Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s visit to El Paso on Wednesday was unwelcome to most of its residents. They understood that his anti-Latino rhetoric and talk of “infestation,” “crime” and “invasion” had inspired the white terrorist who massacred them, and they are inconsolable in the grief for the 22 dead among them, as are […]
Immigrants aren’t “Invaders:” They’re Who will Pay your Social Security
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Australian-American Rupert Murdoch’s white nationalist TV channel, Fox Cable News, is doubling down on the anti-immigrant memes that drove the El Paso shooter, with empty suit Brian Kilmeade and provocateur Laura Ingraham insisting that immigration is invasion. They appear to be conspiring at provoking a race war, more or less […]
On How Latinos are America’s Greatest Hope for Economic Growth and Renewal
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Hispanics or Latinos have been a key population in North America for four hundred years. They are now often coded as immigrants by white Americans, but they were in what is now New Mexico, Arizona and Texas centuries before English-speakers arrived. Spaniards founded San Antonio in 1718, long before the […]
America’s Shame: 15,549 Gun Homicides in US in 2017; 32 (160) in UK
Revised We are reeling from back-to-back mass shootings, at least one of them an explicit manifestation of white nationalist terrorism in which Americans of a specific ethnicity were targeted, Nazi-like. The US policy of constantly endangering our children is enacted by a bought-and-paid-for Congress on behalf of 10 major gun manufacturers with an $8 billion […]
White Supremacist Terrorism strikes Again in the Age of Trump and Putin
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The slaughter of 20 persons in and around a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by a virulent white nationalist on Saturday was not just a “mass shooting.” It was a profound act of terrorism. Nor was it the action of a single person. The alleged shooter was invested in Trump’s […]
Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Greenland Ice Sheets Cascading into Ocean 50 Years Ahead of Schedule
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Amid the European heat wave, Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute set off a panic this week when she observed that Greenland lost 11 billion tons of ice on August 1, the most in recorded history, and half the ice sheet was experiencing some level of melting. She added […]
Iran: Germany and France Refuse to be Inducted into Trump’s Gulf Naval Operation against Tehran
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The government of Angela Merkel in Germany has rejected participation in the the Trump administration’s naval mission, “Operation Sentinel,” aimed at securing the Straits of Hormuz from Iranian interference in shipping. German foreign minister Heiko Maas of the Social Democratic Party said that Berlin opposes the Trump policy of “maximum […]
The Climate Emergency comes for the Democrats
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Despite the reluctance of corporate America, its cable news channels and its favorite candidates to tackle the looming menace of our climate crisis, it came for the Democrats big time in the second CNN debate. Credit where credit is due; the governor of Washington state, Jay Inslee, was the primary […]
Why Trump let Saudi Arabia and UAE censor his “America First” Speech on Energy
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Sunday the NYT revealed that Trump’s staff ran his May, 2016 speech on “America First” by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their input into the energy passages, and actually altered the text based on their editing. The hollow joke of Trump’s “America first” slogan could not […]