So why do I reprise the moldering life of John Lilburne now, during the time of a genocide that his country and my own have armed, funded, and run interference for, when the words that describe the horrors we’ve witnessed are being criminalized, and it’s become dangerous to speak or write about what you see happening and how you feel about it and even more perilous to act, in even small ways, to try to stop it.

For nearly two days, the NYPD covered up the fact that one of their officers had fired a gun inside Hind Hall, while they were arresting students. Ultimately, the shooting was only revealed by the New York City DA’s office. If you call in the NYPD, you can pretty much guarantee there will be bang-bang…Is there any doubt now that the NYPD raid did more damage to the buildings at Columbia than the students? The people who invited these cops on their campus should never be guardians of students again.

2024 will be the warmest year on record, the year warming topped 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s the year the US set new oil and gas production records, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It’s a year that saw the US re-elect a climate denier who vows to double US oil production over these record levels, assuming that’s even possible.  It’s a year that saw two of the most destructive hurricanes in US history roar back-to-back across the Gulf Coast. It’s the year the temperatures in the Atlantic basin shattered records, the Arctic Ocean went ice-free, and the Atlantic Current continued to collapse. It’s the year a tropical cyclone demolished the French colony of Mayotte, killing as many as 10,000 people. It’s the year the UN climate conference, held in the oil city of Baku, failed to reach an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels and committed to providing less than a third of the annual climate funding needed for developing nations to transition from fossil fuels. It’s the year when CO2 levels hit 425.01 PPM, nearly 3 PPM more than last year’s record high. It’s the year when wildfires in Canada burned all year long.

Lame duck senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cast decisive votes against Biden’s NLRB nominee, Lauren McFarren, ensuring that the Democrats will not secure control of the national labor regulator through 2026 and handing Trump effective control of the board when his term begins. The petulant Sinema, who hadn’t cast a vote since 11/21/24, seemed to enjoy making a final twist of the knife.

+ This x-ray may explain why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in the back… + Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands…What happens when you turn this into the billionaires run it all is they get [...]

It appears that the killer of Brian Thompson left his manifesto etched on the spent casings of the bullets used to gun down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside the Midtown Hilton just down the block from Rockefeller Center: “Delay” and “Deny.” Those two chill words might also serve as the unofficial motto of the $500 billion health industry giant, whose investors Thompson was preparing to address.

Twenty-five years ago this week, the streets of Seattle erupted into the kind of militant protest rarely seen in the US. Over the course of five days, thousands of street activists counterpunched the global managers of neoliberalism in the face at their own confab, humiliated Bill Clinton and took the ruling class entirely off guard. The battle in Seattle became a kind of operational template for the popular protests of the both the right and left that followed in its wake: Code Pink’s anti-Iraq war demos, the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and, even, MAGA. The populist right certainly absorbed more lessons from the Battle of Seattle than the liberal elites of the Democratic Party–to their peril and ultimate doom.

The hysteria over Trump’s election must be tempered by just how awful Biden has been after the entirely predictable, if sinister, decision of the American electorate to return Trump to power. The liberal abreaction to Trump has revealed how thoroughly blind many have been to the vileness of Biden and his obedient circle of advisors and enforcers. If there was a secret Biden waiting until after the election to emerge, it was only a more malicious and baleful version of the Biden we’ve witnessed for the last four years. 

It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump just might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally odious Elliot Abrams.)

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump amplified his anti-war rhetoric. Why? According to the New York Times, internal polling showed that still undecided voters were “six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Either the Harris campaign missed this lurking demographic or, more likely, just didn’t care. Of course, Trump’s still going to give Netanyahu the greenlight to burn Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon to the ground and then target Iran.

Kamala Harris proved too cowardly to even address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a hard campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, or that she’d fought for peace, human dignity and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…

Cockburn used to say, vote for whoever makes you happy, knowing that the vote-counting machines will probably record it for someone you despise. So I filled out my ballot, though not very joyfully, and drove to the drop-off site in our little mill town, where the ballot box was being “monitored” by four MAGA people, adorned in their red hats, who, undeterred by the drenching rain, recorded my arrival on their cellphones and asked to see my ID, a request I replied to with a customary Italian gesture, as I told them had left my papers in Juarez.

More than half of Trump’s supporters don’t believe he’ll actually do many of the things he claims he’ll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris’s supporters hope she’ll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won’t. And that pretty much sums up this election.

A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.

There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…

This week’s vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility in politics what we want when the current government is arming a genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people and deport them?

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams on Tuesday night despite knowing he was most likely innocent of the crime he was condemned for.

Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago. Last month, Miss Sassy disappeared from the sight of her owner, Anna Kilgore, a Trump-Vance fanatic in Springfield, Ohio. After a couple of days, Kilgore called 9-11, claiming that her Calico cat may have been stolen and devoured by her Haitian neighbors, who she’d never bothered to get to know.

So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian or humanist.

A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.

True to form, Trump has now taken to calling Kamala Harris “low IQ” and “stupid,” racist tropes he draws on whenever he’s confronted by minorities, women or both. But for all her faults, Harris isn’t stupid. In fact, she’s demonstrated her ability to swiftly master and deftly deploy the finer points of Clintonian triangulation, the strategy of political bait-and-switch that prioritizes running against the core issues held by her own party, even policies she once enthusiastically promoted as signature features of her own previous campaigns. Pulling this off required some pretty adroit political gymnastics, where Harris had to completely reverse herself without showing the strain over long-held positions on fracking, immigration, asylum, a human rights-based foreign policy, student loan forgiveness, torture, the death penalty, and a single-payer health care system. But she sold these policy retreats so smoothly that the Democratic base eagerly embraced her joyful politics of austerity, aggressive policing and genocide with a smile.

“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man [...]

In 2002, Robert Roberson raced his two-year-old daughter, Nikki, to a hospital emergency room in the east Texas town of Palestine.  Nikki was limp, her skin blue.  Roberson told the emergency room doctors and nurses that the two had been sleeping when he awoke and found Nikki on the floor, having fallen off the bed. The child was unresponsive. Nikki Curtis never regained consciousness and died a few days later.

Deputy Sean Grayson didn’t turn on his body camera until after he’d shot Sonya Massey three times. This is probably why he thought he could get away with saying he killed Massey in self-defense, as she was charging toward him with a pot of boiling water. What Grayson didn’t realize is that his partner’s body cam recorded the entire fatal encounter, showing that the diminutive, unarmed Massey was hiding from the Springfield deputy, when Grayson walked around the kitchen counter, shot her in the face and left her to bleed out. Then he lied about it…lies that were caught on tape and exposed as lies on tape.

Before Biden revealed his incompetence at the debate with Trump, he’d already lost his reelection bid by showing his gross immorality in arming the genocide in Gaza. Biden had been trailing Trump in the polls since last October and deservedly so. His withdrawal won’t redeem his reputation, which will forever be stained by the mounds of dead Palestinian children he helped kill and showed no remorse for.

Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.

Biden held his first press conference in a year last Thursday. His staff had promoted the event all week as a “Big Boy” press conference that would demonstrate to NATO leaders and the American public that his inept performance during his debate against Trump two weeks ago that so terrified the Democratic donor class was merely an aberration and that the President still had the mojo to run the Empire.

When people say, “Joe Biden’s a decent man,” what Biden are they talking about? The man who befriended Strom Thurmond, the man who treated Anita Hill dismissively, the man who plagiarized Neil Kinnock’s speeches, the man who crafted the most punitive and racist crime laws of the 20th Century, the man who voted for the Iraq war and armed a genocide?

I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.

Seymour Hersh said Biden isn’t all there. Thomas Friedman and Jane Fonda were reduced to tears. Rob Reiner, who watched the debate with Fonda in LA in the company of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Biden’s VP Kamala Harris, screamed at the TV: “We’ve lost.” One of the party’s top money-bundlers told Politico: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention or he dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.”

It was, as prosecutors often say, an evidence-rich crime scene. Felicia Gayle’s murderer left behind footprints in her blood, fingerprints, hair, and, most crucially, DNA on the knife used to kill her. The problem was: none of the evidence implicated the person the DA charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the crime.

The entire time Al-Hadi was held in Afghanistan he never saw the sun, never knew what time it was, when to say his prayers or in which direction to say them. Unlike many other CIA prisoners, who were blasted with loud music, Al-Hadi was condemned to six months of silence. From his Quiet Cell, he couldn’t hear street noises, bird songs or human voices. He was living in a void.

+ You can believe whatever you want to but …. the two-year increase in the Keeling Curve of peak carbon dioxide levels is the largest on record. + Why are CO2 levels continuing to soar? Because industrial nations are still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, last year the global consumption of fossil [...]

The Americans knew. The Americans helped. The Americans provided the bombs, the helicopters, the fighter jets, the bullets and the tank shells. The Americans watched the attack unfold. They watched from Biden’s pier. They watched from drones. They watched as the streets filled with blood, bodies and limbs. Afterward, the Americans praised the rescue operation and said nothing about the dead Palestinian children and women. Nothing about the amputees and the eviscerated. Nothing about the three hostages who were also apparently killed in the Israeli attack, including an American citizen.