This is what happens to anyone who happens to report the types of things that America’s billionaires want to be hidden from the public.
To understand how it happened to me (and has happened to lots of others), an introduction is needed, first, about the American Government:
America’s First Amendment to its Constitution is this sentence: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Today, I took a photo walk around the Welling Court Mural Project in Astoria, Queens, NYC.
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a …
On the Star Trek TNG episode “The Measure of a Man,” humans of the 24th century pondered whether the android Data was sentient, was property, and whether “he” had a soul (which the JAG officer also wondered about herself).
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Really? Or was he joking?
Whenever January rolls around and a new year begins with its implied ending, I think of my father and Albert Camus, both born in 1913. Camus died on January 4, 1960 in a strange car crash, which might have been an assassination according to Italian author Giovanni Catelli, …
In the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s satirical world (“A Modest Proposal”), we might facetiously attribute the recent decline in US life expectancy to a concerted effort to strengthen the social safety net.
Politicians have been maintaining for decades that it would be necessary to reduce social security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits to keep the systems solvent. Leaders of both political parties have urged cutting benefits, changing eligibility requirements, or raising the already-high age thresholds to preserve the reserves for future recipients. Alarmists have persisted for decades, and seniors and the poor have passionately and successfully resisted cuts …
• End of peak cases of COVID-19
• U.S. boycott affects energy transition
• Huawei makes progress in 10nm microchip manufacturing
• World’s largest national park system
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 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: …
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 – …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
