Progressive calls to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court gained fresh urgency Monday after Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested he would block President Joe Biden from filling a potential high court vacancy if Republicans wrest back control of the upper chamber in next year’s midterms. Continue reading
After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuer of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s. Continue reading
Ditching fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy in order to keep warming below the 1.5ºC threshold is both “necessary and technically feasible.” Continue reading
After more than a decade of grassroots organizing, agitation, and tireless opposition by the international climate movement, the final nail was slammed into the Keystone XL’s coffin Wednesday afternoon when the company behind the transnational tar sands pipeline officially pulled the plug on its plans. Continue reading
One hundred years after the worst instance of racist mob violence in 20th-century America, the Tulsa Race Massacre is finally getting the attention it is due. The 1921 terrorist attack by an armed white mob against a prosperous Black community is perhaps one of the clearest and most extreme illustrations of how many African Americans were stripped of their wealth for a generation. Continue reading
The United States, Russia, Britain, and other countries are waging a war that pits think tank against think tank and criminalizes ideas and opinions. That war heated up on April 15 when the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed financial sanctions on the Moscow-based think tank, Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), for whom I have written for over ten years. OFAC alleged, without much in the way of any hard evidence, that SCF was an arm of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Treasury’s sanctions came after a 2020 State Department Global Engagement Center (GEC) report that illustrated the opinions being expressed by SCF and other Russian think tanks and news organizations as similar to Covid-19 virus microbes. In any event, I’ve been compared to worse than a Covid microbe. Continue reading
Many Americans who follow developments overseas would concede that Israel and its supporters in the United States exercise a fairly high level of control over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Some are also aware of congressional attempts to introduce legislation that would define criticism of the Jewish state as a federal hate crime. That would narrow the options for discussion, infringing on First Amendment free speech rights, and further tighten the grip on policy. It would also make violators of the new law subject to fines and even imprisonment at the hands of the Department of Justice, which has traditionally responded favorably on issues of concern to Israel and its supporters. Continue reading
We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. Continue reading
Reproductive rights advocates on Friday hailed President Joe Biden’s omission of funding for the Hyde Amendment—which prohibits most federal abortion spending—in his $6 trillion 2022 budget proposal. Continue reading
Texas Democrats blocked final passage of a Republican-authored voter suppression bill late Sunday by abruptly walking off the state House floor, denying the chamber’s GOP majority the quorum necessary to proceed to a vote. Continue reading
Intensifying progressive calls to eliminate the legislative filibuster, Senate Republicans wielded the archaic procedural tool on Friday to torpedo a bill that sought to establish an independent commission to probe the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—Republican senators outlined a $928 billion infrastructure proposal Thursday that drastically slashes what President Joe Biden has proposed and sets things up so that the wealthy, unlike the rest of the country, will pay nothing toward fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. In fact, in what is perhaps the most unacceptable part of their “counter-offer” to Biden’s plan, which the president has already cut from $2 trillion-plus to $1.7 trillion, the Republicans want to pay for their plan by taking away money intended for coronavirus aid. Continue reading
Progressive opponents of corporate consolidation are pushing the Biden administration to intervene after Amazon announced Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire the Hollywood film and television studio MGM for nearly $8.5 billion, a deal that critics denounced as harmful to workers, consumers, and U.S. democracy. Continue reading
We’ve all been there before. Continue reading
Colombia witnessed a series of mass protests at the end of April following a call for a national strike. Still ongoing, the protests have many causes: an apparent “tax reform” that was going to transfer even more wealth to the 1 percent in Colombia; the failure of the most recent peace accords; and the inability of Colombia’s privatized health care system to contain the COVID-19 crisis. In response to these ongoing protests, the government has killed dozens, disappeared hundreds, imposed curfews on multiple cities, and called in the army. But the protests continue—because they are, at least in part, a repudiation of the militarization of everything in the country. Continue reading
At the end of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was continuing to ravage the populations of many nations, Israel stood out as a success story, administering more doses of vaccines to its modest-sized 9-million-strong population than any other country after China, the U.S., and the UK. Today, more than 60 percent of Israelis are vaccinated, which is 20 percentage points higher than the United States—a nation that happens to give more foreign aid to Israel than to any other country in the world. Continue reading
I first met Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, the Israeli peace and anti-apartheid activist, on a sunny spring Sunday in Jerusalem almost exactly seventeen years ago, in 2004. It was at the end of the second Intifada, and a few of us clambered into a van so that she and a colleague could give us a tour of what it was like to be a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories. It was revelatory. We’ve remained friends ever since. Continue reading
Free speech and Palestinian rights advocates on Monday hailed a ruling by a federal judge declaring the unconstitutionality of a Georgia law prohibiting the state from doing business with anyone advocating a boycott of Israel. Continue reading
Tribune Publishing shareholders on Friday approved “vulture” fund Alden Global Capital’s $633 million bid to buy the Chicago-based newspaper chain—a development that sparked both confusion about how key ballots were recorded as well as outrage among journalists, union leaders, and readers alarmed over what the future may hold. Continue reading
Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank declared a general strike Tuesday against the Israeli Netanyahu government’s escalation of aircraft bombing runs on Gaza, and the mounting death toll, now exceeding 219, including 59 children, among its inhabitants. Continue reading
The Arizona Senate’s audit of 2.1 million fall 2020 ballots has been extremely controversial since its inception. As recently retired Arizona Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Flake reiterated on May 11, its premise is based on “the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.” Continue reading
Time and again, truth-telling journalism as it should be is a casualty of all things war and related violence. Continue reading
As part of an unprecedented wave of recent GOP attacks on reproductive rights across the United States, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign a bill to not only outlaw ending a pregnancy as early as six weeks, but also allow anti-choice “vigilantes” to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion that violates state law. Continue reading
Just before the state elections in Kerala, in southern India, a television channel ran a program called “The Great Political Kitchen.” The anchor went to kitchens across the state to talk to homemakers about their views on politics. In one kitchen, the anchor asked a woman about a dispute surrounding a temple in southern Kerala where the courts had ordered that women must be allowed full access to the temple premises in 2018. For the past five years, Kerala had been governed by the Left Democratic Front (LDF), which had taken a democratic position over this issue and had supported the entry of women into this famous temple. The right wing claimed this was evidence that the LDF government was against religious freedom; such a claim would not be restricted to the majority-Hindu population but could also be extended to other minority communities in India such as Christians and Muslims. The woman told the TV anchor, “I am a devotee [of the temple], but hunger won’t go away if I cook and eat devotion. That’s all I have to say about it.” Continue reading
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented Friday that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is “deeply unwell” following the emergence of a 2019 video showing Greene—then a private citizen—telling the New York Democrat through the mail slot of her locked office door that she is “bringing God’s judgement on our country” by supporting women’s reproductive freedom. Continue reading
A controversial oil refinery on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in the government’s crosshairs after a third incident in just three months has sickened people. On May 5, after gaseous fumes were released from one of the oil refining units of Limetree Bay Refining, residents of the unincorporated Caribbean territory reported a range of symptoms, including burning eyes, nausea and headaches, with at least three people seeking medical attention at the local hospital. At its peak in 1974, the facility, which opened in 1966, was the largest refinery in the Americas, producing some 650,000 barrels of crude oil a day. It restarted operations in February after being shuttered for the past decade. Continue reading
There’s no ambiguity about life in Occupied Palestine. Continue reading
As the Senate Rules Committee convened Tuesday to mark up a sweeping legislative proposal aimed at protecting and expanding voting rights, progressive activists ramped up pressure on the chamber’s Democrats to eliminate an archaic procedural rule that poses a critical threat to the bill’s chances of becoming law. Continue reading
As Indians continue to scramble for survival through a deadly second COVID-19 wave and deal with an inadequate health care system that has failed them at every step, for a majority of the country living in rural areas and in slums in urban centers, food insecurity is proving to be a bigger struggle than protecting themselves against the deadly virus. Continue reading
At a recent press conference, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described a common scene at the check-cashing places that dot her Bronx neighborhood. Continue reading
Anti-war activism met corporate gaslighting Wednesday as General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic refused to acknowledge the deadly consequences of her firm’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other nations after CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin interrupted a company shareholder meeting. Continue reading
Pushing back on the right-wing narrative about the reason for real or perceived labor shortages in some markets nationwide, progressives on Friday told corporations that if they want to hire more people, they’ll need to start paying better wages. Continue reading
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