parent, Alphabet (2001-2017). He oversaw the growth of Google from $20 million and no earnings in 2001 to a market-value of $202 billion in 2011, then the fifth-largest among Corporations based in the U.S. Google/Alphabet is now among the five Corporations grouped as the biggest of ‘Big Tech’ and known by the awkward acronym of ‘FAAMG’—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google. Sometimes Netflix is added or substituted among this quintet to form the sightly FAANG. Each of the five has a Stock Market value near $1 trillion. Together these five ‘Big Tech’ Corporations’ value in our speculative U.S. economy, $4.36 trillion, is very close to the United States’ 2019 Federal Budget of $4.41 trillion. The five of FAAMG’s Stock Market value far exceeds the U.S. Government’s anticipated revenue of $3.422 trillion for 2019, a Deficit of $985 billion. Continue reading →
Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel. Continue reading →
‘Just one more example of why employer-based healthcare is not stable and not just. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, gets to decide on a whim whether Washington Post employees get to see a doctor or not.’
The Washington Post, owned by world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, is reportedly moving most of its staff onto what one Post journalist described as “high-deductible health insurance plans that shift significant costs and risks onto employees,” a decision Medicare for All proponents highlighted as a prime example of the instability and injustice of the employer-sponsored healthcare system that is frequently praised by centrist Democratic presidential candidates. Continue reading →
Establishment media are in cahoots with US/UK ruling regimes against Julian Assange for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism abhorred in the West—totalitarian rule where these societies are heading. Continue reading →
