In late 2014 Bernie Sanders came out to Iowa City to speak before a large and enthusiastic crowd at that university town’s venerable independent Prairie Lights Bookstore.  It was part of his exploration before finally committing to running for the U.S. presidency as a Democrat   Iowa City was a key spot – a big campus town bastion of liberal Democrats whose support would be needed in the pivotal first-in-the nation Iowa Caucuses in January of 2016.  More

Race is among the more tortured axes of American social relations. The nation was formed from slavery and genocide and no redistribution of political and economic power has been made to rectify the imbalance that resulted. And less formalized types of violence and exploitation have persisted into the present. The same is true of treatment of the indigenous population— as late as the 1970s indigenous women of childbearing age were still being forcibly sterilized. More

Now we know what it takes to briefly flip the script on Saudi Arabia. A journalist has to be murdered in an embassy on the orders of the Crown Prince, his body dismembered with a bone saw and then the butchered remains dissolved in a vat of acid. But not just any journalist.  The Saudis have killed and imprisoned many journalists before. But Jamal Khashoggi was journalist working for The Washington Post, a paper owned by the world’s richest man. Usually, the Saudis just buy off their critics. But in Jeff Bezos they may have encountered a man too rich to be bought. More