Politics
A shocking article in the Daily Caller this week blew the lid on what it’s really like among all those “public servants” working in the Federal bureaucracy: about 85 percent of them do nothing at all related to their jobs. With thousands of “workers” furloughed, the government offices are actually working better than ever. Is there a lesson in this somewhere? Ron Paul discusses this topic with Daniel McAdams. #governmentshutdown
It is a common misconception that democracies do not start wars of aggression or carry out terrorist attacks. The historical facts for the period from 1945 to today show a completely different reality: time and again, democratic states in Europe and North America have participated in wars of aggression and terrorist attacks in the past 70 years. There are so many cases that I am not able to list all of them here. As examples, I have selected three events from different decades….
In the six months since he stepped in to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency following Scott Pruitt’s resignation last summer, Andrew Wheeler has gutted fuel efficiency standards, rolled back carbon emissions rules for coal plants, and moved to allow more mercury emissions—and President Donald Trump made his approval known Wednesday as he nominated Wheeler to officially head the agency. “The only thing Wheeler is going to protect at the EPA is the profits of polluters,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), in a statement. “I’m sure corporate board rooms will celebrate this nomination. But for anyone who drinks water, breathes air, or cares about wildlife, this will be nothing but awful.” #environment
The most important thing we must do to save our #democracy is get big money out of politics. It’s a prerequisite to accomplishing everything else. Today, big money continues to corrupt American politics – creating a vicious cycle that funnels more wealth and power to those at the top and eroding our democracy.
I live in Vienna, Austria, where the 5G rollout is suddenly upon us. Within the last five weeks, pre-5G has been officially announced at Vienna airport and 5G at the Rathausplatz, the main square in Vienna, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to its Christmas market each December and skating rink each January, which are special treats for children. Along with birds and insects, children are the most vulnerable to 5G depredation because of their little bodies.[8] Friends and acquaintances and their children in Vienna are already reporting the classic symptoms of EMR poisoning…
Hope for 2019: While our #democracy is fragile needs the force of law and the will of the people to protect it, Americans have been rising to and meeting that challenge.
An eight-year-old Guatemalan boy died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shortly after midnight on Christmas Day, the second death of a migrant child detained by the agency this month alone. #migrants
The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) resolution to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s years-long assault on Yemen and #yemeni children by a bipartisan vote of 56-41. #YemenCantWait
As the U.S. Senate prepared Wednesday to vote on a resolution to cut military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, House Republicans in their last days in power moved to undermine efforts to end U.S. complicity in the assault that’s dragged on for more than three years in the impoverished country. #YemenCantWait
French authorities will deploy at least 8,000 riot police and gendarmes in Paris on Saturday, and 89,000 forces across the country according to the Prime Minister, as the Elysee prepares for “act four” of the Yellow Vest movement’s violent protests against the Macron government.
A new study published Thursday in The Lancet, one of the world’s preeminent medical journals, makes clear the increasingly familiar attacks used by right-wingers worldwide to dehumanize migrants and refugees by describing them as disease-infested is a xenophobic slur rooted in racism and hate, not facts or the science of public health. In fact, immigrants do more to improve the health of their new country than to harm it.
On Wednesday of last week, the Trump administration sent out a memo to 2 million federal workers warning them that it will be “illegal” for them to talk about the possibility of Trump’s impeachment while at work. They were also warned that they cannot use the word “resist,” a reference to the growing anti-Trump movement from the left. This is unheard of in modern times. #trump
“Medicare for All promises a system that is fairer, more efficient, and vastly less expensive than America’s bloated, monopolized, over-priced and under-performing private health insurance system,” argued Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. “It’s easy to pay for something that costs less,” said Robert Pollin, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. #medicareforall
Kicking off the inaugural Sanders Institute conference in Burlington, Vermont this weekend—billed as “A Gathering of Minds to Envision the World We Want”—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gave a keynote address to a crowd of influential progressives from around the world Thursday evening. In keeping with the Gathering’s mission “to revitalize our democracy,” Sanders’ address encompassed a progressive vision for the future—one in which economic, social, racial, and political power is distributed amongst the people who keep the world’s economies running, rather than accumulated by the wealthiest few.
In a historic vote that could “mark the beginning of the end of American complicity” in Saudi Arabia’s mass atrocities in Yemen, the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Yemen War Powers resolution by an overwhelming margin of 63-37.
