How ECON 100 obscures the relationships among capitalism, racism and racial inequality. Racial inequality is a glaring, enduring and essential fact about the US economy. But remarkably, mainstream economics (that is, the ECON learned by most ...
Organized labor led no mass opposition to Trump’s presidency or the December 2017 tax cut or the failed U.S. preparation for and management of COVID-19. Nor do we yet see a labor-led national protest against ...
US racism and police violence are intrinsically linked and date back many years, but the militarization of the US police and its use of deadly violence against suspected petty criminals, or even non criminals, is ...
A few weeks ago, I was talking to Noam Chomsky about the state of the world. At one point, Noam smiled and said that he is not aware of any German doctors in Italy, even though both ...
The global economic crisis of 2008 should have taught us a lot about how governments cope with major economic shocks, but the level of analysis in 2020 has been abysmal. (Benjamin Studebaker) We never seem ...
The series of debilitating military setbacks that Libya’s renegade general Khalifa Haftar suffered in recent months have spurred diplomatic activities over the conflict in the country. But the war is far from over. Haftar’s dream of capturing ...
(Benjamin Studebaker) As the coronavirus crisis drags on, it has become popular to declare this to be the death of neoliberalism. If neoliberalism were simply noninterference in the economy, the large stimulus packages passed around ...
(Benjamin Studebaker) There are a number of problems with the strategy of the current protest movement. No one seems to be writing about these problems. This is not to say that no one can see ...
U.S. economic policy now focuses on what is already the worst business cycle downturn since the 1929 crash. As data accumulate, it may well prove to be the worst in global capitalism’s entire history. Capitalism ...
The statues are coming down. The most recent avalanche began in the United States after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police and the uprising it occasioned. In Philadelphia, the city removed a statue ...
(Benjamin Studebaker) A short while ago, we were making political demands on our states, of various kinds. Some of us wanted our governments to do more to stop the spread of the virus and save ...
Congress must act decisively to guarantee health care to everyone in the country. It should do so on moral grounds, it should do so on public health grounds, and it should do so to help ...
Most scientists agree that an unprecedented economic transformation is now needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and avert climate breakdown. (Common Dreams) The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a sharp and sudden shock to the global ...
(David Swanson) Already we’ve seen, as a result of people taking to the streets in the United States: Four policemen indicted. More racist monuments dismantled. Some minimal and inconsistent limit on what the New York Times editorial ...
“After the Civil War, Southern police departments often carried over aspects of the patrols. These included systematic surveillance, the enforcement of curfews, and even notions of who could become a police officer.” On May 25 ...
African Americans and Hispanics have been looted of trillions in reduced pay by racist employers and giant corporations, while their safety, lives and peace of mind have been looted by racist police. (Common Dreams) Looting ...
The war on Vietnam plays an infinitely larger role in history in the common understanding of a typical U.S. citizen than does what the U.S. government did to Indonesia in 1965-1966. But if you read ...
We need the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to be better than Trump. But we also need him to be better than himself. Dear Mr. Vice President Joe Biden, You showed up in public on Memorial ...
The utter failure of private capitalism to prepare for the coronavirus should have surprised no one. Private capitalism, as business school graduates repeat, focuses on profit. The “profit incentive,” they learn, makes private capitalism the ...
(World Beyond War) I’m adding Christian Sorensen’s new book, Understanding the War Industry, to the list of books I think will convince you to help abolish war and militaries. See the list below. Wars are ...
Every advanced democracy in the world has their coronavirus epidemic largely under control except the United States. And we’re on the verge of melting down again because a substantial minority of Americans simply don’t know ...
The U.S. has fumbled its own response to the pandemic at the same time that its greedy and selfish behavior about vaccines alienates the rest of the world. Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war ...
Pompeo’s assertion that Hong Kong no longer deserves special treatment could have wide-ranging economic effects for both states, depending on how Trump decides to proceed. Since the British government divested itself of Hong Kong in ...
Even before COVID-19, the U.S. has had one of the lowest voter turnout rates among developed countries. This is a critical election year, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a voting season unlike ...
Without further assistance from the Federal government, all states will be obliged to make draconian cuts in their budgets. (Common Dreams) Has the Senate Majority Leader lost his faith in the wisdom and predictability of ...
Dan Kovalik’s new book, No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests — which I am adding to my list of books you should read on ...
Biden and policy advisers around him have re-tooled the basic Trump and American foreign policy with slightly friendlier language As America reaches 100,000 coronavirus deaths, President Trump is taking a golf trip and most states ...
(By: Anthony Pahnke & Jim Goodman, Common Dreams) From wasted food to the exploitation of farmworkers, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it painfully clear that this country’s food system must be changed. Politicians must pass ...
While negative coverage of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the pandemic, media outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of the dying in our midst. (Common Dreams) Journalists ...
What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying. At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the ...
On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about ...
On May 13, the Senate failed to pass an amendment to the “Freedom Act” that would have required a search warrant for law enforcement to access a person’s browser information or internet search history. Freedom ...
What complicates Russia’s relationship with Syria, which has sometimes been referred to as a Russian client state, is that two strong-willed, highly self-opinionated leaders are also involved here—Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of Syria Bashar ...
The U.S. government is certainly in the running for worst handling of coronavirus on earth. Where did this grotesque incompetence and indifference to human lives come from so suddenly? What if it was always there? ...
This is part 3 of a multi-article series about the Shark Tank collaborative involving NIH and BARDA Part 1 click here Part 2 click here BARDA’S Involvement Dr Gary Dr Disbrow – Acting Director of ...
Trump considers himself above the law. (Common Dreams) Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has allowed large corporations to run rampant, exploit people, and get away with it. Trump considers himself above the law, boldly claiming, ...
A new contact tracing program was recently unveiled in Massachusetts in partnership with Partners in Health, an NGO with links to US regime change operations, big pharma and the Clinton Foundation. (By: Raul Diego, Mintpress ...
Multinational corporations are motivated by profit, which comes from disease, not people’s health. We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the influenza of 1918. It is forgotten that another pandemic known as “the third ...
(David Swanson) In September 2018, I wrote an article about four women who were running for Congress in four separate districts, each speaking against wars and militarism in highly unusual ways. They later all won their ...
“What we need is not a little tweaking. We need the revolution of values that many tried to find an approximation of in Bernie Sanders. We need a society that empowers and rewards kindness instead ...
Most of the most powerful players in the world of digital surveillance aren’t government intelligence agencies, but private corporations. Technological advances and seismic shifts in the way information is diffused and transmitted have categorized the ...
(David Swanson) I’m not quite as big a fan of the new film “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” as Jon Schwarz is but think he makes some great points about it, as he usually does. The film doesn’t ...
The U.S. President Donald Trump has tied himself and onlookers in knots by his alternating encomiums for and diatribes against China over COVID-19 in the recent weeks. Only he can cut the Gordian knot, and ...
According to the IMF, the COVID-19 related economic downturn of 2020 is the world’s worst since the Great Depression. On April 14, the International Monetary Fund released a grim outlook for 2020, making the COVID-19 ...
Discrepancies in different country’s official death counts relate to decisions as to whether to include deaths that are not directly caused by COVID-19 in the official figures. As of May 1st, COVID-19 has infected more ...
Israel is not a poor country. It is certainly not the poorest in the world. So why is it the top recipient of US military “aid?” (DavidSwanson.org) —Did you know that the U.S. government has ...