“In a society where a woman’s status is still largely viewed as subordinate to that of a man, a recent ruling by India’s Supreme Court spotlights the significant, and largely unacknowledged, contributions of women to both individual households and the national economy. In dry legalese, the June 11 verdict establishes a monetary value for ‘loss of domestic care’ in a compensation case for a 2001 vehicle crash that claimed the life of a young wife and mother of three. The court granted the woman’s family a sum of 6.3 million rupees (about $66,000) – more than 25 times the initial award offered in 2003. And the judges also set a minimum estimate for domestic ‘homemaker’ duties at 30,000 rupees ($317) per month – which is about 10 times the amount previously used. Arriving at the current award and the benchmark for future compensation is about much more than numbers, however.” (06/17/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s all about the impulse to control. We come into this world boundless and free with eyes full of wonder, but within a few years our minds create and solidify a sense of self around which our mental lives revolve. We do this because we are helpless when we are born, and things happen which are uncomfortable or startling, so we naturally begin seeking out strategies to control what happens to us. Before you know it we’ve got vast spires of psychological architecture within us dedicated to using thought to promote the interests and security of an entirely symbolic me-character that we made up in our minds. And from that point on we are cut off from the Eden of perception.” (06/18/26)
“Now that Graham Platner is officially the Democratic Party’s chosen candidate to face Sen. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins this November, his campaign staff and the far-left establishment that back him will undoubtedly spend the next five months trying to contain the fallout from his personal history. They will ask voters to look past the domestic abuse allegations, the rhetoric glorifying political violence, the racially charged comments and the Nazi tattoo. They will argue that those controversies are distractions and urge Mainers to focus instead on the issues facing our state. As a Republican serving in the Maine House, I wholeheartedly agree. Because when Mainers look beyond the colorful Platner headlines and turn their focus to his policies, they will find an extreme version of the same progressive agenda that has already made life harder for working families across our state.” (06/18/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Roger D Harris & John Perry
“Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington’s efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute (if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering) is less about ends than means. Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it, with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy. Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony.” (06/18/26)
“‘I’m the boss,’ President Trump joked when he arrived a bit late to a meeting with G7 leaders in France Wednesday. He is. That’s what his detractors forget. America is ‘the boss’ again, the colossus. Iran doesn’t bully us. Israel doesn’t instruct us. Europe can sneer at Donald Trump all it likes, but it’s a supplicant. China respects us. Canada bows. Trump understands power, and it rests easy on his shoulders. He joked about it at the G7 in his relaxed American fashion, and European leaders now get it. They laughed along, but they understood. By the time he had emerged from a glittering dinner at Versailles to fly home, he had signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran that has the great and the good worked up into a symphony of hysterical catastrophizing.” [editor’s note: It’s sometimes hard to discern what percentages of Devine’s brain are “clueless” vs. “crazy,” but the total of other percentages is zero – TLK] (06/17/26)
“The shooting portion of the Iran ‘War’ lasted about 40 days, far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya. Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants—far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far. No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes, depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance. But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.” (06/18/26)
“If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might spit out Alexis Goldstein. She was a federal worker who was fired amid the Trump administration’s push to cripple the administrative state, and she’s running in the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, a state full of federal workers downsized in the DOGE push. Goldstein, a former program manager in the chief technologist’s office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was fired, in fact, for confronting DOGE functionaries at the CFPB offices last February. Plus, Goldstein is a highly skilled financial analyst—she worked as a programmer on Wall Street before quitting to join Occupy Wall Street in 2010—at a time when one of the most operatic and unusual financial schemes of the century is playing out in the highly leveraged data center build-out.” (06/18/26)
“Trustees of the Social Security program just issued their annual report. Each year, the picture of the program’s solvency is dismal. But this year it’s even worse. Rather than falling short in 2033, as reported last year, this year the shortfall is projected to be in late 2032. That’s six years from now. Without action taken, benefits, per the report, will be cut 22% late in 2032. That means that every young working person is now forced to pay, by law, 12.4% of their pay — half paid by them and half paid by their employee — into a bankrupt system. As I recall, this is a free country. So, the fault is ours. We, the voters, sit by and allow this to be done to us. Even if the system was not broken and could pay benefits as promised, it still is a horrible situation.” (06/17/26)
“Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory — for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same — was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. ‘I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,’ he writes in World Cup Fever. ‘A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.’ The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines. For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as ‘the beautiful game.'” (06/17/26)
“As Israeli officials lash out against a preliminary deal to end the war in Iran, President Donald Trump is returning the favor. ‘I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon,’ Trump said Tuesday. ‘Israel would have been blown up a long time ago had I not gotten involved.’ The comments represent a nadir in U.S.-Israel relations under Trump. The dispute is fundamental. Trump is determined to end the war with Iran, and Iran has made clear that a peace deal is only possible if Israel halts its operations against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, in Lebanon. … Israel, for its part, believes its interests are best served by continued war with both Hezbollah and Iran, and it’s insisting that it won’t be bound by the terms of any deal negotiated between Tehran and Washington alone.” (06/17/26)
