“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)
“It’s been a month since the United States captured Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, to put him on trial in New York. Rather than force his regime to dismantle, however, the U.S. chose to work with it, more on economic stabilization than on wholesale political transformation. Yet, while focusing on Venezuela’s vast oil potential, the Trump administration has, ironically, used undemocratic pressure to push the government to take a step toward democracy. So far, about 30% of an estimated 1,000 political detainees have been released. Mr. Maduro’s former deputy, and current interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, announced the release – which she called an amnesty – for all those imprisoned for political activity since 1999, as well as plans to shut down a Caracas prison where political opponents have been held and reportedly tortured. The aim, Ms. Rodríguez said, is ‘to heal the wounds left by political confrontation … to restore justice … [and] coexistence.'” (02/02/25)
“The pattern is all too clear by now. When Trump hits a stone wall, his strategy invariably is to backpedal tactically and change the subject to create new headlines and sometimes new crises. Often, the new subject is merely a ludicrous diversion. Other times, he is playing with fire. Are the ICE raids creating ‘a moral and political debacle’ for the administration, as Trump’s usual allies on The Wall Street Journal editorial page delicately put it? Then let’s lower the temperature, bring in new leadership, begin prolonged negotiations to get the pictures off TV, and get tongues wagging about other stories. How about a two-year closing of the Kennedy Center that every self-respecting artist is boycotting, for ‘repairs’ that were never needed before? Or a new Trumpian Arc de Triomphe, bigger than the one in Paris? Most serious people get that this stuff is a silly distraction. And then there is Iran.” (02/03/25)
Source: TomDispatch
by Liz Theoharis & Sam Theoharis
“Here’s a small suggestion from the two authors of this piece (us): don’t be young in Donald Trump’s America if you can help it. Being young in America right now means you’ll have to contend with stalling job markets, rampant inflation, deep political and economic instability, and impending climate disaster. If you point these things out, you’re labeled a dangerous (and misguided) radical. If you’re too busy trying to make ends meet for you and your family, you get labeled as lazy, apathetic, and defeatist. This is not to say that older generations are doing okay. They’re not. But at least they’ll get to receive (and not just pay into) social security, which has to make the fascism go down easier. Before we explain or suggest what the young can do about all that, let us start by introducing ourselves, since one of us is indeed still Gen Z.” (02/03/25)
