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Ninth Circuit upholds Washington’s ban on ‘dangerous and discredited’ conversion therapy
"This is a massive win for LGBTQ+ youth out of Washington," said one advocate.
LGBTQ+ rights advocates on Tuesday applauded a ruling by a federal court in Washington State which upheld the state’s ban on “conversion therapy,” saying the ban will continue to save lives. Continue reading
In refusing to prioritize drivers’ safety, UPS risks major strike
As UPS drivers around the country struggle to do their jobs in triple-digit temperatures—literally baking inside non-air-conditioned trucks—their wealthy employer refuses to take action.
In late August, as temperatures soared around the United States, a driver for United Parcel Service (UPS) took before-and-after photos of chocolate chip cookies on a baking sheet. The delicious-looking confections were baked on the dashboard of a UPS truck whose internal temperatures shot to dangerous levels—not in an oven. It was an ingenious way to showcase the modern-day horror of the climate crisis intersecting with corporate greed. Continue reading
Wicked Witch of the West selected, not publicly elected UK prime minister
In Britain, majority party members choose the prime minister as head of government. Continue reading
NATO’s five steps to control any country
NATO employs the five basic processes of location, dependency, bribery, civilian control and force to subjugate every country that makes it onto their hit list. Continue reading
How to green our parched farmlands and finance critical infrastructure
There are workarounds the U.S. can use to fund affordable housing, drought responses, and other urgently-needed infrastructure that was left out of the two recent spending bills.
Congress has passed two major infrastructure bills in the last year, but imminent needs remain. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law chiefly focused on conventional highway programs, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) mainly centered on energy security and combating climate change. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), over $2 trillion in much-needed infrastructure is still unfunded, including projects to address drought, affordable housing, high-speed rail, and power transmission lines. By 2039, per the ASCE, continued underinvestment at current rates will cost $10 trillion in cumulative lost GDP, more than 3 million jobs in that year, and $2.24 trillion in exports over the next 20 years. Continue reading
The Biden administration and two looming crises: an economic and financial crisis and a hegemonic war
Besides the lingering COVID-19 pandemic and the on-going climate crisis, which will be accompanied by an energy crisis, not to mention the coming migration crisis, the world could be facing two man-made major crises in the years to come, i.e. an economic and financial crisis and a hegemonic war crisis. Continue reading
The real reason teachers are quitting
There’s a war being waged on America’s teachers, and we must stand up for them before it’s too late. Continue reading
Investigating the victim: On Abbas’ ‘holocaust’ and the depravity of Israeli hasbara
“There was no Massacre in Jenin” was the title of a Haaretz editorial on April 19, 2002, one week after Israel ended its deadly onslaught on the besieged Palestinian refugee camp in the northern West Bank. Continue reading
The American kleptocracy: A government of liars, thieves and lawbreakers
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere. Continue reading
Is the U.S. legal system at war with its people?
Incarcerations, brutality, and torture are common in the U.S. Activists claim that this amounts to a war waged against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people.
The very laws and government agencies created to protect the people in the United States are increasingly being weaponized against those who are often marginalized in society: people of color, the poor, and the working class. In just the last few months, there have been many incidents of this kind of violent abuse of power. Continue reading
How about a civic group to oppose a cashless society?
The most perceptive ancient historians and philosophers could not have foreseen a time when a certain type of mass convenience and abundance becomes a threat to democracy, justice and dispersed power. Welcome to the incarcerations of the credit card payment systems Gulag and the corporate state’s drive to stop consumers from paying with cash. Continue reading
Deliberate misrepresentation: Western media bias makes Israeli war on Palestinians possible
While US and western mainstream and corporate media remain biased in favor of Israel, they often behave as if they are a third, neutral party. This is simply not the case. Continue reading
How unions are combating domestic violence
Losing two coworkers to domestic violence over a three-year span left Emily Brannon and other members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 310L reeling. Continue reading
Corporate media has failed to report accurately on the threats to women’s reproductive rights
The establishment press ignored stories about the right's racist assault on reproductive health for years
In the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the corporate media has been saturated with analyses and reports about the implications of the ruling for women’s lives and health. Legal observers have weighed in on the conservative majority’s reasoning in the case. The impact of the ruling on the 2022 midterm elections has been discussed endlessly. The state-by-state battles over legislation and state-level constitutional amendments banning abortion have been covered exhaustively, as have efforts by women’s rights groups and medical providers to ensure that women get the reproductive health services they need. Continue reading
Is the GOP now promoting the business of tracking women seeking abortions?
When the Dobbs decision came down from six Republicans on the Supreme Court, many folks were wondering how long it would take before vigilantes and GOP-controlled states might start tracking women seeking abortion services. Continue reading
Behind the ‘economic policy’ façade, it’s class war
At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.” Continue reading
Did Nancy Pelosi accelerate Chinese-Russian military cooperation with her Taiwan visit?
China had warned of “serious consequences” in the lead-up to the visit but has avoided any significant military escalation so far.
Following the chaotic U.S. departure from Afghanistan in August 2021 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Washington has sought to reaffirm its commitment to its allies and partners. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on August 2 assuaged nerves in Taipei and underlined the island’s status as a key component of the U.S. Pacific strategy. Continue reading
Community schools can revitalize the neighborhoods around them
The transformative approach to school improvement is a catalyst for community revival.
When Darlene Kamine tells the story about Oyler School in Cincinnati, Ohio, she also likes to tell the story about the house across the street from the school. Continue reading
Make Congress accountable
Its failings and subservience to corporatism are historic in scope. Continue reading
Joe Biden could have gone a lot further on student loans
The president’s loan forgiveness plan is narrow and paltry—and his administration’s preparation to fend off outraged criticism from both sides of the aisle speaks volumes.
President Joe Biden has just launched a plan to forgive a portion of federal college loan debt for millions of Americans. In a speech from the White House, he explained that the Department of Education would “forgive $10,000 in outstanding federal student loans” and that Pell Grant recipients would “have their debt reduced [by] $20,000.” Only those making less than $125,000 a year would qualify for the relief. Given that the average student debt is nearly $30,000, this certainly does not erase the burden that millions of Americans carry with them—some doing so for life, from graduation to past retirement. Continue reading
The human species is acting like a self-destructive individual
Robert Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” And from all the facts in evidence currently available to us, that certainly does seem to be the case. We’re destroying our biosphere and moving beyond mere flirtation with nuclear war to full-blown courtship, all to facilitate a status quo that everyone hates and which benefits hardly anybody. Continue reading
Tuesday primary elections’ results have Republicans shaking in their shoes
KINGSTON, N.Y.—The constitutional right to abortion and democracy itself took center stage and gave Democratic Ulster County, N.Y., Executive Pat Ryan a win in a special congressional election in a swing U.S. House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley. Continue reading
Western ‘naturalism’ disrespects nonhuman animals and the entire natural world
The self-destructive delusion that we are the only species that has a right to life on Earth has led to the ecological crisis.
One species has transformed into a material backdrop for its tribulations the 10 million other species that constitute its extended family, its giving environment, and its daily cohabitants. More specifically, it is one small population of this species that has done so, the bearer of a merely historical and local culture. Making all other living beings invisible is a provincial and late phenomenon—not the product of mankind as a whole. Imagine a people approaching a land populated by a myriad of other related peoples, and declaring that they don’t really exist, and that they are the stage and not the actors (ah yes, it’s not a fiction that requires a lot of imagination, as it also comprises vast swaths of our history). How did we accomplish this miracle of blindness toward the other creatures of the living world? We could hazard here—to exacerbate the strangeness of our heritage—a rapid history of the relations between our civilization and other species, a history which leads to the modern condition: Once nonhuman living beings were debased ontologically (that is to say, considered as endowed with a second-order existence, of lesser value and lesser consistency, and thus transformed into ‘things’), human beings came to believe that they alone truly existed in the universe. Continue reading
The new schism: Will the idea of the ‘West’ survive the scourge of the Russia-Ukraine war?
The ‘West’ is not just a term, but also a concept that acquires new meanings with time. To its advocates, it can be analogous to civilization and benevolent power; to its detractors, mostly in the ‘East’ and ‘South’, it is associated with colonialism, unhinged violence, and underserved wealth. Continue reading
Will 2022 mark the turning point in the climate crisis?
Carbon emissions continue to rise, but this year the international community might finally be getting serious about climate change.
Over the last six months, the world took a giant step backward in its efforts to address the current climate crisis. In February, after finally reversing its position and pledging to become carbon-neutral by 2060, Russia invaded Ukraine and set off a panic around access to fossil fuels. In March, South Koreans voted out an administration that had put a Green New Deal at the center of its agenda in favor a new president whose idea of a sustainable energy transition was to build more nuclear power plants. Continue reading
Liberals love Liz Cheney
When liberals aren't rehabilitating war criminals like George W. Bush, they fall in love with right-wing republicans like Liz Cheney. They stand for nothing and fall for anything.
Soon to be former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney is the flavor of the month for liberals. The cause of the undeserved adulation is her condemnation of Donald Trump and his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Continue reading
Israel’s premature ‘victory’ celebration: The defining War in Gaza is yet to be fought
For years, Palestinians, as well as Israelis, have labored to redraw the battle lines. The three-day Israeli war on Gaza, starting on August 5, clearly manifested this reality. Continue reading
Today’s Republicans: “Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are dead, long live Hitler and Mussolini”
The United States is in the same vulnerable position today as Weimar Germany was in the early 1930s. German democracy died amid acts of violence by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. The United States now finds itself in a similar perilous position. The Republican Party under the Hitler-admiring Donald Trump eschews democracy and embraces fascism. Republican candidates for office this year are as violent, anti-Semitic, and racist as Hitler’s Nazi Brownshirts. Continue reading
‘This is blackmail’: New Orleans denied flood funds over opposition to abortion ban
"I don't think we're responding with the urgency these authoritarian moves deserve," warned one civil rights attorney.
Progressives are sounding the alarm about the lengths to which GOP officials appear willing to go to advance their deeply unpopular and reactionary agenda after Louisiana’s State Bond Commission, at the urging of right-wing Attorney General Jeff Landry, once again denied flood prevention resources to New Orleans due to the city’s opposition to the state’s new abortion ban. Continue reading
Is crypto really going to crash? (Yes)
Crypto is going to crash and could take your savings with it. Continue reading
More young Americans are using cannabis and hallucinogens. That’s good news.
According to a recent National Institutes of Health survey, United Press International reports, “use of marijuana and hallucinogens among young adults in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021.” Continue reading
Free speech doesn’t matter if propagandists determine what people say
Posted on August 31, 2022 by Caitlin Johnstone
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Continue reading →