“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication,” tweeted Sanofi-Aventis after Roseanne Barr blamed her tweets on the sleeping drug Ambien. While the drug maker may look like the good guy now—and enjoy a boost in Ambien/zolpidem sales––12 years ago it was a different story. Continue reading
Black people are in a constant struggle for survival all over the world. We have many enemies from many different places and some of them may even look like the rest of us. But like any embattled group we must rejoice when any of those forces are taken out. One of the worst, that is to say a black person who acts against the interests of other black people, recently became compromised and that is always good news. Continue reading
The European peoples whose governments were paid to sell out the sovereignty of their nations to the EU are experiencing great difficulties in being permitted to govern themselves. Continue reading
Environmental advocates on Friday responded with outrage to confirmation from the White House that President Donald Trump has ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to plot what’s being called an “unprecedented intervention” by the federal government to bail out financially strapped coal and nuclear power plants that can’t compete with the renewable energy sector. Continue reading
There are days I wake up and I’m not sure what country I live in anymore. Continue reading
Cindy Sheehan is better known as The Peace Mom who gave President Bush hell for his illegal invasion of Iraq, in which Cindy lost her son, Casey. I interviewed her to bring readers up to date in June of 2018. Continue reading
Economic bigotry is at the root of most if not all our problems and while the victims of that bigotry grow in number we are reduced to seeing only certain of them from certain groups often identified because they are indeed subjected to even more bigotry than most. But this amounts to the same old lesser evil politics that pit the majority against one another while a rich minority rules over all. The suppression of a potential majority that could bring about national and help in creating global democracy for the first time in recorded history results in identity group minorities gasping for breath by climbing up and over other groups to achieve their goals commonly mis-identified as dreams, while actually enabling and accomplishing the goals and even dreams of all ruling classes: division of the peasants-workers-citizens potential majority into easily controlled minorities at war among themselves while remaining relatively oblivious to their rulers. Continue reading
American schools have increasingly become shooting galleries in a war that the National Rifle Association (NRA) is winning, with the help of venal politicians and clueless Supreme Court Justices, against American students and teachers. In the U.S., criminals, crazies and angry types alike can buy attack weapons of any kind, at will. As a consequence, when students and teachers go to school in the morning, they and their parents are never certain if they are going to come back home, after school. If you follow the news, you may have gotten the impression that American schools have become a lottery of death. Students and teachers have become the innocent pawns whose lives are being cut short to please the fanaticism and the gun idolatry of the NRA. Continue reading
The nation’s largest union of federal workers filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday over an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that seeks to deny workers the right to job site representation—an established guarantee in existing labor law. Continue reading
Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had every reason to expect that his first official appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be the usual slam-dunk as mostly obedient, respectful Senators aligned with his testimony. Continue reading
Is a side effect of Ambien racism and anti-Semitism? Or does it simply lower someone’s inhibitions so their innate racism and anti-Semitism come out? Disgraced TV star Roseanne Barr says taking Ambien explains her recent tweets which instantly moved ABC to cancel her show. Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article, one I didn’t submit. I’d given it to my son to read. His response was: “You need to see a psychiatrist.” Continue reading
The U.S. military is by far the most-respected of all institutions in America. But the U.S. military of today is actually not only the most corrupt but also the worst of America’s institutions. It’s the worst because it serves the worst and is run by the worst. It’s basically a mercenary operation for U.S. and allied aristocracies, and it routinely destroys the lives of millions of people in many countries, but since there is no accountability, it keeps getting even worse. At the basis of it is something fundamentally wrong: not only is it the world’s imperial military, but it is a largely privatized military. The military intrinsically serves a public function; so, privatizing anything in it is corrosive to that public function. This is the basic problem, with America’s military in the modern era. Continue reading
The worst hate group in the United States is not the Ku Klux Klan or any self-proclaimed alt-right group. The most racist, vicious, and deadly menace to black people in this country is law enforcement. The police, courts and prisons exist primarily to keep as many black people under control as possible. All other claims of usefulness are phony and cover up the racist cruelties inherent to their existence. Continue reading
Those coming of age today will face some of the greatest obstacles ever encountered by young people. Continue reading
I spent last week at a conference in South Korea, during which time Trump went from seeking a meeting with Kim Jong-un to cancelling it, then suggesting it might be back on. Continue reading
I’m back in Philly to wrap things up, return my apartment, give a paid talk and say goodbye to my friends. With Felix Giordano, I’ve hit bars in the Italian Market, Point Breeze, Pennsport, Fishtown and Whitman. Soon, we’ll run over to Billy Boy’s in the Pine Barrens, where the owner/cook makes some of the best comfort food anywhere, and the hardy, friendly people soothe our souls. Mellowing in there, it’s hard to believe you’re only 30 miles from the mayhem of Camden. Even in the Piney, though, things have changed for the worse. “You can’t really smell pig shit anymore,” Felix pointed out. “It’s not like when I was a kid, coming here. There’s less pig farming now.” Continue reading
There are presently warmongering characters (Netanyahu, Erdogan, Trump, etc.) in charge in some countries, and they show no respect for international law, whatsoever. The most dangerous among them is, of course, the U.S. President Donald Trump. Continue reading
Some 360,000 Americans now work in the solar industry, more than in nukes and coal combined. In fact, more Americans are now working in California’s solar industry than are digging coal nationwide. And the U.S. wind business now employs more than 100,000 people. Continue reading
The capitalist iceberg that we know as the Deep State has been operating under the radar and under the waves for many centuries with the privatisation of the polity as its endgame. Continue reading
EPA Administrator Pruitt, you lying son of a bitch. You are telling people that god talks to you? And your pig god tells you to trash our air, water and soil so that greedy plutocrats may become wealthier at the expense of everyone else, as species go extinct because of your heinous corruption? Continue reading
Studies on migration from Uzbekistan were first conducted in 2008 with the assistance of UNDP of Uzbekistan and published in a book, “Labor Migration in the Republic of Uzbekistan, Social, Legal and Gender Aspects.” Continue reading
California needs over $700 billion in infrastructure during the next decade. Where will this money come from? The $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative unveiled by President Trump in February 2018 includes only $200 billion in federal funding, and less than that after factoring in the billions in tax cuts in infrastructure-related projects. The rest is to come from cities, states, private investors and public-private partnerships (PPPs) one. And since city and state coffers are depleted, that chiefly means private investors and PPPs, which have a shady history at best. Continue reading
Early in 1968, Clyde Tolson, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy and bosom buddy, a key player in the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed both the hope and intent of those making sure that there would never be another president by the name Kennedy, when he said about RFK that “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.” Earlier, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his new book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, the influential conservative Westbrook Pegler expressed this hope even more depravingly when he wished “that some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.” Continue reading
Since parliamentary democracy was restored in Germany after World War Two, several right-wing parties have sought to get the required 5% of the popular vote to be represented in parliament. They all failed until 2017. In that election a new right-wing party, Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD), won 13% of the vote, making them the third most powerful party, ahead of the Greens, the Lefts, and the Liberals. They also won many seats in the individual state parliaments and one seat in the European Parliament. Continue reading
When Google Earth was initially released in 2001, I immediately rushed to locate a village that no longer exists on a map, which now delineates a whole different reality. Continue reading
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. Continue reading
How did a person who should be in the criminal dock both in the US and in the International Criminal Court for running a torture prison get appointed the Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency? What is all the Washington talk about defending human rights when a torturer is put in charge of covert operations? Continue reading
Donald Trump’s decision to exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement on Iranian nuclear capability is in keeping with his doctrine of joining Israel at the hip of the United States. Fealty to the state of Israel is a constant in United States foreign policy. Every president who has served since that country was founded has given it carte blanche to do anything it wants but Trump goes further than anyone else. Continue reading
Sergey and Yulia recovered enough from whatever harmed them to be released from hospitalization—clearly not a Novichok military-grade nerve agent as falsely claimed—able to cause death in minutes. Continue reading
On May 9, Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s choice for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified at her Senate confirmation hearing in Washington, DC. Some senators questioned her about her tenure, in 2002, as CIA station chief in Thailand. There, the agency ran one of the “black sites” where suspected al-Qaida extremists were interrogated using procedures that included waterboarding. She was also asked about her role in the destruction of videotapes in 2005 that documented the torture of illegally detained suspects. Her evasive answers to these questions, disconcerting and unsatisfying, are also hauntingly familiar. Continue reading
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Why America’s allies are angry
Posted on June 6, 2018 by Linda S. Heard
America’s closest allies, Canada, Mexico and European states are perplexed and angry. There were plenty of warning signs that Donald Trump sought what he calls fairer trade practices which was one of his campaign pledges. Most thought his threat to slap them with crippling trade tariffs on steel and aluminium imports was a mere negotiating bluff. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, they believed. But he did. Continue reading →