Search Results for: BID

Money for Nothing: Lawrence Tabak’s book explores how taxpayers funded the foolish Foxconn fantasy

When then-President Donald Trump held the first White House press conference in 2017 to tout the prospect of a massive television flat-screen factory for the Taiwan manufacturer Foxconn coming to Wisconsin, Madison writer Lawrence Tabak was immediately intrigued. “If nothing else, as a Wisconsin taxpayer, I was concerned that this was going to be a major spending event for all of us who live in Wisconsin,” Tabak said. It also had a deja-vu quality. Two decades earlier, Tabak had written a takedown for The Atlantic on the endless building spree of convention centers from one city to the next,...

Read More

Death as a political strategy: Why the latest unhinged rant against Dr. Fauci perpetuates Republican lies

Republicans are doubling down on death as a political strategy, a process Trump began the week of April 7, 2020. If Meadows’ book is right and Trump was willing to infect then-77-year-old Biden at the debate, we have one more data point in the evil Trump/GOP Death Cult’s plan to leverage the COVID pandemic as a political weapon. And now they’re accusing Dr. Fauci of behaving like the notorious Nazi death camp doctor, Josef Mengele. Seriously: former “real news” reporter Lara Logan laid out that unhinged rant on Fox News this week using the old “people are saying” rhetorical...

Read More

Roe v. Wade rulings: Constitutional rights hinge on the judgment of when “personhood” occurs

By Morgan Marietta, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell The Supreme Court justices signaled a potential major shift on abortion law on Dec. 1, 2021. Hearing arguments in a case that could fundamentally alter abortion rights and regulations throughout the nation, the six conservative justices who hold the majority in the highest court seemed divided: Would they overturn the core right to abortion entirely or would they allow abortion to be limited by the states to the early stages of pregnancy? In either approach, the court seemed to be moving toward the position that some decisions...

Read More

A Fear of Legitimacy: When the only political agenda is to deny Democracy by igniting culture wars

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next year’s midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats. Rather than advancing any sort of a positive program, Republican Senators will be focusing on culture wars. Those have devolved to a point that Republicans are denying the legitimacy of any Democratic victory because, by their definition, Democrats are destroying the country. As Marjorie...

Read More

Predatory Health System: Omicron variant shows need to condemn greed and again celebrate community

As the Omicron variant puts us in its grip, America is still stuck with a predatory health insurance and healthcare system that has barely up to the task of meeting our nation’s needs. This new variant was apparently first detected in South Africa, which has been unsuccessfully begging the WTO for 14 months for a “TRIPS Waiver” to allow them to manufacture COVID vaccine… which might have prevented this variant from evolving. And it is all because of greed. The single most brilliant and evil thing that Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman accomplished in the last century was convincing...

Read More

From AIDS to Omicron: How America’s pharmaceutical apartheid creates a viral underclass

December 1 was World AIDS Day, marking forty years since symptoms were first reported. Over 36 million people have died worldwide from AIDS-related illnesses. The death rate is slowing as effective drug treatments gain wider distribution. But the inequity that long fueled the AIDS epidemic still exists, with punishing consequences, particularly for the people of southern Africa. The persistence and the vastly unequal impacts of the ongoing AIDS epidemic serve as a warning as the new Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus makes its way around the world. Little is currently known about this newly-identified SARS-CoV-2 variant referred to...

Read More