Author: Common Dreams

The campaign of Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, who is running to unseat U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, declared on August 16 that the Republican incumbent “is bought and paid for by Big Pharma.” That charge came in response to Johnson’s comments on August 15 about Medicare negotiating the cost of certain prescription drugs, which is included in the Inflation Reduction Act that U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law on August 16. Appearing on “The Brian Kilmeade Show,” Johnson told the Fox News host that “when you start punishing the pharmaceutical industry, you’re gonna have less innovation; you’re gonna...

Firearm companies have raked in over $1 billion from selling AR-15-style rifles over the past decade, a U.S. congressional committee revealed in a report ahead of a July 27 hearing, prompting calls from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for a renewed assault weapons ban. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held the hearing on gunmakers’ responsibility for a national crisis that costs tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In the wake of recent massacres in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, the House panel queried five leading gun manufacturers — Bushmaster,...

The Democratic primary field in the race to unseat Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin shrank for a second time in less than a week on July 27 as Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry announced he would end his campaign, leaving progressive Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes as the frontrunner. Barnes received key endorsements from Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in recent days, and on July 25 fellow progressive candidate Tom Nelson said he was throwing his support behind the lieutenant governor after his campaign ran out of money. Lasry said he was also endorsing Barnes...

The June 24th Supreme Court ruling nullifying Roe v. Wade should not be viewed as an isolated event in America’s cultural wars but instead as the result of a fifty-year conservative strategy to supplant US democracy with plutocracy. Although culture wars are an important aspect of this strategy, conservative SCOTUS cultural rulings are not the final objective but merely a stepping-stone to the ultimate goal: weakening the Federal system to the point where the U.S. becomes, in effect, a confederacy. Conservatives are refighting the 1861 Civil War. And they are winning. Although the American Civil War was a war fought over...