'…a major destabilizing influence'
(This artidle was written for The Edge, a publication of Ithaca College’s Park Center for Independent Media.) One of the biggest blacked-out stories of 2021 surely has to be the news, on November 16, that the Pentagon once again had abysmally failed to pass an audit, despite the best efforts of 1,200 top-flight Wall Street …
Continue reading “The Pentagon Fails Its Fourth Consecutive Audit”
We have two examples of economic systems and of individual scientific workers and business people doing what they do that offer a instructive illustrations of why the US is so screwed up, and why it doesn’t have to be that way. The first is the extraordinary new (if unfortunately named) James Webb telescope heading rapidly …
Continue reading “Capitalism and the Profit-Motive Didn’t Create the James Webb Space Telescope”
To hear the podcast of the author speaking about and elaborating on this article in the Nation magazine, in an interview by Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener, click here. The interview begins at the 14:10 point in the podcast. In April 1950, three months before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested as Soviet atomic spies, FBI director …
That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021. Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw …
The shooting death by Los Angeles Police of 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who died in a changing room of a Burlington Coat Factory store in a North Hollywood mall while with her mother trying on a dress for her coming 15th birthday celebration, is an atrocity beyond comprehension. I don’t care what kinds of excuses are …
Ever since the 9-11 attack on the US, people here had this mantra that 9-11 “changed everything.” It’s a gross overstatement of course. The country has been moving steadily into becoming a “national security” state since President Harry Truman launched it with the creation of the CIA and the National Security Agency. Since then, …
In the bizarro world of politics in the United States today, probably the most radical government program that exists — the one most close to a socialist idea that actually works and is popular with the vast majority of Americans — is Social Security. Established in 1936 as a pillar of the hugely popular …
It’s looking like Trump’s three nominees on the US Supreme Court, joining three other Republican appointees to give that court its largest reactionary majority in memory is about to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that gave women the right to an abortion. Such a decision in the current case before the High …
Back on November 11, 1918, with the end of World War I, once the most bloody war in history, and with a two-year deadly flu pandemic raging, caused in large part by the war and the rapid spread of the disease by infected troops returning to their homes, nobody was in the mood to celebrate …
Continue reading “Let’s Just be Honest and Call November 11 Forgetting Day”
The US is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has “completed flight testing” of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being “upgraded” to carry thermonuclear weapons. What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, …
Continue reading “US about to Make Nuclear War Much More Likely”