Common Dreams
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The U.S. national debt has officially surpassed $40 trillion, months earlier than forecasters had expected — because of billions of dollars in lost revenue from Trump’s invalidated tariffs, Trump’s tax cuts (mostly to big corporations and the very wealthy), and the soaring costs of Trump’s war. Trump’s hair-brained treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, says there’s nothing to worry about because the…
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008 and must be a smart fellow. He wrote on Substack August 11, “The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized, and there’s nothing radical about wanting to end insurance company parasitism .” Krugman explained that taxpayers currently pay two-thirds of US healthcare costs. It’s not just the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, the Indian Health…
In the almost-over primary season, Democratic voters chose a mix of progressive nominees like Abdul El Sayed, Peggy Flanagan and Angie Nixon and moderates like David Crowley and Jared Moscowitz, often by slim margins. These candidates often disagreed on issues like Medicare For All and military aide for Israel. But in the 11 weeks between now and the general election, Democrats progressives and…
Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, "Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media." In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant 40 years later—when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its…
This weekend, President Donald Trump is turning the heart of our democracy into a taxpayer-funded racetrack. Through an executive order, the administration mandated the "Freedom 250 Grand Prix"—an IndyCar street circuit winding directly through the National Mall. We are being told this is a celebration of America. But earlier this year, IndyCar quietly launched and then hastily deleted a new piece…
America’s farmers understand that some degree of uncertainty comes with the job. They can’t control the weather, after all. But for most of them, the biggest source of uncertainty is not nature, but politics. As US foreign and domestic policy becomes less predictable, it becomes more difficult for families who work the land to make informed long-term decisions. The partisan wrangling over the most…
Independent candidates are popping up all over. We see them running for the U.S. Senate in South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Nebraska. In most of these races, Democratic candidates have stepped aside to avoid splitting the anti-Republican vote. But what does this mean for the Democratic Party? My friend Bob Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect , takes up this question.…
Most discussions about the Democratic Party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats (such as Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who yesterday scored an upset win in the Democratic contest for the Florida Senate). An equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats. Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend Democratic…
In early August Meta joined OpenAI and Anthropic in confessing that one of its AI models, having slipped its sandbox during a security test after a contractor's misconfiguration handed it the open internet, hacked into another company's systems—the third such disclosure in a matter of weeks, each delivered in the grave corporate idiom of the incident report, and each landing, conveniently, just as…
The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated. Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the…
