Using Twitter as a weapons platform, apartheid child Elon Musk has become a major non-state actor threatening the national security of the United States. Treating what was once the world’s dominant social media conveyance as a toy, Musk decided to temporarily “disappear” Ukraine from Twitter’s virtual map of the world by eliminating the country’s code of UA used for two-factor authentication. In addition, Ukraine’s international phone code of +380 was also briefly deleted by Twitter as an option for creating or verifying accounts using the Short Message Service or SMS. Continue reading →
Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers (the United States, China, and the EU) for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. U.S. capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. Europe’s role as a U.S. ally and indeed its economic future became correspondingly riskier as a result. China’s economic growth encountered problems but continued to be remarkably positive and often crucially supportive of world economic conditions in ways that were once more closely associated with the role of the United States. China’s deepening alliance with Russia as well as its burgeoning global economic reach frightened many in the United States. Years of increasingly aggressive competition, tariff and trade wars, and bans and subsidies, mostly initiated by the United States, culminated this past year in global economic warfare. Continue reading →
Host of Republican lawmakers pushed for the Jan. 6 coup and are about to become leaders of the government they wanted to overthrow.
It is a well-accepted maxim that elections have consequences. Voters may not have fully realized, however, that by putting Republicans in control of the House, even by the slimmest of margins, they were granting enormous power to people who openly plotted to overthrow the government. Continue reading →
You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good. Continue reading →
The next Nakba Day will be officially commemorated by the United Nations General Assembly on May 15, 2023. The decision by the world’s largest democratic institution is significant, if not a game changer. Continue reading →
April 7, 2020, was the day everything changed in America. And hardly anybody realizes it. Continue reading →
The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you’ve probably never heard of. Continue reading →
Adapted from Project Censored’s “State of the Free Press 2023”
Remember the Cold War Space Race between the former Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s? During the past year, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk went ahead and turned that into a modern-day dick-measuring contest, for lack of a better phrase, to see who could get there first for the longest. Their space outfits, extensively reported on by CNN Science, received more attention than the pollution caused by this narcissistic billionaire power competition, in which one rocket launch produced an estimated 300 tons of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, where it can remain for years. Continue reading →
Europeans have embraced American manacles more readily than any other subjugated people have in history.
Not only has America slain all Europe’s gods but our moral cowardice ensures there can be no room for either our gods or us in Valhalla. We are a sorry, doomed lot. We Europeans have embraced our American manacles more readily than any other subjugated people have in history. The best protest we can manage is that of the German football team who were laughed out of Qatar all the way back to their obese nation. Continue reading →
The problem with most Western media’s political analyses is that they generally tend to be short-sighted and focused mostly on variables that are of direct interest to Western governments. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—The right-wing Republican-named U.S. Supreme Court majority appears to be on the verge of approving a Republican-pushed radical theory to give state legislatures, and only them, complete control of voting and elections—to the dismay of both the court’s three Democratic-named justices and of demonstrators outside the court yesterday. If they end up ruling the way they seemed to be leaning yesterday the entire U.S. election system will be upended, killing the ability of voters, not lawmakers, to choose the president. Continue reading →
If there is one point on which there should be no political parsing, no legal jockeying, and no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law. Continue reading →
The rail industry can thank Congress and the president for helping it secure $321 million in annual profits at the expense of workers.
The United States Senate acted in a show of rare unity recently in voting 80 to 15 to pass a bill forcing rail workers to accept their employers’ contract offer without a strike. There was no such unity to pass an amendment introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have given rail workers seven paid sick leave days. That bill did not pass even though 52 senators voted for it, as it failed the requisite 60-vote threshold. Continue reading →
A new Black "first" came along at the same moment that the Democratic Party showed itself to be a servant of the ruling classes. Hakeem Jeffries is a very willing tool of powerful people. There is no reason to celebrate his ascension to the House Minority Leader position.
The Black Agenda Report team is proud to have coined the phrases “Black misleadership class” and “Black political class.” These words cannot be uttered and written too often because they name and shame the people who work alongside the neoliberal and imperialist order in the United States while also pretending to act on behalf of Black people, whose needs are antithetical to those of the oligarchy. Continue reading →
The EU is beginning to wake up and realise that its relationship with the U.S. has reached farcical levels of master and slave.
Remarkably, the EU is beginning to wake up and realise not only that it is more servile to the U.S. than ever before, but in fact the relationship has reached farcical levels of master and slave since the Ukraine war started. And yet, despite the EU’s chief diplomat recently refusing to be drawn into a conflict scenario with China and MEPs pathetically voting to deem Russia a terrorist state, it was not the EU which came to the conclusion. It was the French president Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading →
Western economic punishments on Russia continue to severely limit its economic prospects. But they also risk hastening the development of sanctions evasion techniques and rival economic mechanisms outside the control of Brussels and Washington.
Immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S., the UK, and the EU placed major sanctions on Russia to constrict its economy and restrain its war effort. Having been updated several times since, these sanctions have compounded the effects of the previous sanctions placed on Russia in 2014 after it annexed Crimea. Continue reading →
The purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people. Continue reading →
As western countries are floating the theory that Russia could escalate its conflict with Ukraine to a nuclear war, many western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s own nuclear weapons capabilities. Luckily, many countries around the world do not subscribe to this endemic western hypocrisy. Continue reading →
Progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.
In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, with a host of men who perch atop pyramids of power—from Elon Musk, to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Hungary’s strongman Victor Orban—pushing women to have children as a means of growing the base of those power pyramids and further elevating the men at the top. Continue reading →
Protesters in some nations are celebrated. Others are ignored. Protest is a human right to be respected but instead can be used as a pretext for nefarious motives such as regime change.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is on the verge of effectively making protest illegal. The Public Order Bill has passed in the House of Commons and is expected to be approved in the House of Lords and become law. The bill will ban any protest that “interferes with national infrastructure” or blocks construction or transportation. It gives police powers to search without “reasonable grounds.” It allows for Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPO) which give police the right to arrest anyone who may have violated these deliberately vague rules and prevents them from attending another protest for up to two years. The ban gives police the right to electronically monitor anyone they think is in violation. These criteria effectively prevent any large scale public protest. Violators of these provisions may be sentenced to up to 51 weeks in jail if found guilty. Continue reading →
There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable. Continue reading →
As Twitter implodes under Musk’s rule, a lawsuit argues Tesla is vastly overpaying the world’s richest man.
A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom apply to overpaid CEOs as well as their workers? A Delaware court will soon decide, a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe, Elon Musk, feeling more than a little bit uneasy. Continue reading →
Western arrogance and anger about the economic prowess of a non-white nation resulted in Xi Jinping's very public dressing down of Justin Trudeau.
The Group of 20, or G20, comprises those nations said to be those with the largest economies in the world. The heads of state who attend the annual summit may have meaningful meetings with one another but the recently convened G20 in Bali, Indonesia was more a source of U.S. inspired drama than anything else. For example, it wasn’t clear if Chinese president Xi Jinping would meet with Joe Biden after the numerous insults involving Taiwan, including sending the Speaker of the House there after China made clear that this was a red line provocation. Of course, being more mature than the Americans, Xi met with Biden, perhaps only to determine if he was up to some new foolish behavior. The summit was fully devoid of any seriousness when the traditional group photo was eliminated because the U.S. and its NATO/EU vassals didn’t want to be seen with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. But an interesting encounter between Xi Jinping and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was both amusing and instructive about China and how it is perceived and treated by western nations. Continue reading →
Renewable energy isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy—it’s adding to it.
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it. Continue reading →
The votes are in. Continue reading →
Although it was hardly a newsworthy event when Donald Trump, in a lackluster November 15 speech at his Mar-a-Lago grifters’ club in Florida, announced that he was launching another presidential campaign, it served as an example of the growth of nihilism among the “libertarian” right, fascist far-right, and various lunatic conspiracy-obsessed factions of the left in the world today. From Trump’s ongoing “Make America Great Again” traveling white nationalist carnival act and the BREXIT catastrophe in the United Kingdom to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s imperialist threat to attack and occupy Taiwan, the “burn it all down” approach to governance has taken hold in the halls of power of dozens of nations, including those that possess nuclear weapons. Continue reading →
While some high-profile Republicans are ditching Donald Trump after a series of major losses for the party in 2018, 2020, and 2022, the political brand of “Trumpism,” an anti-democratic fascist movement, is not likely to disappear any time soon. Militant political movements that double as cults of personality often long outlive their demagogic leaders. As significant far-right ideologies, Trumpism and its Tea Party forerunner may continue as a potent force within the GOP for several decades. Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, but his philosophy of Reaganism, itself an outgrowth of Barry Goldwater’s brand of doctrinaire conservatism, was only recently discarded with the ascendancy of Trumpism. Goldwater’s extreme conservatism was emblematic of a party that had, for thirty years, dabbled in the extremism of the pro-Nazi Germany American First movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, the postwar Red Scare politics of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the unhinged conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society. Continue reading →
If the powerful leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senators Jack Reed (D) and Jim Inhofe (R), have their way, Congress will soon invoke wartime emergency powers to build up even greater stockpiles of Pentagon weapons. The amendment is supposedly designed to facilitate replenishing the weapons the United States has sent to Ukraine, but a look at the wish list contemplated in this amendment reveals a different story. Continue reading →
The political civil war that is erupting in the Republican Party between loyalists of Donald Trump and Florida’s recently re-elected governor, Ron DeSantis, has the making for a full-blown Hatfield and McCoy-style feud. Although Trump supporters are largely cultists adhering to QAnon and white nationalist drivel, DeSantis supporters include several former Trump fans who are no less driven to settling scores on the streets. No sooner had he taken to disparaging DeSantis on his Truth Social platform, Trump began re-transmitting scores of anti-DeSantis postings from QAnon accounts. Continue reading →
The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one. Continue reading →
In democracy, the people choose their leaders; in fascism, the leader chooses his people.
The elections appear to be a mixed bag, with young people and women, in particular, rejecting the rightwing Supreme Court Dobbs abortion decision. The early youth vote in Wisconsin, for example was 360% higher than in 2018 according to Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Continue reading →
From the United States and Brazil to Israel and Hungary, liberals approach the widening gap in political perceptions with incredulity while Illiberals see polarization as a political opportunity to destroy democracy.
Every election these days seems more consequential than the last. Continue reading →
