Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.” Continue reading
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. Continue reading
Senator Marco Rubio said he wouldn’t attend the State of the Union address because it required a Covid test and he was too busy to swab his nose. Rubio’s bizarre behavior is right in line with the GOP’s embrace of poverty, disease, and death. Continue reading
States that mailed a ballot to every registered voter in 2020’s presidential election saw voter turnout increase by an average of 5.6 percent, and turnout was even higher among infrequent voters, according to the first peer-reviewed academic study of 2020 mail voting. Continue reading
Can Israel be pressured? Or is Tel Aviv the only exception to the global political order in which every country, big or small, is subjected to pressures and subsequent change in attitude and behavior? Continue reading
Anyone who speaks out against imperialism, capitalism, or racism with concrete examples of the terrible harm they do, can expect to be charged with the dreaded term “whataboutism.” Like clockwork, the act of revealing American crimes will result in an accusation that is used to silence dissent. Continue reading
The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24, 2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring of 2014 and has never stopped since. Continue reading
It was inevitable that when brown-skinned Afghan refugees fleeing war were turned away from European borders over the past few years, the callous actions of these governments would come back to haunt them. A whopping 1 million people have fled Ukraine from Russia’s violent invasion in the span of only a week. They are being welcomed—as refugees should be—into neighboring nations, inviting accusations of racist double standards. Continue reading
It has been several years since Dr. Thomas Insel left his post as director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to collaborate on mental health solutions with Google Life Sciences, an arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, now known as Verily. Insel is not the first or last government official to treat himself or herself to the riches of the industry revolving door (Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin surfaced at PhRMA after overseeing Medicare legislation; CDC director Julie Gerberding surfaced at Merck ). But Insel has a disturbing former cronyism record that should not be forgotten. Continue reading
Republican politicos are all over Joe Biden for failing to stop inflation. Perhaps you wonder, though, what these squawkers would do if they were in charge. Continue reading
Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That’s likely because although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways. The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a U.S. intervention. That in itself is a surprise—one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike. Continue reading
A new front is opening in Michigan’s voting wars that raises fundamental questions about how far defenders of fact-based elections and representative government must go to protect voting rights in an era marked by Republicans who deny results and spread lies about elections. Continue reading
While obesity is growing around the world, it is especially evident in younger generations, who used to be thinner than their thick-around-the-middle elders. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, almost 1 in every 3 college-age Americans is now obese—the “freshman 15” has morphed into the “freshman 30.” Continue reading
The U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships are still tarnishing their respective countries with the legacy of oblivion. Earlier last month, Uruguay’s “Relatives of the Disappeared” cautioned that President Luis Lacalle is “whitening the history of Juan Bordaberry’s dictatorship” by holding a meeting with the “Representatives of Political Prisoners” group who are claiming an infringement of liberty in terms of the prison sentences meted out to the dictatorship’s executioners. The meeting took place at the presidential residence. According to reports, Lacalle has not committed himself to upholding their concerns. Continue reading
I figured something out after tossing and turning all night. We on the left often make the mistake of still looking upon Russia as a somewhat socialist enterprise. Of course, it isn’t. The Soviet Union ended in 1991. Russia is an unadulterated neoliberal capitalist gangster’s paradise, modeled during the time of its horrific restructuring under Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) on the United States of America. It should come as no surprise that its autocratic, and possibly unhinged leader, Vladimir Putin, has no more respect for the UN Charter and international law than recent presidents of the United States or prime ministers of England have had. (For example, remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the Iraq invasion.) I, on the other hand, do care about international law and the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and can unequivocally state that if I had been eligible to vote in the General Assembly on March 2, I would have voted with the 141 ambassadors who supported the resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw its armed forces. Continue reading
The tragic and illegal war of aggression launched by Russia (pop. 146 million) against Ukraine (pop. 44 million), its neighbor, on Thursday, February 24, 2022, has raised much emotion and many reactions in the West, and for good reasons. Continue reading
Russian President Vladimir Putin this past weekend turned down numerous requests from foreign leaders that he agree at least to cease fire in his war against Ukraine as the number of Ukrainians fleeing across the border into Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Russia ballooned to 1.5 million of the nation’s population of 44 million. The refugee crisis is the worst in Europe since World War II when many millions were uprooted in the wake of the war and Holocaust instigated by the Nazis. Continue reading
The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression, shaming the rest of the world and the UN Security Council for its failure to protect them. It is an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this war before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, and forces hundreds of thousands more to flee. Continue reading
The possibility of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—or the Iran nuclear deal—being revived, though difficult, seems to have brightened in February 2022. The U.S. may now also believe that the potential loss of Russian natural gas and oil due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war needs to be offset by Iran returning to the global oil market. The nuclear deal could have been accomplished much earlier if not for the Biden administration’s unwillingness to commit to the “way forward” offered by Iran to stay in the deal for the remainder of Biden’s term as president, according to Responsible Statecraft. Former United States President Donald Trump had pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 on the premise that he could get a better deal than the one negotiated by his predecessor Barack Obama. Continue reading
There is a bittersweet battle taking place in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. Workers at the Hershey Company’s second-largest factory, located in the small town of about 12,000, are seeking to unionize. In response, the nation’s largest candy manufacturer is throwing the full force of the standard corporate union-busting playbook at them. The Virginia Hershey manufacturing plant employs about 1,300 people, none of whom are sharing in the bounty of the company’s record profits reaped during a pandemic where Americans ate their weight in candy through numerous lockdowns. Continue reading
Standard media reportage of recent events has become so dogmatic and simplistic, there is no longer even a vague distinction between journalism and propaganda. Dissent and attempts to contextualize such events are treated as seditious inhumanity, ignorance of history, and even foreign agency or espionage as one has experienced. Therefore, in the few short paragraphs ahead, I will attempt to “shed light”, as it were, as an observer and critic of US foreign policy, on how standard narratives and media fare of late have been grotesquely disingenuous.
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By now everyone knows that Ukraine’s flag is blue and yellow. It is impossible to miss as the Empire State Building in New York, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris have all been bathed in those colors. Nearly every city and town across the United States has followed suit and politicians ranging from local legislators to members of congress shout “Stand with Ukraine!” at every opportunity. Continue reading
The U.S. government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry. Continue reading
Mainstream US media continues to celebrate the supposed strength of the US economy. Almost daily, headlines speak of hopeful numbers, sustainable growth, positive trends and constant gains. The reality on the ground, however, tells of something entirely different, which raises the questions: Are Americans being lied to? And for what purpose? Continue reading
“Agency” is the ability to control yourself and your own life. “Loss of agency” is the psychological term for people no longer being able to influence the course of their own life or the world around them. Continue reading
It’s only fair that I spend time with visiting family. Continue reading
The Trump-led Republican Party has used its opposition to teaching the actual racial history of the United States in public schools to capture political power in Virginia and school boards across the nation. Using as a weapon the convenient but erroneous label of “critical race theory,” a niche college post-graduate level course not taught in any public school, the far-right is not stopping at banning outright or altering the teaching of European genocide of Native Americans; the Underground Railroad Emancipation, post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation laws, and the modern civil rights movement; and the era of McCarthyism. The right is also targeting the history of World War II and the almost universally-accepted justification for going to war against Nazi Germany. What the far-right is accomplishing with increased success is historical negationism, denialism, falsification, and revisionism. Legitimate educational institutions find themselves, quite needlessly, on the defensive. That has to change and fast. The right is not entitled to alter the historical record for its own racist, religious, and fascist purposes. Neither does the right possess license to promulgate nonsensical and easily debunked “alternate facts,” as Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway once put it to an astonished public. Continue reading
Big Lies take on a life of their own by ad nauseam repetition. Continue reading
I listened to Putin’s address to the Russian people, indeed, to the entire world, following his meeting with the Security Council. He expressed his sadness that negotiating with the West has taught him complete distrust of Washington, and Putin made it clear that Russia would be prepared for the war that Washington is intent to bring to Russia. Continue reading
After weeks of unsuccessfully attempting to either bully Russia’s Vladimir Putin into submission or bait him into war, US president Joe Biden may finally be looking for a face-saving exit from of the Ukraine “crisis” of his own making. Continue reading
Salmon have shaped the lives and cultures of people in the Pacific Northwest since ancient times. These migratory fish who return each year from the deep sea to the rivers, where they were born to mate, give birth and die—then nourish the forests’ soil after death—are legendary. They are not just a staple food of the area, but are also intrinsic to the art, songs, mythologies and lifestyles of the Pacific Northwest. Many cultures, which are Indigenous to the land that stretches from Alaska through Northern California, call this zone “Salmon Nation” after the fish, knowing that their own survival and the survival of salmon are inseparable. Continue reading
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Putin and Trump have convinced me i was wrong about the 21st century
Posted on March 14, 2022 by Robert Reich
I used to believe several things about the twenty-first century that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 have shown me are false. Continue reading →