Новости за 06.04.2018

Two Right-Wing Coups in the Americas You’ve got to hand it to Hillary Clinton.  In 2016, she helped put the right-wing racist, sexist, nativist, authoritarian, and nationalist oligarch Donald Trump in the White House.  She and her operatives did this in two ways: (1) by rigging the presidential primaries against the popular progressive Democrat Bernie More

Are the federal taxes coming out of your wages and due this week killing you? Sadly what’s rhetorical for US tax payers is gravely literal for people of eight countries currently on the shooting end of the US budget. More

Universal basic income, a regular unconditional cash payment to the whole population is increasingly being discussed in social, political, academic circles and among citizens in general. People are championing it from right and left. But, if it’s being pushed from both ends of the political spectrum, what’s its secret? Is it so amazingly convincing that all differences between political extremes are abolished? Hardly. More like it, the fact that basic income is being hailed from such different political... Читать дальше...

+ The good news: Trump is pulling US troops out of Syria. The bad news: Trump, playing out his Black Jack Pershing fantasy, wants to put them on the Mexican border. Trump’s foreign policy strategy has been incoherent, but he’s always been quite clear about wanting to create a police (super-police) state on the home More

The U.S. is a very rich country.  The Federal Reserve estimates household net worth at $94.8 trillion at the end of the Q1 2017, with the nation’s overall total assets at about $225 trillion. In the World Inequality Report 2018, a study by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the More

I live next door to the world’s biggest gun manufacturer. Here in Mexico, the murder rates are close to civil war levels. They broke records last year, for a total  of 41,217 homicides, with 25,339 first degree murders over the course of the year. And those are the official figures – which if anything, tend to More

Among the reasons why MSNBC, CNN, NPR (its slogan should be: “my choice for conventional wisdom and pro-regime propaganda|”), the handful of comparatively progressive columnists whom The New York Timesand Washington Postdeign to publish, and other exponents of “liberal” thought have become harder than usual to listen to or read since Donald Trump became president More

Left Out, a podcast produced by Paul Sliker, Michael Palmieri, and Dante Dallavalle, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left.   The Hudson Report is a new weekly series produced by Left Out with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every episode we cover an economic or political issue that More

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral; begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. —Martin Luther King Jr. “Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. More

It is rare for meetings in academia to be labelled as “mandatory.” But the memo summoning all the faculty and staff to participate in “ALICE (active shooter) training” made it clear that we were required to attend. I was told by a representative of my faculty union that I could be disciplined by the college More

As Palestinians continue to struggle under the heavy, deadly hand of U.S.-sponsored Israeli oppression, the world’s governments mainly ignore them. This is business as usual for most governments, including U.S. officials, many of whom are ‘PEP’ – Progressive Except for Palestine. March 30 is Land Day in Palestine, a day commemorated annually to mark events More

The United States is in a major upheaval. Trump’s cabinet shake-up moves the country into an alarming direction. From the nomination of torturer Gina Haspel as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director and a vocal opponent of the nuclear deal with Iran as new secretary of state, his selection exposes the More

There are currently several characters of clownish tendency on the stage of international affairs, with others waiting in the wings for an opportunity to prance forward and perform their antics.  The most recent addition to the Western cast is the new National Security Adviser to President Trump, John Bolton, who isn’t so much a clown as More

That teeth-jangling noise you can hear are the fingernails of nuclear power corporations scraping across window ledges in a last, desperate attempt to cling on. It’s a lost cause. Nuclear power is falling to its none too premature death. It just won’t go quietly. Instead, like Steve Martin’s unforgettable character in The Jerk, the mantra for More

Last year the iconic investor, Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, penned his annual missive to shareholders. It contained this nugget: “Above all, it’s our market system – an economic traffic cop ably directing capital, brains and labor – that has created America’s abundance. This system has also been the primary factor in allocating More

The United States government views human rights not as the foundation of human dignity but as an impediment to corporate profits. — Haley Pedersen & Jodie Evans, AlterNet, January 11, 2018. In the United States of America it’s all about the quantity, not the quality, of so-called freedom. That may be because only a few More

It’s been a trying second half of March for black men facing the U.S. justice system. On March 18th, 22-year old father of two was killed by police in his grandmother’s yard, after police responded to a vandalism complaint. As further information unraveled, including the police’s mutingof their body camera following the shooting and an More

Patriots, Traitors & Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, Stephen Gowans’ latest book on the Korean conflict, could not be more timely given the recent tensions on the Korean peninsula as well as the recent overtures being made for peace and reconciliation.   The book is also a very good antidote to the anti-DPRK propaganda More

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, More

So it appears the British are our last best hope of stemming the blood-dimmed Putin-Nazi tide that has shaken the foundations of Western democracy since Hillary Clinton lost the election. The neoliberal Resistance in the United States, led by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media, fights on, but it’s a losing More

Eight hundred thousand people participated in the March for Our Lives rally in Washington on March 24th, say organizers with the #NeverAgain movement sparked by the Parkland, Florida school massacre. The turnout was impressive — but will it lead to new gun legislation? History suggests no. But victory is achievable — if rallies are sharpened More

If thinking big were all it took to be a success, then Cooperation Jackson would be one of the biggest successes ever seen. It is far too early to know what the future will hold for what must be the most thorough-going experiment in economic democracy in the United States today, but no one can More

Ride-hailing firms Uber and Lyft contract with drivers, who after paying their expenses, get a median hourly pay of $3.37 an hour (half above and below), according to a draft paper by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. That sum is less than half of the federal More

Corruption is an enormous, worldwide problem measured in the billions and trillions of dollars. Yet the true cost of corruption goes far beyond mere dollars and cents. Democracy is best served when elected officials are wholly committed to representing the public interest When government is for sale, it destroys public trust in democratic institutions and More