By J.M. Opal | – Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. Nixon was a bully, a cynic and a crook who did all kinds of damage to American politics and society, not to mention to Cambodia and Vietnam, too. And yet he had a sense of obligation to his office — and to the Republican […]
Archives for December 2019
Who’s Afraid of Medicare for All?
Not ordinary Democrats or independents — just insurance companies, lobbyists, and old-line politicians.
Fossil Fuels cause Climate Crisis and Wars: Turkey forces Israeli Ship to leave research on Cyprus Undersea Gas
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Daily Sabah is reporting that a couple of weeks ago the Turkish navy made an Israeli research vessel leave the territorial waters off Turkish Cyprus. The island has been divided politically into a Greek-speaking Cyprus and a Turkish province since the 1974 Turkish invasion. Since 2011 there have been […]
A Coup against Trump? Or Trump’s Coup against the Rule of Law?
(Foreign Policy in Focus) – Donald Trump says that impeachment is actually a coup. It’s one more example of his attack on the rule of law. Coups have been one of the greatest threats to democracy. The people elect a daring leader willing to take on the status quo. And then, as in Iran in […]
Now that Australian Wildfires are choking its Cities with Smoke, Can we Finally talk Climate Emergency?
By Blanche Verlie | – I moved to Sydney less than five weeks ago and the city has been shrouded in smoke haze on and off since then. I joke this is my “Sydney hazing” but it’s only now – having worked on climate change for over a decade – that I’m suddenly feeling burnt […]
The Disunited Kingdom
The General Election in the United Kingdom on Thursday 12 December produced a major earthquake in British politics. Although opinion polls had shown either a narrow majority for the Conservative Party or a hung parliament, and the gap between the Conservative and the Labor parties had narrowed during the last few days of the campaign, […]
From Tory Landslide to Trump non-Impeachment: Can Filthy Rich Liars sink Democracy in Britain and the U.S.?
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The danger to democracy posed by our new information system plus our new levels of wealth concentration cannot be overestimated. The degree of inequality both in the US and the UK is now virtually unprecedented, as is media consolidation. That is, fewer and much wealthier people own more and more […]
Afghanistan War and ‘War on terror’ rage on because the West won’t learn from 20 yrs. failure
By Paul Rogers | – Eighteen years ago the head of the UK’s military warned against relying on military solutions alone. But governments still aren’t listening. Things are not going as well in Afghanistan as the US government would have you believe. Not from a US point of view, anyway. This week The Washington Post […]
World’s Worst War: Can South Yemen’s Warring Factions Make Peace amid Saudi-Emirates Rivalry?
By Stasa Salacanin | – At the beginning of November, warring parties from Yemen’s south reached a power-sharing deal which aimed not only to defuse tensions among Arab alliances in South Yemen but was also seen to as a step closer towards ending the war in the country. The tensions between the Saudi-backed Hadi government […]