Reagan, Clinton and Tip O’Neill were retirement thieves

Demand an End to the Taxation of Social Security Benefits

Social Security, the retirement program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress in 1936 as a cornerstone of the New Deal programs that were put in place to help Americans struggling with the Great Depression, has been under attack by Republicans ever since it began. In the early 1980s, they finally …

How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit

Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed

How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit. By Dave Lindorff On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest single cost …

A call for a more sane, more humane border

An Encounter on the US/Mexico Border

As gullible North Americans were told of disease-ridden Mexican and Central American rapists, killers and ISIS terrorists invading America from the infernal regions of the western hemisphere, on November 17 and 18, Veterans For Peace and other activist organizations sponsored a two-day border-straddling demonstration in Ambos Nogales, the term that covers both Nogales, Arizona (population …

Pelosi’s deceptive plan to ‘protect’ people from tax increases

Blocking a Medicare Payroll Tax Rise Could Rule Out Medicare-for-All and Bolstering Social Security

In the surreal alternative reality world of the US Congress, there are many bills passed each year that on the surface may sound like good ideas — they even give them high-sounding names like the US PATRIOT ACT or Better Care and Reconciliation Act, that in fact are the opposite of what they claim to …

Provisional ballots

It’s All About Dealing with Voter Suppression

The Republicans, worried that the party may lose two Senate seats, a Governor’s mansion, and probably a bunch more close races for the House over the counting of disputed mail-in ballots and provisional ballots, are drumming up conspiracy theories now. I just drove through Trump Country last night and listened to Fox Radio as the …

Thinking longer-term about the election

Not a Blue Wave, but Perhaps a Foreshock of the Big Blue One Coming

The 2018 election looks at first glance like a wash: Republicans gained seats in the Senate and Democrats regained control of the House with enough of a margin to ensure that they can put some limits on presidential power. But longer term impacts of 2018 are, I believe, more significant. In this election, with President …

Election Special:

Many Rural Citizens Vote Against Their Own Medicaid in State and Federal Elections

This story was written for Tarbell.org. It is being co-published with the Hancock Herald in Hancock, N.Y. and West Virginia Public Radio’s 100 Days in Appalachia.   Fishs Eddy, NY — Most of Betty Rosengrant’s extended family needs Medicaid. They’re also mostly Republicans. Rosengrant, a resident of this little villlage in the Town of Hancock, says she …