General Discussion

By Linn Washington, Jr.

London, UK -- Police and prosecutors scheme to secure convictions of persons who did not participate in any crime. Racial minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of this improper practice.

The Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major,

The Great Bear constellation

That presides over the Arctic.

Ursa shows the way to the North Star

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

By Jess Guh

This is the final part of a series on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fight for appropriate health care for himself and for over 2 million prison inmates across the country. (Click here for Part I, here for Part II, or here for Part IIIa)

 This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

By Dave Lindorff

By Linn Washington, Jr.

London -- In a rational world where the rules of arithmetic apply it just doesn’t add up to declare that 40,000 is mathematically more significant than 500,000.

By Dave Lindorff

Someone should have warned Hillary Clinton and the goon squad at the Democratic National Committee that old-fashioned red-baiting isn't going to cut it in today's United States. It's not the 1950s anymore and the Soviet Union and Comintern are ancient history.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

 This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

By Dave Lindorff

            I admit I’ve been slow to warm up to the idea of supporting Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s because I publicly backed Barack Obama in 2008 and quickly came to rue that decision after he took office.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

By Dave Lindorff

            The rising fortunes of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist US senator from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primaries, provides a unique opportunity for organizing a new radical movement around key political goals including a national health care program for all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled, and a national retirement program that people can actually live on.

By Alfredo Lopez

Last week, T-Mobile's CEO John Lagere pubicly asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation a straightforward question: "Who the f*** are you anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble and who pays you?"

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about them. They all had much in common. At a relatively young age, these men had traveled thousands of miles to kill people they didn't know on the say-so of men they didn't know, and for a mere pittance -- all of it done in the name of America.

By Dave Lindorff

Much has been written over the past few weeks in the financial press and the business pages of general interest newspapers debating the wisdom of the decision in December by Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

By Dave Lindorff

By John Grant

Philadelphia -- A number of things converged to make my New Years special this year. Three of them were good, one was not so good -- in fact, it had the sense of a nasty omen for the future.

By Dave Lindorff

Following three days of contentious testimony in a courtroom in Scranton, PA late last month, a federal district judge is considering a legal petition by Pennsylvania's most well-known prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal for a finding that the state's long-running refusal to treat his active case of Hepatitis-C, a potentially fatal disease, violates his Eighth Amendment right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.

By Dave Lindorff

            The leaves came off the last trees -- a crabapple, a willow and a hardy Norway maple -- during the first week of December this year, surely the latest I can remember seeing leaves on trees since we moved to the Philadelphia area 18 years ago. But it’s not just that.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, I’m so old that I’m not sure I really remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of the 1950s, I ducked and covered like Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.

By Jess Guh

This is the third in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal's fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis-C epidemic in the nation's prisons. (Click here for Part I or here for Part II)

Seattle, WA – Physicians are held to professional expectations dictating that the failure to provide standard healthcare is malpractice. There is no difference between failing to provide a service and performing a liable medical mistake.

My special gun cannot sleep.

My gun is black steel and cold as a stone.

My gun talks to itself in the wee hours.

It has a soul.

It is lonely.

It dreams about hitting the bull’s eye,

By Dave Lindorff

The second in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal's fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis C epidemic in the nation's prisons

By Linn Washington, Jr.

The big courthouse news in Pennsylvania this week does not involve yet another sordid revelation in the sleazy racist-pornographic email scandal now soiling top justice system officials in the Keystone State that include a state supreme court justice and ranking prosecutors.

By Alfredo Lopez

When I was very young, my parents used to tell me why having "lots of toys" wasn't a good idea. "The more you have, the more you want," they would say. I didn't have many toys -- we were poor -- so the idea of possessions feeding greed didn't make much sense to me then.

Mouse (who never had an evil thought)

Asked penguin (who never raped or pillaged),

Have you seen caterpillar

(that one who never held anyone at gunpoint)?

By Jess Guh

With this article, ThisCantBeHappening! welcomes Dr. Jess Guh to our collective. You can read about her background by clicking on the "Who, and What, Are We?" button just below our masthead.