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  • America’s Bipartisan Shame

    If hallmarks of economic decline are everywhere apparent, it is Washington’s shameless participation in human genocide that has awakened many an American from their dogmatic slumbers. The United States has been a partner in human slaughter in Gaza, arming and funding, providing intelligence to and political cover for Zionist forces in Israel in their fanatical quest to establish a Greater Israel.

    This blatant moral failing is the surest sign yet that the liberal West has failed. Liberalism was once a symbol of progress, bourgeoisie and workers and rural peasants banding together to overthrow feudalism and the divine right of kings.

    Now it lists in the winds of modernity, an ethical cipher that maintains—like the artificial distortions of Mannerist art—a rhetorical posture of piety. Conservatives declare themselves part of an unfathomable messianic mission to establish mythical free markets and Christian rule, while liberal politicians repeat their multicultural platitudes in data-poor and poorly constructed sophistry that nobody believes.

    Both—through their Republican and Democrat political wings—refuse to acknowledge their culpability, reflecting the absolute arrogance that accrues to those too long in power.

    We Knew All Along

    As the world comes awake to the sickening tango of death being tapped out on the rooftops of Gaza, statements like the following float through the media sphere, unaddressed and unpunished by the world’s leading states:

    • Evidently calling for collective punishment outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation that is out there that is responsible.”

    • Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi said Israel needs to “erase Gaza”

    • Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich transparently disguising ethnic cleansing as “the right humanitarian option”

    • Revital Gottlieb of the Israeli Knesset said, “All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be flattened…We need to stop talking about ‘humanitarian aid’.”

    • Another member of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, added, “Burn Gaza now. No more excuses.”

    • The New York Times reported that American leaders understood that mass civilian casualties were acceptable to Israeli leadership

    • Israeli lawmaker Moshe Saada justified widespread calls to “destroy Gaza”

    Western corporate media has provided extensive cover for Israel’s criminal campaign, often by insisting everyone on air first answer the slighting question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”, as if this is the moral bedrock on which any opinion on Gaza must establish itself. Yet the corporate media deliberately hides the fact that under the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have every right to resist, including employing violent means. None of the international rulings from 1967 onward are included in discussions that are ahistorical at best, farcical at worst. Gore Vidal was prescient when he called America the United States of Amnesia.

    The feigned outrage and disgust by American pundits over the initial Hamas attack, liberal and conservative alike, only illustrates by contrast the utter callousness and emptiness of the public discourse. Seventy five years of oppression, racism, and bloodshed against Palestinians produced no such horror among the corporate intelligentsia.

    And as author Chris Hedges rightly pointed out, “How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?”

    Trump’s Vulgar Sycophancy

    Though not the first to support the present ethnic cleansing, President Trump has embraced the Israeli mission with an enthusiasm that betrays his utter subjugation to those that would keep him in power, notably AIPAC. His love for Israel seems to be the means by which he has made a measure of peace with the National Security State, which wanted him imprisoned in his first term for his friendliness with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

    Now his administration has ratcheted up the vulgarity of American complicity in the Gaza genocide. For instance, he has:

    • Tied state aid to each state’s stance on Israel. This is a despicable policy that hitches domestic support to support for a foreign power, which no American citizen should be compelled to provide

    • Lifted a pause on 2,000-lb bombs, and a couple of ‘human rights’-linked oversight procedures, that had been put in place by the Biden administration as part of its feckless PR campaign to pretend to oppose the slaughter

    • Approved $7B in munitions and $3B in “emergency” bombs in February 2025 alone

    • Continues the Memorandum of Understanding from the Obama era under which the United States finances weapons procurement by Israel from U.S. defense firms

    • Congressional Reporting Service (CRS) notes enhanced military intelligence cooperation with Israel

    • Vetoed another UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate unconditional ceasefire

    • Conducted “limited” strikes on Yemen Houthis, which are pro-Palestinian allies of Iran

    • Has floated various real-estate fantasies about turning Gaza into another riviera once all the unwanted Arabs are removed, while children are trampled by tanks, in a kind of breathtaking display of utter callousness

    • And much else, though he’s only been in office 8 months

    Biden’s Liberal Narcissism

    Setting aside the current administration, lest we slip into the fanaticism of the liberal, the more important point to remember is that Democrats are also morally bankrupt, if not as crass, and if marginally better in social uplift statistics. Because if we do not recognize this, the electoral pendulum that swings between corrupt neoliberal capitalist Democrat and corrupt neoliberal capitalist Republican will continue, while the majority suffer economic debasement at home and slaughter abroad.

    The conservative critique that liberals prefer virtue signaling to principle is correct. It has been ever since Bill Clinton demonstrated that the New Democrats could win corporate money, co-opt business-friendly Republican policies, and sell them with the rhetoric of social empathy with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Coupled with a vigorous identity politics and companion campaign of discrimination against privileged and majority ethnic groups, it was a winning electoral strategy.

    Clinton’s triangulation model proved an irresistible rationale for members of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), who claimed to hope to ‘do well by doing good.’ In the end, doing well meant maintaining their class privileges and material advantages while looking askance as their party practiced counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad, and instead hyping token reform at home.

    Where has this left the liberal class? With the following:

    The Biden administration was Israel’s most important military, financial, and political backer from the beginning of the genocide to the end of his term in office. We should set aside anonymously-sourced reports of Biden’s anger with Bibi and attend to the facts.

    Aside from $3.8B in annual military aid, the Democrats sent emergency arms shipments, and provided additional financial and political support, including:

    Military Supplies:

    • 14,000 tank shells in an October 2023 shipment

    • More than 2,000 2,000-pound bombs, great for mass casualty attacks

    • 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells in a December 2023 shipment, including bunker busters

    • F-35 fighter jet parts and $1B in new arms shipments approval in March 2024, the second time Biden used the Arms Export Control Act to bypass pesky Congress to arm the genocidaires

    • Ongoing intelligence sharing, including satellite imagery and location tracking

    • Military advisors dispatched by the Pentagon to assist in Israeli attacks

    • Deployed U.S. warships to block regional intervention

    • Launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect Israeli shipping

    • The Costs of War Project at Brown University, the United States spent nearly $18B in military aid to Israel in a single year

    • In August 2024, Biden approved a $20B arms shipment to Israel

    Political Cover:

    • Vetoed three UN Security Council Resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and abstained from a fourth despite a death toll of some 30,000

    • Attacked the ICJ finding on Gaza as meritless and threatened sanctions on ICC officials

    Financial Support:

    • Continued ongoing $3.8B annual military support deal, inked by the Obama administration, with no stoppage or even threat of stoppage

    • Added $14.5B in a Supplemental Aid Package in April 2024

    • Cut funding to UNRWA over unproven Israeli claims, devastating aid delivery. This means that the administration was blocking aid to Gaza while arming Israel

    All of this despite a death toll exceeding 30,000 people (likely far higher), the vast majority of which were women and children. And despite famine. And despite hundreds of reported potential violations of international law (rendering bootless the token human-rights verifications attached to some aid).

    And despite two leading Israeli rights organizations—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—both released reports declaring Israel’s conduct in the war on Palestinians constitutes genocide.

    (Even Grok wasn’t having it: “Israel’s actions in Gaza align with genocide indicators per ICJ’s plausible ruling, the UN’s “Anatomy of a Genocide” report, and Amnesty’s findings on intentional mass killings. US funding enables this horror—stop the slaughter.”)

    Coda to a Catastrophe

    Whatever the particular violent exploitation, there is bipartisan consensus. Whether participating in genocide in Gaza; sparking a bloody proxy war against nuclear-powered Russia in Ukraine; facilitating the wholesale destruction of Syria and whitewashing its terrorist leaders; aggressively working to disarm Iran while arming Israel; encircling China with military force; sanctioning every country that pursues a different model of economic development than Washington’s hegemonic system; or strip-mining Argentina through the IMF with the help of comprador elite. In any and every case, liberals and conservatives will always side with violent fascist imperialism over peaceful socialist mutualism because fascism doesn’t threaten capitalist profits. Rather it reinforces and amplifies them. Historical examples abound.

    Is there a difference, then, between the two electoral fronts for corporate power? Let’s ask Hedges, “Of course, there’s a difference. It’s how you want corporate fascism delivered to you. Do you want it delivered by a Princeton educated, Goldman Sachs criminal or do you want it delivered by racist, nativist, Christian fascist?”

    A quote from Noam Chomsky should suffice to close this chat: “I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even begin to approach it.”

    The post America’s Bipartisan Shame first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Envoy Sparks Fury for Telling Lebanese Journalists Not to Be “Animalistic”

    The U.S. ambassador to Turkey sparked fury on Tuesday for chiding a group of Lebanese journalists to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic,” saying such behavior is responsible for the strife in the Middle East. During a press conference in Beirut on Tuesday, as reporters asked questions and clamored for his attention — a typical practice in news conferences around the world — Tom Barrack…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Conservatives Are Trying to Kill the Voting Rights Act

    More To The Story: The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. The landmark piece of legislation is considered one of the most effective laws protecting the right to vote for racial minorities around the country. But the conservative movement has successfully hollowed out much of the law, thanks to Supreme Court decisions over the last decade. On this week’s episode, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is now in a constitutional emergency.

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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  • “Fight the Trump Takeover” Protests Spread Nationwide

    Progressives rallied across the country on Saturday to protest against US President Donald Trump’s attempts to get Republican-run state legislatures to redraw their maps to benefit GOP candidates in the 2026 midterm elections. The anchor rally for the nationwide “Fight the Trump Takeover” protests was held in Austin, Texas, where Republicans in the state are poised to become the first in the…

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  • Regime Change 2025

    The popular protest sign “They’re eating the checks, they’re eating the balances” exactly captures the destruction Donald Trump has wrought in his first six months in office as he follows the Project 2025 roadmap to change every aspect of American government and American life. No American institution has escaped Trump’s wrath: the U.S. Constitution’s three branches of government, the media (including Rupert Murdoch), higher education, large law firms, free trade, the corporate sector, and even the very definition of who is an American, not to mention windmills, EVs, and showerheads. Trump uses extortion like a mafia Don to back these changes while his MAGA foot soldiers threaten violence. However imperfect, our American form of democracy has functioned for nearly 250 years not only because of the rule of law but also because of all the informal rules and traditions that allow our two-party system to govern. Regime change is not merely a change in players. It is a change in the very structure and norms of government and its relationship to the governed. We are witnessing regime change.

    Much ink has been spilled on the White House’s invocation of “unitary executive theory,” its appeal to 18th century emergency powers to legitimize assaults on immigration, DEI, elite law firms, universities, and most especially the federal government itself. But it is important not to miss the forest for the trees. When one branch of government moves aggressively and successfully to subordinate all others to its will, basic principles of checks and balances and separation of powers are not only trampled, they are abandoned, lost. Donald Trump and his team are building new political norms, new political habits, new rules of the game. The most important one is, Trump is Supreme Ruler and anything he says goes. It is difficult to overstate how radical President Trump’s claims for his executive power really are. They effectively eradicate the intricate machinery of our constitutional system, our republican form of democracy. The outward institutional forms remain, but the political substance of our form of government is disintegrating right before our eyes.

    There is no point more critical in America’s founding texts than the Framer’s fear and caution against concentrated, monopolized state power. As James Madison declared in Federalist 48, power is “of an encroaching nature” and to maintain the separation of powers the separate branches of government need to have “a constitutional control” over one another. That means each branch has significant independent power, not just the executive. Trump won’t tolerate this. Ergo, there goes the old regime.

    Regime change can only happen when politicians allow it. Squeezed between Trump’s threats to “primary” them and Maga’s threats to harm them and their families, virtually all congressional Republicans have prioritized saving their seats rather than preserving our constitutional principles. That’s why elections are still important. With the off-year election rapidly approaching and Trump’s poll numbers plunging, Democrats are already envisioning a “Blue Wave.” But the challenge to Democrats cannot be overstated. First, they must stop Trump’s reckless rampage. Given the senate’s sixty-vote standard to pass a bill and a two-third majority in both houses needed to override a presidential veto, a Blue Wave isn’t enough. The Dems need a tsunami to get that super majority to stop Trump and the larger MAGA movement he feeds. At the same time, they must also rebuild the institutions of our procedural democracy. After all, despite its many limitations, a bourgeois democracy is better than a fascist autocracy. It’s a long way to November 2026 and much can change, but even a Blue Tsunami may not be enough to stop what may be irreversible changes in the form and substance of the republic.

    The post Regime Change 2025 first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin.

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  • Ron Johnson: Stock Trading Ban Would Make It “Unattractive” to Be in Congress

    Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), one of the richest people in the Senate, said on Wednesday that Congress shouldn’t be banned from trading stocks because the basic anti-corruption rule would make it “unattractive” to run for office. During debate on a congressional stock ban introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) on Wednesday, Johnson said that he was concerned about “unintended…

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  • NC House GOP Pushes Bill to Bringing Back Electric Chair, Implement Firing Squad

    Early this year, and seemingly out of the blue, a group of Republican lawmakers in the North Carolina House introduced an alarming new bill. “Revise the Law on the Death Penalty,” otherwise known as HB 270, proposes bringing back the electric chair and implementing a firing squad as a means of forcing incarcerated people to choose their own ghastly method of execution. Should the person not want…

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  • Republican Promoted to House Foreign Affairs as He Says of Gaza: “Starve Away”

    One of the most inflammatory Republican representatives in the House was appointed to the high-powered House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday — the same day he called for Israel to “starve” Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On social media Tuesday morning, Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida) cheered a report saying that 15 Palestinians in Gaza, including four children, had died from famine in a…

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  • Voters Want a Third Party. They Just Don’t Want Musk in Charge of It.

    New polling this week indicates that there is a strong desire among U.S. voters for a third political party, to counter both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, when asked if they’d join a party created by billionaire Elon Musk, voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea. After hinting for several weeks that he’d start a new party after he and President Donald Trump had a public…

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  • 5 House Democrats Join Most Republicans to Pass $832 Billion Military Bill

    The U.S. House passed legislation early Friday that would provide roughly $832 billion in funding for military programs for the coming fiscal year, a vote that came shortly after the chamber approved a $9 billion rescissions package that takes an axe to public media and foreign aid. Five House Democrats — Reps. Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas…

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  • Capitol Hill Republicans back Trump-Epstein coverup – or back away


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

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  • The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom

    During President Donald Trump’s second term, education has remained a central battleground in American politics. Republicans claim that classrooms have become hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination, accusing educators of promoting progressive agendas and tolerating antisemitism. In contrast, Democrats argue that conservatives are systematically defunding and dismantling public and higher education precisely because it teaches values like diversity, equity, and inclusion. While these partisan skirmishes dominate headlines, they obscure a much deeper and more enduring issue that encompasses all of these issues and more: the influence of corporate and military power on public education.

    For decades, scholars have warned that corporations have steadily infiltrated the classroom—not to promote critical thinking or democratic values, but to cultivate ideologies that reinforce capitalism, nationalism, and militarism. Critical media literacy educators, in particular, have drawn attention to the convergence of tech firms and military entities in education, offering so-called “free” digital tools that often serve as Trojan horses for data collection and ideological control.

    One striking example is the rise of programs like NewsGuard, which uses public fears over fake news to justify increased surveillance of students’ online activity. Relatedly, in 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered with Meta to perform “fact-checking” on platforms such as Facebook. In 2022, the US Marine Corps discussed developing media literacy training. It remains to be seen what training, if any, they will develop. However, what is known is that a large global player has entered the media literacy arena: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While NATO presents its initiatives as supportive of media literacy and democratic education, these efforts appear to be oriented more toward reinforcing alignment with its strategic and political priorities than to fostering critical civic engagement.

    NATO was created in 1949, during the Cold War, as a military alliance to contain communism. Although the war officially ended in 1991, NATO has expanded both its mission and membership. Today, it encompasses more than thirty member nations and continues to frame itself as a global force for peace, democracy, and security. But this self-image masks real conflicts of interest.

    NATO is deeply intertwined with powerful nation-states and corporate actors. It routinely partners with defense contractors, tech firms, think tanks, and Western governments—all of which have a vested interest in maintaining specific political and economic systems. These relationships raise concerns when NATO extends its reach into education. Can a military alliance—closely linked to the defense industry and state propaganda—credibly serve as a neutral force in media education?

    In 2022, NATO associates collaborated with the US-based Center for Media Literacy (CML) to launch a media literacy initiative framed as a strategic defense against misinformation. The initiative included a report titled Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic, authored by CML’s Tessa Jolls. It was accompanied by a series of webinars featuring military personnel, policy experts, and academics.

    On the surface, the initiative appeared to promote digital literacy and civic engagement. But a closer look reveals a clear ideological agenda. Funded and organized by NATO, the initiative positioned media literacy not as a means of empowering students to think critically about how power shapes media, but as a defense strategy to protect NATO member states from so-called “hostile actors.” The curriculum emphasized surveillance, resilience, and behavior modification over reflection, analysis, and democratic dialogue.

    Throughout their webinars, NATO representatives described the media environment as a battlefield, frequently using other war metaphors such as “hostile information activities” and “cognitive warfare.” Panelists argued that citizens in NATO countries were targets of foreign disinformation campaigns—and that media literacy could serve as a tool to inoculate them against ideological threats.

    A critical review of NATO’s media literacy initiative reveals several troubling themes. First, it frames media literacy as a protectionist project rather than an educational one. Students are portrayed less as thinkers to be empowered and more as civilians to be monitored, molded, and managed. In this model, education becomes a form of top-down, preemptive defense, relying on expert guidance and military oversight rather than democratic participation.

    Second, the initiative advances a distinctly neoliberal worldview. It emphasizes individual responsibility over structural analysis. In other words, misinformation is treated as a user error, rather than the result of flawed systems, corporate algorithms, or media consolidation. This framing conveniently absolves powerful actors, including NATO and Big Tech, of their role in producing or amplifying disinformation.

    Third, the initiative promotes a contradictory definition of empowerment. While the report and webinars often use the language of “citizen empowerment,” they ultimately advocate for surveillance, censorship, and ideological conformity. Panelists call for NATO to “dominate” the information space, and some even propose systems to monitor students’ attitudes and online behaviors. Rather than encouraging students to question power—including NATO itself—this approach rewards obedience and penalizes dissent.

    Finally, the initiative erases the influence of corporate power. Although it criticizes authoritarian regimes and “hostile actors,” it fails to examine the role that Western corporations, particularly tech companies, play in shaping media environments. This oversight is especially problematic given that many of these corporations are NATO’s partners. By ignoring the political economy of media, the initiative offers an incomplete and ideologically skewed version of media literacy.

    NATO’s foray into media literacy education represents a new frontier in militarized pedagogy. While claiming to promote democracy and resilience, its initiative advances a narrow, protectionist, and neoliberal approach that prioritizes NATO’s geopolitical goals over student empowerment.

    This should raise red flags for educators, policymakers, and advocates. Media literacy is not a neutral practice. The organizations that design and fund media literacy programs inevitably shape the goals and methods of those programs. When a military alliance like NATO promotes media education, it brings with it a strategic interest in ideological control.

    Educators must ask: What kind of media literacy are we teaching—and whose interests does it serve? If the goal is to produce informed, critically thinking citizens capable of questioning power in all its forms, then NATO’s approach falls short. Instead of inviting students to explore complex media systems, it simplifies them into a binary struggle between “us” and “them,” encouraging loyalty over literacy.

    True media literacy must begin with transparency about who and what is behind the curriculum. It must empower students to question all forms of influence—governmental, corporate, and military alike. And it must resist the creeping presence of militarism in our classrooms. As educators, we must defend the right to question, not just the messages we see, but the institutions that shape them.

    This essay was originally published here:

    The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy

     

    The post The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Real Conspiracy Behind the Texas Floods

    David Sirota is a journalist, former speechwriter to Bernie Sanders, and co-writer of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up, about the threat of climate change. On this week’s More To The Story, Sirota joins host Al Letson to discuss how climate change is fueling more intense weather events like the recent floods in Texas, how the country’s leaders are failing to address climate disasters while avoiding accountability, why Trump’s domestic policy bill is “class war in legislative form,” and why some Democrats still don’t know how to react to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win in New York City.

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

    Listen: Master Plan (The Lever)
    Listen: 2024 Broke The Democrats. Can They Put Themselves Back Together? (Reveal)
    Read: How Zohran Mamdani Tied Climate Policy to Voters’ Pocketbook Issues (Mother Jones)

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Sanders: Members of Congress Who Voted for “Big Beautiful Bill” Must Be Ousted

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has called for every member of Congress who voted for Republicans’ reconciliation bill to be ousted from their seat, saying that the bill is “disastrous” and will only make the U.S. health care system even worse. “Our broken health care ‘system’ is the most expensive and inefficient in the world. Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ will make it even worse…

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  • “Tax-Dodging Consultant” Is Now the US Treasury’s Top Tax Policy Official

    A corporate lobbyist who for decades has helped major companies and rich Americans dodge taxes is now serving as the U.S. Treasury Department’s top tax policy official, a position in which he will write rules implementing the newly passed Republican budget law. That role is “enormously powerful,” The New York Times’ Jesse Drucker wrote in a Monday profile of Ken Kies, whom the GOP-controlled…

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  • The US Public Loves the National Park Service. Trump Is Destroying It Anyway.

    If there is one thing Americans love, it’s our national parks. A record-setting 331 million people visited the 63 national parks in 2024 — a number roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population. Park visitors spend tens of billions each year on lodging, restaurants, and travel expenses, significantly boosting local economies. The National Park Service is the most popular government agency…

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  • GOP Missouri Governor Repeals Paid Sick Leave Measure Voters Passed in Landslide

    Missouri’s Republican governor on Thursday signed legislation repealing the paid sick leave portion of a ballot measure that the state’s voters approved with nearly 60% support in the 2024 election. The short-lived provision, which will officially be repealed on August 28, required Missouri employers to provide workers with an hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours of work.

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  • Decades of Neoliberalism Entrenched US Inequality. Trump’s Budget Made It Worse.

    Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was signed into law last week, has been described as a monstrous piece of legislation. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, world-renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin provides an overview of this “disgraceful” federal budget bill. Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research…

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  • Federal Judge Blocks Attack on Planned Parenthood in Trump-GOP Budget Law

    A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a provision of the new Republican budget law that bars Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood health centers across the United States, an attack that reproductive rights advocates warn could shutter hundreds of clinics nationwide. The decision by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, an Obama appointee…

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  • Republican Lawmaker Dumped Medicaid-Related Stock Before Voting to Gut Program

    Republican Congressman Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania got publicly shamed by many of his congressional colleagues on Thursday after it was revealed he unloaded a Medicaid-related stock before voting for a massive budget package that enacted historically devastating cuts to the program. Quiver Quantitative, an investment data platform that tracks stock trades made by politicians and other…

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  • The Impeachment Problem

    I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.

    The United States has an impeachment problem. Impeachment was put into a Constitution that made no mention of, allowance for, or plans to survive the existence of political parties. Presidents are now generally not impeached for any abuse or outrage unless there is one party that doesn’t itself engage in that same abuse or outrage and that party is in the majority in the House. The use of a sex scandal for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was part of the process of destroying the impeachment power, but we’re now probably past sex scandals, for better or worse. We’re reduced to obscure or even fictional offenses, or physical attacks on Congress Members. And even those can be impeachable only when the non-presidential party has a House majority. And even then, the same party would have to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate to get a conviction, since a president’s party’s members will do virtually anything a president commands.

    This impeachment problem, unless it is solved, effectively means that a popular nonviolent movement to oust a lawless dictator from the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue must turn out the entire government and start over. The reason the proper course is not the one everyone has been conditioned to mindlessly follow, namely waiting for a distant election, is the same reason impeachment was put into the Constitution: some abuses and outrages should never be tolerated. They do too much massive damage, and they set precedents that are very hard to undo. When Bush-Cheney and then Obama were allowed to finish out and not be removed, warmaking became more acceptable than ever, as did warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, murder by missile, etc. Criminal thuggery became firmly a policy choice, not an impeachable or prosecutable offense — unless of course you’re not the president. The top impeachable offenses by Bush are in this list of 35. Partway into the Obama presidency, I documented his continuation of 27 of those 35.

    The Trump-Biden-Trump era has iced the cake of acceptable and legalistic monstrosities.  In 2019, RootsAction put together a list of 25 articles of impeachment for Trump:

    Violation of Constitution on Domestic Emoluments
    Violation of Constitution on Foreign Emoluments
    Incitement of Violence
    Interference With Voting Rights
    Discrimination Based On Religion
    Illegal War
    Illegal Threat of Nuclear War
    Abuse of Pardon Power
    Obstruction of Justice
    Politicizing Prosecutions
    Collusion Against the United States with a Foreign Government
    Failure to Reasonably Prepare for or Respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria
    Separating Children and Infants from Families
    Illegally Attempting to Influence an Election
    Tax Fraud and Public Misrepresentation
    Assaulting Freedom of the Press
    Supporting a Coup in Venezuela
    Unconstitutional Declaration of Emergency
    Instructing Border Patrol to Violate the Law
    Refusal to Comply With Subpoenas
    Declaration of Emergency Without Basis In Order to Violate the Will of Congress
    Illegal Proliferation of Nuclear Technology
    Illegally Removing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
    Seeking to Use Foreign Governments’ Resources Against Political Rivals
    Refusal to Comply with Impeachment Inquiry

    One could go on piling up the articles of impeachment or documenting their continuation and expansion. But what’s missing is not the documentation. Here’s a guy who incited violence at his campaign events prior to his first stint on the throne. RootsAction proposed his impeachment for open financial corruption on his first inauguration day. The case was beyond solid, and has been built up ever since. Every weapons shipment for genocide by Biden, Trump, or a harmoniously bipartisan Congress violates numerous U.S. laws. The corruption is gradiose, fantastic, megalithic. The wars, the lies, the kidnappings by masked thugs, the environmental destruction, the promotion of bigotry and hatred — it’s a festival of flagrantly overly justified grounds for removal from office. But what’s missing is the will to make removal happen. On June 24, a huge, happy, bipartisan majority voted not to impeach Trump for making himself a king, just 10 days after huge demonstrations all across the country denouncing Trump for having made himself a king.

    I’m afraid of what will happen instead of impeachment. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is nobility in that idea. But there is no such thing as making nonviolent revolution impossible. And the powers of nonviolent action are virtually unknown in U.S. culture. Mildly objecting to mass murdering foreign people is a lot for us. The notion that we might actually learn from the successes of foreign people could be asking too much. And so the vast panoply of options between demanding impeachment and hitting Capitol Police officers with flag poles may be lost on too many of us. It may be lost on us beyond our ability to recognize the absurd insufficiency of choosing between two disastrous candidates every four years. We may realize what a scam this so-called democracy is, but not realize our latent power to take it over without counterproductive violence. That does not bode well.

    The post The Impeachment Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Republican Governors Quiet Amid Plans to Slash Medicaid Spending in Their States

    The last time a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump moved to slash Medicaid spending, in 2017, a key political force stood in their way: GOP governors. Now, as Congress steamrolls toward passing historic Medicaid cuts of about $1 trillion over 10 years through Trump’s tax and spending legislation, red-state governors are saying little publicly about what it does to…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘These cuts are death sentences’: Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ passes Senate

    Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s massive spending and tax bill, which will now go back to the House of Representatives for final approval. President Trump has publicly pushed his party to get the bill on his desk to sign by July 4. Dozens of peaceful protestors, including disabled people in wheelchairs, were arrested last Wednesday, June 25, in Washington, DC, while protesting Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which will slash taxes, dramatically increase funding for war and immigration enforcement, and make devastating cuts to vital, popular programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Lorraine Chavez, an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago, and Christine Rodriguez, a legal assistant from Pasadena, California, both of whom traveled to DC with the Debt Collective and were arrested for participating in the peaceful act of civil disobedience.

    Guests:

    • Lorraine Chavez is an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago. She is also a student debtor and traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.
    • Christine Rodriguez is a legal assistant and student debtor from Pasadena, California, who also traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.

    Credits

    • Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s massive spending and tax Bill three Republican Senators, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined all Democrats in voting against the bill. But with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, the bill will now go back to the House of Representatives for final approval and Trump has publicly pushed his party to get the bill on his desk to sign by July 4th. Now, dozens of peaceful protesters, including disabled people in wheelchairs were arrested last Wednesday in Washington DC while protesting President Trump’s so-called one big beautiful bill, which will slash taxes and includes devastating cuts to vital, popular and lifesaving programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or snap.

    Dr. Richelle Brooks:

    These cuts are death sentences. Trump is proposing 1.4 trillion in cuts, 793 billion from Medicaid alone and 293 billion from a CA. This would result in 10.9 million people immediately losing their health insurance. If this bill is passed and its rules are codified, this will cause mass loss of insurance for many people in need for years to come. It’s not just going to affect us now. It’s going to affect us later. This bill doesn’t just remove care from those in need and who need access to it most. It adds barriers to access for everyone. They’re intentionally attacking Medicaid and benefits like Snap Pell grants and programs like public service loan forgiveness because they are the last remaining examples of what access to Repairative public goods can look like in this country. They don’t want us to think that we have a right to healthcare. They don’t want us to believe that we have a right to public goods. They want us to believe that we need to earn the access for our basic needs to be met with our labor, with our compliance, and with our silence.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Speaking to Republican colleagues who were worried about the public blowback to these deeply unpopular cuts, former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell reportedly said, I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid, but they’ll get over it now. These massive cuts to public programs like Medicaid and food stamps are part of a systematic overhaul that would place the biggest financial burden on poor and working people to pay for Trump’s staggering increases to war and immigration enforcement spending and to make permanent his tax cuts from 2017, which overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the rich as part of Trump’s plan to remove undocumented immigrants from the country. The Guardian reports Immigration and customs Enforcement will receive 45 billion for detention facilities, $14 billion for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029. And more than $50 billion is allocated for the construction of new border fortifications, which will probably include a wall along the border with Mexico.

    Now, the Senate version of the bill also includes over 150 billion in new military spending and decade after decade, Republican tax cuts have eroded the US tax base and enriched the wealthiest households all while funding for war policing and surveillance has continued to rise. Trump’s one big beautiful bill would reportedly increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion and someone has to pay for that. And Trump and the GOP think that that someone should be working people like you among other things. The so-called big beautiful Bill also includes a provision to bar states from imposing any new regulations on artificial intelligence or AI over the next 10 years. A move that critics say is both a massive violation of states’ rights and a dangerous relinquishing of government oversight on big tech and AI when oversight is most needed. The bill would also restructure the student loan and debt system imposing stricter limits on new borrowers who hope to attend college and much harsher repayment plans for current debtors.

    The fact that so many millions of Americans will be directly impacted by this bill is exactly what brought so many different groups out to Washington DC last week to protest it, including popular Democracy in Action, the Service Employees, international Union, planned Parenthood, Federation of America, the Debt Collective Standup, Alaska Action, North Carolina, Arkansas Community Organizations and American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or Adapt. Now, I spoke with Lorraine Chavez, an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago, as well as Christine Rodriguez, a legal assistant from Pasadena, California, both of whom were arrested in DC last week for participating in the Peaceful Act of Civil Disobedience and both of whom are student debtors themselves and traveled to DC with the Debt Collective. A union of debtors

    Lorraine Chavez:

    I came to DC having followed the Debt Collective for a number of years, and I came because I personally have student loan debt that I have no capacity to pay. I’m a single mother. I put my two kids who are twins both 33 through college, and they did not receive any financial assistance at all from their college professor, father, so it was all on me. So I have no capacity to pay back my own debt, and I know others have all kinds of medical debt. I know there are all kinds of cutbacks coming to the disabled community of which I had been a part of and an advocate for in Chicago. So I didn’t mind getting arrested. I was really thrilled to be with all these other advocates from all over the country.

    Christine Rodriguez:

    So all these things that are just interconnected. And then on top of this, all these tax cuts are going to basically allocate for funding for increased military defense, which I live near Los Angeles. I’ve definitely seen a lot heavier military presence along with our police, but specifically federal military, the Marines coming into Los Angeles, all these tax cuts, that’s just where our money is going to go to armed people who want to just lock us up and silence us. I came in for student loan forgiveness, but just in that introduction round, I had now become a part of other folks who were fighting for Medicaid, fighting for to reduce, to not cut the spending for the SNAP program or for the food stamp program.

    Lorraine Chavez:

    It just speaks to the crisis that we have around all debt on all levels and these really horrific policies that are about to or will be passed. And some of the banners that people had, which I fully support, said that people are going to die if these policies are put in place. How are Medicaid recipients going to get medical care? We are in a deep, profound crisis of health in the country, and these cutbacks will drastically increase the death rate for sure of millions of Americans who will be denied access to healthcare.

    Christine Rodriguez:

    And when we get to the Rotunda area, there’s already a lot of police presence there. I guess they got word because there’s so many of us at the hearing, they even tried to tell us like, you guys cannot, woo. You guys can’t chant. You can’t be too loud. You could only clap. So kind of in that moment at the press hearing, we could already see they’re trying to keep us quiet in a sense. The Capitol police were really almost waiting for us at the rotunda, definitely at the second floor where we wanted to do our banner drop at the rotunda at the time, we could already hear that the demonstration was going on. As we’re trying to drop our banner, we could already kind of hear that the plan of people are going to have a die-in at the bottom. They’re going to have a banner shush over us. And I think from the videos that I’ve seen already, when people were lying on the floor, banners were being taken away and people were already getting arrested just from, they could see their association with the Diane. So people were just getting arrested. We say arrest is really, it’s a dramatic citation. It is what happened because they let us go for $50. But again, it’s why does this need to be so dramatic of us advocating our First Amendment rights to express how much we don’t want the government to go through with this big disastrous plan?

    Lorraine Chavez:

    We were a peaceful group of demonstrators, totally peaceful, exercising our first amendment rights, and even within the holding center where we were, no air conditioning, it looked like a gigantic empty garage. There were fans, but it was excruciatingly hot the whole time. And I counted how many police men and women. There were about 30 of us there, and there were about 25 policemen and women. I mean, it was it absurd. And to see dozens and dozens and dozens of police, men and women swarming the Senate building as well. There must have been a police man or woman for every single one of us that was there. It was ridiculous, quite frankly, and also terrifying because we were just there exercising our First Amendment rights about issues that impact all of us. And there was an enormous crowd, enormous group of protestors in wheelchairs and amongst the disabled, their hands were tied in front or in back of them. It was a really dangerous situation. I actually had bruises on my wrist until the next day because of the plastic ties were just gripped around my wrists, and I wasn’t even allowed really to drink water. I mean, it was a dangerous situation given the heat and given the fact there was no air conditioning virtually in the police fans, there was no air conditioning at all in the holding center.

    And here we were simply exercising our first amendment rights for free speech and to protest, which we are allowed to do under the Constitution. So it was really terrifying, honestly, to observe all of that going on around us

    Christine Rodriguez:

    And let the record show that I do not want my student loan forgiveness money to be funding ice my community in Pasadena. Just last week, two weeks ago, we experienced two raids within a week, and these raids were within walking distance of my apartment That’s happening right in my backyard. And as we saw with our action that we did earlier this week, there’s a lot of people who are going to suffer if these funding cuts happen. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite. That’s what should be happening. We should be giving more money to Medicaid. We should be giving more money to food stamps. People are barely getting by and this is their one lifeline that could be cut.

    Lorraine Chavez:

    I personally feel in such kind of a desperate state about all of this that I said, I don’t care if I get arrested. I mean, what else are we going to do? But unfortunately, put our bodies on the line. I don’t know. Of course, I’ve written 500 emails to my representatives. I’ve been an advocate myself for the fight for 15 in 2013, marching on the streets of Chicago for blocks and blocks. So I’ve done this before, but I just feel this incredible feeling of desperation right now.

    Christine Rodriguez:

    Are you tired of seeing the system fall in front of you? Are you tired of seeing injustice? Step number one, talk to your neighbors, right? We have to be our own kind of networks, and a lot of that takes just talking to strangers, but neighbors, but also strangers. Lorraine was a stranger a week ago, and now we’re buddies for life because we had this amazing experience. Say, definitely visit your local city council, city, town hall, any local thing, try to get tapped in because there’s a lot of information and drama there that’s not advertised, and it could cause a little change in your community and it could really push you to be more involved.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • JD Vance Says Medicaid Cuts for Millions “Immaterial” Compared to Funding ICE

    Vice President J.D. Vance has callously called the GOP’s massive cuts to Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs “immaterial,” saying the maintenance of such programs is trivial compared to boosting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the rogue immigration agency ravaging communities across the U.S. In a series of social media posts on Tuesday, Vance downplayed the impact of the cuts…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Political Blowback to GOP’s Medicaid Cuts Has Already Begun

    As Senate Republicans rushed to pass a massive budget package known as the “big, beautiful bill,” the political consequences of pushing for the deepest cuts in decades to Medicaid and other safety net programs serving millions of people are already becoming clear. After working overnight to vote on a number of amendments and pass the package ahead of an entirely symbolic July 4 deadline imposed by…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • After All-Night Session of Wrangling, GOP Still Lacks Votes to Pass Budget Bill

    Even after an all-night session of amendment votes and wrangling behind closed doors, Senate Republicans still did not have enough support to pass their reconciliation package as of Tuesday morning, leaving party leaders scrambling to placate GOP holdovers who are purportedly nervous about the legislation’s unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance. Sen. Chris Murphy (D…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • America’s Republicans’ Hatred of the Poor

    The budget-and-tax bill that President Trump has placed before America’s U.S. Senators and Representatives to pass by a majority in each of the two houses of Congress is a total repudiation of the first Republican U.S. President (and the only progressive Republican U.S. President), Abraham Lincoln, as will here be documented.

    The Republican Party was basically started by Lincoln, who (if he had lived) would have repudiated and condemned virtually all of his Republican successors. The assassination that killed him transformed his Party into its exact opposite, in the most important ways.

    Here is Lincoln speaking, so that the transformation wrought by that bullet is made clear by Lincoln himself, in his own time:

    It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

    Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

    Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others nor have others working for them.

    Lincoln was profoundly opposed to coerced labor, and he recognized that it can take many forms — not ONLY the form called ”slavery.” He also recognized that the few individuals who, as a group, own the most wealth and consequently hire a substantial percentage of the U.S. population, will possess, by their ability to hire and fire, enormous power, which might enable them to coerce their employees to accept unjustifiably low wages for their work. On this basis, he spoke publicly on the record as siding with the oppressed against their oppressors — even outside the context of merely slavery.

    The poor are the lowest class of workers, and Lincoln there was making explicitly clear that — directly opposed to today’s Republican Party, which makes policy on the basis of the principle that a person is worth only whatever his/her net worth is, and so a billionaire is worth as much as a thousand millionaires — a person’s worth has no necessary relationship to his/her wealth — none.

    Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not!

    Today’s Republican Party — this Party that Lincoln would consider an abomination — is the exact opposite of anything that would become law in any democracy. If Trump’s bill, or anything like it, becomes law in America, this will be announcing to the entire world that America is a dictatorship by its super-rich. Such a Government used to be called an “aristocracy.” At every election-time, America’s public are being asked to side with one group of billionaires (the Republicann ones) against another group of billionaires (the Democratic ones), instead of to side with themselves and the rest of the public, against all billionaires — the remarkably few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government. This applies both in national U.S. politics and in state U.S. politics, so that the billionaires have veto-power to prevent ANY candidate they don’t control, from even getting their Party’s nomination (much less winning the final campaign). It is the aristocratic type of dictatorship — and Lincoln condemned it.

    The post America’s Republicans’ Hatred of the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Democrats or Republicans be the party of peace?


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Right Incites Blatant Islamophobia After Zohran Mamdani’s Win

    Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have responded to New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s landmark win on Tuesday with blatantly Islamophobic and xenophobic hatred, inciting violence against the left-wing politician who was already recently subject to a hate-related death threat. Mamdani, who is Muslim, faced threats of a car bomb last week from a caller who left repeated…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Voters Will “Get Over It,” McConnell Tells GOP Colleagues About Medicaid Cuts

    During a closed-door meeting of Republican senators on Tuesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) tried to tamper down fears of voter blowback against the proposed cuts to Medicaid spending in the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, claiming that voters will ultimately “get over it.” The former Republican Senate leader’s comments came after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), one of the most…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.