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Take the stock market, for example. Last Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 666 points, or 2.5 percent, its biggest percentage decline since the Brexit turmoil in June 2016 and the steepest point decline since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

There’s no way to measure just how cheery this period really is — not if you’re the CEO of a major company. Just as the World Economic Summit was opening in Davos, Switzerland, and President Donald Trump was flying in to put his mark on the moment, PwS, a global consulting firm, released its annual survey of 1,300 CEOs.

Two documents published by the U.S. government in the past two months spell it out loud and clear: the U.S. is on the warpath against emerging big power rivals China and Russia.

We all know that Hollywood movies are fictional, right? Even the ones “based on actual events”? But at some level, if a fictional film references actual history and includes stunning visuals, great acting, and a powerful musical score, it can become accepted and internalized as “the truth.”

Thomas Friedman had a column in the New York Times yesterday justifying the Israeli slaughter of Arab civilians. Israel needs to go “crazy” in its confrontation with Hezbollah and Iran in Lebanon and Syria because, “This is not Scandinavia.”

The current expansion has gone on for 102 months. Only the expansions from March 1991 to March 2001 (120 months) and from February 1961 to December 1969 (106 months) are longer. Unfortunately, growth during this expansion has been slow and the gains have largely gone to a very few. And there are signs of economic trouble ahead.

 “Congress Advances Bill to Renew NSA Surveillance Program After Trump Briefly Upstages Key Vote” was the headline on a Washington Post article. The lead described the bill as reauthorizing “the government’s authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil.”

As if to highlight the American government’s real position on world peace, and Trump’s true position on Russia, just as peace talks between North and South Koreas are reaching their zenith (peace talks that occurred just as the North developed a ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear payload to the U.S., and the promise of Mutually Assured Destruction- a coincidence, surely) it seems Trump is getting ready to ask for a sharp increase for the 2019 US defense budget.

Foucault, Chomsky, and Fanon are all radical leftists in one way or another.

Last Sunday, January 27, the Alternative Revolutionary Force of the Common (FARC), which is the political party formed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas, launched the presidential candidacy of Rodrigo Londoño, alias Timochenko, setting a new cornerstone in the political history of Colombia.

My view is that liberal critics of populism, standing on their heads, get it wrong. If made to stand on their feet, they’d have to admit that populism actually represents the failure of liberal democracy.

I had a friend who as a child wrote to Ursula Le Guin. He was feeling miserable, bad things had happened to him and he wanted to run away to Earthsea. He told her that he felt ashamed that he wasn’t facing up to life, felt it was a failing that he just wanted to live a fantasy.

Brazil has just taken another step toward the dismantling of its democracy. On January 24, an appeals court confirmed a previous ruling against former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party), sentencing him to over 12 years in jail.

Veteran labor activist Bill Fletcher jr. talks about how capitalism is based on the slave trade and colonialism, the Black contribution to Marxism, and the need to organize.

On Sunday, the international press agency EFE did not have enough words to praise the not-even-that-new initiative of a Mexican “seduction school”, lamenting that this kind of workshop remains largely “taboo” in the country.

I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie.

When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize.

Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico.

Jose Marti was a renaissance man — journalist, poet and leading figure in the Cuban struggle for independence. OLLIE HOPKINS explains his relevance in today’s Cuba