Battles Over Barley: Australia, China and the Tariff Wars
It promised to be bruising to both dignity and wallet. However brazen Australian politicians have been drumming up support for an international inquiry into the origins of the novel coronavirus, the...
View ArticleThe Other Side of Covid-19
United States, United Kingdom and India are known as the world’s most important democracies with elected leaders in power. At present, the three democracies, their people and their leaders are caught...
View ArticleThe Proliferation of Conspiracy Theories & the Crisis of Science
We’re all familiar with what a “conspiracy theory” is: a narrative of social control in which shadowy groups are secretly rigging events to increase their own power and profit. An apt personification...
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The Long March of the Locked-Down Migrants
Photo: NITYANAND JAYARAMAN. I had to write this song because the world is facing a difficult and turbulent time. At the very hour that some of us implemented the lockdown and bolted ourselves in our...
View ArticleA Simple Solution for the Coronavirus Crisis in Prisons
If you’ve ever had a parent or loved one incarcerated, you know how scary it can be. There’s so much that can go wrong in prison, and neither you nor your loved one have much control over it. Thanks to...
View ArticleRoad Trippin’
I’ve traveled from Burlington, VT to Washington, DC’s Maryland suburbs several dozen times in the past thirty years. In those trips, I’ve traveled by plane, train, bus and automobile. Although my...
View ArticleThe Man Who Cried Wolf
When it comes to the Big Lie, one must turn to the master, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief who theorized: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to...
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Our Friend Eugene Schulman
The Eugene Schulman Reading Room at the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. Our friend Gene Schulman died today. He was in his ninetieth year. Mercifully, he was only...
View ArticleA Pandemic and a Plague of Absurdity
At a certain point in an age of absurdity the normalization of madness becomes so common that it is almost indiscernible to most in the thick of it. Indeed, late capitalism, the stage which is...
View ArticleDon’t Be Black in America
Brown and blue and white and black, All one color on the one-way track. – Bob Dylan The musical ‘West Side Story’ was produced over sixty years ago, and the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim still strike a...
View ArticleCoronavirus and Other US Health Threats? Fund Public Health Not Foreign Wars
How is it that in the richest nation on Earth we don’t have enough masks, gowns, virus tests, and ventilators to serve our front-line healthcare providers in this coronavirus pandemic? Part of the...
View ArticleWhy Israel Fears the Nakba: How Memory Became Palestine’s Greatest Weapon
On May 15, thousands of Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and throughout the ‘shatat’, or diaspora, participated in the commemoration of Nakba Day, the one event that unites all Palestinians,...
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America and the Rise of the Chinese Century
Photograph Source: The White House from Washington, DC – Public Domain News of America’s global supremacy and victory as well as demise are often premature. In 1942 journalist Henry Luce described the...
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Work is Inevitable but its Organization is Not
Photograph Source: Jonas Bengtsson – CC BY 2.0 All human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern, have an important commonality — the need to work. Water, food, shelter and other basics...
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What Stanford University and Fox News Have in Common
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair On April 21, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, one of Donald Trump’s most vociferous supporters, spoke to Stanford University physician-professor John Ioannidis about...
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An Old Story Again: Capitalism vs. Health and Safety
Photograph Source: Southern Foodways Alliance – CC BY 2.0 The U.S. president recently ordered meatpacking employees back into workplaces plagued by coronavirus. He did not order the employers to make...
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Will Things Fall Apart Now or in November?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair “[T]he Republican fraud drumbeat could lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump and his supporters to reject the election results should he lose.” – Michael Wines,...
View ArticleAlex Azar Knows About Diabetes
As soon as the Administration got into trouble because it failed to respond to the plague, it began hunting around for scapegoats. Trump’s calling it a “Chinese virus” put heat on the entire Asian...
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If Nancy Pelosi Is So Great, How Come Donald Trump Still Isn’t Dead in the...
Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain To hear Democratic Party propagandists and anti-Trump Republicans on the cable networks tell it, Nancy Pelosi...
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Factory Farming on Hold
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Covid-19 has infected meat-packers, almost 12,000 of them. At least 48 have died and many plants have temporarily closed. So it seems like a good time to ask, would it...
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