Does Bernie Sanders know what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did to Honduras? Does he care? Last week saw yet another savage murder of a Honduran activist for democracy -- one of hundreds such atrocities since Clinton and Obama blessed a brutal oligarchical coup there in 2009. But Sanders said nothing -- says nothing -- about this damning legacy of his opponent. It's an extraordinary omission by someone presenting himself as an alternative to the failed elitist policies of the past. More

Now that Trump is under attack from a fair part of the Republican establishment, it is worth remembering that much of Trump’s noxious shtick is consistent with the longstanding GOP playbook. Trump may be breaking new ground, going beyond Sarah Palin when it comes to incivility, crudity, and sheer white nationalist idiocy, but the racism, nativism, sexism, and macho militarism he’s throwing out at his rallies runs in deep and ugly grooves dug by Republicans since the 1960s. The Republican Party has spent decades stirring the pot of white Amerikanner hatred and hurling the terrible brew at women, Blacks, immigrants, gays, liberals, Muslims, intellectuals, week-kneed liberals and civil libertarians and socialists both real and (like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, actually, Bernie Sanders) imagine.) In doing so, it has endeavored to misdirect white working class anger away from capitalist plutocrats and Big Business on to less powerful and more vulnerable soft-targets like Black “welfare mothers” and “illegal immigrants.” Read Thomas Frank’s once bestselling book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004). In that sense the Democratic US Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-AZ) is right to call Trump “the Republican Party’s Frankenstein.” More

Since it began March 11, 2011, thousands of freelancers have reported on the Fukushima-Daiichi triple reactor meltdowns and radiation gusher, the deluge of accidents, leaks, faulty cleanup efforts, the widespread contamination of workers, citizens, soil, food and water, and the long series of cancer studies, lawsuits, and ever-changing clean-up and decommissioning plans. As Japan Times reports last October, “Extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel make it impossible for [Tokyo Electric Power Co.] to chart the course of its planned decommissioning of the reactors.”

The journalism is partly a response to the lack of mainstream US news coverage, and partly a warning against similar radiation disasters risked in the United States every day by the operation of 23 identical GE reactors (Fukushima clones) in this country. More