It is one year since an anonymous op-ed appeared in the New York Times. The author claimed to be part of a group of “senior officials in the administration” who are “working within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.” The op-ed’s portentous title, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” conjured up an image of a sweating bureaucrat tapping madly away on a laptop beneath his desk in a dark office, darting anxious glances at the door while wondering who will play him in the movie. If only the op-ed could have broken off in a strangled scream, it would have been perfect. More

Those deserving of a Peace Prize should be seen as assisting in the reworking of an otherwise violent human culture. As it presently stands, this higher ideal is being ignored in order to award the Peace Prize to those who may have “contributed to peace” in a much more narrow fashion—a peace that is often lacking justice and thus short-lived. In some cases the winner turns out to be someone who, like Alfred Nobel himself, was also a purveyor of war or other forms of violence. More

The crux of Labour’s antisemitism controversy is the bruhaha over its grudging acceptance of the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism”. The media’s coverage of this controversy was framed by 2 assumptions: that under Corbyn antisemitism in Labour had become “institutionalized”, and that Corbyn and his associates had failed to counter this. More

Economic problems weigh heavily in Cuba. The Cuban people continue to face shortages and their incomes remain low, despite recent pay raises. The government’s foreign debt is growing and access to credit is limited. Cuba is overly dependent on food imports despite land tenure reforms. The U.S. economic blockade targets foreign investors through implementation for the first time of Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Law More

Contemporary Republican politicians like to invoke the legacy of Ronald Reagan to bolster their policies. However, the type of White nationalism being espoused by Donald Trump and his supporters more accurately traces back to two less appealing Republican personalities: Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and to the backlash created by the Civil Rights Movement of the nineteen sixties. More

The problem is that the Green New Deal does rely on one bit of magical thinking—the techno-optimism that emerges from the modern world’s underlying technological fundamentalism, defined as the faith that the use of evermore advanced technology is always a good thing. Extreme technological fundamentalists argue that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. More

Our pundit class have to decided to make a crusade out of forcing Senators Warren and Sanders into saying that their proposals for universal Medicare will require a tax increase. Both have repeatedly responded by saying that total costs for the vast majority of people will fall, since Medicare for All will lead to a large reduction in costs by all accounts, because it reduces waste in the health care system. More

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is adding lies on top of lies to cover up his backing of the Iraq invasion. At last week’s ABC/DNC debate Biden lied about his Iraq record, just like he did at the first two debates. In the July debate, Biden claimed: “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress.” More

The corporate media talking-head commentary on the third Democratic presidential debate last Thursday night focused on two things: Beto O’Rourke’s call for a federal confiscation of the nation’s assault weapons and Julian Castro’s attempt to humiliate Joe Biden by suggesting that the former vice president had forgotten what he said about his health care reform program two minutes before. More

Last week the corporate media were going all out to lionize former Marine General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis in tandem with the publication of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, his memoir of his lengthy career (Co-authored with former Undersecretary of Defense, Bing West, also a marine officer and veteran of Vietnam). As this celebratory gala of war and warrior hood lapses yet another military idol will have joined the pantheon. When George H.W. Bush launched Desert Storm in 1991 and “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” he also claimed to re-elevate the glory of the American way of war whereby the exceptional U.S. would defend the underdogs of the world against the predations of Hitlers reborn. Thereafter “Mad Dog” Mattis’s career would unfold. More

If there is an upside to Brexit, it is this: it has made it increasingly hard to present Jeremy Corbyn, contrary to everything the corporate media has been telling us for the past four years, as anything but a political moderate. In truth, he is one of the few moderates left in British – or maybe that should read English – politics right now. The fact that still isn’t obvious to many in Britain is a sign of their – not his – extremism. More