It’s long past time to start understanding the giant mass shootings that have become part of the new-normal fabric of life in the United States as terrorist attacks on the U.S. populace conducted by the nation’s plutocracy through one of its key and rightward campaign funding, lobbying, and policy organizations – the National Rifle Association (NRA).  

We know the drill. The venues are different each time – an elite private college campus in Virginia, a public university lecture hall in northern Illinois, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, an elementary school in Connecticut, a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, a gay dance club in Orlando, and now an open-air concert in Las Vegas (site of the biggest single-gunman mass-shooting ever) – but the story is always the same.   More

On Tuesday, President Trump visited Puerto Rico. On Wednesday, it will be two weeks since Category 4 Hurricane Maria. It will also be a year since Category 4 Hurricane Matthew tore through the western peninsulas of Haiti. 

The situation in Puerto Rico remains quite urgent. Damage is still being assessed but there is no water, electricity is offline for at least a month, and hospitals are low on fuel (or already out) for their emergency generators.  More

Empire equals militarism. In order to maintain an empire, a nation must make either threats of violence or violence to bear to bring outliers into the fold. Both forms of violence are banned by international law and the United Nations Charter, but almost no one pays attention to such niceties of law these days. Domestically, outliers are reined in through the same process. In the twentieth century, the U.S. took on the mantle of empire and “status” as the world’s superpower from England. It was after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, that the U.S. assumed sole status as the world’s only superpower. More