Trump ridiculed, then minimized, then delayed the federal government’s response to the coronavirus for weeks. Then finally he wrapped his boastful, confused ego around reality. But Trump is actively pushing programs that will endanger more Americans. Continue reading
As U.S. COVID-19 cases double every few days and the death toll mounts, the U.S. seems to be caught in a “worst of both worlds” predicament: daily life and much of the U.S. economy is shut down, but no real progress has been achieved in its efforts to contain or eradicate the virus. Continue reading
Support for Medicare for All among U.S. voters has reached a nine-month high in a Morning Consult/Politico tracking poll as the deadly and ongoing coronavirus pandemic lays bare the horrors and systemic inefficiencies of America’s profit-driven healthcare system. Continue reading
We still have choices. Continue reading
Can democracy be protected during a pandemic? Even under the best-case scenario now being presented by officials, the United States may lose up to 100,000 people to the deadly COVID-19 virus. In the midst of this outbreak, it has become painfully clear that President Donald Trump has no intention of mounting a truly national response to the coronavirus, leaving the task of saving lives up to local officials. As uncertainty and fear take hold, it’s easy to forget that a national election—a true life-or-death vote—is fast approaching in November. Continue reading
Tunisia is the Middle East’s greatest success story, according to the findings of the V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2019. Continue reading
The coronavirus pandemic has had a deadly toll on the world’s population. However, the pandemic has also seen another, collateral, victim. Various forms of federations, where a central executive should provide an equal safety and health umbrella over all of the constituent parts of the federal entity, have seen the centers shirk their responsibilities and either failed to act for the nation as a whole or played favorites with certain member constituencies. Two of the most egregious failures of federal structures during the pandemic have been two countries led by megalomaniac far-right conspiracy-believing presidents, namely, the United States and Brazil. Continue reading
As millions of Americans await the $1,200 cash payments authorized by the latest coronavirus stimulus package, experts and progressive advocates are condemning a move by the Trump administration which would force millions of seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities to jump through unnecessary hoops to receive money they are entitled to under law. Continue reading
The gross inequalities and declining standards of life in the US are magnified by the corona crisis, pushing already marginalized populations to the brink. Continue reading
On May 1, 1962, President John Kennedy was meeting in the Oval Office with a group of Quakers who were urging him to do more for peace and disarmament. As he kept explaining the great political opposition he was facing within his own government, they kept urging him to do more. He listened very closely to their words and finally said, “You believe in redemption don’t you.” By the next spring he had turned decisively toward the peacemaking the Quakers had urged upon him, resulting in his murder in the fall by treacherous government forces, led by the CIA, that opposed him all along. Continue reading
The second highest office-holder of the great state of Texas, Republican Lieutenant General Dan Patrick, recently proclaimed on Fox News that lots of senior citizens would be willing—or should be, anyway—to sacrifice their lives to coronavirus in order to save the economy for their grandchildren. Continue reading
Contrary to ruminations from far right-wing Republicans, including Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as fundamentalist crackpot Jerry Falwell, Jr., that COVID-19 involves either a willful or accidental biological warfare operation set in motion by China or North Korea, the facts are that the deadly virus involves no military or intelligence service. The fact that every military and intelligence service on the planet has been negatively impacted and severely hobbled by the virus is evidence that there are no strategic military winners and only losers with respect to the pandemic. It is Donald Trump’s senior Republican officials and evangelical supporters who are pushing such nonsense that COVID-19 is a biological warfare attack. It is proof of the paucity of any level of military or intelligence expertise in the Republican Party and the Trump administration. Continue reading
Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus—efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts—in order to minimize business losses. Continue reading
During the 2008-09 financial crisis, banks got trillions of dollars of free bailout money. Ordinary Americans got sold out. Continue reading
Why has China succeeded in getting a handle on the coronavirus while one of the world’s richest countries—the United States—now holds the dubious number one ranking with respect to total cases and new cases? Continue reading
The global coronavirus pandemic has put our economy in free-fall. Continue reading
American author Stephen Crane, who penned a masterpiece about war without having ever stepped foot on a battlefield, once wrote a short story called “The Open Boat.” It was a tale of a handful of survivors of a shipwreck who were stranding aboard a lifeboat, exposed to the elements, thrashing rain and a hot beating sun, which sapped what little strength they’d had. The boat rocks sickly through the open sea, and finally dumps the men into the wintry water as they make for a distant shore. The fittest and strongest of the bunch dies in the deep. The unfit cook, an injured captain, and a despondent correspondent all survive through good fortune. Some say Crane was mocking the ascendent Darwinian worldview, revealing the indifference of nature to our scrupulously mapped destinies and our inflated sense of our own power. Indeed, it seems an apt tale for modern times, when the fittest seem to have forsaken the public realm and left us scrambling through an undertow of political idiocy to evade one crashing catastrophe after another. Continue reading
“The West” is the nations that are essentially controlled, basically dictated-to, by America’s approximately 600 billionaires, who control the U.S. government, by coordinately funding (through their news-media and political donations, and also by their members-only private conferences) the careers of cooperative politicians, and who thereby defeat the politicians who act against increasing the percentage of the nation’s wealth that these few people hold, and against increasing their extractions from everybody else. (Those non-compliant politicians are derisively called “socialists” and equated with the communist Joseph Stalin instead of with the democratic socialist FDR and the leaders of the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries; and America’s dumbest voters, who always tip the ‘democratic’ balance favoring the billionaires’ propaganda, believe this propaganda from these billionaires’ organizations, which equate “socialism” with “communism,” and they think that they live in a democracy, which they don’t. Their beliefs are false both about history and about ideology.) Continue reading
Greetings from the epicenter. We are ensconced in my small downtown Manhattan apartment, social distancing as best we can and, so far, safe and healthy but warned that the worst is yet to come, an “apex” of contagion they believe is on its way over the next couple of weeks. Continue reading
Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo bank, thinks most Americans should return to work in April, urging that we “gradually bring those people back and see what happens.” Continue reading
It was only a matter of time before the anti-Muslim sentiment in India turned violent.
A country that has historically prided itself on its diversity and tolerance, and for being ‘the largest democracy in the world’ has, in recent years, exhibited the exact opposite qualities—chauvinism, racism, religious intolerance, and, at times, extreme violence. Continue reading
The United States has become the new center of the global coronavirus pandemic, with over 80,000 cases, more than China or Italy. More than a thousand Americans have already died, but this is surely only the very beginning of this deadly collision between the U.S.’s exceptionally inadequate public healthcare system and a real pandemic. Continue reading
We’re all now party to the most critical election protection debate in U.S. history, one that has entered the coronavirus stimulus package to the tune of $400 million, which may be just a fraction of what’s really needed. Continue reading
The US is the world’s leading narco-terrorist state—an indisputable fact! Continue reading
The far right thrives on fear. It’s no surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda. Continue reading
A likely scenario that is to follow the ending of the COVID-19 is the incredible stress that people in large numbers might go through on a global scale, symptoms of which can already be seen in the lockdowns being observed in most parts of the world. Continue reading
The US is the world’s only developed country without some form of universal healthcare. Continue reading
The City of Destiny in Apopka, Florida [right] is a de facto entertainment complex for the weak-minded and gullible. It is neither a theme park nor a cinema multiplex. The City of Destiny is one of several megachurches across the United States that always takes advantage of people during a major threat like the COVID-19 pandemic to fleece their congregations and lure into their grips the fearful. Continue reading
You can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Continue reading
The Middle East region, battered by wars and adjoining humanitarian crises that have left millions of people stateless, hungry and diseased, is in urgent need for peace, security and reconstruction. Thanks to the US, Russian, French, Israeli and other weapons manufacturers, however, it is now the dumping ground for military hardware, an ominous sign for the years ahead. Continue reading
Social distancing is hard, and it’s not fun. Continue reading
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COVID: Invasion of the Wealth-Snatchers
Posted on April 6, 2020 by Jane Stillwater
Hold on to your piggy banks, guys! Financial vampires are coming to steal them as well. Continue reading →