“National public health policy under the leadership of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made no shortage of headlines in 2025. As a short list, RFK made controversial statements about vaccines, vowed (but failed) to find the root cause of autism, initiated efforts to ban some food dyes, cut funding, cut employment, misused AI, and tried to eliminate medical scientists from publishing in select academic journals based on their funding. Less importantly, he also wears jeans when he works out. In contrast, the Food and Drug Administration, easily the most powerful sub-agency overseen by the HHS and RFK, has had a quiet 2025. It began the process of banning red dye #3 in food products, reassessed some safety standards for cosmetics, and implemented a rule now requiring complete safety disclosures in drug advertisements. Most of the FDA’s planned major reforms are still underway.” (01/02/26)
“Relations between China and India – the world’s two most populous nations, which also rank among its top five economies – have been fraught and frosty for decades, starting with armed conflict in 1962 along their shared Himalayan border and, more recently, a serious clash in 2020. But going into this new year, there are encouraging signs of a gradual thaw between the two nuclear-armed Asian powers. Even this slight warming – which one Indian diplomat described to a news magazine as a “state of armed coexistence” along disputed border areas – helps temper potential military flash points. On the political and economic fronts, the prospects are somewhat brighter. The leaders of both countries have met in recent months; flights and tourist travel are slowly resuming. And officials are exploring avenues for economic diversification and integration – moves that could boost regional growth as well as strengthen Global South economies jolted by the unexpectedly steep U.S. trade tariffs of 2025.” (01/02/25)
“Elon Musk recently put forth a bold vision: that within two decades, AI will automate virtually all productive activity, work will be optional, and money will lose meaning. Coming from Musk, such pronouncements carry gravitas. And noticeably, the expressed vision unsurprisingly dovetails neatly with Musk’s admittedly exciting entrepreneurial visions. Yet variants of those claims have circulated for years, usually without reference to economic theory, institutional constraints, or political risk. Rigorously examining those assertions is essential to decouple technological optimism from the practical realities that will shape the next two decades.” (01/02/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Michelle Ellner
“Overnight, the United States government bombed civilian and military sites across Venezuela and illegally kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These are blatant and illegal acts of war by the Trump Administration. This act of aggression is a continuation of US attempts to seize and plunder Venezuela’s natural resources and undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of other countries in Latin America. This war also does not reflect the will of the people. Nearly 70% of Americans oppose another war and reject the endless cycle of military interventions carried out in their name. … The U.S. now claims Maduro will face ‘criminal charges’ in a US court. This sham proceeding will be done under the auspices of ‘drug trafficking’ — but we know it has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with Trump’s policy of regime change.” (01/03/25)
“Both extremes are recycling old ideologies, but liberalism has a far stronger hand to counter them before they cause the death and destruction of the last century.” (01/02/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Sven Beckert
“It is impossible to pinpoint an exact place or moment when capitalism began. Capitalism is a process, not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end, and it did not drop fully formed into a particular location. Even today, no society is organised along fully capitalist lines, and some have argued that a fully capitalist world is a theoretical impossibility. Efforts to isolate one patch of soil as capitalism’s place of origin — Florence, Barbados, Amsterdam, Baghdad, the southern English countryside, or Manchester, for example — have all proved insufficient. That is because the capitalist revolution had always been a process that drew energy from myriad sources.” (01/02/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“I am not sure if you caught Zohran Mamdani’s swearing in ceremony and his speech as he became New York City’s new mayor, but it was an eye opener for sure. I am going to leave his notion that the collective is better than the individual comment aside as I want to focus on a gesture he did during the event, that was precisely the same as Elon Musk made during a similar event almost a year ago. Yet, the mainstream media has taken two dramatically different views to create a false narrative that the public happily ate up.” (01/02/26)
“In an extraordinary military operation, the United States launched a large-scale military operation in Caracas, Venezuela, early Saturday, with Special Forces seizing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. There is a pending 2020 indictment of Maduro in the Southern District of New York, where he is expected to be taken to face prosecution. The operation comes not long after the 37th anniversary of the capture of Manuel Antonio Noriega on Dec. 20, 1989. Noriega was convicted of drug and money laundering offenses and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was tried in Miami. Maduro was indicted in a four-count superseding indictment …” (01/03/25)
“The last thing that protesters in Iran need are threats of intervention from the U.S. government. The last thing that the U.S. needs is another conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. is not helping anything in Iran by threatening to attack the country. It is a reckless threat, and it puts the U.S. and Iran on yet another unnecessary collision course.” (01/02/26)
“Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promises to ‘replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Funny that he chose those words. In Europe, where collectivist anti-fossil-fuels ‘green’ policies have been enacted in the name of combating a conjured-up climate emergency, many people get dangerously cold in the winter. So far, this hasn’t happened on a large scale in America, where the climate collectivists have not been as adept in imposing their lethal program as their European counterparts. Freer markets keep people warmer in winter.” (01/02/26)
