When Democrats and Republicans joined together to expose government wrongdoing

As it becomes increasingly clear that Republican members of the House and Senate actively supported Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6th, it seems that it was in an alternate universe that Democrats and Republican senators came together in 1975 to hammer then-Central Intelligence Agency director William Colby on his agency’s assassination program. Compare that to the present ongoing cover-up by Republicans in Congress to the coup plot and the first non-peaceful transfer of presidential power, outside of assassination, in the nation’s history. Continue reading

Treat “early and often” and other drugmaker ruses

I have often reported on the drugmaker ruse of “disease mongering” or “selling sickness”—floating symptoms of scary diseases that you may have right now with convenient online, “symptom quizzes” for you to self-diagnose and verify. Long gone are the days when the medical establishment assured you that you were well (“take two aspirins and call me in the morning”) thanks to direct-to-consumer advertising. Continue reading

Republicans prepare transphobic offensive for 2022 elections

A new record was set in 2021 for the filing of anti-transgender legislation, with more than 110 bills put forward by right-wing lawmakers in at least 37 states. From Hawaii to Alaska, Texas to Maine, Republicans went on a full-court press to target trans people—especially trans female student athletes. Continue reading

The Democrats in D.C. promised consequential racial justice reform—where is it?

The message to Black Americans expecting more progress has largely been to wait—for a better political opportunity, for the racial wealth gap to widen, for another Black American to die at the hands of the police.

The lesson of the 2020 U.S. election cycle was clear: Do not underestimate the influence of Black voters. At a time when the electoral process was characterized by voter suppression, Black voters in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin gave this country renewed hope by securing the presidency for President Joe Biden. Thanks to the Black voters who pushed Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff over the electoral edge in Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. With Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches, the promise of much-needed progressive change with respect to racial justice seemed to be on the brink of becoming reality. Continue reading

Monetizing nature is Wall Street’s latest scheme

Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30”—30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030—a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.

A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class.” Continue reading

The U.S. moral superiority complex is accelerating its decline

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Someone should tell the Biden team.

Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and Deep State insider, remarked, “The reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden national security team that has rarely known personal failure (…) These are America’s best and brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.” Continue reading

Democratic in-fighting gives way to electoral victories of far-right seditionist party

Month after month of Democratic Party in-fighting in Congress, caused overwhelmingly by the Trotskyist bloc of Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent Socialist-VT) and House Progressive Caucus Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) on one side and the pro-corporate faction led by Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on the other side cost the Democrats dearly in elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The failure of the Democrats to pass legislation to give the U.S. economy a post-pandemic kickstart led directly to victories by pro-sedition right-wing Republicans Glenn Youngkin—a former Carlyle Group executive—for the governorship of Virginia and a razor-thin loss for “Stop the Steal” activist Jack Ciattarelli for governor of New Jersey. Continue reading

Do any Republicans still support democracy?

Republicans should heed Churchill's warning about appeasing authoritarians: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, it will eat him last.”

Investigative accounts of the Trump administration, like the recent Washington Post feature on the January 6 insurrection, routinely write about three kinds of conservatives. Continue reading

Space colonization and the myth of separateness: Notes from The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

I’m old enough to remember people defending the incarceration of Nelson Mandela with “He’s a criminal, he cheated on his wife, people died because of him!” Now they smear Assange but history will vindicate his defenders. The only question is how long, and will it kill him first? Continue reading

Predators with badges: The sex traffickers on America’s police forces

We are a nation on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Continue reading

Abortion rights ‘in peril’ as Ohio GOP proposes total ban modeled on Texas law

Reproductive rights advocates on Thursday doubled down on their urgent demand that federal lawmakers pass legislation to protect the right to abortion after Ohio Republicans introduced a total ban on the procedure—part of a proposal modeled on Senate Bill 8 in Texas. Continue reading

COP 26: Can a singing, dancing rebellion save the world?

COP Twenty-six! That is how many times the UN has assembled world leaders to try to tackle the climate crisis. But the United States is producing more oil and natural gas than ever; the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere and global temperatures are both still rising; and we are already experiencing the extreme weather and climate chaos that scientists have warned us about for forty years, and which will only get worse and worse without serious climate action. Continue reading

Rediscovering the power of unions

Better wages and health care may always face headwinds in Washington, but unions are striking to win them directly.

It was called “Striketober.” While politicians in Washington bickered over infrastructure, jobs, and the social safety net, unionized workers across the heartland went on strike to get their fair share directly. Continue reading

As the planet wants to go green, France has a nuclear habit it just cannot kick

On July 28, French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Tahiti and said that France owed a “debt” to French Polynesia. The debt was related to approximately 200 nuclear tests France conducted in the 118 islands and atolls that comprise this part of the central South Pacific, which France has controlled since 1842. These tests were conducted between 1966 and 1996. Macron did not apologize for the environmental and human damage caused by these tests. He remained stoic, acknowledging that the tests were not “clean.” “I think it’s true that we wouldn’t have done these same tests in the Creuse or in Brittany,” he said, referring to parts of territorial France. “We did it here because it was farther away, because it was lost in the middle of the Pacific.” Continue reading

Opponents of critical analysis of history want students taught Qanon anti-history

Republicans have placed the critical and factual teaching of history on the ballot of the Virginia gubernatorial race between Republican Glenn Youngkin, a Trump-supporter and former CEO of the sinister Carlyle Group, and Democratic former Governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has vowed to eliminate the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) in Virginia schools. However, Virginia does not and never has taught the theory, which is found only in the graduate curriculum of select universities and colleges around the country. Emulating Senator Joe McCarthy, Youngkin has transformed the non-issue of CRT in Virginia schools into a rallying cry for Donald Trump’s base of ranting and raving whites across the commonwealth. Continue reading

Ecuador’s neoliberal government announces state emergency to impose austerity

On October 18, 2021, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency for 60 days. This declaration led to the constitutional rights of Ecuadorian nationals being suspended and heavily armed troops flooding the streets in Ecuador. The immediate reason for the declaration was the murder of an 11-year-old boy named Sebastián Obando, who was killed in a crossfire between “an armed robber and a police officer” on October 17 at a cafeteria and ice cream parlor in the Centenario neighborhood in Guayaquil. Continue reading

Elections and the illusion of Black political power

Black politicians may be openly conservative or pretend leftists but their constituents rarely get what they need. Politics absent a mass movement is a recipe for inaction or even outright betrayal.

Election day is treated with great fanfare in this country. Citizens are propagandized into voting for the sake of voting and are shamed if they don’t. Black people who question the value of the process are under particular pressure. “People died so that you could vote,” and other exhortations cheapen the memory of the liberation movement which sought to guarantee human rights for Black people. While casting a ballot is seen as a quasi-religious duty, the development of mass movements that are the foundation of all important political change is actively discouraged. The result are electoral victories for politicians that often spell defeat for the voters who are propagandized to put them in office. Continue reading

The West’s China complex: Beijing as the enemy and the savior

“Could China’s economy collapse?” was the title of an October 15 article published by QUARTZ magazine. The article makes an ominous case of a Chinese economic crash and its impact on China’s and global economies. Continue reading

Why do Supreme Court justices keep saying they’re not hacks?

Because there’s good reason to believe they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.” Continue reading

Conservative SCOTUS justices dance around but avoid key abortion rights issue

WASHINGTON—Much is being made of several conservative justices appointed by Trump expressing concerns Monday about how the outrageous Texas abortion law is written to avoid federal judicial review. Continue reading

Are Trump & his cronies guilty of mass murder?

All across America this past year-and-a-half 700,000 people have died an agonizing, terrifying, drowning-in-their-own-fluids death, their relatives helpless, saying goodbye using Zoom or FaceTime. Families broken and shattered; husbands, wives, children and grandchildren left bereft; doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants dying along with them or holding their hands as they draw their final, tortured breath. Many of those deaths were absolutely unnecessary. Continue reading

Don’t call “slaughter-free” meat, “fake meat”

What PR genius came up with the catchy, dismissive moniker “fake meat”? The term, along with the euphemistic “protein plants” for slaughterhouses, shows just how threatened meat producers have become by the legions now embracing plant-based meat….and the prospect of cultured meat coming up the rear. Continue reading

Frogs slow-boiling in their pans

The rules-based liberal order was always, in part, an illusion—albeit one that gripped much of the world, for a period of time.

George Kennan’s famous 1946 ‘long telegram’ from Moscow was primarily a piercing analysis of the inherent structural contradictions within the Soviet model, leading to its analytical conclusion that the USSR would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own flaws. That was written just over seventy years ago. Continue reading

What happened to the party of limited government?

I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party stood for limited government—when Ronald Reagan thundered “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Continue reading

How the Texas abortion law’s faulty legal text could self-destruct

The ghastliness of the new Texas abortion law is difficult to express in words. It prevents women from aborting their pregnancies after six weeks and creates legal avenues for the punishment of those who assist a woman in her efforts to obtain an abortion. Texas has opened a multidimensional Pandora’s box that threatens marginalized communities across the country. Continue reading

Justice for Assange is justice for all

Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime.

When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.” Continue reading

Still no accountability from Israel over the 1956 massacre of Kafr Qasem

With Kafr Qasem, as well as with other massacres, Israel needs to set the record straight—it is a perpetrator, with intent, and with an entire political structure that has supported its ethnic cleansing for decades.

On the 65th anniversary of Israel’s brutal massacre on the village of Kafr Qasem, where 48 Palestinians were gunned down by border police, the colonial entity has still failed to formally acknowledge its responsibility for the killings. A bill presented at the Knesset by Arab Israeli MKs was once again voted down. The bill would have required educational instruction in Israeli schools about the massacre, as well as the publication of any classified documents. Continue reading

Climate change and the limits of economic growth

If economic growth ushered in this era of climate change, how can economic growth also be part of the solution?

Since the nineteenth century, human society has experienced extraordinary but uneven economic growth thanks to the energy unleashed from fossil fuels. That growth, and the greenhouse gasses released from fossil-fuel use, has also created the current climate crisis. The conventional solution put forward to this crisis, a putative compromise between economic and environmental imperatives, has been to maintain economic growth but on the basis of sustainable energy sources. Continue reading

American tax policy in the age of trillionaires

Have we just about decided that the further accumulation of billionaire fortunes makes for good public policy?

Barely a year ago, my colleagues Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo noted the passing of “a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power.” On August 13, 2020, just twelve obscenely wealthy Americans held a combined $1.015 trillion. They called those twelve the “Oligarchic Dozen.” Continue reading

Republican book banning will lead to book burning

“It’s fine work. Monday bum Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes, then bum the ashes. That’s our official slogan.” These are the words of Montag the fireman in the novel “Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision for a world where books are illegal. In that world, firemen don’t put out fires but start them, particularly in houses in which books are found. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper catches fire. Continue reading

The most important battle for press freedom in our time

If he is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Scheerpost)—For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years. Continue reading

The U.S. has an unhealthy obsession with Cuba

The piggy bank was rattled again. In September 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave $6,669,000 in grants for projects aimed at “regime change” in Cuba, a euphemism to avoid saying “direct intervention by a foreign power.” The United States’ current Democratic administration has especially favored the International Republican Institute (IRI) with a bipartisan generosity that Donald Trump never had. Other groups in Miami, Washington and Madrid that have also received generous amounts have been among those calling for an invasion of the island. These groups paint an apocalyptic panorama in Havana to secure greater funding next year. Continue reading