Inequality

Erdoğan’s streak came to a screeching Halt as Turkey’s economy pays the price for Years of Policy Mistakes

By Gulcin Ozkan, King’s College London | – (The Conversation) – For many years, it wasn’t the economy that determined voting behaviour in Turkey. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won almost every election he contested despite a deteriorating economic outlook. This is commonly explained by the importance of identity politics in a country that […]

Inequality

Total U.S. Billionaire Wealth is Up 88 Percent over Four Years

Inequality.org

By Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo | – ( Inequality.org ) – Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. Four […]

Conspiracy Theories

Could Trump win again? Roots of MAGA Paranoia and the Politics of Fear

Arthur Goldwag

Brooklyn, NY (Special to Informed Comment; featured) – The cover of my The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia features a photograph of a bearded, fur-clad man with a horned helmet, tattoos and face paint. On January 6, 2021, Jacob Anthony Chansley, aka the Q Shaman, stood at the House Speakers’ dais […]

Climate Crisis

We Need to Phase out Fossil Fuels Immediately, but Equitably

Tom Athanasiou

By Tom Athanasiou | – This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow […]

Far Right

Our World-Historical Turning Point – Kairos – is Now, and Everything Depends on the Youths

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com) – “All Americans owe them a debt for — if nothing else — releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect.” That’s how Howard Zinn […]

Corporations

We Deserve Medicare for All, But What We Get Is Medicare for Wall Street

Common Dreams

By Les Leopold | – ( Commondreams.org ) – The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it. Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. […]

Corporations

How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits

ProPublica

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester | – ( ProPublica) – Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant […]

Homelessness

How America Abandoned our Poor: Confronting the Needless Scourge of Poverty

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On the island of Manhattan, where I live, skyscrapers multiply like metal weeds, a vertical invasion of seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a century, they have risen as symbols of wealth and the promise of progress for a city and a nation. In movies and TV shows, those buildings churn […]

Corporations

Meeting Union Demands would be a Win-Win for Automakers

OtherWords

By Sonali Kolhatkar ( Otherwords.org) – The United Auto Workers (UAW), a union of nearly 150,000 workers at America’s “Big Three” automakers, are on strike. On the face of it, UAW’s demands sound audacious. They’re calling for a 46 percent pay raise and a four-day workweek, among other things. But in the broader context of […]