President Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to roll back established constraints on the U.S. military’s ability to use landmines overseas despite the weapons’ long history of killing and maiming civilians around the world. Continue reading
With just days until the Iowa Caucus, Bernie Sanders is the clear front runner in what is still a crowded primary field. Sanders has gained a lead in the polls in key states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and California. He also leads all candidates in the number of volunteers and small donor contributions, and it’s not even close. The Democratic Party establishment is in a panic about Sanders’ recent success. Sanders has faced an intensified attack from his opponents, yet his popularity continues to rise. Continue reading
Massive natural gas discoveries off the eastern coast of Israel and Palestine is slated to make Tel Aviv a regional energy hub. Whether Israel will be able to translate positive indicators of the largely untapped gas reserves into actual economic and strategic wealth is yet to be seen. Continue reading
Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Americans understand that it was an illegal war based on lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” But our government is now threatening to drag us into a war on Iran with a nearly identical “big lie” about a non-existent nuclear weapons program, based on politicized intelligence from the same CIA teams that wove a web of lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Continue reading
This January, President Trump claimed credit for new figures from the American Cancer Society showing “the sharpest one-year drop in cancer death rate ever recorded” between 2016 and 2017. Continue reading
Chicago’s Bobby Rush and San Francisco’s London Breed have sold themselves to super-plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, the worst stop-and-frisker in history. Continue reading
Writer, scholar and activist Brynn Tannehill came out to say that the United States, particularly under the Trump administration, is already several steps down the path towards committing genocide against certain segments of the population. In a viral tweetstorm, the navy veteran and former defense analyst claimed that immigrants, Muslims, the homeless and transgender people are most at risk, noting that India, Brazil and much of Europe are moving in a similar direction. Continue reading
This is a make or break year for many migrants seeking to improve their families’ financial conditions. They say they’re being persecuted in their homeland, yet they fear being vilified for crossing the border. What to do? Continue reading
Last week, prosecutors in Brazil filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, an internationally lauded journalist best known for publishing leaked documents detailing the NSA’s mass surveillance. Greenwald’s prosecution is an attempt to use computer crime law to silence an investigative reporter who exposed deep-seated government corruption. Sadly, this isn’t the first such effort and, unless we stop this drift to criminalizing journalism, it likely won’t be the last. Continue reading
Negotiating with the US on major issues is an exercise in futility. Continue reading
During the George W Bush administration it was popular in conspiracy circles to speculate that events might be orchestrated which would allow the Bush family to complete a coup against the US Constitution and hold on to power indefinitely. Continue reading
Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Syria since 2012, and their coup against Ukraine in 2014, and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands—America’s subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991. Continue reading
On October 16, 1939, Hollywood director Frank Capra premiered Mr. Smith Goes to Washington before an audience of US senators and House members, Supreme Court justices, journalists and assorted other DC dignitaries. It was an all-star event, sponsored by the National Press Club and held at Constitution Hall. Some 4,000 were in attendance. Continue reading
Censorship is the new normal in America and the West, wanting the message controlled, targeting what conflicts with it for elimination, notably on major geopolitical issues. Continue reading
Details of the US president’s much-touted ‘Deal of the Century’ are scheduled to be announced at the White House today to coincide with visits by Israeli political rivals Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White centrist alliance. Continue reading
Do you remember SARS? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was so contagious; a SARS-afflicted man on an Air China flight in 2003 infected 20 passengers sitting at a distance away from him and two crew members. The simple act of flushing the toilet spread the deadly lung disease and health care workers had to wear HazMat suits to treat patients. Eight hundred people died including Pekka Aro, a senior official with the United Nations. Continue reading
We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination. Continue reading
In 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote a 368-page book called On Revolution—It is a hard slog to get through but basically boils down to one sentence. “It takes a village to raise a democracy.” Continue reading
Last week almost all media failed in their duties, as did the US Supreme court a decade ago, to bring you the true and most important—and unreported—story of this generation in American election politics. Continue reading
The crowing by Donald Trump that he “terminated” the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Major General Qaseem Soleimani, simply because Trump believed, mobster-style, that he had it coming, should remind the world that the United States government stands as the world’s record-holder in either directly carrying out or coordinating with other parties the assassination of political leaders, American and foreign. Continue reading
Is there another country, other than the US, that assumes they have the right to send drones across the border of a sovereign country in order to assassinate a prominent political and military figure of another sovereign country? Of course, I’m referring to the recent US assassination of Iranian General Soleimani while he was visiting in Iraq. Continue reading
On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump was asked if cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is on his agenda. Continue reading
Sixty-one years ago, Walter M. Miller Jr. published A Canticle for Leibowitz. The story spans thousands of years as humans rebuild civilization after a devastating nuclear war. Among the episodes is a conflict between warring nomads and a settled people who rely on cunning instead of arms and introduce hoof and mouth disease into the herds of the nomads. I was reminded of this as I read this account in RT of what appears to be a worsening situation with the coronavirus in China. China’s President Xi Jinping has described the situation as “grave” with the spread of infection accelerating. Continue reading
And so it continues. Continue reading
An advocacy group composed of doctors and medical professionals on Wednesday joined the chorus denouncing President Donald Trump for threatening to slash Medicare and Social Security funding “at some point” should he win a second term in November. Continue reading
As long as the Internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy”—a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon. Continue reading
Billions of US taxpayers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid. Continue reading
To say that there has been some strange stuff coming out of the White House lately would be an understatement. If President Donald Trump knew a bit more about history, he would understand that countries that rent out their national armies to serve as mercenaries usually wind up holding the short end of the stick. There is the example of Pyrrhus of Epirus in the third century B.C., for whom the expression “Pyrrhic victory” was coined, and, more recently there was the British employment of 30,000 Hessian and other German soldiers in the American revolution. Hessian regiments were rented out by their prince to the King of England to pay the expenses of his government. The use of mercenaries by the British was cited by the colonists as one of their principal grievances and the Hessians became the losers in one of the few early colonial victories at Trenton. Continue reading
Hey, Sanders, hey, Warren, hey, Biden and the rest of you. Listen, I know from party divisiveness. As a very (very!) young man, I worked on the campaign staff of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. There now will be a slight pause as you imitate explosions and other sound effects from your favorite disaster movies. Continue reading
Ten years ago, in January 2010, the Supreme Court released its disastrous Citizens United decision. The court, either through remarkable naivety or sheer malevolence, essentially married the terrible idea that “money is speech” to the terrible idea that “corporations are people.” Continue reading
As the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism. Continue reading
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America’s coronavirus: Containing the outbreak of Trumpism
The banality of President Trump’s evil has infected huge swaths of the electorate as well as the federal government. Can it be treated?
Posted on January 31, 2020 by John Feffer
The epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak is widely thought to be a wet market in Wuhan. At such markets, seafood, chicken, and other conventional foodstuffs are on sale alongside live animals. You can buy more than just dogs and cats there. Local epicures also shop for more exotic fare like foxes, badgers, civets, and snakes. Continue reading →