2023 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. — How many American will face “climate gentrification” and what will be done? — Why the GOP Can’t Unite: Is it because Trump is like the Don Corleone of the Republican Party and still in control? — If only the framers of the Constitution had had a thesaurus, then Trump couldn't run for president. — Wisconsin Republicans hold hostage pay raises for university staff unless they end diversity programs: the GOP is saying, “If you not racist, we won’t pay you.” — Here comes net neutrality! — What will be the impact of Mortgage rates hitting 8%? — Geeky Science! ADHD: Can You Overcome Procrastination? — Crazy Alert! MAGA pastor whines about handicapped parking & says wheelchair-bound people should just walk or go to a different church....

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have a national, single-payer healthcare system… Former Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton is struggling to pay her medical bills and has opened up a GoFundMe page to collect donations. How can this be happening in the wealthiest nation in the world? America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right, the only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare, and the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, continuously enslaved and legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race. These things are connected.

Why right wing crises face incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.. Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go. “All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.” She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister: “We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.” What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”

The more things change, the old saying goes, the more they stay the same. It’s true, at least with regard to giant corporate interests fighting regulation and seizing control of governments that might try to restrain them. The year of 1776 had a huge impact on the future of the world. Not only did Thomas Jefferson and friends declare that they’d no longer submit to the military, commercial, and political power of Great Britain, but one of the world’s great analysts of capitalism, Adam Smith, published his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.3 At the same time that the American colonists were decrying the monopoly that the East India Company held over them, Smith was criticizing the Company—and the others who had succeeded in creating monopoly—in Great Britain.