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UK top court rejects Assange’s request to appeal extradition decision
The decision represents "a blow to Julian Assange and to justice," said one human rights campaigner.
The U.K. Supreme Court on Monday denied WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s request to appeal an earlier decision permitting his extradition to the United States, where he faces espionage charges and up to 175 years in prison for publishing classified documents that exposed war crimes. Continue reading
Cracking down on Russian oligarchs means cracking down on U.S. tax havens
While other EU countries have been increasing transparency and cracking down on kleptocratic capital, the U.S. is a laggard.
As part of sanctions against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States, United Kingdom, and other European Union nations are cracking down on Russian oligarchs, freezing assets and tracking the yachts, private jets, and luxury real estate holdings of oligarchs. Continue reading
If high gas prices are so painful, shouldn’t we move away from fossil fuels?
Not only is it possible to switch to renewables, but it’s also cheaper and would make economies less vulnerable. Yet, bizarrely, politicians and the fossil fuel industry, who are using the war on Ukraine to justify high gas prices, are now calling for more oil to be produced.
Long used to cheap gas at the pump, Americans are experiencing serious sticker shock these days as gas prices rise to $6 or even $7 a gallon. News headlines are linking this sharp increase to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Guilt-inducing memes are cropping up on social media shaming people for complaining about the high gas prices in the face of Ukrainian suffering. Continue reading
What makes more sense, a minimum income tax or a maximum income?
The U.S. senator who chairs the GOP Senate campaign effort wants America’s poorest to pay up more at tax time.
Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, doesn’t have a problem with billionaires. He’s spent his entire political career helping billionaires make more billions. But Mitch Connell does have a problem with one particular fabulously rich figure. Continue reading
Cutting through the fog masking ‘a new page in the art of war’
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. Continue reading
Why does everything the GOP touches cause poverty, disease & death?
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
On Palestine’s everyday victories: Why Israel is no longer the exception
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
Why don’t we treat all refugees as though they were Ukrainian?
Masses of refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere have faced racially motivated hostility in Europe. Now, Ukraine’s refugee crisis is revealing Western double standards.
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
New mental health book hides institute director’s sordid past
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
Ukraine: A conflict soaked in contradictions and new patterns in war and media
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
Michigan initiatives clash on how to stop GOP’s election deniers
Competing state constitutional amendments go to different lengths to enshrine voting rights and target anti-voter legislation and court rulings.
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
Four factors contributing to a generation of obesity
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
Efforts at upholding oblivion over dictatorship crimes in Uruguay
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
The war-profiteering gangsters will kill us all unless we unite against them
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
Mass suffering in Ukraine amidst historic refugee crisis
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
Can Iran and the U.S. breathe life back into nuclear deal?
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’s no sugarcoating Hershey’s abuse of workers and union-busting tactics
Hershey factory workers in Virginia are sick of company abuses and are voting to join a union. But their union-busting employer has other plans.
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
Ukraine exposes white supremacist foreign policy
White supremacy is at the heart of US war propaganda. The exhortation to "stand with Ukraine" is no exception to this rule.
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 Mind Control Police: The government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers
The U.S. government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry. Continue reading
Fake news claim: Russia seeks wider conflict
Big Lies take on a life of their own by ad nauseam repetition. Continue reading
Ukraine: US “diplomacy” is the problem; can it become the solution?
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
Why the Freedom Convoy is more American than Canadian
Conservatives in the United States have fallen in love with the fringe protests led by Canadian truckers. It is a cause that unites the libertarian and extremist wings of the GOP and offers a new front in the culture wars to mobilize right-wing forces.
Canadians have a reputation for being polite, nice people. But the high-profile weeks-long civil disobedience actions by some Canadian truckers that began in late January in the capital city of Ottawa has undermined this reputation. Truckers and their allies caused traffic snarls within the city and wreaked havoc along the international supply chains crossing the United States-Canada border. Continue reading
Will Biden resurrect the conflict-ridden Robert Califf as FDA commissioner?
In 2011, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, an Obama nominee, lamented that the government could not find enough experts who were not funded by drug makers to serve on advisory committees and recommended that the FDA’s conflict of interest rules be loosened. Continue reading
Consciousness is all there is
As Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know for sure but which just isn’t true.” Continue reading
Nuke power at the brink of bankruptcy, war, apocalypse
Fifteen atomic reactors in Ukraine currently spew out massive quantities of radiation alongside the smoldering ruin of Chernobyl Unit 4. Continue reading
The U.S. needs Cold War but the real enemy is within
The U.S. has a date with destiny as it faces up to its own inherent failings and its very real enemy within— the national security state.
Georgy Arbatov, the witty Soviet diplomat, remarked for an American audience at the end of the Cold War: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” His observation at the time seemed to be an oxymoron. Continue reading
What is going to happen in Ukraine?
Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen? Continue reading
Russian recognition of Donbass long overdue
In February 2014, the Obama/Biden regime’s Maidan coup transformed democratic Ukraine into Nazi-infested fascist rule. Continue reading
On the eve of another war: familiar bluster and false signals
A European dictator was expected to launch a full-scale military assault on his neighbor. The media was all over the map in speculating whether war was imminent or not. Peace feelers by diplomats and heads of state and government abounded, “don’t worry, he’s bluffing,” many stated to an anxious and nervous public. Continue reading
American overlord demands Europe sign suicide note
The infernal danger is that Washington and London are pushing Europe and the world towards the abyss of a nuclear with Russia.
The Anglo-Americans are running a modern-day reworking of Operation Overlord, the June 1944 military invasion plan billed to liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. This time around, the billed objective is to “liberate” the European Union from its “tyrannical” dependency on Russian natural gas. Continue reading
“It can’t be illegal to help a people”: The persecution of Alex Saab
Saab is virtually unknown in the United States, where he is currently languishing in a Miami prison, but he has been vital to Venezuela’s ability to survive the brutal economic war being waged by the U.S.
“It’s not a crime to fulfill a diplomatic mission. It’s not a crime to evade sanctions that are harming an entire country. It can’t be illegal to help a people.” Camilla Fabri Saab made these impassioned remarks when explaining the situation behind the illegal arrest and extradition—the kidnapping, in essence—of her husband, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Continue reading
Going for tax reform big time
Posted on March 15, 2022 by Ralph Nader
What if $10 billion were raised over ten years to transform Congress and make it do what it should be doing for the people (See, Think Big to Overcome Losing Big to Corporatism, 1/7/22)? In a more recent column, Facilitating Civic and Political Energies for the Common Good, 2/2/22, I outlined how $1 billion per year could be spent lobbying Congress for a people’s agenda. Continue reading →