Too Little; Too Late

After five months of doubling down with Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, the Biden administration now finds itself walking in two directions.  On the one hand, it continues to supply U.S. bombs that fall indiscriminately on both northern and southern Gaza.  At the same time, it air drops food parcels for the hungry.  While President Biden now acknowledges that the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre is “over the top,” last weekend he reaffirmed his unconditional support of Israel, declaring: “I am never going to leave Israel.”
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For America’s Wealthy, a Sweet Start to Our 21st Century

The Bush tax cuts didn’t fully phase in until 2010. In that year, an earlier CBPP reporthad noted, the Bush cuts raised the after-tax incomes of America’s richest 1 percent by 6.7 percent. In that same year, the Bush tax cuts inched up the after-tax incomes of the nation’s poorest 20 percent by just 1 percent. The Trump tax cut in 2017 simply magnified that reward-the-rich trend. Top 1-percenters now stand to gain, on average, an estimated $61,090 in 2025 from the Trump tax giveaway More

Smoke and Mirrors: How Israeli Agitprop Lies Become Fact

That coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the US mass media is distorted by a bias in favor of Israel is hardly news to people more or less in command of their faculties. But events since October 7 have brought to light examples that go well beyond the usual daily distortions to outright lying—lies that rival those of the WMD fabrications used to justify the US invasion of Iraq. More

Oscar’s Ring of Fire

What the Osage delivered were undeniable, unshakeable sonic facts in a literal confrontation of Hollywood’s musical outrages against Native people—not to mention all its other screen crimes against them over the past century. Last Sunday’s Osage performance came just over a half-century after Marlo Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the Oscar ceremony to refuse his Best Actor award for the Godfather because of “Hollywood’s unfavorable depiction of Native Americans.”  Backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that evening in 1973, John Wayne had to be restrained from assaulting Littlefeather. The Academy apologized to her in 2022, two weeks before she died at the age of seventy-six. More