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
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 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
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
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
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
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
Historically a cipher and pass-through for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been transformed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the urging of Donald Trump, into an aggressive business intelligence operation designed to financially benefit Trump’s top donors in private industry. USAID is a component of the U.S. State Department and is officially tasked with managing U.S. foreign assistance programs, mostly in developing countries. Continue reading
Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday warned of potentially devastating consequences for journalism around the world after a British judge denied Assange’s request to delay his U.S. extradition hearing in February. Continue reading
Current events concerning Turkey and the Kurds in Syria remind me of a conversation I had with a US Air Force colonel almost 17 years ago in a courtroom in Des Moines. To refresh my memory, I dug deep into my closet and dusted off the transcript of the case, “STATE OF IOWA, plaintiff vs. CHRISTINE GAUNT et al.,” in which I was a defendant, heard in February, 2003, the month before the US invasion of Iraq. The following quotes from that dialogue are verbatim per the transcript. Continue reading
One of the tropes Israel and its international phalanx of lobbyists has used since the state’s inception in 1948 is that “Poor Little Israel” requires Western money and diplomatic support because the small country is surrounded by hostile Arab countries. Neither of these contentions have ever been true. Continue reading
Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators during a closed-door session Friday that President Donald Trump pressured the State Department to oust her after a “concerted campaign” of attacks led by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Continue reading
The Trump administration is reportedly considering gutting regulations designed to prevent corporations from shifting profits overseas to avoid U.S. taxes, a move Democratic lawmakers and progressives condemned as yet another effort by the White House to enrich large companies at the expense of workers. Continue reading
The US is a declining empire, the more aggressive and widespread its malign activities, the sooner its fall from grace will arrive. Continue reading
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Monday was told in no uncertain terms that her refusal to abide by a 2018 order stopping her department from collecting on student loans made to predatory for-profit Corinthian College had the potential to land her in jail, though Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim made clear that was, for now, an unlikely outcome. Continue reading
By Donald Trump’s own admission and through documents provided by an Intelligence Community whistleblower and former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Paul Volker it is known that the Trump administration pressured at least four countries to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The countries identified as being involved in the Trump operation thus far are Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The attack on the Democratic Party’s leading presidential candidate in 2020 is far worse than that carried out by Richard Nixon henchmen G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Donald Segretti, and Charles Colson in the Watergate scandal and events surrounding it. Continue reading
Workers are stuck “paying the ultimate price for executives’ poorly-timed deals,” said Our Revolution on Monday after General Electric announced it was freezing the pensions of roughly 20,000 employees with salaried benefits. Continue reading
Furious family farmers flamed Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue Wednesday after comments he made on the future of the dairy business that cast doubt on the future of small farms during a stop in Wisconsin Tuesday. Continue reading
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed into law historic legislation that would allow the state’s cities and counties to establish public banks as an alternative to private financial institutions, a move advocates hailed as a “stunning rebuke to the predatory Wall Street megabanks that crashed the global economy in 2007-08.” Continue reading
Digital rights advocates said the public must “be ready to fight like hell” to save the open internet from telecom attacks after a federal appeals court on Tuesday largely upheld the FCC’s 2017 repeal of net neutrality. Continue reading
With the word “whistleblower” spinning through news cycle after news cycle these last few days, every headline about Trump, Giuliani and Ukraine is a powerful reminder that the whistleblower is a proud tradition in the United States, one that merits our support and protection. Continue reading
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