Alternet.org

What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying. At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus. As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency.

Bill Barr is covering up for Donald Trump. Trump's first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, had a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, just after President Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. Flynn "urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions with a retaliatory move against the United States-perhaps by kicking American diplomats and spies out of Russia." Flynn denied that the call was about sanctions, but it has become pretty clear based on new reports that what took place was "a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put in place to punish the Russians." In any other time, a national security adviser who acted this way would be considered a traitor. But not in Bill Barr's America.

The Constitution provides a couple of mechanisms for Trump to lose the 2020 election—both the popular vote and the Electoral College—and still hold the office of president for a second term. It’s keeping historians and constitutional scholars up at night and, based on offline conversations I’ve had with D.C. conservatives I know, is something the GOP and partisans within the Trump administration are already discussing.

Lev Parnas recently told Rachel Maddow that he’s more afraid of Attorney General Bill Barr than he is of the mobbed-up foreign oligarchs he has betrayed. Barr, after all, can weaponize our prisons to punish Parnas. “Am I scared?” he said. “Yes, because I think I’m more scared of our own Justice Department than these criminals right now.”

Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure we can’t import prescription drugs from Canada, but they’re more than happy to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing controls and exploitable labor that ensure high-profit margins.

Now that we’ve entered an election year, there is a lot of speculation about what America could look like if Donald Trump gets another term, by hook or by crook. As Trump uses a crisis he created in the Middle East to distract us from impeachment, increases his chances of reelection, and boosts the fortunes of his buddies in the Military-Industrial Complex, it’s important to understand how other demagogic leaders consolidate their power.

The current issue of the Atlantic magazine founded itself in the years just before the Civil War, is ominously titled, “How to Stop a Civil War.”

People being killed by wildfires in California and people dying because they can't afford their insulin are the same thing. Both represent the capture of government by corporations-in other words, both are symptoms of democracy in the United States being replaced by a corporate state with little regard for morality, life or the law.

After Brown v. Board and its subsequent supporting decisions in the 1950s, and Roe v. Wade in 1973, Republicans concluded that they needed to curb—or seize—the power of the Court. The easiest way to do that would be to have as many Republican presidents in the White House as possible, as each could potentially nominate new conservative justices to the Court.

To save our republic, some of Trump’s enablers and political appointees may have to go to jail, just like happened with Nixon’s people. Trump’s policies are inflicting massive damage on…