Новости за 19.09.2018

Bernie Sanders knows full well the life of Eugene Debs and what it says about the U.S. government and the Democratic Party. Sanders also knows the fate of a genuine U.S. anti-authoritarian: At best, they will be shunned—ask Ralph Nader whose phone calls Sanders has not returned since 2000; or in Debs’s case, thrown in prison; or, even worse, they will be assassinated—ask the friends and family of Fred Hampton. More

There are reported to be some 43 million registered Democrats in the U.S. We know, however, that the Democratic Party has been having trouble translating their numbers into continuous electoral success. Why so? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that the party leaders concentrate on recruiting and satisfying a constituency of centrists. More

Remember when our science-challenged president declared that global climate change was a “Chinese hoax”? That his assertion ran against the judgment of 97 percent of the scientific community apparently had no effect upon his foolish and incorrect statement. But now, with killer hurricanes rolling into the East Coast while “super typhoons” clobber the Philippines and western wildfires persist into fall, millions are suffering or worse as a direct result of Trump’s climate change delusions. More

On learning that he was from Afghanistan, I asked my Afghan taxi driver in New York his opinion about the situation in his country. “Americans don’t get it,” he said. “They are not going to succeed in Afghanistan. My father was a warlord who fought the Russians, and I grew up in Afghanistan, so I More

I realize how callous the title of this article sounds. The decline of the middle class, which in recent years has been the subject of innumerable articles, books, and movies, entails a terrible increase in human suffering. The descent of millions of families into relative poverty is beyond appalling, not something to be celebrated. However, More

It has always been dangerous to be a protester and activist for human rights in Saudi Arabia. Readers will recall that Saudi Arabia was a nation created out of whole cloth by the West once its deposits of oil were discovered. Many died during World War II for Winston Churchill’s objectives of exploiting the Middle More

Once upon a time, there was a little-known energy company called Enron. In its 16-year life, it went from being dubbed America’s most innovative company by Fortune Magazine to being the poster child of American corporate deceit. Using a classic recipe for book-cooking, Enron ended up in bankruptcy with jail time for those involved. Its More

This past weekend, September 15-16, marked the 10th anniversary of the Lehman Brothers Investment bank collapse and the subsequent generalized financial system crash that followed. Business and mainstream media flooded the airwaves and print publications with recounts and assessments of the events of ten years past. Most promoted the theme about how the Federal Reserve More

On introducing idiocy as a political category of Austrian exceptionalism; or, why everything remains the same yet gets uglier by the minute. The deed is done. The new coalition government of FPÖ[1]and ÖVP[2]has reunified Austria and Hungary in spirit: neoliberalism and fascism honeymooning. Police, military, and the secret services are answerable to the FPÖ, the More

This is just my gut talking, but I have a feeling Team R would be nuts to push this. I’ve learned, over more than 30 years, not to put my trust in either princes or the power of Utero-Americans. At least a few hundred times (most recently in late October of 2016), I have heard More

If you’ve been paying attention, Trump recently overturned an Obama-era moratorium on mining on US Forest Service lands near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). A fragile and relatively pristine aquatic wilderness, the BWCAW is especially vulnerable to mining pollution and run off, specifically Acid Mine Drainage which is a historically unstoppable problem for More

There is something peculiar doing the rounds in Australian food circles.  The land down under, considered something of a nirvana of fruit and vegetable production despite horrendous droughts and calamitous cyclones, is facing a new challenge: human agency, namely in the form of despoliation of strawberries. The results have knocked Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket chains, More

On September 1st, I came across a story by William J. Broad in the New York Timesthat was intriguing. The story, headlined “Microwave Weapons are Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers”, was about mysterious “attacks” that started in 2016 on U.S. personnel stationed in Cuba who had suffered the equivalent of concussive brain More

Riding the train the other day I couldn’t help but overhear an older man telling a young woman about a dream he’d had the night before. He was the sole diner in a diner, he told her, and he ordered the daily special: a three course meal. The first course was a green salad. When More