The easy answer is greed, profit, and kickbacks. But how are such actions undertaken so frequently?
One of the most fundamental rationales put forward decades ago by charter school advocates for why charter schools should exist is the so-called “accountability-for-results” bargain. The basic “logic” here is that traditional public schools are “unaccountable failing monopolies” controlled by “self-serving unions” and, as such, families deserve “more accountable school options (charter schools) that deliver better results.” And, if a charter school fails to “deliver results” (i.e., high scores on standardized tests produced by corporations), then …
Human achievement is often celebrated as personal success, but its true value lies in its impact on the world around us. Fourteen years ago, I asked whether our accomplishments serve more than our own ambition. Today, that question is unavoidable. Every degree earned, every promotion secured, every innovation celebrated shapes the world we share — for better or for worse.
I. Achievement Without Responsibility Is Dangerous
Modern society rewards advancement but rarely asks whether our achievements strengthen or weaken the world that sustains us. Knowledge without humility becomes extraction. Expertise without conscience becomes domination. Progress without responsibility becomes harm.
Yeah, this latest column/commentary of mine came out Dec. 31, in the Lincoln County Leader. You have to understand my method, though: while I am a full-fledged communist, I have to navigate my local community. I have already been banned from teaching in the k12 system, at the local community college. I am an unemployable schmuck, here, since a hiring manager could do one Google search and sear through my writings and deem me not only Scarlet Letter ready, but a blight on America, Americanism, Capitalism, the norms of the day….
This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”
Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were …
Revealed for the first time in public is that President Vladimir Putin believes that international terrorism of the radical Islamic type is not the result of Middle Eastern conflict or of regional poverty or of Great Power proxy warfighting. Rather, he thinks it is a form of competition of the Marxist-Leninist type between Islamic and Jewish capital. At least, that’s what Putin told President George W. Bush when they met in China in October 2001.
Also revealed is the consistency of Putin’s three-step method for dealing …
I hear a song in you, comrades. I hear your voices in the streets. I hear you all across the country, your chants and instruments of disruption echoing from every corner. May your tune continue to carry, reverberate, and resonate, stirring and rousing others still. May your thunder continue to amplify and distort until the noise of fascism is drowned out completely. You are already proving that silence and injustice would never ring true of us.
What we do now, wherever we may be, matters more than ever. We know this. We …
Trump’s behavior has triggered a recall of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, based partly on his life, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In the novel, the protagonist’s employer hires an eccentric Bolivian scriptwriter to write soap opera serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter’s success and increasing popularity. The soap operas become more bizarre and reflect the scriptwriter’s descent into madness.
From start of his second ascendancy to king of the kingdom, Trump has exhibited a growing intensity of aggrandizement, internalized success that begs greater accomplishment, and escalations in daring episodes, violations of constitutional norms, and profanity of life. Each day, his disregarding …
Summary
Several global generic ideologies were seeded by the USA-controlled United Nations (UN) of the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the USSR, and were actively percolated into all Western institutions (education, propaganda instruments, law, governance, hiring policies, etc.) (Rancourt, 2019). These delivered generic ideologies became tied to and protected by strong career and institutional interests, but also spun towards absurd and damaging lucrative endpoints (e.g., gender equity replaced women’s rights and morphed into the gender fluidity that feeds a grotesque medical industry). The thus introduced and evolving ideology of climate change is an ideology centered on a fictitious kind …
A new architecture of power is reshaping the world, and the Global South cannot afford to close its eyes.
by Sammy Attoh / January 20th, 2026
Africa and the Global South stand at the edge of a historic turning point. A new architecture of global power has emerged—one built not on armies or invasions, but on algorithms, data pipelines, and invisible systems of digital control. In this new epoch, the greatest danger is not war. It is sleep.
To sleep now is to surrender the future. I. The World Has Changed While Many Slept
The recent operation in Venezuela revealed a truth that should shake every nation awake: a state can be subdued without a single soldier crossing its borders. Air‑defense systems were blinded, a capital city was plunged …
Of course it would take millions of images to convey the full story of the harm done by military bases, foreign and domestic, but a key point is, I think, conveyed by the map above. The countries colored blue or purple have U.S. military bases in them. The countries colored red or purple have been threated with war by the United States or actually attacked or invaded by the U.S. military within the past year.
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza was always going to raise a host of niggling questions. From the outset, the US President made it clear he would be the helmsman of what was essentially an outfit of selected corporate overseers tilling the soil for The Donald’s posterity fund. These anointed sorts have been given the ostensible task of reviving and resuscitating a pulverised, rubble strewn enclave that has seen atrocities aplenty visited upon it. But to what end?
The envisaged structure of control over Gaza, seen as a vital part of fulfilling Trump’s 20-point plan for the …
In an interview with the New York Times, when asked if there were any checks on his powers on the world stage, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
A voice jumps in to ask: “Not international law?”
“I don’t need international law,” said Trump. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Trump’s own morality.
Morality is a set of principles that distinguishes between right and wrong that guide one’s behavior accordingly.
This inquiry into the morality of Trump will leave aside exploration of Trump’s alleged sexual peccadilloes, sexual abuse, …
If the first two weeks of January are any indication, the United States is in for a helluva lot more protests and rallies. In fact, unless the current regime in the White House and their cronies turn over a small forest of new leaves real soon, the price of poster board futures is going to shoot sky high. From a journalistic standpoint, a whole new genre of criticism may be called for — that of the protest critic. In fact, I’ll inaugurate that innovation right now.
“No War for Oil” is one of the most popular slogans in the many emergency demonstrations sprouting up around the world in response to the criminal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela and their forced removal to detention in the US.
For many outraged by the naked military aggression on Venezuelan sovereignty, the abduction is an escalated step toward the capture of Venezuelan energy resources by the US government, given that Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves of any country at this moment.
The argument goes that– when you pull the curtain …
His Gaza proposal reveals a far larger and world-threatening project. It’s a bid to replace the UN— and this MAGAlomania must be stopped now
by Jan Oberg / January 19th, 2026
Original photo by FoxNews
There are moments in political life when the surface events are so loud, so chaotic, so distracting that they obscure the deeper shift taking place beneath them. We focus on the headlines, the personalities, the daily provocations — and miss the architecture being built in the background.
But every once in a while, a document appears, a proposal emerges, or a pattern becomes visible enough that it forces us to stop, step back, and look at the larger design.
Trump’s so‑called “Board of Peace” is one of those …
The US president’s push to acquire the island follows a “long and complex historical tradition of American territorial expansion,” Mats Nilsson has told RT…
Like all new frontiers touted as necessary and worthwhile, the cashless society is advertised as a supremely convenient way to facilitate financial transactions while avoiding such silly inconveniences as carrying cash and scouting for a money dispenser. A cashless society also facilitates inequality, manifests a pattern of conduct easily monitored by both private companies and State agencies, and repudiates the notion of valid tender. It also subordinates its users to a digital ecosystem that can, at any given moment, fail.
The literature on the problems of a cashless cosmos is only growing, …
An in-depth discussion with Jeremy Brecher on the strategy, potential, and challenges of mass social strikes following the Minnesota ICE murder
by Alexandria Shaner / January 17th, 2026
As authoritarian politics harden in the United States, familiar channels of resistance are proving dangerously inadequate. Elections are constrained, courts are under siege, and dissent is increasingly met with repression in the streets. In this moment, questions of power — who has it, how it is exercised, and how it can be withdrawn — are no longer abstract. They are immediate and practical. Labor historian and longtime organizer Jeremy Brecher has spent decades grappling with these questions, and in a recent series of reports, culminating in “Social Strikes: Can General Strikes, Mass Strikes, and People Power Uprisings Provide a …
If you’re planning a visit to the Smithsonian, you may want to go sooner rather than later — before the nation’s most important public history institution becomes another casualty of Trump-era historical revisionism.
For example, on January 10, People magazine’s Charlotte Phillipp reported that Trump complained that his portrait in the Smithsonian Institution’s Portrait Gallery pointed out that he was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.” The White House provided …
With the recent kidnapping of President Maduro by Yankee imperialists, I wonder about how BRICS nations and other countries sympathetic to them such as North Korea and Iran will respond. Venezuela has made an attempt to join BRICS and clearly they are in the socialist camp so I would expect it would be especially important to China. Were BRICS countries and their allies aware of the build-up for the kidnaping and what kind of help did they offer?
(Image by The White House)
In December, U.S. President Donald Trump was awarded FIFA’s newly created “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World” by FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The decision immediately sparked disbelief and criticism worldwide, raising a fundamental question: What does FIFA mean by peace?
If football is truly meant to unite the world, then this prize—and the process that produced it—must be seriously reconsidered.
The awarding of the Peace Prize did not emerge from a transparent or democratic process. It reflects a broader pattern in which the Trump administration has exerted political and diplomatic pressure on international …
“Chinese-style modernization presents itself as a possible alternative path to the Western capitalist model, especially important for Global South countries that are seeking to break free from the shackles of colonization and imperialism.
– The Editors, Monthly Review[i]
China will join hands with all countries to explore ways to reform and improved global governance, working together to forge a bright future of peace, prosperity and progress.”
– President Xi Jinping announcing China’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI) on September 1, 2025[ii]
“The Chinese threat is that it exists. China exists; it will not follow U.S. orders… China can’t be …
After declaring his second presidential victory on 6 November 2024, Donald Trump said of his first term:
‘You know, we had no wars for four years. We had no wars. Except we defeated ISIS, we defeated ISIS in record time. But we had no wars. They said, “He will start a war.” I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’
On New Year’s Eve, 2025, with Gaza in ruins, Trump’s anti-war fervour still burned bright. A journalist asked him: ‘Mr. President, do you …
— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘Speak’ (Bol), translated by Azfar Hussain
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, the United States carried out Operation Absolute Resolve – a large-scale military strike on Venezuela followed by the illegal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. At least 80 combatants were killed defending the Bolivarian Revolution, including 32 Cuban internationalists …
I am told that if I don’t like what “my government” is doing, I should write “my representative.” So I dropped Senator Adam Schiff a note about the US war on Venezuela.
The senator’s reply, with my translations of his Washington-speak (in italics) provided in brackets, is as follows:
I have been opposing the administration’s unlawful use of force against targets [a sovereign country] in the region…the U.S…conducted an operation [act of war] on January 2-3, 2026, to capture [kidnap] the illegitimate [lawful] leader [president] of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro is a thug [not Trump] who has terrorized and oppressed [defended] the …
What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be vacated, either through force or massaged consent, to enable its eventual seizure.
In a January 12 report, the New York Times found that Israel had razed over 2,500 buildings in the Strip since the ceasefire with Hamas commenced on October 10, 2025. These have been initiated on the …
An inevitable trajectory is in play; fascism is imperialism inflicted homeward
by Phil Rockstroh / January 14th, 2026
Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808
Fascists and various authoritarian personality types have a proclivity for playing the victim. Anyone who calls into question their brutal tactics is a terrorist/terrorist supporter who not only places them in mortal danger (i.e., As a rule, clad in body armor, heavily armed, and traveling in a belligerent pack) but the security and welfare of the state itself.
Yet how many ICE thugs have fallen to violent acts? The honest answer: Not one. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Zippity doo dah. Bupkis. A yawning void. A great …
DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod interviewed Ervand Abrahamian on January 11, 2026, about protests in Iran. Discussions also touched on the US invasion of Venezuela, US imperialism, late-stage capitalism, and the European, Russian, and Chinese positions on a possible second round of US/Israeli military attack on Iran. Abrahamian is an emeritus distinguished Professor of Iranian and Middle Eastern history and politics at the City University of New York and the author of many books, including A History of Modern Iran, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, and the forthcoming The Inevitable Revolution.
Charter schools are the main form of school privatization in the United States. As such, they have never been part of a true organic grass-roots movement, that is, they have always been part of a top-down neoliberal agenda right from the start.1It is helpful to study some of the original writings on charter schools from more than 30 years ago (e.g., by Ray Budde, Albert Shanker, Ted Kolderie, Ember Reichgott Junge, and others) to decipher the top-down nature of charter schools. This is why, for example, about 95% of charter schools have not been …
It is helpful to study some of the original writings on charter schools from more than 30 years ago (e.g., by Ray Budde, Albert Shanker, Ted Kolderie, Ember Reichgott Junge, and others) to decipher the top-down nature of charter schools.
The concerns about China and Russia seizing Greenland retells the same nonsense President Donald Trump promoted in kidnapping the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Looking past the spurious narcoterrorism claims against the former leader, it fell to the issue of who would control the natural resources of the country. If we don’t get Venezuelan oil now and secure it for American companies, the Chinese or the Russians will. The gangster’s rationale is crudely reductionist, seeing all in a similar vein.
The obsession with Beijing and Moscow runs like a forced thread through a dotty, insular rationale that repels …
