Crisis

The impeached U.S. President, Donald Trump, has taken a step never attempted by any of his predecessors. Trump, who every day is exposing his fascist policies and intentions, has announced that he is establishing a “1776 Commission” to re-write American history and force-feed it to every public and certain private school students throughout the United States. Trump’s move is intended to counter the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which is designed to place slavery and the slave trade in a central context in dealing with the history of pre- and post-colonial America.

On September 11th, Gallup headlined “Bias in Others’ News a Greater Concern Than Bias in Own News”, and reported (based upon polling a randomized sample of 20,046 American adults) that:

About twenty years ago The Atlantic published a piece by Jeffrey Tayler named “Russia is finished” subtitled “The unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.” Not a very successful prediction was it? But what he did was fashionable at the time – he described what was happening in Russia in the nineties and made a straight-line projection from there.

Steven HILL
The future of work is here, ushered in by a global pandemic. But is it turning employment into a Worker’s Paradise of working at home? Or more of a Big Brother panopticon?

Patrick COCKBURN

Twenty years ago, a novelist went to see his publisher to discuss his proposal to write a dystopian novel set in Britain in 2020 when newspaper columnists have taken power and are running the country.

These opinion-makers, sometimes called the Commentariat, had for years been expressing outrage at the failings of the government and everyone else. Now they had a chance to show what they could do to put things right.

R.I.P Ruth Bader Ginsbergby Thomas NeuburgerRuth Bader Ginsberg passed away on September 18 from consequences of her ongoing cancers.

Ralph NADER
The American people own most of the wealth – private and public – and most of the information in the country. The top one percent do not.
The American people have most of the power in the country. The top one percent do not.
These assertions may surprise you, because the top one percent and the giant corporations work overtime to control what you own. This means they do not have to seize what you own so long as their control provides them with both riches and power over you.

Conn M. HALLINAN
During the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-565 AD), a mysterious plague spread out of the Nile Valley to Constantinople and finished off the Roman Empire. Appearing first in China and North India, the “Black Death” (Yersinia pestis) radiated throughout the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe. It may well have killed close to half the world’s population, some 50 million people.
Covid-19 is not the Black Death, but its impact may be civilizational, weakening the mighty, raising up the modest, and rearranging axes of power across the globe.

On March 10th of this year, there were 290 daily new U.S. cases of Covid-19 (coronavirus-19).

In Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, he reports on interviews he did in February and March with U.S. President Donald Trump about the coronavirus. Trump admitted that the virus was virulent, but he decided to underplay its danger.