“The U.K. government agreed Wednesday to release documents casting light on the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, as it tries to stem mounting anger over the revelations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced the wrath of opposition lawmakers, and his own Labour Party backbenchers, after acknowledging that he had known at the time of the 2024 appointment about Mandelson’s friendship with the convicted sex offender. Starmer said that he was unaware of the depth of the relationship, and that Mandelson ‘had lied repeatedly’ about his ties to Epstein. A trove of documents about Epstein released last week by the U.S. Justice Department has finished off Mandelson’s long political career — and left Starmer facing angry questions about his judgment in making him Britain’s envoy to the Trump administration, the country’s most important ambassadorial post.” (02/04/25)
“A wave of school protests sweeping the US in response to the fatal shooting of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota has revealed how teachers unions have weaponized classrooms for their own left-wing agenda. The unions have revealed themselves as political operatives more concerned with indoctrinating kids than teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic. These disruptions didn’t materialize out of thin air. The teachers’ unions fired the starting gun by blasting out anti-ICE propaganda to teachers, urging them to rally against immigration enforcement and turn schools into battlegrounds for their partisan fights. The National Education Association is also pushing teachers to print out immigration-related political propaganda posters and put them in their classrooms.” [editor’s note: Anti-ICE isn’t “left-wing,” it’s “anti-gang” – TLK] (02/04/25)
“President Trump’s budget office is instructing the Department of Transportation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claw back more than $1.5 billion from blue states on grounds the money was being mishandled, officials told The Post. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told the DOT Wednesday to cancel more than $943 million, while the CDC was ordered to nix at least $602 million meant for New York, California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota. An OMB spokesperson said that the states were being targeted for ‘waste and mismanagement’ of taxpayer funds. Illinois was slated to receive the largest of the transportation-related grants, with $100 million provided to the state’s Environmental Protection Agency to build electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.” (02/04/25)
“President Trump has been clamoring for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates on the grounds that inflation is much lower than what’s being officially reported. It turns out Trump is spot on, with today’s real inflation rate being only one-third of the official metrics. These numbers come from the real-time price aggregator Truflation, which monitors millions of prices daily. That is orders of magnitude higher than the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which observes only a few thousand prices three times per month. According to Truflation, prices have risen an average of just 0.9 percent over the last 12 months. That’s about as good as it gets outside of a recession, especially when the Fed is engaged in money printing, euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’. Truflation’s annual inflation rate is now much lower than the official inflation rate of 2.7 percent reported by the consumer price index (CPI).” (02/04/25)
“Officials in Georgia’s Fulton County said Wednesday they have asked a federal court to order the FBI to return ballots and other documents from the 2020 election that it seized last week, escalating a voting battle as President Donald Trump says he wants to ‘take over’ elections from Democratic-run areas with the November midterms on the horizon. The FBI had searched a warehouse near Atlanta where those records were stored, a move taken after Trump’s persistent demands for retribution over claims, without evidence, that fraud cost him victory in Georgia. Trump’s election comment came in an interview Monday with a conservative podcaster and the Republican president reaffirmed his position in Oval Office remarks the next day, citing fraud allegations that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.” (02/04/25)
“A small crowd of abortion rights advocates gathered at a public comment session of the Gwinnett County Department of Planning and Development in July 2025. The most diverse and second-most populous county in Georgia, Gwinnett County distributed millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to local nonprofits in 2025, with most recipients receiving something in the tens of thousands. One organization, Georgia Wellness Group, was set to receive a much bigger prize: $450,000. According to its website, Georgia Wellness is a clinic that provides ’compassionate holistic care’ for women and families. But this is a rebrand from its longstanding religious, explicitly anti-abortion identity. The group arguably fits into a category known as ‘crisis pregnancy centers,’ or CPCs, part of a project from the Christian Right dedicated to replacing public reproductive healthcare with anti-abortion ‘clinics.'” (02/03/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“I saw a video of a food delivery robot navigating around the body of a homeless person lying on the sidewalk, and I can’t stop thinking about it. This video is as close to a self-portrait of western civilization as it gets. This is who we are. This is where we’re at. … It captures so perfectly the creepy dance between suffering, apathy, frivolity and corporate profiteering that makes our particular dystopia so distinctive, in just a few short seconds of footage. This is the dance that makes the empire go round. It’s got everything: * A man splayed out on the concrete because it hurts to be human in this global ghost town, and because he was unsuccessful at becoming a productive gear-turner in the capitalist machine, and because social safety nets have been stripped bare in order to help millionaires become billionaires.” (02/03/25)
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum on January 20 was not an exercise in pique. It was the clearest articulation yet of a strategic shift that has profound implications – not just for US-Canada relations, but for the entire structure of American alliances worldwide. Carney told the Davos audience that ‘the old order is not coming back’ and that the rules-based international system was always ‘partially false’. The strongest exempted themselves when convenient, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and Canada ‘placed the sign in the window’ while avoiding the gaps between rhetoric and reality. That bargain, he declared, no longer works. Canada is now building what Carney called ‘strategic autonomy’: the capacity to feed itself, fuel itself, and defend itself without depending on the United States.” (02/03/25)
“‘This is time for a revolution … They can’t take us all down.’ Those words from ‘Breaking Bad’ actor Giancarlo Esposito are being echoed by a growing number of armchair revolutionaries today. Revolution is again in the air as we approach the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. On Tuesday, Simon & Schuster is releasing my book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, an exploration of the founding and the future of our unique republic. It is a book about revolutions and how they can consume those who start them. Both the American and French revolutions arose during the same period, but one became the world’s oldest democracy while the other became a blood-soaked tyranny known as the Reign of Terror.” [editor’s note: The American revolution created … Iceland? – TLK] (02/03/25)
“Among the critical issues facing our country today, nuclear arms control is seldom top of mind for most people, understandably, given our myriad political, social and economic crises. Recent books and films such as Annie Jacobsen’s 2004 non-fiction tome Nuclear War: A Scenario and last fall’s A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, garnered needed attention for the still-existential threat of nuclear weapons, yet the problem remains mostly absent from our political discourse. Part of the fault for that lies with President Donald Trump, who while constantly touting his ability to ‘make deals,’ is missing in action on a simple agreement that would make the US and the world safer. New START, the arms control treaty negotiated by President Barack Obama and extended by President Joe Biden, will expire on February 5.” (02/03/25)
