I’m guessing that being rich is a comfortable feeling—no money worries, you’re set for life! But is it possible that being too rich can be too much, even discombobulating? Continue reading
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Rich and clueless? Buy a $500,000 armored car
If you’ve got more money than you can spend, you can spend your extra wealth on… guarding your extra wealth.
Braggadocio in the White House, carcinogens in our neighborhoods
In Trump America, science no match for ‘free market’ fundamentalists and CEOs chasing windfalls
Earlier this month, still another one-day-wonder of a Twitter storm surfaced and quickly sank in Donald Trump’s America. On January 9, President Trump claimed credit for new figures from the American Cancer Society that show—between 2016 and 2017—“the sharpest one-year drop in cancer death rate ever recorded.” Almost immediately, the American Cancer Society politely pointed out that the Trump administration had nothing to do with this encouraging decline. Continue reading
Bernie Sanders’ people-powered campaign is on fire
The Bernie 2020 campaign is a crucible of broader activism from the grassroots that can spark uprisings of heat and light.
To corporate media, Bernie Sanders is incorrigible. He won’t stop defying the standard assumptions about what’s possible in national politics. His 2020 campaign—with feet on the ground and eyes on visionary horizons—is a danger to corporate capitalism’s “natural” order that enables wealth to dominate the political process. Continue reading
Drone strikes leave innocent widows and orphans
The killing of Iranian General Soleimani was big news. There were a few points made in the Western mainstream media about its legality being dubious, but nobody seems to be concerned that it contravened international law, in addition to be totally amoral. One wonders if any of the drone operators, the little key-tapping techno-dweebs thousands of miles away, were awarded a medal for their gallantry in prodding buttons to blast human beings to shards of flesh and bone. Continue reading
Pompeo in fascist Colombia
Fascist Colombia is a narco-terrorist state, providing an illicit drug super-highway to the US and other countries. Continue reading
Warmonger Cotton accuses antiwar think tank of anti-Semitism
If you wonder what the post-Trump Republican Party will look like, take a glimpse at Tom Cotton, one of the US senators from Arkansas (where I live). Cotton has waged a relentless campaign for war against Iran and has supported every horror produced by the US foreign-policy establishment for the last 20 years. He makes other American hawks look like pacifists. Cotton once said that his only criticism of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where people are held indefinitely without charge or trial, is that too many beds are empty. Continue reading
George Washington’s advice to us is now even more timely
U.S. President George Washington’s final words to his fellow Americans, upon leaving office, are now even more timely than when he spoke them, but have been ignored in practice for many decades; and the most recently published popular book about that speech ignores the most enduringly important part, so this part of Washington’s Farewell Address will be quoted from here, and will be placed into its historical context, so as to make clear what the central meaning in that speech is for our times, and for all times. Continue reading
‘Welp, glad that’s settled’: Global poll finds majority believe capitalism more harmful than good
The majority also said they believe they won't be better off five years from now.
A global survey out Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos shows that over half of respondents believe capitalism in its current form does “more harm than good.” Continue reading
Iraq must free itself from self-serving foreign hands
It needs an inspirational leader and a constitution that does not pander to sectarianism
Divided loyalties, competing ideologies, sectarian rivalries and foreign interference combine to tear Iraq apart. This once powerful Arab state that stood as a buffer against Iranian expansionism is in urgent need of a unifier, a strong and charismatic figure who can bring together Iraqis of all faiths and sects under one flag. Continue reading
Two meat-related diseases that could become epidemics
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
Executive Power: Alan Dershowitz’s imagination versus the Constitution
“The Constitution,” Alan Dershowitz claims, “allocates to the president sole authority over foreign policy (short of declaring war or signing a treaty).” Continue reading
America’s greatest hero: Martin Luther King Jr
On the occasion of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I think it’s important to compare his accomplishments to that of others lionized in our culture as heroes. Continue reading
China’s growing economic miracle a mirage?
Or… everyone pays the Piper
In emulating the American economic raison d’etre, China has attempted to develop its unique capitalist model while ignoring that it too will soon suffer the same fate for the same reason: Unsustainable debt. When examining the recent realities of Chinese banking and finance over the past year it seems the steam that president Xi Jinping touts as powering the engine of his purported economic miracle of a master-planned economy is only a mirage, now almost completely evaporated before his eyes. Continue reading
Pompeo unveils a U.S. “Murder, Inc.” to deal with U.S. opponents around the world
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution still echoes the dire warning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered in a January 13 speech. The speech, titled “The Restoration of Deterrence: The Iranian Example,” set forth a new policy of deterring “threats” to American interests by carrying out future political assassinations like that of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Al Quds Force commander Major General Qaseem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport. Pursuant to this same new policy, the chief treasurer for the Quds Force, General Abdul Reza Shahlai, narrowly escaped assassination in Yemen by American military forces. Continue reading
Human Rights Watch disinformation
In cahoots with its wealthy donors and imperial USA, Human Rights Watch (HRW) operates as a mouthpiece for powerful pro-Western interests. Continue reading
Trump calls retracting harmful tariffs a US/China ‘trade deal’
The first thing to understand is that it is not a trade deal. It is Trump backing off his tariffs when he discovered that the tariffs fall on US goods and American consumers, not on China. Trump is covering his retraction by calling it a trade deal. China’s part of the deal is to agree to purchase the US goods that it already intended to purchase. Continue reading
Analysis of 30 years of single-payer research shows Medicare for All would absolutely save us money
‘Across the political spectrum, there is near consensus among these economists that a single-payer system would save money.’
A comprehensive new study that reviewed nearly three decades of existing analyses shows implementation of a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All could dramatically reduce costs in the United States, with savings likely experienced in the first year and definitely over the longer term. Continue reading
Trump: Make space great again
The U.S. military is creating an imaginary 'space gap' to pour money into closing, wasting funds while increasing the risk of conflict.
With a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump created an entirely new branch of the armed forces last year. It’s the first new branch of the U.S. military since 1947. Continue reading
Red flag nation: Anti-gun laws, sanctuary cities and the Second Amendment
We never learn. Continue reading
Sealed off and forgotten: What you should know about Israel’s ‘firing zones’ in the West Bank
A seemingly ordinary news story, published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on January 7, shed light on a long-forgotten, yet crucial, subject: Israel’s so-called “firing zones” in the West Bank. Continue reading
How do billionaires make money? By having money already
The world’s billionaires don’t grow their bank accounts with hard work. Their money does the work for them.
As Ray Charles wailed in a song of true-life blues: “Them that’s got is them that gets/And I ain’t got nothin’ yet.” Continue reading
#CNNisTrash trends as pushback grows against oligarchic election meddling
The hashtag #CNNisTrash is the number one trend on Twitter as of this writing due to the network’s appalling treatment of Bernie Sanders in Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Iowa. Continue reading
It is remarkable—and dangerous—how little scrutiny Biden has received for supporting Iraq war
Maybe there's a reason nobody who voted in favor of that war—excluding George W. Bush—has won a presidential election.
While Biden and his surrogates like John Kerry continue to falsely claim that the former vice president and U.S. senator was not for the Iraq invasion, the Bernie Sanders campaign has rightly highlighted more documentation—such as this video—of Biden’s support for the Iraq invasion both before and after it happened. Continue reading
Freedom Rider: Solidarity with Moms 4 Housing
Black women in Oakland confronted the austerity regime head-on by seizing the housing their families need. Continue reading
US deterrence: Code language for endless wars on humanity
Washington’s criminal class is bipartisan. Continue reading
They like to get the landmarks
In the 2016 science fiction sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, actor Jeff Goldblum, describing the targeting priorities of aliens invading the Earth, says, “They like to get the landmarks.” In both Independence Day and its sequel, movie viewers were treated to scenes of macabre-looking extraterrestrials destroying the Empire State Building, the White House, Los Angeles’s Tower Records building, and London’s Tower Bridge and “the Eye” wheel. Continue reading
A brutal Trump makes culture war on Iran—and everyone else
Civilization gets sucker punched.
There’s an old joke about how Richard Nixon was the kind of politician who’d cut down an endangered giant redwood, then climb on the stump and make a speech about conservation. Continue reading
Biden, Buttigieg, and corporate media are eager for Sanders and Warren ‘trash talk’ narrative to take hold
It would be a serious error for progressives to buy into corporate media portrayals of the Sanders and Warren campaigns as destined to play a traditional zero-sum political game.
Corporate Democrats got a jolt at the end of last week when the highly regarded Iowa Poll showed Bernie Sanders surging into first place among Iowans likely to vote in the state’s Feb. 3 caucuses. The other big change was a steep drop for the previous Iowa frontrunner, Pete Buttigieg, who—along with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden—came in a few percent behind Sanders. The latest poll was bad news for corporate interests, but their prospects brightened a bit over the weekend when Politico reported: “The nonaggression pact between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is seriously fraying.” Continue reading
And we allow this madness to continue
Try as I did, I found it impossible to send New Year’s greetings to friends in Iraq given the unthinkable and shameless actions of Trump and his regime the last weeks. His decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qasim Soleimani at the Baghdad airport led to the Iraqi Parliament voting to expel all foreign troops from Iraq. Trump’s quick response to that was “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.” Continue reading
The endless war with Iran
The current crisis might be averted, but the longer U.S. war with Iran continues
The United States has been in a 40-year cold war with Iran. Continue reading
Trump’s escalation imperils innocents
While an eerie, surreal calm has fallen over US-Iranian relations, I wouldn’t assume we’re out of the woods yet. Trump had no reason to be confident that Iran’s response to his most recent escalation of violence would be little more than symbolic. Although he’s accepted that response more or less passively for now, with Trump, things can turn on a dime. Who can tell what determines his mood at any given time? Continue reading
How to be a mentally sovereign human
Posted on January 23, 2020 by Caitlin Johnstone
We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn’t make head or tail out of. We were then taught what’s what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier. Continue reading →