Economy

( Tomdispatch.com) – “All Americans owe them a debt for — if nothing else — releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect.” That’s how Howard Zinn […]

Debt

The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Winner (Not You) – Overspending on the Pentagon Is Stealing Our Future

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com ) – 2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country’s indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there’s a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one […]

Corporations

We Deserve Medicare for All, But What We Get Is Medicare for Wall Street

Common Dreams

By Les Leopold | – ( Commondreams.org ) – The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it. Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. […]

Corporations

Tech “Visionaries” are Actually Holding back Progress with Bloated, Predatory Corporations

The Conversation

By Peter Bloom, >University of Essex | – Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon. […]

Plutocracy

A “Delicate Matter”: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears among Rich that He Would Resign

ProPublica

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy | – ( ProPublica ) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court. In early January 2000, Supreme […]

Corporations

How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits

ProPublica

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester | – ( ProPublica) – Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant […]

Artificial Intelligence

Swarms vs. Swarms: How Intelligent, Artificial or Otherwise, is any of This?

Michael T. Klare

( Tomdispatch.com) – A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it’s a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of […]

Far Right

The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority: How Leonard Leo built a machine that is Remaking the American legal system

ProPublica

By Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz | – ( ProPublica ) – The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and […]