Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all. People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn.” (02/24/25)
“If you need another reason to hope for success from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — you probably don’t, but there are plenty to go around — it turns out that efforts by the waste-hunting, government-shrinking (we hope) body may not just save money; it may help make people more honest. That’s because, after decades of increasing flows of federal grants to local governments, there’s strong evidence that the money fuels corruption.” (02/24/25)
“State governments can reshape welfare to serve as a safety net that helps people when they fall but doesn’t trap them in a cycle of dependence.” (02/24/25)
“Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media — the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry. The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said — just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying.” (02/24/25)
“Donald Trump is often described as an imperialist and an expansionist and these terms are usually used interchangeably. Neither of these descriptions is meant to be flattering, but the larger problem is that they are imprecise.” (02/24/25)
“I have been struggling to think of what to say about the absolutely stunning collapse in Ukraine’s diplomatic position, and the larger radical shift in America’s relationship to Europe. Various commentators, including Noah Smith and Francis Fukuyama, have wondered whether, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the United States has gone from being the leader of the free world to being an enthusiastic member of an authoritarian entente — at a minimum allied with Russia, maximally encompassing China, India, Turkey, India, Israel and the far-right parties of Europe. As I’ve turned things over and over in my mind, though, I think the best way to understand Trump’s move on Ukraine specifically is by thinking of Ukraine not as a cause that we’ve abandoned, but as a business venture that is no longer viable.” (02/24/25)
“I was born in a Jewish family in Leningrad – Russia and lived in Kharkiv – Ukraine for 30 years before emigrating to the United States 40 years ago. Back then, the war between Russia and Ukraine was unimaginable. Today, after hundreds of thousands on both sides are dead and memorable places of my youth have been reduced to rubble, I am trying to make sense of it and wonder how it is going to end. … The consequences of poor judgment often become irreversible. The brutality and illegality of Russia’s actions notwithstanding, the prospect that it will give back the annexed Ukrainian lands (now incorporated into the Russian Constitution) is next to none.” [editor’s note: Much of that “annexed” land doesn’t have to be “given back” because Russia doesn’t control it – TLK] (02/24/25)
“In 1944, my father was arrested in Berlin for the double crime of being half-Jewish and a Hitler opponent. He was imprisoned and enslaved in the infamous Buchenwald camp, where he barely survived the Nazis’ brutal program of ‘extermination through labor,’ and had been scheduled for involuntary sterilization. … I have dedicated my life to defending free speech because history demonstrates that it is the most essential engine for securing human rights. But if CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ host Margaret Brennan had been correct, when she claimed last week that ‘free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide’ in Germany, that would be a powerful argument for censorship. Sadly, she was wrong. In fairness to Brennan, she was repeating an all too common assumption: that the Nazis rose to power during Germany’s Weimar Republic because of its tolerance of their hateful rhetoric.” (02/24/25)
“The President of the United States clashed with the governor of Maine over transgender participation in government-organized athletics. Quite a hoot. Behind this fracas looms the legacy of … Richard M. Nixon.” (02/24/25)
“The left [sic], not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the ‘Resistance’ to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support. Academia at least should have known better, given that it has entire departments devoted to studying how politics works.” (02/24/25)
