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United States is a “flawed democracy” heading for “hybrid regime” status
Yet another major right-of-center watchdog of telltale signs of global authoritarianism has reduced the “democracy” ranking of the United States. Continue reading
It’s time to expand the COVID-19 exception to all American health care
While the federal government only seems to consider care for COVID-19 patients and protection against the coronavirus to be its responsibility, those struggling with other ailments and lacking insurance are on their own.
There has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to American health care over the past two years. The federal government under the previous administration of Donald Trump, as well as the current one of Joe Biden, has carved out what can be characterized as the “COVID-19 exception,” inconsistently intervening to help people avoid the virus or recover from it, while standing by as Americans struggle with other ailments. In doing so, it has exposed the vast fissures of a broken system into which millions of Americans routinely fall, some, never to emerge. Continue reading
Have we learned nothing from the COVID-19 pandemic?
New animal epidemics ignored
You would think as COVID-19 has now killed 5.54 million, there would be greater vigilance about other brewing zoonotic epidemics. Yet even as 41 countries now have outbreaks of avian influenza, called HPAI or H5N1, including the US, there is little to no reporting on the threat in the US press. The attitude still seems to be “wait and see” as it was with COVID-19 though cases surfaced six months before any action was taken; have we learned nothing? Continue reading
How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ plans to control all Palestinian content online
It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was introduced by Netanyahu’s Likud party rival, Gideon Sa’ar. Continue reading
How the ‘rules’ determine if criminals become politicians
How do criminals take over countries? Continue reading
As voting advocates talk about election reform, GOP-led battleground states are busy restricting voting
In swing states, Republicans are targeting key local stages of the process.
The failure of major federal voting rights legislation in the Senate has left civil rights advocates saying they are determined to keep fighting—including by suing in battleground states. But the little bipartisan consensus that exists on election reform would, at best, lead to much narrower legislation that is unlikely to address state-level GOP efforts now targeting Democratic blocs. Continue reading
Consider the possibility that this is already the dystopia you fear
Consider the possibility that the Orwellian dystopia you fear is already here and has been in place for many years, you just haven’t noticed because you’re still allowed to watch Netflix or buy a gun or say whatever you want to say within a small impotent online echo chamber. Continue reading
Senate Republicans, after stormy debate, sink voting rights bill
Democratic lawmakers and people’s movements continue the fight nevertheless.
WASHINGTON—Catering to their white nationalist Donald Trump constituents and the corporate contributors who fund GOP campaigns, the Senate’s 50 Republicans sent the two big voting rights bills down the drain again. Continue reading
Check out the Republican Party’s newest invention: election police
Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.” Continue reading
Save our endangered cartoonists
An invaluable American species is being wiped out as their media habitat is intentionally destroyed.
Right before our eyes, an invaluable American species is fast disappearing from view: Kartoonus Amerikanas. Continue reading
The surprise ending
Humanity’s collective awakening will unfold in ways that nobody is anticipating, for the same reasons an individual’s awakening always unfolds in ways they can’t anticipate. Continue reading
After a year of Biden, why do we still have Trump’s foreign policy?
President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising. Continue reading
Mr. Xi plays Davos Man
A collective West “led” by unspeakable mediocrities looks at the Russia-China strategic partnership as if it was something like a double-headed Anti-Christ. Xi, for his part, seems not to be impressed.
The virtual, special address by President Xi Jinping to the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Davos Agenda exhibits all the elements of a riddle inside an enigma. Continue reading
On the Biden plantation
The idea that Joe Biden would provide harm reduction was created to help the unpopular candidate secure an electoral victory. The reality is a litany of lies and certain defeat for Democrats at the polls. There's no harm reduction in a neo-liberal system.
“Biden came across as a plantation owner telling the field hands that they have a good life and ought to be grateful.” Continue reading
Corporate seditionists are no better than the seditionists who attacked the Capitol
Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. Continue reading
Are Western wealthy countries determined to starve the people of Afghanistan?
On January 11, 2022, the United Nations (UN) Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths appealed to the international community to help raise $4.4 billion for Afghanistan in humanitarian aid, calling this effort, “the largest ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian assistance.” This amount is required “in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there,” said the UN. If this appeal is not met, Griffiths said, then “next year [2023] we’ll be asking for $10 billion.” Continue reading
DirecTV to drop rabidly pro-Trump One America News
"Millions of viewers will no longer be subsidizing this hateful content with their monthly pay-TV bills," said one campaigner.
Facing a wave of grassroots pressure, one of the largest television providers in the U.S. reportedly plans to drop the far-right, rabidly pro-Trump One America News Network, an outlet that has come under fire for disseminating falsehoods about the 2020 election results, the coronavirus pandemic, and other major issues. Continue reading
As Israel plots endgame in occupied Golan, Bennett must remember lessons of the past
With Syria still embroiled in its own war, Israel has been actively rewriting the rule book regarding its conduct in this Arab country. Gone are the days of a potential return of the illegally occupied Golan Heights to Syrian sovereignty in exchange for peace, per the language of yesteryears. Now, Israel is set to double its illegal Jewish settler population in the Golan, while Israeli bombs continue to drop with a much higher frequency on various Syrian targets. Continue reading
Worshiping markets, genuflecting to grand fortune
Today’s ‘utopians’ have reserved heaven on Earth for the richest among us.
Our conventional political wisdom, here in the United States, tends to see utopians as lefty egalitarians of one sort or another, clueless reformers and revolutionaries who just don’t understand how the “real world” operates. But today’s most clueless utopians, suggest recent reflections from political economist Abby Innes, actually hail from the right end of our political spectrum. These utopians see the marketplace as humanity’s only “sphere of true freedom” and government as the most direct threat to that freedom, an outlook on the world that most typically goes by the label of “neoliberalism.” Continue reading
We must have accountability for corporate crime
Most recently, 100 mph winds swept grass-fires through Colorado, leaving thousands homeless. It was 116 degrees here in Portland last summer, as wildfires and drought ravage the West. The Gulf Coast, South and Eastern Seaboard are now annually torn apart by superstorms, while the Midwest faces mile-wide tornadoes never before seen with this ferocity and frequency. Continue reading
As cryptocurrency becomes mainstream, its carbon footprint can’t be ignored
As Bitcoin prices rise, so will the incentive to mine it, creating a feedback loop that spells trouble for the climate.
For advocates of cryptocurrency, the promise of an economic future that is managed by a blockchain (a decentralized database that is shared among the nodes of a computer network, as opposed to being held in a single location, such as a central bank) is compelling. For anyone paying attention, the rapid expansion of cryptocurrency has been stunning. In 2019, the global cryptocurrency market was approximately $793 million. It’s now expected to reach nearly $5.2 billion by 2026, according to a report by the market research organization Facts and Factors. In just one year—between July 2020 and June 2021—the global adoption of cryptocurrency surged by more than 880 percent. Continue reading
As Sinema defends filibuster, progressives say ‘vote her the hell out’
"The filibuster is a meaningless Senate rule. It's a remnant of slavery used to block civil rights for generations."
On what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday, voting rights advocates and progressive lawmakers rallied in Arizona on Saturday to target the first-term Democratic senator blocking legislation aimed at strengthening ballot access amid growing GOP-led suppression efforts. Continue reading
How ‘Queer Eye’ upholds liberal economic fantasies
The popular reality television show focuses on the victims of American capitalism, offering the sort of help that only wealthy elites can enjoy while deliberately avoiding critiques of a system that perpetuates gross inequality.
When Netflix recently released season six of the popular reality show “Queer Eye,” I eagerly binge-watched all 10 episodes, savoring Tan France’s precise fashion sense, Bobby Berk’s jaw-droppingly elegant interior designs, Karamo Brown’s sage and insightful personal advice, Antoni Porowski’s versatile kitchen skills, and, of course, Jonathan Van Ness’ endearingly quirky makeovers. Continue reading
Teaching the children misogyny, or when a wondrous Eve told God to go to hell
Of the misogynist myths propagated to the children, none is more damning than the legend of Eve’s act in the Garden of Eden. For this, the folklore tells us, she, together with all females, was condemned by god to forever bear children in pain and suffering. From such myths, generations are raised to believe that within the female gender lies malevolence. Continue reading
The U.S. makes a mockery of treaties and international law
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order. Continue reading
GOP-named Supreme Court majority cements its role as a pro-corporate fiefdom
WASHINGTON—Recalling the 1930s, when the “Nine Old Men” scrapped key New Deal legislation, the GOP-named U.S. Supreme Court majority may again show its implementation of the right-wing pro-corporate agenda, this time by nullifying OSHA’s anti-coronavirus Emergency Temporary Standard. Continue reading
Manchin joins Sinema in destroying Democratic hopes to pass voting rights
"We're old enough to remember a whole month ago when both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin voted to make an exception to the filibuster for the debt ceiling," Public Citizen sardonically noted.
As conservative U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday joined his right-wing Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema in announcing his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster, progressive observers excoriated the pair—who recently supported a filibuster carve-out to raise the debt ceiling—for obstructing their party’s landmark voting rights legislation. Continue reading
Biden indicts Trump for leading the ongoing conspiracy against democracy
WASHINGTON—One year after the deadly Trump coup attempt, President Joe Biden stood at the U.S. Capitol last Thursday morning and indicted the former White House occupant and his supporters in the Republican Party as part of an ongoing conspiracy against democracy. Continue reading
Nicaragua in the multipolar world
The U.S. regime change effort in Nicaragua has failed. The people are determined to assert their rights of self-determination and the U.S. is not the only player on the world stage.
The United States and the European Union announced new sanctions on the day that Daniel Ortega was inaugurated as president of Nicaragua. The move was not surprising, given that the United States congress passed the RENACER Act one week before elections which were held on November 7. Continue reading
The shocking things the GOP and Trumpians believe
With the Republican Party turning to Trumpism, and the Democratic Party returning to their progressive roots, will we have an honest debate this election year in our media? Continue reading
The United States: A push toward moral decline, political extremism, political divisions and violence?
Poll after poll indicates very deep political divisions among Americans, with indications that such divisions are deepening, and even widening as a consequence of the pandemic. Indeed, according to the most recent NPR/Ipsos poll, seven in ten Americans believe the country is in crisis and is at risk of failing. Continue reading
The filibuster is busted. Time to scrap it.
Letting small minorities of senators block things most Americans support delivers obstruction, not bipartisanship.
Posted on January 27, 2022 by Robert P. Alvarez
If you’re under the impression that the filibuster is an important tool in the toolbox of American democracy, you’ve been misled. Continue reading →