A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
The 2018 election looks at first glance like a wash: Republicans gained seats in the Senate and Democrats regained control of the House with enough of a margin to ensure that they can put some limits on presidential power.
But longer term impacts of 2018 are, I believe, more significant. In this election, with President Trump as party leader pushing a rabidly racist claim that immigrants fleeing from the largely US-caused poverty, chaos
By Dave Lindorff
This story was written for Tarbell.org. It was co-published with the Hancock Herald in Hancock, N.Y. and 100 Days in Appalachia.
Fishs Eddy, NY — Most of Betty Rosengrant’s extended family needs Medicaid. They’re also mostly Republicans. Rosengrant, a resident of this little village in the upstate New York town of Hancock, says she knows Republicans have proposed cuts to the federal/state health care system, but that “people just vote the way their parents voted,
By Dave Lindorff
Trump has been tearing up treaties since taking office, from halting negotiations on the TPP to NAFTA, but his latest threat to pull out of the nuclear deal, negotiated by President Reagan in the 80s, may be his biggest mistake.
Meanwhile, while US President Donald Trump and his National Security Advisor, the neoconservative firebrand John Bolton, justify their threat by accusing Russia of
By Dave Lindorff
The brutal murder of sometime Washington Post visiting columnist Jamal Khashoogi, apparently on orders from Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has many American journalists and columnists in high dudgeon. How, they ask, can the US be allied to a country run by such a blood-thirsty leader? How can the US ally itself to, and sell $100 billion worth of arms to, a country so medieval in its behavior?
Perhaps
By Dave Lindorff
The US media are in high dudgeon over the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi living in the US in self-imposed exile who among other things had been writing articles critical of the current Saudi royal leadership, and especially Saudi Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
Certainly outrage is justified. It seems clear from the evidence that Khashoggi was deliberately lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul,
By Dave Lindorff
It looks like Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh will soon be the ninth member of the Supreme Court.
The FBI has turned in a submissive fig leaf of a report on its cursory, rushed and presidentially circumscribed “investigation” into the claims of sexual abuse leveled against him by several women who assert that he attacked them when they were in high school or college, and now the three Republican senators who pretended to be concerned about his behavior and his veracity in
By Dave Lindorff
Why did the US military have a vertical-take-off F-35B launched from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean make an attack on a Taliban position in Afghanistan?
Nobody’s mentioning several things about this Pentagon-touted first-ever US military “combat use” of the most expensive and supposedly sophisticated fighter-bomber ever produced at a current price of over $115 million per plane for the B model.
The first point is why it happened at all. The plane is not actually meant
By Dave Lindorff
Whatever your view of Brett Kavanaugh, let’s get one thing clear: While he’s hoping to become the ninth justice of the US Supreme Court, he is not on trial. He is facing a confirmation hearing by the Judicial Committee of the US Senate.
Republican backers of this clearly flawed and truth-challenged candidate are insisting indignantly, in the case of mounting charges from alleged victims, that he’s entitled to a “presumption of innocence” as several
By Dave Lindorff
In the preface to his remarkable three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, writing in 1930 about earth-shaking events in which he was a key actor, explains his view of writing history. Citing the reactionary French historian Louis Madelin, who wrote that “…the historian ought to stand upon the wall of a threatened city, and behold at the same time the besiegers and the besieged” in