Plutocracy

( Otherwords.org) – Again and again, studies show that the richer wealthy Americans become, the shorter the rest of us live. What do the folks at the U.S. Census Bureau do between the census they run every 10 years? All sorts of annual surveys, on everything from housing costs to retail sales. The most depressing […]

Investment

Trump’s Economic Sanctions: War by Another Name

H. Patricia Hynes

(Informed Comment) – In early 2019, the White House threatened to invade Venezuela, take down the government and replace it with their choice of president and political party. Though no missiles have been fired and no bombs dropped on the country, our government is waging a war by other means, namely criminal economic sanctions, to […]

China

China: How the Republican Imperial Presidency Led to Trump’s Trade National Socialism

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump has put US companies on alert that he might force them to withdraw from China, where they have $256 billion invested. He says he is given this power by the 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The Republican Party has spent over a century […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Hide the Real Plot, of Corporations against our Health

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump came to power in part because of weird conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, and he is still at it. This pollution of our information system with ridiculous charges against the Clintons, or the Obamas, or any number of other bêtes noires, is a form of misdirection, a technique used […]

Donald Trump

Racist Billionaires, Patriotic Socialists, Climate Emergency and the Fate of America

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – As I turn 75, there’s no simpler way to put it than this: I’m an old man on a new planet — and, in case it isn’t instantly obvious, that’s not good news on either score. I still have a memory of being a camp counselor in upstate New York more […]

Climate Change

Why We Can’t Address the Climate Emergency without confronting Plutocracy

Inequality.org

By Tom Athanasiou Something has changed, as most everyone in the climate movement agrees, and we have plenty of signposts that track the shift, from David Wallace-Well’s 2017 New York Magazine piece, The Uninhabitable Earth, to last year’s Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, a paper downloaded by the hundreds of thousands. The […]

Inequality

Is Bernie Sanders Right that 3 Billionaires Have more Wealth than Half of America?

Institute for Policy Studies

By Chuck Collins | – And in addition to the 3 billionaires Bernie mentioned, we should also be worried about the expanding fortunes of multi-generational wealth dynasties. The wealthiest 3 billionaires in the U.S. –Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population […]

Climate Change

Politicians are Choosing Corporate Polluters & Planet Wreckers over Our Welfare: Can we Make them Stop?

OtherWords

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson | – (Otherwords) – From the White House to Ohio, too many politicians care more about protecting toxic industries than their constituents. I spent the summer of 2015 knocking on doors across Cincinnati. As a rising college sophomore, I’d joined a group called Ohio Citizen Action to canvass for my community and […]

Neoliberalism

How Neoliberalism & Privatization are Driving our Crises, from Guatemala to Moscow

John Buell

To the corporate media, history goes back only as far as yesterday. Thus the media portray the chaos and violence in Central America as though this is just a case of stuff happens. Or all of a sudden millions decided to come north in search of a better life. And these exculpatory views survived even […]