There are roughly 9 million pigs in North Carolina—the same number as people. There are also 819 million chickens and 33.5m turkeys on a multitude of poultry farms and even fish farms. Continue reading
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Trump comes up empty at UN on Iran sanctions
Donald Trump’s attempt to persuade members of the United Nations to comply with his “secondary sanctions” against Iran, scheduled for enactment by the United States on November 4, came up empty-handed. To varying degrees, member states, including the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, rejected Trump’s attempt to apply extra-territorial jurisdiction over other nations’ trade and financial ties with Iran. Continue reading
When Africans cheered John Bolton: Criminals on the ICC
When US National Security Advisor John “The Walrus” Bolton threatened the International Criminal Court with US Sanctions many of us here in Africa cheered, long having given up hope that the ICC would ever be held to even the slightest account, least of all for its crimes against our continent. Continue reading
Empire of lies: Are ‘we the people’ useful idiots in the digital age?
“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?” Continue reading
Bolton and Pompeo threaten Iran
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are hardcore neocon extremists. A ruthlessly dangerous duo, they’re hostile to world peace, democratic values, rule of law principles, and independent nations Washington doesn’t control. Continue reading
Apply Logan Act against South Florida, not John Kerry
Donald Trump’s and his far right-wing flank of war-mongering zealots in the US Congress are calling for former Secretary of State John Kerry to be criminally investigated for violating the arcane Logan Act of 1799. Enacted during a time when President John Adams—who rolled back much of the foreign policy independence of the United States in favor of Great Britain, its former colonizer—wanted to deal out harsh punishment to those like then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Dr. George Logan, a Philadelphia Quaker, who were negotiating peace with the post-French Revolution Directory in Paris. Adams dearly wanted to ally the United States with Britain in a war with France. In pursuit of criminal sanctions against pro-French politicians like Jefferson, Logan, and others, Adams and his pro-British clique, which included former President George Washington, enacted the Logan Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Continue reading
The real reasons behind Washington’s war on UNRWA
The US government’s decision to slash funds provided to the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, is part of a new American-Israeli strategy aimed at redefining the rules of the game altogether. Continue reading
Cowboys for climate action
A new group is naming and shaming the people bankrolling climate change denial.
Shame is that queasy feeling you get when you realize you’ve done something improper, ridiculous, or just flat-out contemptible. But it’s socially invaluable, for feeling ashamed is a built-in jerk alarm, keeping most of us from doing the same embarrassing thing again. Continue reading
The unbelievable cruelty of the GOP’s Kavanaugh charade
When I hear people shouting on TV that an assault in one's teens doesn't matter, it feels like they're shouting at me, too.
This past week, my private reality and the public reality playing out on the television have diverged. It’s hard to believe that I live in the same world as Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate judiciary chair trying to Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court. Continue reading
Bret Stephens’ neocon vision
The neoconservative vision of the world is a place where the United States can do what it wants because it is both better morally speaking and also more capable of enforcing desirable standards of behavior. Such a viewpoint just might perhaps be understandable if Washington were actually willing to operate in a disinterested leadership capacity to promote standards that are generally accepted by the international community, somewhat similar to what the United Nations is supposed to do, but it becomes repugnant when there is no sense that the US is actually willing to judge itself by the values that it claims to be upholding. This is why global opinion believes that Washington, not Russia or China, is the greatest threat to world peace and also why the United States ranks near the bottom in opinion polls assessing which countries are viewed favorably. Continue reading
Freedom Rider: World war dangers in Syria
Israel has bombed Syria at will, apparently with Russian permission, but that may change after the downing of a Russian plane. Continue reading
Trump’s UN General Assembly dissembling and rage
Virtually all politicians lie. The Clintons, Bush/Cheney, and Obama were serial liars. Continue reading
CIA, State Dept. hemorrhaging expertise
WMR has learned from knowledgeable intelligence sources that the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of State are losing valuable expertise as a result of a Trump administration-led purge of those with different views on the Middle East, Iran, North Korea, Latin America, and overall geopolitical issues. Continue reading
Beyond Bolton: The path to a progressive foreign policy
Across the arc of chaos and instability caused by U.S. wars, interventions and sanctions around the world, the past several weeks have seen new flare-ups of deadly violence and worsening humanitarian crises. Continue reading
Social pressure, trauma, or employers result in sexual harassment/assault going unreported
There are a variety of factors why 15-year old Christina Blasey did not report the alleged sexual assault by a 17-year old Brett Kavanaugh at a party in 1982. The freewheeling 1980s were not kind to those who were sexually harassed or assaulted. The decade was marked in the Washington, DC area by booze, drugs, and inappropriate behavior in the workplace. This was the environment, particularly insidious among the affluent teens of Georgetown Prep and University crowd, that Blasey found herself. Continue reading
Trump regime’s rage for regime change in Venezuela
Beginning with the Clinton co-presidency, US regimes opposed Venezuela’s Bolivarian social democracy, wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing it. Continue reading
Millions of unwitting Americans paying $1 billion more for dirty coal energy each year when cleaner, cheaper sources available
Millions of U.S. energy consumers are unwittingly propping up a coal industry by paying more than $1 billion annually over recent years for dirty energy that renewable sources could have provided at much cheaper prices. Continue reading
Another tax scam for the rich
Hard to believe, but the Trump administration is proposing yet another massive tax windfall for the rich. Continue reading
Trump’s extortion racket on visas, US assets, and tariffs
It did not take long for Donald Trump to transform the US government into a mob operation, where administration officials use the threat of US travel bans, asset freezes and forfeitures, and punishing trade tariffs to bring other nations and their leaders to heel. Continue reading
How the US piles pressure on Palestinians
Funding cuts to the institutions in Palestine are followed by legislation that brands criticism of Israel anti-Semitic
Palestine is occupied and I am beginning to wonder whether Washington is as well. Not only has President Donald Trump gifted occupied Jerusalem to the Jewish state and defunded UNRWA, he has axed $25 million (Dh91.82 million) for Palestinian hospitals, closed the PLO’s mission and revoked visas for the Palestinian envoy and his family. His latest blow was to cut $10 million for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence programmes. Continue reading
Trump regime wants criticizing Israel criminalized
Zionist zealot Kenneth Marcus heads the Trump regime’s Education Department Office of Civil Rights (OCR). Continue reading
The new Iraqi WMD: Russian interference in US elections
The Washington Post has a regular “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, who checks the accuracy of statements made by politicians and other public figures. On September 3, he announced that President Trump’s first 592 days in office had produced 4,713 false or misleading claims; that’s about 8 per day. Continue reading
Future generations will mourn what the EPA did on 9/11
The White House wants to clear the way for frackers to release more methane, which poisons communities and torches the climate.
September 11 is already an annual day of mourning. But while the nation grieved over victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency announced a plan future generations may well grieve as a tragedy in its own right. Continue reading
Kavanaugh and Georgetown Prep: Pedophilia acceptance
Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s dubious nominee for the Supreme Court, not only faces questions about his views on a woman’s right to choose her own health decisions and his own questionable past treatment of women, but his elite high school. Georgetown Preparatory High School in North Bethesda, Maryland has been a hotbed for Roman Catholic sex abuse of minors. As a member of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh would become the court’s fifth Catholic judge. His decisions on cases involving the cover-up of child sex abuse by religious organizations and politically powerful individuals could dictate for decades to come how the nation deals with the issue of sex abuse of minors. Continue reading
The grumpy old men of the Senate: Time for this movie to fade to black
Call me a sentimental fool (pipe down out there) but I keep waiting for the big Frank Capra moment that, rationally, I know may never come—you know, like the climax of Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when the corrupt, patrician senator played by Claude Rains, finally undone by the truth told by Senator Jefferson Smith (earnestly played by Jimmy Stewart), tries to shoot himself. Continue reading
Lest we forget one of Washington’s greatest crimes
The world will long remember the present immigrant crisis in Europe, which has negatively affected countless people there, and almost all countries. History will certainly record it as a major tragedy. Could it have been averted? Or kept within much more reasonable humane bounds? Continue reading
Hazardous to health GMO foods and pesticides
The danger is indisputable. Independent scientific studies exposed the hazards long ago—suppressed by Washington and US media, supporting corporate profits over human health. Continue reading
Amazon is making workers tweet about how great it is to work there
They even get bathroom breaks, they say. Doesn't sound suspicious at all!
In Corporate World, when trouble pops up and things get sticky, CEOs don’t wring their hands and try to dodge the issue. Continue reading
Suspending the Constitution: In America today, the government does whatever it wants
We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document. Continue reading
Advocacy groups vow to ‘Protect the Protest’ as government and corporations challenge First Amendment rights
With wealthy corporations, state legislatures, and the federal government finding new ways to challenge Americans’ right to protest, several nonprofit groups have banded together to fight back on behalf of those facing legal jeopardy for peacefully blocking pipelines or using civil disobedience to resist other fossil projects and destructive policies. Continue reading
Political fragmentation on the homefront
The United States is politically fragmenting. It would seem that the various cultural and ideological stresses impacting the nation are destabilizing the country’s two traditional political parties. Continue reading
Kavanaugh, Ford, and power
Posted on October 1, 2018 by Robert Reich
Make no mistake: The drama that took place in hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, was about power: On one side, the power of men who harass or abuse women and get away with it, the power of privileged white men to entrench their power even more on the Supreme Court, the power of men to take away a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. Continue reading →