Monday
By Bev Conover
If the corporate media had raised a ruckus over the fact that some 50 members of the Electoral College were illegally seated and just one US senator had joined with one member of the House to challenge the certification of the electoral vote, Donald Trump might not be taking the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20.
By Dave Alpert
In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote the folk song, “This Land is Your Land,” a song that is still sung by many well-intentioned folk singers.
By Wayne Madsen
If the last name of the individual offering up news or intelligence is Kagan, Friedman, Kristol, Rubin, Brooks, Cohen, Goldberg, Podhoretz, Ledeen, Woolsey, Krauthammer, Goldfarb, Hayes, Senor, Zakheim, or Weiss, it should simply be disregarded as fake.
By John Klyczek
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the eminent “free market” economist, Milton Friedman, referred to the tragedy as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” into a privatized system of “school choice” competition. Heeding Friedman’s call, education reformers have converted approximately 90% of the New Orleans school system into a network of for-profit and nonprofit charter school corporations that are integrated through Louisiana’s two P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils: the College and Career Readiness Commission and the Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence. Now, nearly ten years later, this 90% privatization overhaul is being touted as a model for a total charter privatization takeover of the United States national education system through P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils.
By Michael Winship and Bill Moyers
Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.
Tuesday
A sad parody of Joseph McCarthy waving fistfuls of blank paper in the early 1950s, insisting they were lists of Communist spies.
By John Chuckman
The single most important point to keep in mind about the “Russians did it” three-ring circus underway in Washington—after the essential fact that still no proof has been provided to support accusations coming from the highest level—is that there is no issue around the contrived notion of interfering in an American election or endangering American security. None.
By Emanuel E. Garcia, MD
Mark Twain is reputed to have said that whenever a politician opens his mouth a lie jumps out, and whenever he closes it he cuts one in half.
There's a way to keep our short attention spans and Trump's norm-shattering behavior from damaging the republic: ‘Expose and Oppose.’
By Steven Harper
Americans are living through the dangerous effort to normalize the abnormal candidate who won the presidency with a record popular vote deficit of nearly 3 million ballots. Donald Trump has about the same popular support as losing candidates Michael Dukakis (1988) and John Kerry (2004). But that won’t slow him down.
By Philip A Farruggio
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 satire of the same name (without the question mark)was meant to be a warning for Americans during the height of Nazism in Germany. Lewis understood how easy it can be for fascist movements to grow during tough economic times. He observed it in first Italy and then more powerfully in Germany, culminating with Hitler being appointed chancellor in 1933.
By Linh Dinh
I last saw Vietnam in 2001. Back then, Saigon had no American fast food joints save a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long-term foreign residents were few, and mostly confined to the Ph?m Ngu Lão area. There were no foreign stars in the just-established professional soccer league.
Wednesday
By Jack Balkwill
For corporate media to be successful at lying to us on behalf of the portfolios of their owners, board members and advertisers, they must pretend to offer diversity in their reporting so as to convince the majority that different sides of issues are being aired.
By Dana Gabriel
As Donald Trump prepares to become U.S. president on Jan. 20, the future of NAFTA is in doubt. He has promised to either renegotiate or withdraw from the trade agreement. Despite the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, there are still many different existing North American integration mechanisms that remain in place.
Many are hoping that the same organized outrage that lead to the Republicans' backtrack on the ethics rule change can also pressure lawmakers to rethink other unpopular—and outlandish—policies
By Lauren McCauley
Republican leaders racing to tear down as many as 20 million (pdf) individuals’ healthcare without providing a replacement, it turns out, also don’t want the American people to know how much the repeal will cost.
By Linda S. Heard
I’m no fan of the US President-elect Donald Trump but whether or not he’s cut from presidential cloth is for Americans to decide, and indeed, they have. Now, as his inauguration looms, the frustrated losers and disapprovers, among them President Barack Obama as well as Congressional dinosaurs, have ganged up to mount a campaign aimed at throwing barriers in front of his policy decisions and are set on delegitimising his win in the same way they are alleging Russia has done so as to scupper Hillary Clinton’s chances.
By John W. Whitehead
Let’s talk about President Obama’s legacy, shall we?
Thursday
The frightening rise of authoritarian populism in the West is a very real, clear and present danger.
By Mike Lofgren
The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate historical precedents to be certain.
Successfully resisting Trump requires united action toward a common goal, thoughtful strategy and flexible tactics.
By Steven Harper
Ordinary citizens searching for the convenient satisfaction of immediate necessity are Donald Trump’s unwitting allies in an unseen war on democracy. It’s difficult to blame them. Most Americans are busy leading frenetic lives. In sound bites, they receive what passes for news; there’s no time to confirm its veracity. Politicians like Trump tell them what they want to hear; it pleases them. But quick solutions displace efforts to understand complicated challenges for which there are no easy answers.
Some documents are no longer the property of the U.S. government, giving lawmakers the ability to hide critical information from an investigation
By Lauren McCauley
Amid the uproar over the Republican Party’s attempt to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics, a little-noticed rule change was passed that guts an essential element of government oversight.
By Margaret Kimberley
The word contradiction explains much of what seems inexplicable as Donald Trump prepares to take office. It may seem strange that progressives are quoting the CIA with great enthusiasm or that Fox news host Sean Hannity is lionizing Julian Assange. These events are logical at the moment when the system is cracking under its own weight. The contradictions have become quite acute.
By Wayne Madsen
Senior officials of a Republican presidential campaign committed outright treason against the United States when they secretly met with envoys of a foreign government to lay the groundwork for the defeat of the Democratic presidential candidate. We are not referring to the unsubstantiated charges about the 2016 presidential campaign leveled against Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Friday
A raw and sometimes darkly comic survey of America’s treacherous political terrain
By John Chuckman
The books about “The Wizard of Oz” were written as satire on American politics, but Hollywood, in its inimitable way, turned them into a song-and-dance picture for children. Still, one scene in the film has a sense of the author’s intent. That scene is when Dorothy, in Emerald City, approaches a closet-like structure, which, as it happens, is the Wizard’s control booth for sounds and smoke and lights, his special effects for intimidating visitors and impressing them with non-existent power.
A new movie reminds us of past racial injustice as a new administration tries to roll back the clock.
By Bill Moyers
As the Senate hearings for Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general ran into their second day, I kept thinking about the movie Hidden Figures, which my wife Judith and I saw three days earlier. The film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly about three African-American women in the early 1960s who lived in the segregated South while working on NASA’s first manned space missions.
By Edward Curtin
On January 4, 1960, Albert Camus died in a car crash at a point when he thought his true work had not even begun. He was 46 years old. He had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, among other works. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet he felt that in his writing he had to hide behind a mask that stifled him. After all these successes, as well as criticism from the left and right French intelligentsia, he was looking forward to a time when he would be able to speak his own truth without the mask of depersonalization—to enter a period of création en liberté.
By Ramzy Baroud
Long before December 28, when Secretary of State, John Kerry took the podium at the Dean Acheson Auditorium in Washington, DC, to pontificate on the uncertain future of the two-state solution and the need to save Israel from itself, the subject of a Palestinian state has been paramount.
Are we going to let interest group politics undermine public safety?
By Jill Richardson
The incoming Republican government is waging a war against regulations.
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