Plutocracy

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – It would be unfair to suggest that the titans of Wall Street are oblivious to poverty. One of their central themes is the role that financial literacy can play in teaching citizens how wealth is acquired and maintained. In their worldview saving and investing in the stock […]

Djibouti

City-State or Empire? The United Arab Emirates Seeks dominance in the Horn of Africa

Middle East Monitor

By Usman Butt | – ( Middle East Monitor) – Since the 2011 Arab Spring the United Arab Emirates has been taking an active role in a number of hotspots from Egypt, Libya to Yemen. The Gulf nation has spent $26 billion annually on its defence budget since 2016 and this is expected to increase […]

Arab Spring

Failures of Democracy in America and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Today is ten years since Egyptian youth gathered in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo demanding the resignation of Egypt’s brutal and corrupt Interior Minister, Habib Adly. Even those who called for the rally were surprised by the thousands of youth and workers that showed up, on Egypt’s Police Day, and […]

Donald Trump

The Other Capitol Mob: How the Billionaires funded the Insurrection

Jim Hightower

Much to the embarrassment of major corporations, their political donations were traced to the mayhem of January 6. ( Otherwords.org ) – You can’t poke into any issue in Congress without stumbling over sacks full of corporate campaign donations. The recent eruption of pro-Trump mob violence inside the U.S. Capitol exposed boodles of that special […]

Congress

McConnell Cynically used the Trump-Monster to get Tax Cuts and SCOTUS, Now Dropping him like a Squeezed Orange

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In Chapter 7 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the enormously wealthy Jay Gatsby becomes concerned about word getting out that he is having an affair with Daisy, who is married to Tom, and abruptly stops having the big parties he had been throwing, to which assorted society flotsam […]

Banking

Letting the Markets go Wild while the People Go Down: A War of the Worlds

Tomdispatch

By Nomi Prins | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. As it happens, I’m thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins. We all know, of course, that we’re living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people […]

Donald Trump

Biden to invoke Defense Production Act for Vaccine manufacture. Trump? Playing Golf at Mar-a-Lago

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Will Feuer at CNBC reports that Joe Biden will invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up the manufacture of more doses of the coronavirus vaccine. You may ask yourself, why has this not already been done? Trump said on December 9 that he “might” invoke the Korea War-era act, […]

Debt

Austerity Terrors: Congress Stimulus Package Finally Passes – but it is Too Little, Too Late

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – 900 billion dollars is a big amount, Apparently one trillion is a whole order of magnitude greater. Or at least the number is so terrifying that politicians bend heaven and earth to avoid being connected with trillion dollar expenditures. And this allergic reaction is bipartisan. In the […]

Donald Trump

White House Partying like it is 2021, with a Covid 9/11 Death Toll Every Day

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – ‘Tis the season to be folly Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la Don(ald) we now our gay apparel, Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!… It’s party time in the nation’s capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn’t? And hey, don’t you want to […]