In his short White House tenure, Donald J. Trump has set some kind of record for histrionic temper tantrums against the media — whether CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times or, most recently, MSNBC for revealing his 2005 tax return. He’s actually pursuing a well-worn path of American presidents blaming the press for […]

Highlights – Ralph Nader Interviews Hedrick Smith : “Certainly Trump didn’t intend to do this, nor did Steve Bannon, his Rasputin in the White House, but you know, accidentally and unintentionally, they have triggered and ignited a fire in the political prairies of this country.” “I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of electricity, this kind of […]

Washington – For Candidate Donald Trump, one sure-fire way to ignite his political base in 2016 was to savage Wall Street for stealing the American Dream from the working middle class and to accuse Hillary Clinton of rigging the system for her friends at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks. “She is their puppet […]

Washington –  Okay, let’s keep score. He’s thrown down the gauntlet. After taking the oath of office, President Trump used his Inaugural address to tar his presidential predecessors and most of Congress, whose members sat around him, as failures – “politicians who are all talk and no action.” So that’s Trump’s standard – action, not […]

Washington – With his cabinet of billionaires and trickle-down CEOs, President-elect Donald Trump has set the stage for the second “Revolt of the Bosses,” ignoring that the first “Revolt of the Bosses” starting in the late 1970s fueled the gaping inequalities of income and wealth that now plague America and that infuriated Trump’s working class […]

If you’re still puzzling or in shock over the 2016 election, this is a must-watch video. I dig into the roots of the populist mutiny that caused this year’s populist earthquake – a mutiny that has been brewing for three decades in Middle America and that finally exploded, firing the astonishing candidacy of Bernie Sanders […]

Sioux Falls –Time and again, opinion polls tell us that 70%, 80% and even 90% of Americans believe our political system is broken but think there’s nothing We the People can do about it. Perhaps a progressive state like California or Massachusetts might pass an isolated reform, but the political cognoscenti regard the rest of […]

Washington – From its raw beginnings to its stunning finale, the presidential campaign of 2016 has been a political earthquake, a broad populist rebellion that has shattered the landscape of power within both major political parties. The entire narrative of this campaign has been driven by a revolt from the bottom up, by two candidates […]

Washington –  SuperPACs in 2016 were  breaking records  once again – close to $1.6 billion raised – but there was a new twist. Instead of putting top priority on the presidential race, SuperPACs, political parties and independent donors poured more money into the battle for control of the Senate – $616 million, plus millions more to be […]

Washington – What got lost in the mudslinging of the second presidential debate and the political uproar over Donald Trump’s bragging about predatory sexism was an important watershed in U.S. political history  – the political reforms that a majority of Americans back in opinion polls gained a first tier advocate moving closer to the White […]