Source: Common Dreams
by Phil Buchanan & Elisha Smith Arrillaga
“Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has waged war on nonprofits. Actions have included federal funding cuts to the tune of billions of dollars, targeting of specific organizations with investigations or indictments, and threats to tax-exempt status. While some efforts have been turned back by the courts, the administration has been unrelenting and, sadly, every American community will suffer as a result of this sustained attack. Presidential announcements warn of ‘anti-American NGOs’ and allege without any credible evidence that networks of nonprofits are acting as ‘domestic terrorist organizations’. Recently, the administration issued proposed regulations intended to impose sweeping new restrictions on nonprofits that receive federal funding—including that such organizations not advance diversity, equity, and inclusion or assist in voter registration.” (06/24/26)
“The Supreme Court has a history of facilitating the war on drugs by whittling away at civil liberties, to the point that critics have long perceived a ‘drug exception’ to the Bill of Rights. But last week, when the justices unanimously upheld the gun rights of cannabis consumers, they made it clear that there is no drug exception to the Second Amendment.” (06/24/26)
“Industrial policy — government efforts to favor certain sectors, technologies, or firms — has a long history. Far from a fringe idea, politicians across the spectrum have promoted such policies for centuries. But the results are far more problematic than its current popularity suggests.” (06/23/26)
“A very successful businessman (and a major contributor to Democratic Party candidates and causes) once explained to me why he talked, acted, and thought like a Republican but never considered supporting any Republican candidate, ever. ‘We’ve already got the Republicans’, he told me. This is the transactional essence behind corporate support for Democrats in California, the one-party state. Republicans have no political power, and whenever the Democrats in the state legislature are surprisingly split on a matter of concern to business interests, the handful of Republican politicians will invariably cast pro-business votes. This has been going on for a long time. Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 1997 and the governorship since 2011. A signature moment came in 2010 when Jerry Brown defeated the hapless billionaire Republican Meg Whitman to begin his second two-term stint as governor.” (06/24/26)
“The off-again, on-again hostilities and opening of the Strait of Hormuz are prompting more creative and proactive thinking about global diplomacy and global markets. Governments are using the lulls to rev up stalled economic activities. And the key fossil fuel-producing nations of the Gulf are working quickly to establish alternative infrastructures of cooperation – as well as of concrete and steel. Already, Iraq – which has had tense relations with Syria for years – has been exporting its oil overland via tanker trucks to Syrian ports. And many Gulf states have pivoted to importing tons of timber, cement, and agricultural and consumer goods through those same ports. There are efforts to collaborate on new pipelines, storage facilities, and even a multicountry rail project. As the Monitor reported last week, these moves are ‘already reshaping regional trade and cementing new Mideast alliances’ among countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Syria.” (06/23/26)
“From the self-proclaimed ‘most transparent administration in American history,’ the transparency offensive, ranging across the UAP files and the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. records, has been celebrated by boosters as a long-overdue reckoning with governmental secrecy. And to be sure, the argument is democratically intuitive: the government hides too much; a more transparent government is a more trustworthy one; an informed citizenry is an empowered one. It’s a tidy thesis, and one I think many people would endorse. Except it’s being weaponized—and the Trump administration’s information avalanche is the clearest proof.” (06/24/26)
“Rather than govern on the strength of his supermajority in Parliament, Starmer governed as though he had something to fear, spending his majority appeasing not the Conservatives he had beaten but a Reform he chased rightward as it climbed. Starmer had room to govern boldly. Instead, he governed in a crouch. … The bet was that the right’s goods in gentler packaging would deny the right its market. It failed twice over. The voters he hoped to hold by sounding tougher did not stay; they went to the people who meant it. The voters he might have inspired got nothing to be inspired by. He alienated the left without satisfying the right.” (06/23/26)
