Author: nick

[ad_1] A smoker landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City would have to pay $19 for a pack of Marlboros. If that same smoker drove a few hundred miles south to North Carolina, he would pay less than half that price. The same product could have vastly different prices depending on where in the country you are. The difference has little to do with the cigarettes themselves. It is almost entirely the result of tax policy. Tobacco is the most highly taxed consumer product in the United States. Cigarettes are taxed at the federal, state, and local levels. On…

[ad_1] Pigs in a confined feeding factory in the Midwest. Photo: EPA. I was disappointed to learn the Building for Power campaign, put forward by the Green New Deal Campaign Commission of the Democratic Socialists of America, doesn’t seem to address the enormous environmental damage caused by animal agriculture. Building for Power focuses on four areas: energy, transit, housing, and public spaces. Unfortunately, our food system is a massive contributor to climate change, and it’s hard to take seriously an ecosocialism which doesn’t recognize this and plan accordingly. I should begin by acknowledging the reasons why I suspect greenhouse-gas emissions…

[ad_1] Comerica Bank Building, Ventura Boulevard, LA. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. A coalition of progressive groups, led by the huge union SEIU-UHW, managed to get a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the ballot this fall. The tax would apply to the assets over $1 billion held by the state’s 200 or so billionaires. This is a great opportunity for the people of California to tell billionaires what they think of them. Over the last half-century, billionaires have become increasingly aggressive in stealing from the rest of us, as well as being more open in expressing their contempt for ordinary…

[ad_1] In California, Sacramento officials are now inspecting residents’ garbage, recycling, and organic waste bins to make sure people are sorting their trash correctly under S.B. 1383, a state law aimed at reducing methane emissions from landfills. Through September, city workers will go through nearly 5,000 curbside bins, and residents “will either get a ‘great job’ tag or a ‘let’s sort this out’ tag” to educate them about proper waste disposal, said city spokesperson Jesa David. City officials say the inspections are meant to help residents comply with the law and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Sergeant Tom Robinson RLC/MOD – OGL v1.0 Just two years after the July 4, 2024, general election, in which Kier Starmer led the Labour Party to a landslide victory, his party has forced him out as prime minister. Andy Burnham has succeeded him, becoming the seventh prime minister of the United Kingdom in a decade – an unprecedented frequency of change of government in modern Britain. Under Starmer, Labour ended 14 years of Conservative Party rule, during which the Conservatives had five different prime ministers and had become associated with instability in domestic politics and foreign relations.…

[ad_1] “The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary.” That’s Thomas Jefferson—sounding the alarm over what he saw as the greatest threat to the Constitution and your liberty. He gave us four main warnings: Consolidation is death to freedom. Judges can be just as corrupt and power-hungry as any politician. The courts are the engine of consolidation. And the final disaster—judicial supremacy turning the “land of the free” into an oligarchy ruled by black robes. The Foundation of Tyranny Thomas Jefferson understood that the root of every tyranny is the same—centralized power destroys liberty. Guaranteed. That’s exactly how…

[ad_1] Through the tear gas, darkly. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people. The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the after-effects of an earthquake. Some holders of this status have…

[ad_1] The Democracy Perception Index 2026 is a global survey covering over ninety percent of the world’s population. It has produced results that confound nearly every assumption underlying the Western foreign-policy consensus. The United States, self-declared champion of the rules-based international order, now ranks among the most negatively perceived countries on earth. When the world is asked to choose sides in active geopolitical conflicts, it sides against Washington again and again – overwhelmingly with Palestine over Israel, and almost unanimously against American military bases on foreign soil. China is seen more favorably than the United States across most of the…

[ad_1] Few ideas have shaped the way Washington talks about Beijing more than the Thucydides Trap. The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison built the phrase on a single line from the ancient historian Thucydides, who wrote that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Allison turned that observation into a general law of world politics. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, he argues, fear and miscalculation push the two toward a catastrophic collision. He first floated the term in a 2012 Financial Times essay and…

[ad_1] Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Last June 17, 2026 Trump announced the US and Iran had agreed to a Memorandum of Agreement (MOU) and a ceasefire in the war. The global price of crude oil fell almost immediately—from the $100 per barrel range at which it hovered throughout April and May to $67 for West Texas Crude (WTI) and $70 for Brent crude. The retail price of gasoline in the US—which had surged from $2.92/gallon nationwide for regular grade gas before the war to the $4.50/gallon range at its peak—cost the American consumer $69 billion in additional out of…