Category: 1st Issue

The topic of today’s article is greed, the kind that U.S. industries are famous for. Making a killing off those least likely to afford it (and that’s includes more than one-half of Americans) is business as usual in America’s capitalist economy. Whether it’s the oil and gas industry making billions in profits by exploiting their monopoly status to raise prices far exceeding the cost of their products, the tech industry minting instant billionaires by trading on the gullibility of the public to pay for outrageously overpriced goods, or the financial crooks that underwrite virtually every new corporate swindle. Slimy as the business practices of these operators are, it is not until you reach the pharmaceutical industry that you have finally arrived at the bottom of the barrel. Big pharma profits to the tune of over half a trillion dollars on the misery and desperation of sick people. The worst place in the world to live if you have a life-threatening illness, particularly cancer, is the U.S. where cancer drugs are three to four times more expensive than any other place on earth. Even patients with insurance are forced to pony up an average of $16,500 every year out of their own pocket to stay alive. Imagine, living in the richest, most powerful country in the world and getting stiffed by big pharma on a scale that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other wealthy country. But in the U.S. the government is a silent partner in the swindle. Heard enough? There’s lots more that will make your blood boil. Check out “Prescription Drug Prices Are Too Damn High” and continue to take your overpriced blood pressure medicine.

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Time to face facts. The U.S. has shed the democratic principles that at its founding made it the envy of the rest of the world. It is now the world’s war machine, a pariah of violence and destruction spending more on war than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine — combined. Its foreign policy has devolved into regime change wars, invasion of sovereign countries and imposition of economic sanctions that bring starvation and death to the world’s people. Domestically, the birth of the national security state has made the American people the most surveilled among the world’s advanced nations. Censorship, the handmaiden of surveillance, has become a new cottage industry. The repression of speech too massive a task for the government alone has been subcontracted to powerful corporations, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. The U.S. is a declining nation using its overwhelming military might to barely hold on to the title of the world’s hegemon. Rewinding the historical tape one hundred years, we are reminded that the U.S. has been treading this dangerous path for the last one hundred years. (if not since 1777). Want to see history repeating itself with disastrous consequences for the mass of Americans? Check out “Watch out. There may be G-Men Under Your Bed.”

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Do antiwar protests prevent or stop U.S military actions all over the world?  A hard question to answer. Although demonstrations and protests have accompanied every U.S. war in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, their success as a change agent is mixed. Demonstrations and rallies accompanied every phase of the Vietnam war. But it took over a decade of a losing war and a shattered presidency to make Congress turn off the money spigot financing the war. History repeated itself almost four decades later in 2003, when worldwide protests [between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests] against the Iraq war failed to stop the US and its European vassal states from invading Iraq. That wasn’t the end of the story. Ten years and another war hawk president later,

Congress finally showed a spark of gumption and refused to authorize President Obama’s war plans for Syria. History teaches us that the value of antiwar protests may lie in their power to finally get leaders to reject the myth of America as the rightful hegemon. Calling out the U.S. war machine in public protests may be only way to a saner, safer America. For all who hold out hope that the US will turn from its wanton ways, check out “A Battle for the Ages: Antiwar Protestors Meet the US War Machine.”

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All hail the healthcare industry taking its place alongside big oil, big tech, slimy defense contractors and big banks as the oligarchic masters of the U.S. empire. If you thought America was the world’s greatest democracy, a revelation awaits. If, in fact, America was ever a democracy (the jury is still out), all traces of it went out with girdles and phone booths. If you still cling to your high school fantasies of living in the greatest democracy the world has ever produced, get a load of this —“Functioning democracy means that there’s a correlation between the will of the people and the policies that affect them… [The US] may call itself democratic, but in essence, it’s an oligarchy.” With oligarchy comes income inequality — tons of it. America now leads the advanced economies that make up the G7 in the inequality sweeps. You know where you’ll find lots of it? In healthcare where one hundred million people struggle with medical debt, 41% of all American adults. While the suffering among the people intensifies, there’s good news for healthcare oligarchs —the CEOs of 178 health care companies collectively made $3.2 billion in 2020, 31% more than in 2019. During the same period, millions of people were suffering and dying from COVID. You need a strong stomach to handle this —in 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was a stunning 351-to-1. There’s more, much more about how economic inequality is deepening the class divide between the haves and the have-nots. Check out “Plague on Your House” for all the nauseating details.

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