Politics

March 30, 2023 FINALLY!! Trump INDICATED !! I agree that “THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE.” Just not because we’ve finally indicted Trump for a few of his manifold crimes. How’bout the death toll during the pandemic? 17% of the world’s deaths due --->> read more -->>

China spends more on importing computer chips – $260 billion in 2017 – than it does importing oil. President Biden’s recent bans on the export of American-made chips to China as well as a ban on companies throughout the world using American technology to export to China intends to make --->> read more -->>

I can’t seem to forgo comedians. Sometimes a laugh brings brief relief. Stumbled on this typical brief rant (3 minutes) from Lewis Black. A bit of context. This is shortly after the election of Obama. He had run against John McCain in 2008. These are the politicians he is referring --->> read more -->>

Catching up on reading The New Yorker brought me to the January 16th issue and Jill Lepore’s “What the January 6th Report Is Missing”. As noted elsewhere here, I am somewhat possessed by the question of how we can explain that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 after --->> read more -->>

Individualism and Libertarians Americans are renowned for their sense of individual identity and empowerment. de Tocqueville noted this back in the 1830s in his Democracy in America. Hollywood and mass media have mined it continuously. Politicians appeal to it frequently. In my lifetime the position of the individual has been --->> read more -->>

The recent release of a pile of emails, text messages, and memos from within Fox News has raised the Dominion Voting System‘s defamation lawsuit to large public view. Here is a 52-minute discussion between Stewart and Anderson Jones that explores the facts revealed in the data dump, the boundaries and --->> read more -->>

Yesterday as I was taking a walk up and down Warren St. here in Hudson I realized that I had become actively angry about the state of the US and the world. I walked past hotels where a single room would set you back $400 for a night or you --->> read more -->>

The Russian war against Ukraine has produced a lot of noise about the fate of Russian oligarchs. Seizures of the yachts, bank accounts and more. Perhaps we should spend a bit of energy focusing on our own oligarchs, the rich and corporations. Despite all of the noise of the Republican --->> read more -->>

In the midst of the exploding pandemic here in the US we should not be distracted from understanding why we are in this catastrophic mess. Further we should not be distracted from taking action. Our Situation – the dirty laundry list The overall condition of our country is so dire --->> read more -->>

11.28.2021 – revised 11.29.2021 For the last ten years and more I have been studying US history and the current state of our affairs. A significant focus has been on what I refer to as the “actual workings of capitalism”. You can find some of the findings at AmericanDelusions.com. More --->> read more -->>

Ban inequality – the word, the naked word, from our political rhetoric. Inequality is everywhere around us in the media sphere as well as in our day-to-day conversations. Amongst progressive folk one can drop the word like an F bomb and summon up agreeable outrage in one’s interlocutors without saying --->> read more -->>

“A 30-Year Campaign to Control Drug Prices Faces Yet Another Failure Democrats have made giving government the power to negotiate drug prices a central campaign theme for decades. With the power to make it happen, they may fall short yet again.” This is the headline with its tagline in today’s --->> read more -->>

Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in crisis and renewal (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux 2021) has aroused quite a bit of attention and comment in the media. At the heart of the book is Packer’s description of four Americas: Free America, Real America, Smart America, and Just America. The writing is --->> read more -->>

The US is commonly cited as the first large experiment in popular government. Even admitting that it started on the basis of a government of white men that excluded women and non-European men and who enslaved other human beings, it was the first large trial of the idea that the --->> read more -->>

Since I noticed that every day now as many Americans are dying in the Trump Pandemic as died during the 9/11 attacks I have thought about how different public and government reactions have been. 9/11 2,977 people died in the attacks in the US on 9/11/2001. 9/11 brought on a --->> read more -->>

Thursday 12/3/2020 2,977 people died in the attacks in the US on 9/11/2001. The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center reported 2,804 deaths yesterday. As noted earlier, back in February and March of this year one could just say that the pandemic was an act of nature. But after 9 --->> read more -->>

Friday November 6, 2020 – Election Results Still in the Waiting Room As I wait for the electoral machinery to complete its work I am struck by how this election has confirmed that we are in a deep mess with nothing in sight to set us on a more productive --->> read more -->>

Trump and his Republican enablers – the Trumplicans –  are responsible for the pandemic in the US and the nearly 200k deaths that have occurred to date. Comparing the US response with the rest of the world makes it clear that this catastrophe is the direct result of Trumplican policies. --->> read more -->>

It is absolutely clear that Trump and Republicans (Trumplicans) are to blame for the state we find ourselves in. Trump and Republicans can talk all they want about “Wuhan virus” and other racist slurs. There is no other explanation for the tremendous surge in COVID-19 cases across the southern belt --->> read more -->>

The recent upheavals around the killing of George Floyd and police violence more broadly has been surprising in its breadth and scope. In the midst of this, new discussion of reparations has surfaced. I have not actively thought about this topic since the widely read and cited article The Case --->> read more -->>

Anonymity is a plague in our lives, public and private. The web is filled with anonymous material authored by anonymous creators. Facebook is filled with millions of anonymous fake people who are really, it frequently turns out,  paid actors for various political and economic actors. Our local web-based social platforms --->> read more -->>

The May 21, 2020 Issue of the London Review of Books contains a review article, “The Corrupt Bargain” by Columbia U. Professor Eric Foner. It is a wonderful review of the history of this peculiar institution, The Electoral College. In the midst of his survey of the history of the --->> read more -->>