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After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December 2012, impending firearm control legislation led to panic buying of guns throughout the country. In 2016, the prospect of Hillary as president led to another rush to buy. Smith and Wesson stock prices soared. Remington Arms Company boosted production. Walmart gun sales went up. Incidents of gun violence only seem to induce more gun buying. Gun owners complain of bullet shortages. The gun homicide rate is at least six times higher in the United States than any country in the world and all too often it is young people getting killed. With Trump in the White House the prospects for any meaningful gun control legislation are nil. And the blood in the streets, malls and schools will continue to flow.

Winston Churchill once observed, the further back you go, the farther forward you can see. We know little of Russia and its history beyond bears, Siberian winters, the Kremlin and Doctor Zhivago. The United States emerged victorious at end of the Cold War. An era of cooperation was to be ushered in. What should have been an opportunity to create a structure for peace and stability did not happen. Instead of an inclusive security system the U.S.-led NATO military alliance expanded to the east. Hardliners in Washington goaded by the military-industrial complex, seeking more profits from weapons sales, have vilified and demonized Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The media followed in lock step. A reheated Cold War with a new arms race and the catastrophic dangers of hot war are the last things that humanity and the planet need. Interviewed by David Barsamian.

Trumponomics. Wall Street likes what it sees in the 45th president. The stock market is way up. The reality TV star heads up one of the most pro-corporate administrations in U.S. history. After railing against elites Trump’s cabinet is loaded with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan honchos. Millionaires and billionaires are staffing key positions. It’s the wealthiest cabinet in history. Deregulation of banking is high on their to-do list. Critics are calling Trump’s economic policies warmed over trickle down Reaganomics. Remember the slogan, a rising tide lifts all boats? Thing is only the yachts go up, the canoes and rowboats sink to the bottom. The New Yorker says, “Trump’s proposed tax cuts would greatly accentuate inequality” and his “protectionist impulses, meanwhile, almost certainly won’t bring back lost manufacturing jobs, but they could spark a damaging trade war.”

The Saudi-U.S. relationship takes crucial shape in 1945 when FDR meets with Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, on a U.S. destroyer in the Suez Canal. The essence of the get together was to insure Saudi’s vast oil reserves would be the special preserve of U.S. oil companies. In return Washington would guarantee the security of the kingdom. The agreement has generated a windfall of profits for the oil cartel. Politically it has had sinister consequences. The U.S. has basically ignored the repressive and feudalistic order within the kingdom as well as for its support of Wahhabi extremist fundamentalists around the world. Saudi Arabia is a veritable gold mine for U.S. arms merchants and with those weapons Riyadh has committed major war crimes in neighboring Yemen. With friends like these, as the saying goes, who needs enemies?

Noam Chomsky - Utopia In the darkest of times we have to imagine that a world of equality and environmental and social justice is possible. Are we dreamers? Not practical? Out of touch with reality? Perhaps. But throughout history it has been small groups of visionary activists who ignite the flame and light up the darkness and show us the way forward. Progressive change happens when people rise up and struggle for it. In Howard Zinn’s masterwork, A People’s History of the United States, he closes with these lines from the poet Shelley which were recited by women garment workers to one another in New York sweatshops a century ago: “Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many; they are few!”

B.B. King sings, “Nobody likes you but your mama and she may be jiving you too.” A lot of poor people may feel that way. They are stigmatized and demonized. If they’d only go away. What’s wrong with them? Can’t they find a job or a place to live? The persistence of poverty in the U.S., perhaps the richest country in history, is a national disgrace, a shanda as they say in Yiddish. Neoliberal economic policies have produced huge inequality. Who suffers the most? Children. Almost 15 million children were poor in 2015, with more than two-thirds in working families who toil away in our low-growth, low-wage economy. A disproportionate number are Black, Latino and Native American. There’s no money to alleviate poverty, we’re told. Are you kidding?  There’s plenty of dough to enrich the imperial war machine.

2016 will be the hottest year on Earth since data keeping began 136 years ago. Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese. He says he will gut the Environmental Protection Agency and pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement. We can get out of this death spiral. There is an abundance of low-cost solar and wind renewable energy. Despite all the evidence that the planet is heating up, the corporado’s addiction to fossil fuelishness continues. But there is push back. The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline project by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota has inspired indigenous people and their allies the world over. The needs of humanity and Mother Nature are much more important than the bottom lines of the fossil fuel industry.

Bob Dylan is indisputably one of the major musicians of our time. He is a complicated and paradoxical figure that defies categorization. Although his work has undergone some ironic transmutations over the years, his musical development has often been a response to his rebellious and restless nature and refusal to be typecast. Like Picasso and other great cultural figures he has constantly reinvented himself. For Dylan, the times are always changin' and no moss will gather under his rolling stone. In October 2016 he was honored with the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy praised Dylan, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" and compared him to ancient Greek poets. Leonard Cohen, the marvelous Canadian singer-songwriter who sadly passed away about a month after the Nobel announcement said, awarding Dylan the prize “is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”

Following the mass killings in Rwanda and the international communities’ failure to act, the UN formulated a new doctrine called Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Its key provision is “Sovereignty no longer exclusively protects states from foreign interference.” Libya is a perfect example of R2P gone haywire. There were hyperbolic reports of atrocities, bloodbaths and massacres. The U.S. invoked R2P. A UN resolution to protect civilians was passed and its authority almost immediately exceeded. NATO embarked on a heavy bombing campaign. R2P quickly morphed into regime change. Qaddafi was assassinated. Hillary Clinton joked, “We came, we saw, he died.” Cheers could be heard in the corridors of power in the West. Today, Libya is a broken, devastated country. R2P, if it is to be effective and have credibility, cannot be selectively applied. Nor can it be used as a cover for big power intervention.

The historical lens through which national holidays are viewed is often blurred and distorted. Thanksgiving is a case in point. The much-revered Pilgrims fresh off the Mayflower sat down and shared native foods with the friendly Wampanoags.  A heart-warming story. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian, helping to establish and enrich what would become the United States, is a myth. Native Americans would soon be overwhelmed and killed en masse by white settlers. Those that survived the murderous campaigns against them were relegated to inhospitable reservations. Indian land was stolen fair and square. Today we honor the memory of the slaughtered with Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, Jeep Cherokees, the Washington Redskins and calling bin Laden, Geronimo.  Native Americans are offended by the appropriation of their culture. It is the final stage of genocide.