Greenfield, MA (Special to Informed Comment) -Budgets are moral documents (or immoral, depending on priorities). So also is tax policy. Consider Trump’s proposed $1.3 trillion discretionary budget for 2021. In snapshot, the Pentagon gets 55% and every other need of 331 million people–from health, education, agriculture, transportation, environmental protection to housing–is left with 45%. As […]
Civil Disobedience in the Time of Climate Crisis
On March 27, 2018, a Massachusetts judge found thirteen protestors who obstructed construction of a high-pressure fracked gas pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts not responsible for their crime of trespassing and disturbing the peace. The judge ruled that the potential environmental and public health impacts of the pipeline – including the risk of climate change […]
Filthy Rich: How America’s Unprecedented Inequality is Literally Killing Us
“The 500 richest people in the world…gained a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019, further exacerbating inequities that have not been seen since the late 1920s…Eight of the 10 richest people in the world are from the U.S.” – Bloomberg, 12/27/2019 Greenfield, Ma. (Special to Informed Comment) – Why, in the richest of countries […]
Climate Crisis after Disappointing COP 25: “The Science is Screaming!”
(Special to Informed Comment) – In the wake of the disappointing UN COP 25 climate conference in Madrid, thousands of climate scientists are exhorting governments publicly, with an existential sense of urgency based upon the most up-to-date science, that we are doomed within decades if we do not act immediately to slow the climate crisis. […]
On Armistice Day: How WW I is at the Root of our Total Wars– Poison Gas, Aerial Bombing, Machine Guns
Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace –“ the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror.” (1) (Informed Comment) – World War 1 was the first […]
Trail of Tears: Refugees at Our Southern Border
“There were many trails of tears all over North America of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed by government forces. The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears.” – Joy Harjo (Informed Comment) – Children, families and caravans of brown-skinned people arriving […]
Trump’s Economic Sanctions: War by Another Name
(Informed Comment) – In early 2019, the White House threatened to invade Venezuela, take down the government and replace it with their choice of president and political party. Though no missiles have been fired and no bombs dropped on the country, our government is waging a war by other means, namely criminal economic sanctions, to […]
We are here because you were there: Refugees at the US-Mexican Border
(Informed Comment) – Why would so many Guatemalans make the arduous journey to the US-Mexican border seeking refuge, knowing the hatred heaped on them by the Trump Administration? A short list of our long history of corporate exploitation and military aggression in that country might explain. In 1928 the American United Fruit Company (present-day Chiquita […]
The Measure of our Happiness: Our Miserable Plutocracy
Most policies adopted by our government are those that favor the economic elite and business interests.
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