Over 300 groups on Monday urged Senate leadership to reject a bill currently under consideration that would incentivize communities to sell off their public water supplies to private companies for pennies on the dollar. Continue reading
Trump regime hostility toward China keeps pushing the envelope toward rupturing relations altogether or possibly something worse. Continue reading
Wall Street banks and corporate executives have wasted no time trying to establish themselves as allies of the Black Lives Matter movement, professing support for the historic protests against police killings of Black people. Continue reading
I came to Washington, more than four decades ago, to run the Palestine Human Rights Campaign. We founded the PHRC after hearing from lawyers and human rights activists in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian lands horrible stories of rights being abused on a daily basis. Because these stories weren’t known in the US, or they were ignored, we launched the PHRC to shine a light on these violations and mobilize support for the Palestinian victims. Continue reading
Since Hugo Chavez established Bolivarian social democracy in 1999, four US regimes—from the Clintons to Trump—sought to eliminate what they consider the “threat” of a good example. Continue reading
Reproductive rights advocates celebrated Monday after a federal judge blocked Tennessee’s sweeping new restrictions on abortion within in an hour of Republican Gov. Bill Lee signing them into law. Continue reading
In spite of nine years of negotiations since Ethiopia took advantage of the chaotic Arab Spring to begin construction of the $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile the concerned parties—Cairo, Khartoum and Addis Ababa—are still far from reaching an agreement on various technical and legal issues. Time is now of the essence to agree a solution to avoid possible all out military conflict. Continue reading
Likability is a trait that politicians across the political spectrum seek to achieve during their careers. Achieving popularity among the masses requires empathy and rationality, two elements that politicians of the right-wing, many of whom believe they are “populists,” lack. With the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, an overwhelming majority of those political leaders who have seen their popularity rise are those who cared more for the health and safety of their constituents than in the value of stock market shares. Continue reading
Children arrive in this world unthinking and empty-headed, like idiots. We have to teach them how to be smart and knowledgeable thinkers like us. Continue reading
As the world contends with the deadly pandemic of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, the Chinese embassy in the Kazakhstan capital of Almaty has issued its citizens a warning about an unknown pneumonia that has seen a spike in infection cases since last month. The novel pneumonia spikes are in Atyrau and Aktobe provinces and the city of Shymken. Continue reading
A federal court late Friday struck down the Trump administration’s attempt to erect new barriers to abortion care, this time using the for-profit insurance industry. Continue reading
Useful ways to pass the quarantine time: Since April, in response to the pandemic, I’ve been involved with a series of Zoom webinars examining a number of issues through the lens of COVID-19. So far, we’ve covered everything from mental health and addiction and recovery to the search for a vaccine. Continue reading
The Biden campaign held an online event on Wednesday, July 8, pitched as the former vice president’s “vision for Venezuela and Venezuelans in the U.S.” Spoiler alert: his vision for Venezuela barely differs from President Trump. This event, which didn’t merit an appearance from Biden himself, was aimed at getting Venezuelan-Americans to volunteer for “Uncle Joe”, as Representative Darren Soto (D-Fl) called him. It was an hour and a half of shilling for votes and influence, and it demonstrated that when it comes to Venezuela, policies of regime change, sanctions and a refusal to engage in dialogue unite VenezolanosConBiden (the group hosting the event) with MAGAzuela (the term for Trump-supporting Venezuelans). Continue reading
Saturday’s New York Times headline boldly exclaimed, “PRESIDENT IS ‘NOT ABOVE THE LAW,’ JUSTICES DECIDE.” But then the Supreme Court majority found a way not to apply the law to Trump’s defiance of Congress. Continue reading
The University of Pennsylvania was founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1740 to serve as a center of liberal arts education to train the next generation of colonial American leaders in commerce, government, and public service, three disciplines that were never mastered by one of the university’s graduates, Donald Trump. In fact, according to the information provided in the blockbuster book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” by Dr. Mary L. Trump, Trump’s niece and a clinical psychologist, the University of Pennsylvania should invalidate Trump’s Bachelor of Science degree in Economics because Trump paid a friend, Joe Shapiro, to take his college admission SATs. A sharper mind than the simpleminded Trump, Shapiro’s performance on Trump’s SATs earned Trump admission into Fordham University for two years and a follow-on transfer to Penn. Continue reading
Wednesday, July 1, was meant to be the day on which the Israeli government officially annexed 30% of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and the Jordan Valley. This date, however, came and went and annexation was never actualized. Continue reading
What exactly is going on? Continue reading
For the world’s super rich, the thrills don’t come cheap. But they do keep coming—even amid a pandemic. Case in point: this past Monday night’s historic Sotheby’s art auction, the first-ever “hybrid” sale of high-end artwork. On site in London, Hong Kong, and New York, socially distanced Sotheby’s specialists took in phone and online bids for four-and-a-half hours of often breathless auctioneering. Continue reading
There is a new contagion sweeping across America, more deadly than the COVID-19 virus released by our collapsing environment, and even more dangerous than the worldwide economic collapse triggered by the pandemic. The widening collapse has undermined our local and state governments, precipitated by their failure to protect peaceful First Amendment protests against racial discrimination and the lack of accountability for police violence allowed by corrupt governments. This new strain of plague is spread by burning and looting, as infected mobs destroy the structure and stability of our communities, eliminate the livelihoods of our working neighbors, and sever access to our own means of survival. The most critical stage will be the imposition of martial law by presidential decree, and the deployment of military and intelligence assets to defeat the righteous resistance of the People to corrupt government and loss of liberty. Continue reading
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed Monday night that he is strongly considering banning the hugely popular video app TikTok. “I don’t want to get out in front of the president, but it’s something we’re looking at,” he told Laura Ingraham. When the Fox News anchor pushed him further, asking if anybody should download the app, he responded, “Only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.” Continue reading
Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle. Continue reading
Addressing the horror of police officers who kill innocent people will get nowhere until we find a better way to identify and eliminate psychopaths who apply for work in law enforcement. Continue reading
Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t. Continue reading
Don’t think that the president of the United States is a racist, catering to the worst elements in American society? Trump’s racism is a matter of record and every supporter, business tycoon and apologist knows this is a fact. He is as close to an American dictator that the United States has had in modern history; Benito Mussolini, to be exact, mixed with a with a sprinkling of the Adolf Hitler’s philosophy. Trump’s racism extends to corporate boardrooms, financiers and others who have gotten rich off his tax cuts and the trillions doled out by the Federal Reserve to salvage US business during the pandemic of 2020. Continue reading
When President Clinton dropped 23,000 bombs on what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999 and NATO invaded and occupied the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, U.S. officials presented the war to the American public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population from genocide at the hands of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. That narrative has been unraveling piece by piece ever since. Continue reading
There is a critical solution to where America can vote during the pandemic—and beyond. Continue reading
America’s dirtiest three-letter word may now be “CEO,” and our ongoing economic meltdown is only making that tag even dirtier. Chief executives the nation over have spent this past spring scheming to keep their pockets stuffed while their workers suffer wage cuts, layoffs, and even death by COVID-19. Continue reading
Donald Trump said last Thursday’s jobs report, which showed an uptick in June, proves the economy is “roaring back”. Continue reading
When those of us who are white are asked to engage with anti-racism, we are being asked to do something emotionally difficult: understand how we have benefited from a system that disadvantages and hurts others, so we can help dismantle it. Continue reading
Most everything The New York Times claims about nations on the US target list for regime change is suspect at best, a gross perversion of reality at worst—state-approved propaganda over truth and full disclosure. Continue reading
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday slammed the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate for refusing to act to address the coronavirus-induced public health and economic crises that continue to intensify, throwing millions more out of work, overwhelming hospitals, and endangering countless lives. Continue reading
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10 reasons why defunding police should lead to defunding war
Posted on July 15, 2020 by Medea Benjamin and Zoltán Grossman
Since George Floyd was murdered, we have seen an increasing convergence of the “war at home” against Black and brown people with the “wars abroad” that the U.S. has waged against people in other countries. Army and National Guard troops have been deployed in U.S. cities, as militarized police treat our cities as occupied war zones. In response to this “endless war” at home, the growing and thunderous cries for defunding the police have been echoed by calls for defunding the Pentagon’s wars. Instead of seeing these as two separate but related demands, we should see them as intimately linked, since the racialized police violence on our streets and the racialized violence the U.S. has long inflicted on people around the world are mirror reflections of each other. Continue reading →