The Base Heather Stroud
Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People Charles Derber
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
What does the GIG economy signify?
The following is the Introduction to my new book, At the Lost and Found (Clarity Press).
My dear mother, who had an artistic temperament that tended at times toward the sentimental, liked to call me a contrarian. She was right. I think she liked but feared this inclination of mine that started in childhood. It no doubt has many roots, some of which an artful reader may sense in the essays in this book, for while I have written …
Olfactive Implications
Apparently, he is addicted to it. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, adores using perfume. The variety: Dior Eau Sauvage. Dior states that the perfume is characterised by notes of Calabrian bergamot and Papua New Guinean vanilla extract. The company is also keen to glorify elements of power and nobility in the scent.
Apparently, the use of that particular fragrance by the France’s head of state happens to be “industrial” in application, “at all hours of the day”, intended to impress “less-accustomed visitors” with “the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful.” A former aide is quoted as claiming …
Former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter usually provides excellent analysis of geopolitical events and places them in a morally centered framework. However, in a recent X post, Ritter defends a controversial stance blaming Iran for US and Israeli machinations against Iran.
What is worse than censorship?
Donald J. Trump is reinstating protectionist rhetoric, using tariffs as a tool for reindustrialization, political pressure, and wealth redistribution, while the American elite continues to support him, despite the potentially devastating effects on the global economy.
Is Trump turning his tariffs against the United States’ historic allies? One doesn’t have to be a genius to see that. At the same time, the local elite stands by Trump, seeing him as a savior, even when stock market indices on Wall Street fall or the competitiveness of American businesses declines.
Why did America have to resort to tariffs (taxes on imports)? The reason is …
There are no winners in a tariff war, the Chinese president has said
As Americans prepare their taxes for Tax Day on April 15, remember that the U.S. government continues to spend the citizen’s money to fund mass violence against Palestinians. What could the U.S. fund instead of more weapons to Israel? In collaboration with our partners, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights-Action (USCPRA), we updated our visual series, Fund Care Not Killing, to show that the $17.9 billion in military funding that U.S. lawmakers sent to Israel to fuel genocide in 2024 could have been used to fund housing, healthcare, education, and solar electricity for …
An epiphany.
The Trump administration’s EPA has put the home insurance industry, home mortgage industry, real estate industry, and individual homeownership on notice that the rules are changing against their best interests. Already, before these negativePreview (opens in a new tab) changes to EPA policy, radical climate change has forced insurance companies to eliminate home coverage in regions of America. (“Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters,” ProPublica, April 10, 2025)
The Environmental Protection Agency has thrust a dagger into the heart of American homeownership, and the home insurance industry …
9 April marked the 80th Anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Denmark.
Of course, it never occurs to anyone to ask why Denmark and so many other countries …
There is very, very much to like about the recent (3-24-2025) article in Jacobin by Branko Milanović entitled “What Comes After Globalization?”
First, Milanović explores historical comparisons between the late-nineteenth-century expansion of global markets and trade (what he calls Globalization I and dates from 1870 to 1914) and the globalization of our time (what he calls Globalization II and dates from 1989 to 2020). The search for and exposure of historical patterns are the first steps in scientific inquiry, what Marxists mean by historical materialist analysis.
Unfortunately, many writers — including on the left — take the more …
The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth. The crime fit the skull.
With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases. A paper published …
On 7 April, a Mondoweiss headline ran as “Trump announces surprise Iran talks during Netanyahu meeting.”
United States president Donald Trump had met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss “Gaza, tariffs, and the alleged nuclear threat of Iran.” As for the latter, Trump said that the US is having direct talks with Iran on nuclear weapons and announced that there would be a “very big meeting” with important officials on April 12.
Said Trump: “I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the …
If we’re going to divide the voting public into two warring tribes, we should understand what allegiance to each of the major parties actually represents. Here we look at the ‘R’, next the ‘D’.
History adds clarity and perspective.
Here is the U.S. Federal Income Tax Rate Schedule from 1963.
Back then, if your gross income was $4,000 or less, you paid a 20% rate. If your gross income was $400,000 or more, on the earnings over $400,000 you paid a …
Comes the Reality Television Messiah
Victor Brauner Totem of the Wounded Subjectivity II, 1948
Because the one, agreed-upon faith in the US, internalized in the belief system of all too many of the nation’s citizenry, is monetary fundamentalism in combination with perpetual (shallow, distraction-inducing) entertainment — there would come to pass the inevitable entrance of the figure of a Reality Television Messiah i.e., the persecuted by the Pharisees of the Deep State and pronounced politically dead yet risen Donald J. Christ.
Inevitably, within the spectrum and attendant actions of a fundamentalist/authoritarian belief system, a witch-hunt, e.g., ICE’s …
SETTING: Rome
DATE: March 411 CE
SCENE: Ruins of the Diocletian Baths
PRINCIPALS: Four habitués gather in the remains of the tepidarium
The foursome is made up of local cognoscenti – self-styled pundits who gather to exchange impressions of what’s happenings in the imperial capital. All the normal chatter about the rising cost of housing, what gladiator is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), the relative merits of the Diocletian thermae and the Antonine thermae on the sea at Carthage, gossip on the latest political machinations and the reports from the endless war against the Sassanids in eastern Syria is eclipsed by the calamitous sack of …
What we’re witnessing is the calculated use of emergency powers to concentrate power in the hands of the president, enrich the Deep State, and dismantle what remains of economic and constitutional safeguards.
Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.
Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.
Having inherited one …
Some people think that U.S. President Trump does terrible things because he isn’t smart enough to know better, but I shall document here (via the links, including the links within linked-to articles), that it doesn’t take any sort of genius to know better than Trump what he is doing and saying.
On April 8, Glenn Kessler, the ‘fact-checker’ for the Democratic Party billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, headlined “Vance’s whopper on alleged Social Security fraud: The vice president falsely claims that 40 percent of calls to a retirement …
War tax resisters are taking to the streets to call for an end to genocide and protest a president who is exceeding his authority. They are divesting from the taxes that fund war and investing in people, planet, and justice.
The US supports Israel with over $3 billion in military aid each year and has provided more military aid to Israel than any other country since the end of World War II. The endless US war on terror continues with drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen. This is often forgotten, but a certain text thread recently reminded the public of this …
I am not just a survivor, but a witness. A witness to destruction, resilience and countless stories of suffering and survival. So many stories will never be told, so many names will never be remembered.
The Occupier asked us to surrender, but I don’t know what surrender means anymore. The war took away my ability to choose, instead I endured. Every tear marks the beginning of another story, every pain marks the birth of hope. I was pregnant when the war began, and for months all I knew were hunger, thirst, heat …
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Gaza on March 23. It all came to light from a video that the IDF did not intend anyone to see, filmed by Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan in the last minutes of his life. Caught red handed, the wires and levers of justification, mendacity and qualification began to move.
The pattern of institutional response is a well-rehearsed one. First came the official claim that the troops only opened fire because the convoy approached them “suspiciously”, enshrouded in darkness, …
President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But critics say Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.
The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected …
If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces. — I.F. Stone
Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the twentieth century—so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The Project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention—and praise—from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, …
These top Washington think tanks are lobbying lawmakers for sadistic sanctions on some of the hemisphere’s poorest countries while raking in millions from corporations and arms makers.
Sanctions are a form of hybrid warfare that harms or even kills the target populations at little cost to the country imposing them. In Latin America alone, US sanctions (correctly known as “unilateral coercive measures”) have …
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take …
Japanese Americans gather at Santa Anita Assembly Center in 1942 shortly before being shipped off to one of the 10 internment camps set up …
Withdrawal Symptoms
Europe seems to be suffering paroxysms of withdrawal, notably when it comes to international conventions. Many states on the continent seem to have decided that international law is a burden onerous and in need of lightening. Poland, Finland and the three Baltic states, for instance, have concluded that using landmines, despite their indiscriminately murderous quality, somehow fits their mould of self-defence against the Russian Bear. That spells the end of their obligations under the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention. Lithuania’s government has thought it beneath it to continue abiding by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, withdrawing last month. …
Antarctica is coming apart, crumbling into the sea, much, much faster than anybody ever thought possible. After all, it was only a couple of months ago when polar scientists called an extraordinary emergency meeting to discuss shocking developments: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Source: Our Science, “Your Future: Next Generation of Antarctic Scientists Call for Collaborative Action,” Australian Antarctic Research Conference, November 22, 2024).
Another more recent new study using data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program is now overshadowing those panicky voices of polar scientists in November 2024. The new …
