Economy

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 […]

Climate Crisis

Getting Mad and Getting Even: Is California’s Climate Lawsuit against Big Oil a Gamechanger?

Juan Cole

Reprinted from Tomdispatch.com : See the original site for Tom Engelhardt’s crucial introduction. ( Tomdispatch.com ) – The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like Saudi Arabia have so assiduously lied to […]

Homelessness

How America Abandoned our Poor: Confronting the Needless Scourge of Poverty

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On the island of Manhattan, where I live, skyscrapers multiply like metal weeds, a vertical invasion of seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a century, they have risen as symbols of wealth and the promise of progress for a city and a nation. In movies and TV shows, those buildings churn […]