The Trump election debacle demonstrates the bankruptcy of the current leadership of the Democratic Party. Faced with a foe who has engaged in serial bankruptcy as a business strategy, is a notorious know-nothing bully with a very sensitive ego, and is best known as the red-faced guy on reality TV --->> read more -->>

– The Morning After – The election of Trump and the continued Republican control of both Congress and Senate guarantee that the rich will continue to get richer at the expense of the shrinking middle class and further aggravate conditions for the poor. Trickle down economics and tax subsidies will flow --->> read more -->>

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US standard of living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon is a weighty book in every regard. At 762 pages it is a heavy lift – not beach reading or even bed-time either. But I found it almost a page turner. --->> read more -->>

Now that the quadrennial Presidential election circus has officially passed the first pole, we can take a look at the field. None of the Republicans would even be allowed into my outhouse let alone past the front door. They are all counter-factual, racist, homophobic, religious, free market fundamentalist zealots (excepting --->> read more -->>

Defense Dept. Budget (does not include CIA, NSA, and other departments like DEA that conduct international operations) Military Bases and Personnel (all data from DOD Base Structure Report – 2015) Military Bases Department of Defense Personnel Army – 540,330 Navy – 321,599 Marines – 187,891 Air Force – 312,453 SubTotal --->> read more -->>

The trail of money around Hillary and Bill Clinton and their foundation continues to attract lots of comment and not a few efforts to prove that money changed hands in return for specific acts by Hilary as Secretary of State. Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and --->> read more -->>

Yesterday’s defacto legalization of gay marriage by the U.S. Supreme Court  is a wonderful development. It appears certain that this non action by the court will cascade to all fifty states fairly quickly. This raises the question of why American public opinion has changed so radically in the last 15 --->> read more -->>

The relationship between our financial services industry, our government, and us, ordinary citizens who have repeatedly suffered the consequences of the avarice and incompetence of this industry, has always been troubled. Booms, busts, crashes, bubbles, depressions, inflation. Since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession we have hoped that the --->> read more -->>

The 1/2% of the Population That Run Our Politics Recently I came on a Ted Talk by Lawrence Lessig, “We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim” filmed in February 2013 (18:19 minutes). This typically brief TED talk provides a compelling argument for why the dominance of big money in --->> read more -->>

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment. So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State --->> read more -->>

Recently I stopped at the US Marine Corp War Memorial in Washington DC. Walking around the base with its lengthy list of Marine engagements since 1775, now a double row on several sides, I thought, “How many of these can faithfully be considered to be in defence of the homeland? --->> read more -->>