New York Times and Reaction to It Help Us See Where Nazis Come From

“Imagine being so bad at drumming that you become a Nazi,” someone tweeted in response to the recent and scandalous New York Times’ article about an Ohio Nazi. “Or at painting,” I replied.

That part of the explanation of where Nazis come from is not new.

What’s newest about the article is the reaction to it: a flood of outrage filling my social media and email, including demands that Nazis not be “humanized” or “normalized,” and insistence that they be simply condemned, ignored, read more

Suddenly, I’m a ‘Russian agent’: The US Government Requirement that RT-TV Register as a ‘Foreign Agent’ is a Threat to Our Press Freedom

By Dave Lindorff

            For a number of years now, I have been periodically interviewed as a source or a commentator on news programs and as an occasional panel participant on RT TV, the Russian government-funded English-language television station. For the past year, I’ve been paid a small amount for my work.

read more

            Effective Monday, November 13, something changed, though. read more

The UK’s National Health Service up close and personal: Comparing Britain’s National Health to Medical Care in the US

By Dave Lindorff

In late September, AmerisourceBergen, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical distribution companies with revenue of $150 billion, was fined $260 million by the US Food and Drug Administration for emptying pre-filled glass syringes of expensive cancer drugs and reloading the drugs, in slightly smaller doses, into cheap plastic syringes before distributing them to oncology centres. For years, the company allegedly pocketed the profits obtained by creating and selling 10 per read more

Focus: North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Annals of Rehabilitation

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200 billion?  He also suggested that the “successful prosecution” of such a war “would read more

His critique of US media still resonates: Manufacturing Consent Co-Author and Media Critic Ed Herman Dead at 92

            Edward Samuel Herman, who died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 92 on Nov. 11, didn’t just cry out “fake news” like so many politicians and media pundits do today referring to stories that they object to. Rather, he explained why so much of the news in the US is and has long been fake and how the seemingly independent system of news organizations go about creating it, almost as if they were operating under the direction of some government of propaganda.

            read more

Against Thanksgiving

What the hell do I mean I’m against Thanksgiving? Can’t I find something worse to be against? How about famine, cholera, war, slavery, rape, murder, torture, environmental collapse, refugee crises, evil heartless lying scheming governments, oil spills, slick propaganda, mass incarceration, entrenched apathy, bigotry, greed, or sadism? Indeed, I’m certainly against all of those things and thousands of others, and more so than I am against Thanksgiving.

But the world’s problems are relevant read more