Articles

BY PATRICK MAZZA Photograph Source: Carl-Henrik Skårstedt – CC BY 2.0 Once again, while other needs are squeezed, a federal budget deal will literally starve the poor to feed the military. While new work requirements are placed on SNAP recipients that will drive some from the food support program, the military budget (never call it defense) remains untouched. The recent debt ceiling deal leaves Joe Biden’s $886 billion 2024 Pentagon budget request intact while domestic programs are slashed. In real terms it is the largest military budget in U.S. history, the only exceptions being World War II and the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that came after 9-11. Larger by far than during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or the Reagan military buildup. The real military bud...

BY DON FITZ – STAN COX The preamplifiers of the National Ignition Facility. Photograph Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – CC BY-SA 3.0 Like a third rate zombie movie on Netflix, delusions of nuclear fusion repeatedly rise from the dead.  The cover story in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American by Philip Ball, “Star Power: Does Fusion Have a Future After All?” recycles the corporate line which was broadcast on December 13, 2022.  The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had reached a “breakthrough” in developing an alternative to fission. As Joshua Frank described the hype over nuclear fusion … ...

BY STEPHEN COOPER Photo by Maria Oswalt Objectively, one of the most glaring impediments to President Biden’s reelection for human and civil rights advocates—and activists—is Biden’s unacceptable inaction to effectively use the power of his office to advance death penalty abolition. Two years ago I wrote: “Biden has not commuted the sentence of any, much less every, federal death row prisoner—which many legislators, legal experts, and social justice advocates have urged, and which he can do with a pen-stroke—indefensible inaction that, with each passing day, smacks of pusillanimous political calculation.” No pundit or political analyst can successfully prevaricate away the fact that the Biden administration continues to pursue the death penalty in federal courts—...

BY HENRY GIROUX Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Capitalism has always been constructed on the basis of organized violence. Wedded to a political and economic system that consolidates power in the hands of a financial, cultural social elite, it construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only obligation of citizenship. Matters of ethics, social responsibility, the welfare state, and the social contract are viewed as enemies of the market, thus legitimating the subordination of human needs to a relentless drive for accumulating profits at the expense of vital social needs and the larger public.[1] Driven by a ruthless emphasis on privatization, deregulation, commodification, a sclerotic individualism and ruthless model of competition—neoliberal ...