Source: Cobden Centre
by Max Rangeley

“There is a particular kind of financial wisdom that used to be passed down at kitchen tables. A grandparent, someone who remembered harder times, would explain that the first obligation of a responsible person was to spend less than they earned, put something away, and let patience do its quiet work. The savings account was not a sophisticated instrument. It was a vessel for deferred consumption—a way of translating present discipline into future security. The interest it paid was modest, but it moved in the same direction over time. That world has not merely changed. It has been, in a precise and largely unacknowledged sense, inverted.” (06/04/26)

https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/06/there-is-no-reprieve-in-the-feds-war-on-savings/

Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jackie Calmes

“Just a month out from America’s celebration of its 250th birthday, the national capital is a mess. And I’m talking about the sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington, especially the White House. The once-verdant park remains a construction site, with makeshift fencing only partly obscuring the vast scar that was once the East Wing and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. Cranes sway in place of the felled trees, to build President Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom despite court orders and overwhelming public opinion against it. The South Lawn has been replaced with a gargantuan circus-tent-like arena for Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches and a Trump-picked audience of thousands. Yes, cage matches. To mark not the nation’s birthday but the president’s 80th on June 14. Because it’s all about Trump.” (06/04/26)

https://archive.is/Lgc8x

Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter

“NATO partisans in both Europe and the United States are perpetual optimists about Ukraine’s prospective fortunes in its war against Russia. Lately, there has been yet another inundation of such accounts in Western news media outlets. Many of them emphasize that Moscow’s latest military offensive against Ukrainian ground forces has come to a halt with inconclusive results. The lack of a decisive breakthrough, members of Ukraine’s fan club contend, means that Russian president Vladimir Putin has again failed in his quest to conquer Eastern Europe’s resilient ‘democratic’ frontline state. That version of recent developments contains just enough truth to gain credibility among gullible opinion shapers and political leaders in the United States and in most other NATO countries.” (06/04/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/ted_galen_carpenter/2026/06/03/nato-propagandists-again-proclaim-that-ukraine-is-on-the-verge-of-winning-the-war/

Source: Common Dreams
by Harry Seavey

“The war in Iran has forced many Americans to confront what their tax dollars make them party to. After the US has killed hundreds of Iranian children in school and bombed the country’s civilian infrastructure, more and more Americans are considering tax refusal. It’s a tradition older than the republic itself. Quakers resisted military taxes in the colonies, sometimes at the price of seized property. Thomas David Thoreau was jailed for refusing a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. And hundreds of thousands resisted the telephone tax during the Vietnam War, when the National War Tax Resistance counted 192 centers in 45 states. Call that ‘freedom.’ In an age of ascendant religious liberty, a fortunate class of Americans enjoys it in special measure. Employers, schools, religious institutions, and corporations have won exemption after exemption from ordinary legal duties they claim violate their religious faith.” (06/04/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-doesn-t-honor-anti-war

Source: Washington Monthly
by David Atkins

“It sounds too weird to be true, but in the Trump era, frequently, the dumbest explanation is often the right one.” (06/04/26)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/06/04/maga-believe-voter-fraud-conspiracy/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson

“When the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and 1991, followers of the Austrian School of Economics knew that socialism’s lack of a coherent method of economic calculation certainly led to the demise of these regimes. Economists had known for years of the chronic shortages, shoddy workmanship, and all of the other negative aspects of economic life in those countries and why no one who understood socialism was surprised at these results.” (06/04/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/economic-calculation-and-southern-california-beach-girl