US politics

How Sen. Manchin just Positioned Chinese Firms to dominate the Green Energy Markets of the 21st Century, Leaving the US in the Dust

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has succeeded in blocking the part of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill that would have moved the U.S. electricity grid quickly to green energy. This development is very bad news for the earth, since human beings burning coal, petroleum and natural […]

African-Americans

“A Certain Hope Died:” How the White nationalist Republican Party used up Colin Powell, then Spit Him Out

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Colin Powell died on Monday, not long after his rival inside the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld. Both of them tore down the post-World War II order that the framers of the United Nations had erected (among them, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower), which aimed at criminalizing aggressive warfare. Despite his […]

Antisemitism

Trivializing the Holocaust: Georgia GOP Senatorial Wannabe Herschel Walker Fumbles Backwards, Coached by Trump

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, CA. (Special to Informed Comment) – Maybe Republicans don’t know the historical significance of the swastika. Many don’t know the history of WWII. Thanks to former football great and Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, the Republican Party’s open embrace of Fascism just got more visible and messier. Walker is running against Georgia Senator […]

Crime

Top Trump Fundraiser Boasted of Raising $3 Million to Support Jan. 6 “Save America” Rally

ProPublica

By Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan | – The Insurrection The Effort to Overturn the Election ( ProPublica) – As much as $3 million may have been raised to support the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the attack on the Capitol, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica, with some money […]

Featured

Will Israel’s Muslim Fundamentalists help Pass Marijuana Bill?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jack Khoury and Noa Shpigel report at Haaretz that the Israeli government is advancing a marijuana bill that may gain the support of the United Arab List, a Muslim fundamentalist party that forms part of the 8-party coalition underpinning the government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Although Mansour Abbas, the […]

Afghanistan

Celebrating Rep. Barbara Lee, our Cassandra who warned against the Failed 20-Year Wars

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I’d saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a grey suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. […]

CO2

Sordid Advantage: America can’t avert Climate Hellhole because Manchin, Sinema are Corporate Hired Mercenaries

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – American journalists like to personalize stories and create horse races empty of real content. That is why most Americans don’t know what is in the Democratic Build Back Better Bill backed by President Joe Biden– the substance has not been reported on. That bill was originally budgeted at $350 billion […]

Employment

How Finding that immigrants don’t reduce the wages of native-born workers won the Nobel Prize

The Conversation

By Arvind Magesan | – Applied economists spend a large fraction of their time trying to squeeze meaningful answers — causal effects — out of observational data. Unlike the natural sciences, we can’t run experiments in order to answer the big questions in our field. If we want to know, for example, how raising the […]

Antisemitism

Bogus charges of Antisemitism and the Case of Rashida Tlaib

David Rubenstein

By David Rubenstein | – ( Southside Pride) – You have to wonder how many people actually listened to the allegedly antisemitic comments made by Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in a speech to a Socialist convention earlier this year. Not many, you can be sure of that. For days those comments were a lead news […]