Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The European Union has activated the Instex trading mechanism for the purpose of sending medicine and medical supplies to Iran to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Instex operates in Euros rather than dollars and avoids US banks, so that the US Treasury Department cannot claim jurisdiction over it. The Instex bank […]
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US politics
How we gave up our Health, Environment and Diplomacy for Wars, Walls and Plutocracy
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 […]
Trump admits that Easy Voting would Defeat Republicans. That’s because they’ve made Their Base White and Evangelical
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Colin Kalmbacher at Law&Crime surveys reactions to Trump’s admission in an interview on Fox News that a mail-in ballot program that made it possible for the public to vote with ease and increased turnout would keep Republicans from ever being elected again. Voter suppression has not always been a purely […]
How My Dad, Born just before the Spanish Flu, Predicted the Decline of America
( Tomdispatch.com) – My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my […]
The Real Danger behind Trump’s “China Virus” Mantra
Ann Arbor (Special to Informed Comment) – The “China-Virus” mantra illustrates well this administration’s habit of responding to challenges by branding people as ethnic, religious, or political types ranked good or bad, us or them. Not a few have dismissed this practice, rightly, as racist, scapegoating, or just off the point, but the administration’s groupthink […]
Trump bashed Immigrants, but Nearly 1/3 of US Doctors are Foreign-Born, on Pandemic Front Lines
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It turns out we need those foreigners after all, despite what Trump thinks. On Sunday British investigative journalist Iain Overton tweeted, The names of the first three doctors to die fighting COVID-19 in the UK Amged el-HawraniAdel el-TayarHabib Zaidi — Iain Overton (@iainoverton) March 29, 2020 The significance is that […]
Maybe that Imperial Presidency Idea wasn’t so Great: The Coronavirus Reveals that America Long Since Fell Apart
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – If you were asked three months ago, when news of the novel Coronavirus we now call Covid-19 was just emerging from China, which rich country in the world was the most defenseless against a global viral pandemic, would you have said anything but the United States? The Coronavirus crisis […]
Italy Coronavirus Deaths Pass 10,000: How Austerity and Anti-Immigrant Politics Created Europe’s Worst Crisis
( Foreign Policy in Focus) As the viral blitzkrieg rolls across one European border after another, it seems to have a particular enmity for Italy. The country’s death toll has passed China’s, and scenes from its hospitals look like something out of Dante’s imagination. Why? Italy has the fourth largest economy in the European Union, […]
A Civil Rights Issue: Less than 1% of Americans Provide most Money for Political Campaigns
By By Chiraag Bains | – ( Otherwords.org) – Less than 1 percent of the population provides most of America’s campaign funds. It looks nothing like the rest of us. By Chiraag Bains | March 17, 2020 Ten years after Citizens United, our elections are awash with money from mega-donors and corporations. They drown out […]
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