Politics

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Using behemoth-sized vehicles as weapons, truckers shut down Canada’s capitol city Ottawa and blocked several bridges to the United States, including the Ambassador Bridge responsible for a quarter of the trade — 360 million dollars per day — between the United States and Canada. Car manufacturers including Toyota and […]

censorship

Banning ‘Maus’ only exposes the significance of this searing graphic novel about the Holocaust

The Conversation

By Biz Nijdam | – A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously in favour of removing the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman from its Grade 8 language arts curriculum in January. Maus is based on interviews with Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 […]

Far Right

Could Plea deal and Political Ban of former PM Netanyahu Topple the Israeli Government?

Middle East Monitor

Adnan Abu Amer | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – Israeli parties have witnessed successive developments recently, including the likelihood of a political explosion following a possible deal with Leader of the Opposition and head of the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu. This will have a direct impact on the party itself, and on the […]

Far Right

France’s Eric Zemmour and the Strange Story of Fascist Minorities Promoting Hate of . . . Minorities

Mohammed Samaana

Belfast (Special to Informed Comment) – Before joining university in England, I knew that encountering racism was inevitable. What I did not know was that my first encounter was going to be with a dark-skinned teenager who was with his two white friends when he told me with his English accent “go back to your […]

Authoritarianism

How democracy gets eroded – lessons from a Nixon expert

The Conversation

By Ken Hughes | – Now that a full year has passed since the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, the 2020 election and the republic, it’s evident that the attack never really ended. Instead, it spread out to other, less visible, more vulnerable targets. Donald Trump had hoped to reverse his election loss […]

Left Politics

A Few Magnificent Things That Happened in 2021

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | – ( Otherwords.org) – It would be easy to survey the end of 2021 and see another year in wreckage. There’s the pandemic that won’t end. Rising inflation. Climate disasters. A democracy that looks creakier by the day. And that was before West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hit the brakes on […]

Donald Trump

The Donald Also Rises? The Far Right Continues to Build Its International

John Feffer

( Tomdispatch.com) – What alt-right guru Steve Bannon failed to create, German taxpayers have just stepped in to revive: a Nationalist International. Thanks to the German government, the far right is about to get its own well-heeled global think tank, complete with the sort of political academy that was so dear to Bannon’s plan for […]

Bill of Rights

Bannon Vote: Republicans once Voted to Hold Hollywood 10 in Contempt for Making Leftist Movies but won’t act on Far-Right Plot to Overthrow Gov’t

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Anyone who knows the history of abuse in the Congress’s prerogative of subpoenaing witnesses and holding people in contempt for declining to testify is a little uneasy about the vote today to refer far-right gadfly Steve Bannon to the Department of Justice on charges of contempt of Congress. Mary Clare […]

Crime

Top Trump Fundraiser Boasted of Raising $3 Million to Support Jan. 6 “Save America” Rally

ProPublica

By Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan | – The Insurrection The Effort to Overturn the Election ( ProPublica) – As much as $3 million may have been raised to support the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the attack on the Capitol, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica, with some money […]