ALL ARTICLES

Trump’s Inauguration Paid Trump’s Company — With Ivanka In The Middle Of The Ethical Muddle By Ilya Marritz & Justin Elliott & Ilya Marritz ProPublica / WNYC  (12/14/18) When it came out this year that President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised and spent unprecedented amounts, people wondered where all that money went. It turns out one beneficiary was Trump himself. The inauguration paid the Trump Organization for rooms, meals and event space at the company’s Washington hotel, according to interviews as well as internal emails and receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica. During the planning, Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s eldest daughter and a senior…

“…fanatic who believes in a dictatorship of executive power.” By William Rivers Pitt Truthout (12/12/18) Donald Trump has been president for almost 700 days now. In all that time, I have managed to find exactly one redeeming quality in the man: I thoroughly enjoyed the prodigious hard time he gave his now-departed attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sumpter Appomattox Shiloh Both Bull Runs Sessions III. Even that small pleasure, however, is poisoned. Aside from Scott Pruitt, who managed to defoliate the Environmental Protection Agency while stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down or glued to a desk, Sessions was Trump’s most effective cabinet…

  If privatization efforts succeed, millions of people may well face a return to 19th century standards of expensive, private delivery services and limited USPS access. By Kathy Toler OtherWords.org (12/11/18) I’ve been a postal clerk for 23 years, serving my customers in a public post office in Gresham, Oregon. As you might imagine, with the holidays fast approaching, it’s a busy time of year for us. Every day, I help my customers mail letters, cards, and packages across town and across the county. Even when we’re busy, it’s a joy to share a small part in spreading holiday cheer….

Macron’s rabbit-out-of-the hat political ascension leaves him with little legitimacy, once the glow of glossy magazine covers wears off. [Editor’s Note: The same conditions lighting up the streets of Paris are to be found here in the United States … only worse. What, one wonders, will happen here when there is one DC-backed rip-off too many. — Mark L. Taylor] By Diana Johnstone Consortium News (12/5/18) Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure…

  By Harvey Wasserman Reader Supported News (12/10/18) In the Trumputin world of organized crime, Michael Cohen has committed the ultimate betrayal: he’s helped Robert Mueller prove beyond doubt that don Putin in the Kremlin put his very own bagman into the White House. Cohen is the ultimate mobster nightmare, the inside attorney who flips. Many a consigliere has died at Mafia hands for far less. For what might come next, see Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post reporter literally butchered by the Saudi branch of the Trumputin oligarchy. Nixon’s lawyer, John Dean, called Watergate a “cancer on the presidency.” Cohen has confirmed that the “conspiracy…

  By Paul C The Daily Kos (12/3/18) I received an ominous email Friday from Oil Change USA’s Climate Truth Action saying that unless Sen. Schumer intervenes, global warming denier Sen. Joe Manchin is in line to “lead” Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (I will quote the email extensively as this is an action notice not an article): Senator Manchin as ranking member in the Energy Committee would be a complete disaster. Senator Manchin has proven time and time again to be a fossil fuel money puppet, having accepted $965,288 from the coal, oil, and gas industries…

    By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (12/6/18) Pulling back the curtain on the ostensibly “bipartisan” orientation for newly elected members of Congress at Harvard’s Kennedy School in Boston, Reps.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) informed the public through live social media updates on Thursday that—contrary to the ideologically neutral advertising—the private conference featured a heavy dose of speeches by corporate CEOs and completely shut out organized labor and members of the progressive community. “Our ‘bipartisan’ congressional orientation is co-hosted by a corporate lobbyist group,” Ocasio-Cortez noted, likely referring to the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, which is co-sponsoring the event. “Other members have…

Family members of political prisoners protest outside the White House in 1922. (Shutterstock) The targeting of immigrants is intimately linked to a long and ignoble record of labor civil rights repression in the United States.  By Harry Blain Foreign Policy in Focus (11/30/18) The Republican pre-election strategy of exploiting “the caravan” was irredeemably ugly. It’s hard to say what was worse: the shameless and farcical framing of a helpless stream of people as a national security threat, or the president’s off-hand suggestion that these people might actually be funded by the prime villain of most anti-Semitic conspiracy theories: George Soros. Few commentators have failed…