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Monday
By Jack Balkwill
On the occasion of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I think it’s important to compare his accomplishments to that of others lionized in our culture as heroes.
Or… everyone pays the Piper
By Brett Redmayne-Titley
In emulating the American economic raison d’etre, China has attempted to develop its unique capitalist model while ignoring that it too will soon suffer the same fate for the same reason: Unsustainable debt. When examining the recent realities of Chinese banking and finance over the past year it seems the steam that president Xi Jinping touts as powering the engine of his purported economic miracle of a master-planned economy is only a mirage, now almost completely evaporated before his eyes.
By Wayne Madsen
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution still echoes the dire warning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered in a January 13 speech. The speech, titled “The Restoration of Deterrence: The Iranian Example,” set forth a new policy of deterring “threats” to American interests by carrying out future political assassinations like that of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Al Quds Force commander Major General Qaseem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport. Pursuant to this same new policy, the chief treasurer for the Quds Force, General Abdul Reza Shahlai, narrowly escaped assassination in Yemen by American military forces.
By Stephen Lendman
In cahoots with its wealthy donors and imperial USA, Human Rights Watch (HRW) operates as a mouthpiece for powerful pro-Western interests.
By Paul Craig Roberts
The first thing to understand is that it is not a trade deal. It is Trump backing off his tariffs when he discovered that the tariffs fall on US goods and American consumers, not on China. Trump is covering his retraction by calling it a trade deal. China’s part of the deal is to agree to purchase the US goods that it already intended to purchase.
Tuesday
By Eric Zuesse
U.S. President George Washington’s final words to his fellow Americans, upon leaving office, are now even more timely than when he spoke them, but have been ignored in practice for many decades; and the most recently published popular book about that speech ignores the most enduringly important part, so this part of Washington’s Farewell Address will be quoted from here, and will be placed into its historical context, so as to make clear what the central meaning in that speech is for our times, and for all times.
The majority also said they believe they won't be better off five years from now.
By Andrea Germanos
A global survey out Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos shows that over half of respondents believe capitalism in its current form does “more harm than good.”
It needs an inspirational leader and a constitution that does not pander to sectarianism
By Linda S. Heard
Divided loyalties, competing ideologies, sectarian rivalries and foreign interference combine to tear Iraq apart. This once powerful Arab state that stood as a buffer against Iranian expansionism is in urgent need of a unifier, a strong and charismatic figure who can bring together Iraqis of all faiths and sects under one flag.
By Martha Rosenberg
Do you remember SARS? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was so contagious, a SARS-afflicted man on an Air China flight in 2003 infected 20 passengers sitting at a distance away from him and two crew members. The simple act of flushing the toilet spread the deadly lung disease and health care workers had to wear HazMat suits to treat patients. Eight hundred people died including Pekka Aro, a senior official with the United Nations.
By Thomas L. Knapp
“The Constitution,” Alan Dershowitz claims, “allocates to the president sole authority over foreign policy (short of declaring war or signing a treaty).”
Wednesday
In Trump America, science no match for ‘free market’ fundamentalists and CEOs chasing windfalls
By Sam Pizzigati
Earlier this month, still another one-day-wonder of a Twitter storm surfaced and quickly sank in Donald Trump’s America. On January 9, President Trump claimed credit for new figures from the American Cancer Society that show—between 2016 and 2017—“the sharpest one-year drop in cancer death rate ever recorded.” Almost immediately, the American Cancer Society politely pointed out that the Trump administration had nothing to do with this encouraging decline.
The Bernie 2020 campaign is a crucible of broader activism from the grassroots that can spark uprisings of heat and light.
By Norman Solomon
To corporate media, Bernie Sanders is incorrigible. He won’t stop defying the standard assumptions about what’s possible in national politics. His 2020 campaign—with feet on the ground and eyes on visionary horizons—is a danger to corporate capitalism’s “natural” order that enables wealth to dominate the political process.
By Brian Cloughley
The killing of Iranian General Soleimani was big news. There were a few points made in the Western mainstream media about its legality being dubious, but nobody seems to be concerned that it contravened international law, in addition to be totally amoral. One wonders if any of the drone operators, the little key-tapping techno-dweebs thousands of miles away, were awarded a medal for their gallantry in prodding buttons to blast human beings to shards of flesh and bone.
By Stephen Lendman
Fascist Colombia is a narco-terrorist state, providing an illicit drug super-highway to the US and other countries.
By Sheldon Richman
If you wonder what the post-Trump Republican Party will look like, take a glimpse at Tom Cotton, one of the US senators from Arkansas (where I live). Cotton has waged a relentless campaign for war against Iran and has supported every horror produced by the US foreign-policy establishment for the last 20 years. He makes other American hawks look like pacifists. Cotton once said that his only criticism of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where people are held indefinitely without charge or trial, is that too many beds are empty.
Thursday
Soon will come a time when fighting among Democrats must cease.
By Michael Winship
Hey, Sanders, hey, Warren, hey, Biden and the rest of you. Listen, I know from party divisiveness. As a very (very!) young man, I worked on the campaign staff of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. There now will be a slight pause as you imitate explosions and other sound effects from your favorite disaster movies.
Ten years after Citizens United, the damage is broad and deep—but we can still fix it.
By Tiffany Muller
Ten years ago, in January 2010, the Supreme Court released its disastrous Citizens United decision. The court, either through remarkable naivety or sheer malevolence, essentially married the terrible idea that “money is speech” to the terrible idea that “corporations are people.”
By Robert Reich
As the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism.
By Caitlin Johnstone
We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn’t make head or tail out of. We were then taught what’s what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier.
If you’ve got more money than you can spend, you can spend your extra wealth on… guarding your extra wealth.
By Jim Hightower
I’m guessing that being rich is a comfortable feeling—no money worries, you’re set for life! But is it possible that being too rich can be too much, even discombobulating?
Friday
By John W. Whitehead
And so it continues.
‘We've long suspected he would try to gut Medicare in a second term.’
By Jake Johnson
An advocacy group composed of doctors and medical professionals on Wednesday joined the chorus denouncing President Donald Trump for threatening to slash Medicare and Social Security funding “at some point” should he win a second term in November.
By Margaret Kimberley
As long as the Internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy”—a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon.
By Ramzy Baroud
Billions of US taxpayers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid.
By Philip M. Giraldi
To say that there has been some strange stuff coming out of the White House lately would be an understatement. If President Donald Trump knew a bit more about history, he would understand that countries that rent out their national armies to serve as mercenaries usually wind up holding the short end of the stick. There is the example of Pyrrhus of Epirus in the third century B.C., for whom the expression “Pyrrhic victory” was coined, and, more recently there was the British employment of 30,000 Hessian and other German soldiers in the American revolution. Hessian regiments were rented out by their prince to the King of England to pay the expenses of his government. The use of mercenaries by the British was cited by the colonists as one of their principal grievances and the Hessians became the losers in one of the few early colonial victories at Trenton.
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