A Country Lost At Sea, Non-Profits Taking a Slice of the Opioid Pie: It’s Time to Stand Up and Be Counted

“We have to stand up against the status quo. We have to call on Congress and keep calling until they hear our message. If you can speak, speak. If you can march, march. When you can vote, vote” (Student nationwide rally for gun control legislation, March 14, 2018). Paraphrasing our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, the time is ripe to speak loudly and carry a big stick. Leave it to the late Howard Zinn’s to put his finger on the solution: “The really critical thing isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but… who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating…”

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We Must March My Darlings (Right Into the White House)

We Must March My Darlings (Right Into the White House) November 8th was the beginning —a shorter lived facsimile erupted six weeks later when the electoral college made Trump’s inauguration inevitable — spilling out from left and right coasts and soon the howls of dismay could be heard in the heartland where the media, mainstream […]

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Trump’s State of the Union Speech —What It Didn’t Tell Us

What’s wrong with this picture? A bunch of folk, whom we laughingly call the voice of the people, behaving badly from nationalistic chest-thumping (USA! USA!) to a spasm of dancing in the aisles (confined to Democratic women celebrating their 2018 election success), to periodic ovations (standing and clapping multiple times). What did we interrupt? The Houston rodeo, a country fair, a rally for the latest populist hero? Surprise, surprise, this was President Trump’s second State of the Union speech before elected officials, SCOTUS justices, administration heavies and a few plain folk for window dressing. Nothing new to see here in a speech chock full of the usual lies, misstatements, exaggerations and just plain nonsense that appear daily on his Twitter feed. What to make of the blather about immigration or in Trump-speak the encroaching hordes on the border, the U.S.-inspired attempted coup in Venezuela or as Trump’s tells it the heroic attempt of the U.S. to help bring democracy to a benighted nation, and the folderol about socialism threatening the pristine U.S. democracy? Suspicious Angels documents how some of Trump’s over-the-top claims went unnoticed by the corporate media intent on restarting the Cold War via Russiagate. Is it as Trump claims the empire on another triumphal march through history or is it all smoke and mirrors? You decide after you read “Trump’s State of the Union Speech — What It Didn’t Tell Us“.

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Progressives Make Merry While Democrats Set the World on Fire

Progressives Make Merry While Democrats Set the World on Fire

The silly season is upon us as November approaches, and the rhetoric from both sides goes from simmer to
boiling. For those of you who still believe that progressives hold the key to righting the ship of state, it appears that train has left the station with
nary a progressive politician onboard. Here’s their message to the faithful.
Read it and weep: “With our support and voice, progressives may persuade and enable President Biden to achieve more progressive policy objectives during his
second term and prevent a fascist takeover.”
Wait a minute, wasn’t that his mandate for the first term? As far as the eye can see the Biden foreign policy
gang has managed to destroy Ukraine, is complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and has stirred up a hornet’s nest with its troop deployment within
striking distance of China. At home the situation is equally dire — privatized healthcare making the U.S. the most expensive and least effective healthcare
system in the world, the cost of a college education spiraling out of control ($100,000 annually for some colleges). No surprise then that undergraduate
college enrollment has dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after the pandemic hullabaloo faded. Then there’s 43.2 million students coping with $1.6
trillion of student debt “owed” to a greedy bunch of banks, private equity companies and sadly even their own government. In the richest country in the
world, 38 million Americans are living below the poverty line, the highest overall poverty rate among advanced economies. Adding another notch to their
belt, Americans surpass the rest of the well-to-do world in income inequality. Worse still by early 2023, 14% of U.S. children went to bed hungry. Will a second
Biden administration address these critical problems and many others bedeviling our lives? It seems likely that a second Biden term will only compound the
catastrophic mess of the first —more war, more foreign aid bloopers, littlehelp for the 78% of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck [Payroll.org].
To find out how bad it really is and how the “party of the people” has left true believers out in the cold, check out
Progressives Make Merry While Democrats Set the World on Fire.

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