Articles

BY YARDEN KATZ Image Source: Pharaoh and the Midwives, James Tissot c. 1900 – Public Domain Passover and the Tradition of Shifra and Puah This world needs revolutionaries who refuse orders to kill and exploit. Two midwives named Shifra and Puah were such revolutionaries. When a racist ruler asked them to limit the reproduction of slaves – out of fear of a slave uprising – they disobeyed. Shifra and Puah refused to implement eugenics: the practice of exploiting and killing those deemed disposable, while cultivating those that the powerful consider worthy. While eugenics is often presented as a “modern” practice, exemplified by the US eugenics laws of the early twentieth century and later the Nazi regime of racial hygiene, the practice is quite old. Shifra and Puah...

BY HENRY GIROUX Photograph Source: Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) – Public Domain Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. – James Baldwin The long shadow of domestic fascism, defined as a project of racial and cultural cleansing, is with us once again. Americans have seen the ghosts of fascism before in acts of savage colonialism and dispossession, in an era of slavery marked by the brutality of whippings and neck irons, and in a Jim Crow age most obvious in the spectacularized horror of murderous lynchings. More recently we have viewed fascist acts of terror in a...

FacebookTwitterEmailShare On Tuesday, April 4, Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom to hear 34 felony criminal charges against him brought by the Manhattan District Attorney. Trump entered pleas of not guilty to the charges. This is the first-ever indictment of a U.S. president, whether in or out of office. As such, this is an extremely sharp example of the fact that those who rule this country are at each other’s throats. They can no longer rule and hold things together in the way they have since the Civil War. The old ways—the old “norms”—are coming apart. We will be covering this trial as it unfolds—but there are a few important things to point to now, and there is an overall question of how to approach such a serious juncture. First, there is the response fr...

BY JOSEPH GROSSO Photograph Source: Oton Barros (DSR/OBT/INPE), Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, http://www.dsr.inpe.br – CC BY-SA 2.0 Anyone perusing the business press in recent times will have surely noticed that the topic of electric vehicles features predominately on basically a daily basis. A recent report by the International Energy Agency states that EVs accounted for roughly one in every seven passenger cars brought globally in 2022. Norway remains the world leader with around 80 percent of new cars being EVs- thanks largely to a government buildout of charging stations. Iceland currently comes in second with around 60 percent. Both countries are blessed with huge amounts of renewable energy- hydroelectricity for Finland, geothermal for Iceland. In th...

BY TOM H. HASTINGS It’s Budget Season in DC and the swamp is in full bloom. Republicans refuse to offer a budget. Why is that? After all, they are demanding that Biden and his Democrats promise to make major cuts because Republicans are sooooo concerned about the debt ceiling, even though they are largely responsible for much of the massive national debt. What the Republicans don’t want to reveal is that their budget won’t cut the huge items that do nothing for our communities. What the Rs want to cut are relatively small budgets that actually help working Americans. But again and again they vow to “stay strong” on “national defense,” and will vote to increase the DoD budget, already the largest in the world by far, eclipsing the combined total of ...