Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare...

The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia.  To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’ Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material...

Lindsey Graham, the neocon senator for South Carolina, wants to murder Vladimir Putin. Lindsey Graham says the only way the war in Ukraine will end is if Russia "breaks" and someone "takes Putin out" pic.twitter.com/M5do9Oj06q — Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) December 23, 2022 Many members of the political class are unapologetic psychopaths who are eager to resolve geopolitical issues with murder, torture, and rape. The “indispensable nation” believes it can murder anybody it wants after...

Even long after most people have left the coronavirus scare behind, you can count on the United States government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to keep the coronavirus fearmongering going. The latest example of this is the CDC’s Thursday report “Mortality in the United States, 2021” blaming coronavirus for much of the decrease in life expectancy for Americans registered for the years 2020 and 2021. Ignored in the report is the great contribution to this dire development...

It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI “nothing-to-see-here” statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election, gave millions to Twitter, and targeted even satire or tiny posts that did not conform with its guidelines. The releases...

The spectacle in the US Capitol Building Wednesday night was downright retch-worthy. And we are not actually referring to the detestable little warmongering clown who preened at the podium in a sweatshirt and cargo pants, offering endless lies and hideously false promises about why American taxpayers and consumers are being bled to death in a pointless and necessary war. No, we are referring to the pathetic gaggle of Representatives and Senators who applauded relentlessly and uproariously in...

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: "The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically." The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization. Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern...

When the Biden administration came into office it had promised to reenter into the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. Under Trump the US had left the deal and had reissued sanctions against Iran. Tehran followed up by increasing its enrichment capabilities and by accumulating more enriched Uranium. It would have been easy for Biden to immediately eliminate the sanctions and to rejoin the deal. Iran would surely have followed up by returning to the enrichment levels the deal allows for. But Biden...

The US military has been showering CNN's retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire. "Today closes a remarkable career for CNN's Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps," reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. "Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this...

Consider just how fortunate we are to have the Twitter Files. Every few days, we are seeing dumps of documents from the operations of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. This weekend’s release was especially shocking. It revealed a close and symbiotic relationship between the company’s management and the FBI, which employs 80 people to police social networks and flag posts. They aren’t looking for crime. They were focused on wrongthink on matters of politics.  In other words, all our worst...

Truthout has a recent article titled "The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism" with a subtitle asserting that "Chinese workers and Uyghurs need solidarity from leftists worldwide," and it at no point attempts to defend either one of those titular claims. The article features comments from New York University's Rebecca E Karl and is replete with leftist-sounding phraseology like "heteronormative patriarchy" and "the hegemonic hold of white power," but what...

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022....

With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform. In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that...

Despite my support for Elon Musk’s continuing efforts to reduce censorship and restore free speech protections on Twitter, I have been critical of some of his moves from his use of polls on restoring certain posters to the suspensions of media figures this week. However, this morning, I was struck by the European Union (EU) rushing into the controversy to threaten, again, sanctions against Musk. The EU is apparently aghast that Twitter could suspend media even temporarily after ignoring the...

If Congress has its way, funding for the Department of Defense and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy will reach more than $850 billion in Fiscal Year 2023, far higher than spending at the height of the Cold War or the peak years of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. While advocates of spending these enormous sums often argue that the money is needed to “support the troops,” more than half of the Pentagon’s yearly budget goes to private contractors, many of whom are...