Latest articles
by Gerald E. Scorse / January 7th, 2023
President Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act earmarks $80 billion over the next ten years for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). According to the Treasury, most of the money will be going toward increased enforcement—specifically, stopping rich Americans from cheating on their taxes.
Yet the same agency has strangely signed off on a huge tax loophole that could put another $50 billion in the pockets of the rich by 2025. Laws enacted in 29 states allow the owners of certain high-income businesses to fully deduct state and local income taxes on their returns. The …
by Steve Lalla / January 7th, 2023
Throughout 2022, monopoly capitalism, with the US at its core, continued to erode from within and buckle under pressure exerted by sovereign states and peoples’ movements alike. Relentless blows reigned down on the empire. These were some of the most memorable:
January 30: Prior to the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the leaders of China and Russia meet, the first visit between Xi Jinping and any world leader in over two years. A Russia–China joint statement heralded the dawning of a “new era,” warned against “the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region,” and …
by Ralph Nader / January 7th, 2023
What follows is an encore for a column I wrote in 2018 for the new progressive Democrats elected to the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party won control of the House in 2018, and again barely in 2020. There was no response nor adoption of any of these power-enhancing suggestions from any of the novice legislators in those two election cycles.
I am now sending to the entering class of 2022 these helpful tools to strengthen both their efforts and those of the citizen groups in the halls of Congress.
The rapidity with which the Democratic Party’s political cocoon wraps itself around …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 6th, 2023
What to make of it? History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind. Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it. The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list. In what can only be described as one of his “Nazi uniform” moments, Prince Harry has revealed in his memoir Spare that he killed a number of Taliban fighters. (In the same memoir, the weak-willed royal blames his brother for the uniform idea, though not for organising the Afghan …
Positive Vibes for 2023
by Ramzy Baroud / January 6th, 2023
When the newsstand of Giuseppe Trani was swept away by massive flooding that devastated the southern Italian town of Casamicciola, near Naples, the 70-year-old man lost everything.
Not for long, though, as the townsfolk, who were also affected by the flooding and landslides experienced throughout the whole region, raised the needed funds to help Trani rebuild his kiosk.
It is incorrect, let alone unfair and fatalistic, to associate the ‘human condition’ with nothing but greed, selfishness and propensity to violence. Though a case can be made for the latter, …
by Greg Palast / January 6th, 2023
The 800-page gorilla of a report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol seems strangely silent on a few matters that, apparently, were a bit too uncomfortable for the Committee to take on.
So, buckle up for a discomfiting ride with our investigative team that has been tracking the insurrectionists for years before the Insurrection.
Rioters on the GOP Payroll
Yes, the Committee did acknowledge our report that, days before the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Trump ‘bro Ali Alexander, riot instigator, declared,
Either they take Trump, prove that they won, or we’re not going to …
by Mickey Z. / January 6th, 2023
We begin this long and winding ode on August 7, 2012 — a classic hot-and-humid Big Apple summer day. I was taking part in a demonstration called “Occupy Saks” and I came within an eyelash of being arrested by seven cops. I’ll get to that shortly.
For now, I’ll explain that the protest was ostensibly against a man named Carlos Slim who, despite such a cinematic moniker, is not a James Bond villain.
Slim is one of the world’s wealthiest humans with a fortune amassed by exploiting the poorest of the …
by Allen Forrest / January 6th, 2023
How should one feel about the corporate globalists’s technocracy?
by Paul Haeder / January 6th, 2023
Oh, the fun of these major Mafia Corporations, and the fun of the paid-off media, and the fun of the Polluted Press, and the fun of the Colonized Public, and the Fun of Billionaires like Gates who have invested billions into genetically modified germs and seeds and Round-Up Ready Death.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease involving several protein mutations in glycine-rich regions with limited treatment options. 90-95% of all cases are non-familial with epidemiological …
by Barbara G. Ellis / January 6th, 2023
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / January 5th, 2023
For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.
Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: …
by Allen Forrest / January 5th, 2023
How many jabs does it take to be immunized? Or will one even become immune despite how many jabs one receives?
by Vijay Prashad / January 5th, 2023
Philip Guston (Canada), Gladiators, 1940.
In May 2021, the executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and the UN high representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, wrote an article urging governments to cut excessive military spending in favour of increasing spending on social and economic development. Their wise words were not heard at all. To cut money for war and to increase money for social development, they wrote, is ‘not a utopian ideal, but an achievable necessity’. That phrase – …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 4th, 2023
Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.
As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.
In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a …
by Paul Haeder / January 4th, 2023
Delusional thinking. Trapped inside a world of knee jerking. Multi-Generational Trauma on steroids. Fear thy self and thy enemy, so self-loathing in a bipolar self-aggrandizing flipping. Yo-yo thinking.
If you attempt to get a bead on the “situation,” you know, THE Situation, it is almost impossible to be and to live and to survive in this society without many forms of media and collective consciousness pollution from flooding even a 9 to 5 and 8 to midnight, M-Sunday worker, busting his butt with two jobs.
The air is a miasma that is impossible …
But kids can learn to fight back
by Claire Nader / January 4th, 2023
When children realize how big businesses are controlling their childhood, their rebellious sense of being exploited connects with their instinct for safety and self-respect.
The commercial pressures descending on our children through relentless direct marketing, radically bypassing parental authority, are at a fever pitch.
It will take more than studies by nutritionists and health specialists, more than congressional hearings, more than repeated findings about harm to physical and mental health to make real changes.
Companies with children’s marketing divisions treat these alarms as so much water off a duck’s back. They continue to pitch junk food, sugary …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 4th, 2023
It just keeps getting darker and darker. For the professionally ignorant, things are only getting better. With one of history’s great events of sportswashing concluded – the 2022 Qatar World Cup – another state famed for its cosmetic distractions and moneyed seductions made a splash. Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, his sun setting and his prospects diminishing among Europe’s top clubs, was signed to play in Saudi Arabia.
He had been seething and fuming at Manchester United, increasingly cast into peripheral, bench warming roles. The …
Or is it reality?
by Allen Forrest / January 4th, 2023
In 2067 one man is on journey to the future to save a dying Earth. Or is it Elysium where Matt Damon as the hero Max is on a mission save the dystopic Earth and the 1%-ers world, Elysium?
How fascism has become an acceptable part of American politics
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / January 4th, 2023
Migrants traveling from Texas arrived by bus outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence in Washington, DC. Fox News
Migrants traveling from Texas arrived by bus outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Fox News[/caption]Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s Christmas Eve political stunt of sending busloads of desperate immigrants, including women and children, to Vice President Harris’ home in Washington is another sign that Trumpism exists without Trump. To many modern-day pundits, the wide-spread acceptance of Trumpism suggests that the seeds of fascism are already taking root in …
Even Before NATO Expansion, the West Sought to Strangle Russia Economically
by John V. Walsh / January 3rd, 2023
The first post-cold war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security structure that would include Russia.
The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”
The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 3rd, 2023
Photo credit: Economic Club of New York
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, known for his staunch support for Ukraine, recently revealed his greatest fear for this winter to a TV interviewer in his native Norway: that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. “If things go wrong,” he cautioned solemnly, “they can go horribly wrong.”
It was a rare admission from someone so involved in the war, and reflects the dichotomy in recent statements between …
Palestine's Supporters Can Gain Control of the Narrative
by Dan Lieberman / January 3rd, 2023
In community devastation, destruction of the Palestinian people ranks with the most severe. A group of foreign people invaded a land, seized property and resources from native people, expelled a mass of the population, and oppressed and controlled the remaining inhabitants. After decades of suffering under extreme oppression, with no end in sight, with oppressors who could live as well in other places, the destruction of the Palestinian people has unique qualities that defy rational thought. Only those who are inattentive to the situation, are genocide deniers, or have agendas that preclude recognition, cannot realize that the willful destruction of …
by Allen Forrest / January 3rd, 2023
by Edward Curtin / January 3rd, 2023
On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination. It garnered a great deal of attention.
Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 2nd, 2023
Another critical year for Palestine has folded. While 2022 has wrought much of the same in terms of Israeli military occupation and increasing violence, it also introduced new variables to the Palestinian struggle – nationally, regionally and internationally.
Palestine, the War and the Arabs
The Russia-Ukraine war starting in February pressured many political entities, including Palestinians, to take sides or, at least, to declare a position. Though the Palestinian Authority (PA) and various Palestinian political parties insisted on their neutrality, Russia’s deviation from the US-led political paradigm in the …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 2nd, 2023
Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.
— Aristotle, Poetics (1457b)
It all seemed familiar. Anthropomorphised Mother Nature in vengeful mood; humans wondering if they might meet a frozen demise in trapped vehicles; the planners taking stock as to how best to cope with grim circumstances. The New York State governor Kathy Hochul was happy to stick her head out in declaring the latest lethal winter storm in Buffalo to be nothing less than a “war with Mother Nature, and she has been hitting us with everything she has.”
Having found her less than imaginative …
China eliminated absolute poverty; it now works toward common prosperity for all
by Kim Petersen / January 2nd, 2023
Yellowknife, Boxing Day 2022
Can you imagine walking downtown in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any other burg in Canada or the United States and not seeing any panhandlers? This homelessness, begging, and dumpster diving is not confined to major urban centers. Last week, I was in Yellowknife, the capital of Denedeh (Home of the People; colonially designated as Northwest Territories), home to about 20,000 souls, where the temperatures ranged from -30° Celsius to -40° Celsius. Despite this, the homeless were out in the …
by William Manson / January 2nd, 2023
If you are dehumanized, I am dehumanized.
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu
How to explain, psychologically, such a bizarre group-fantasy as QAnon–which is believed in by countless millions of Americans? We are witnessing a massive regression to a pre-logical, paranoid delusional system about a secret cabal of evil, devil-worshipping, pedophilic, cannibalistic Democrats. (The scathing irony is that leading Democrats, in complicity with President Bush, were implicated in the very real crimes, of immense consequences, of making war against Iraq.) But, as to QAnon, one is shocked to realize how similar such mass delusions are to the 17th century witch-hunts, …
by Allen Forrest / January 2nd, 2023
Open-minded skepticism is using one’s smarts. One keeps one’s mind open to possibilities, but remains skeptical until solid evidence is forthcoming. In the case of COVID-19, the authorities told people to follow the science. “Follow the science” was an oft heard refrain of Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, but when did he ever lay out the science for people? To tell people to follow the science and not back it up with the science is unscientific. This is faith. The question is whether people will put faith …
by Karnig Kerkonian / January 2nd, 2023
For seventeen days, Azerbaijani special forces and military personnel—masquerading as “environmentalists”—have blocked the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia. They have effectively severed the only lifeline the Artsakh Armenians have to the outside world—a lifeline guaranteed by the Trilateral Statement of November 10, 2020. With 120,000 Artsakh Armenians now completely encircled and isolated, Azerbaijan is poised to rid itself of the entire Armenian population this holiday season, and it will try to do so while Europe sips hot chocolate and watches.
Frankly, it is rare to have the opportunity to witness mass …
