Author: Dave Lindorff

By Dave Lindorff

            It’s July 4. Do you want fireworks?  You’re in luck, because that’s what your militarist government wants to deliver.

            You may have to wait a bit, but what’s in store is a new arms race, a new era of super instability with the chance for, or even likelihood of a catastrophic ending in the form of a global nuclear war.

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            It’s read more

By Dave Lindorff

            The wailing you hear from public sector unions and from trade unions in general in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Wednesday Janus decision banning the mandatory payment of fees to unions by workers who choose not to join them in the public sector is overwrought. In many states with strong public sector unions, this has been the case long before this ruling came down.

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             It’s read more

By Dave Lindorff

            Over a generation ago, engineer Bill Smith, working at Motorola, developed a management system called Six-Sigma, designed to help companies avoid quality problems in their products and business processes. His system caught on and became a catch=word in business schools and in large corporations.

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            In 1995, Jack Welsh, CEO of GE, made it central to the read more

By Dave Lindorff

Let me start out with full disclosure: I’m 69 and next April I will start collecting $30.000 a year in Social Security benefits — the amount I qualify for on the basis of both my highest 35 years of earnings as an employed and later self-employed journalist, and because I’ve waited until I hit 70, the maximum age for starting to collect benefits, before starting to receive my checks.

So it particularly galls me to read news articles about read more

Dave Lindorff

            The summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was pretty much all symbols and no solid content — basically it’s an agreement to talk further with plenty of wiggle room for either side to back out later. But that said it was a striking departure from the gutless and arrogant refusal of 11 prior presidents to make any move towards ending the state of war between the US and read more

By Dave Lindorff

         The latest report of the Social Security Administration trustees is out, and as usual they are issuing dire warnings that the Social Security system is heading for the rocks. The Trust Fund — extra money  deliberately collected from workers and employers since 1983 to build up a surplus so as to fund the cost of benefit checks to the wave of Baby Boomers who began retiring in 2011 — will “run out” in read more

By Dave Lindorff

My wife Joyce and I came home last week from a three-week trip to Manila in the Philippines, and to Hong Kong and Beijing in China.

Even though Philippines President Rodrigo Dutarte has an ongoing program of murdering drug dealers on the streets, and China has a penchant for locking up critics of the regime — even Nobel Laureates — and beating up and arresting journalists, there was only one place on that jaunt where I personally read more

By Dave Lindorff

It’s long been an American conceit that the way you negotiate is to demand a surrender by your opponent, and then you hammer out the terms of that surrender.

Ir worked great in World War II after the Red Army chewed up Germany’s elite army and left the country with the choice of being overrun by the Soviets or surrendering at least part of the country to the read more

By Dave Lindorff

Funeral of an 8-month old baby who died from IDF-fired tear gas at the Gaza border protest

Hong Kong — Sitting in this peaceful city on the far side of world from the United States can put some things in perspective. For one thing, the local papers, both Chinese-language and the English-language South China Morning Post today featured front-page images of dead Palestinian protesters lying on the ground in Gaza. Accompanying read more