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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.

Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the …

How do Trump’s tariffs help? And for who?

There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.

JFK and Israel/Palestine

Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.

In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” That warning, issued …

To this day, she’s remembered as one of the first anti-colonial revolutionaries in Africa. After you’ve read this story of Kimpa Vita, you’ll never forget her name, her commitment to her people, and her uncompromising valor.

Kimpa Vita was just a teenager when she began to challenge the powers that ruled her world.

Born in 1684 in the Kingdom of Kongo, Kimpa Vita grew up in the growing shadow of colonial devastation. Once a mighty African kingdom, the Kongo her people once knew had been torn apart by European encroachment and the …

I want to recommend three new books about abolishing police and prisons. And I want to recommend multi-issue abolitionism beyond those two institutions.

What else would I abolish? Well, a list might start with war, fossil fuels, militaries, prisons, nuclear energy, police, nuclear weaponry, campaign bribery, health insurance companies, the death penalty, the livestock industry, Wall Street, borders, poverty, the NSA, the CIA, the United States Senate, Fox News, MSNBC, the Star Spangled Banner, the cyber truck. I could go on. Lists will vary around the world.

By abolitionism I mean,  primarily, persuading masses of people of the superiority of a new …

The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.
Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:

There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.

1. The first sees the …

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on …

For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).

The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.

Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant …

Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark …

Who will save the Palestinians from genocide? Nobody.
Who will save Americans from moral, political, economic, and social decay? Nobody.

Uncontrolled criminals prance around Gaza and West Bank neighborhoods, shooting whom they want, destroying what they don’t want, stealing whatever pleases them. The locals can’t interfere and the authorities have been told to protect the criminals from harm. Alarmed citizens in foreign neighborhoods organize to halt the criminality and are accused of illegal activity against the criminals, who are portrayed as victims. The appointed U.S. representative to the United Nations, previously a New York congressional representative, designates students who fought courageously to …

“Universal Basic Income Explained – Free Money for Everybody?”

Israel has justified bombing a Gaza hospital, killing civilians, because an injured Hamas politician was there. The laws of war only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.
Israel and its genocide cheerleaders are claiming Israel’s air strike on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza last night – which killed several patients and staff – was justified because a Hamas politician was being treated there for injuries from an earlier Israeli strike.

Israel has also seized on the fact that a …

Real estate has become climate change’s biggest victim. Climate change is attacking America’s most valuable, biggest asset class. For the first time in history there are regions of the country where major property insurers have dropped coverage altogether as elsewhere rates are on the climb, pricing some buyers out of the market.

America’s politicians punted on tackling climate change decades ago, except for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has masterfully delivered more than 290 “Time to Wake Up” climate speeches to the Senate, calling out deniers and demanding bold action. If Congress had been composed of “Whitehouse intellect,” the world climate system …

The Economist is an influential weekly magazine that was founded way back in 1843. But its age hasn’t lent it much ability at all to analyze China’s economy, making embarrassingly bad predictions about this country over the last few decades that show us crystal clear: if you want to understand China and its economy, DO NOT read The Economist.

The magazine has got it wrong on so many major subjects, most recently being China’s huge successes in the AI sector.

Just yesterday they were forced to admit that success, with an article calling China’s AI boom “astonishing,” but just a few …

This is a continuation of my article yesterday “Trump/Witkoff: ‘We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.‘”

In order to keep that article brief, I didn’t there go into the lies about history that Trump/Witkoff expressed, which they got from their Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist-pro-Jewish, or “nazi”-Jewish for short) friends and acquaintances, which includes many of Trump’s political megadonors to whom Trump owes his 2014 electoral victory, and so Trump/Witkoff share those mega-billionaires’ values, which are Biblical values and therefore support Israel against the Palestinians and so …