Articles

BY BERNIE SANDERS The US Senate is now debating an $886bn defense authorization bill. Unless there are major changes to the bill, I intend to vote against it. Here’s why. As everyone knows, our country faces enormous crises. As a result of climate change our planet is experiencing unprecedented and rising temperatures. Along with the rest of the world, we need to make major investments to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into more efficient and sustainable energy sources, or the life we leave our kids and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and precarious. Our healthcare system is broken. While the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry make hundreds of billions in profit, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsur...

BY PAUL STREET Never underestimate the Democrats and the American System’s capacity to let the slithering orange monstrosity off the hook and back into power. Many of the nation’s liberal talking heads and pundits want you think that the US bourgeois electoral and constitutional system is working because the fascist leader and putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump is now under multiple criminal investigations and has been indicted twice so far – in Manhattan for the payment of hush money to safeguard his path to the presidency in 2016 and at the federal level in Florida for his handling of classified documents since his departure from the White House. Indictments are now apparently imminent for his brazen attempts to subvert and reverse the 2020 presidential ...

BY LAURA FLANDERS Photograph Source: Earth100 – CC BY-SA 3.0 How do you nurture the soil, feed hungry bodies, and heal hurt people and places in these stressed-out times? In Central Louisiana, a network of Black farmers just may be showing how. They’re engaged in a brave experiment in rice growing, regeneration and repair. It’s all about magic and spirit, says Konda Mason, founder of the Jubilee Justice Black Farmers’ Rice Project. Spending time with the spirits around Jubilee Justice this summer made this city girl see that was true. For one thing, Jubilee Justice is up against history. Black farmers have lost 98% of their land over the last century, according to a Congressional report. Louisiana’s growing fields are hot, humid and haunted by all the B...

The former US president suggested that Joe Biden is not fit for purpose in his role as Commander in Chief Former U.S. President Donald Trump enters Erie Insurance Arena for a political rally while campaigning for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election on July 29, 2023 in Erie, Pennsylvania © Getty Images / Jeff Swensen/Getty Images Former US president Donald Trump took aim at Joe Biden at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Saturday, branding his successor in the White House “the most corrupt president in American history.” “We have somebody that’s not at the top of his game,” Trump said of Biden to a fiercely loyal crowd at the Erie Insurance Arena. “Never was at the top of his game. We have a guy who is a dumb son of a b*tch.”  Trump, t...

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF Container ship on the lower Columbia River, heading toward the Pacific. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Early U.S. capitalism was centered in New England. After some time, the pursuit of profit led many capitalists to leave that area and move production to New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Much of New England was left with abandoned factory buildings and depressed towns evident to this day. Eventually employers moved again, abandoning New York and the mid-Atlantic for the Midwest. The same story kept repeating as capitalism’s center relocated to the Far West, the South, and the Southwest. Descriptive terms like “Rust Belt,” “deindustrialization,” and “manufacturing desert” increasingly applied to ever more portions of U.S. capitalism. So long as capitalism’s...

BY MELVIN GOODMA Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain Democratic presidents have a way of reaching out to undeserving Republicans to protect their domestic flanks on the right. Bill Clinton appointed James Woolsey to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1993 in order to gain standing among national security conservatives. Barack Obama retained Robert Gates as secretary of defense in 2009 in order to appease Pentagon professionals. And now President Joe Biden has named Elliott Abrams to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Why in the world would anyone want to resurrect Elliott Abrams? The Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is hardly a well-known bureaucracy, not even to hard-core policy wonks. But it was created in 194...