By Arun Gupta (April 2, 2019) While I stayed away from the Russia controversy because I thought it was overblown, I did write an article in December 2016 pointing out of course Russia would want to destabilize the U.S. Putin is a brutal authoritarian and Islamophobe who persecutes journalists and the LGBT community. He carried out a program of such…
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By Arun Gupta (November 8, 2018) Everyone should be deeply disturbed what happened in the election. One seasoned electoral activist told me it was “A blue wavelet with a strong red undertow.” The Democrats lost crucial Senate and gubernatorial races, made only modest gains in state legislatures, and had a middling performance in the House. This election should have been…
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By Arun Gupta (October 25, 2018) Trump is a (white) nationalist. FOX News is his ministry of propaganda. Journalists are being murdered. Transgender people may be eliminated. 13,000 children are in concentration camps. Bombs are being sent to political opponents. Brownshirts violently attack people in three cities in a week. Families fleeing violence and poverty are dubbed terrorists and criminals….
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By Arun Gupta (July 20, 2018) Consider this. Jeff Bezo’s wealth has surpassed $150 billion. There are at least 11,600 homeless people in King County, where Amazon is located. Amazon recently strong-armed the Seattle City Council to repeal a small $275 annual head tax on large corporations to address the soaring homelessness in the wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere….
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By Arun Gupta ( June 18, 2018) Immigrants are not your bludgeon to use against Democrats. Immigrants are not an object for your history lessons. Immigrants are not numbers in your game. Your argument that “it happened before” is utterly inhumane and shows complete contempt for solidarity for millions of immigrants in peril. What is happening now is unprecedented. Trump…
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By Arun Gupta (June 14, 2018) After immersing myself in Bourdain’s work for days — his books, interviews, hundreds of articles, a dozen shows — I did some cooking with my mom. Bourdain is right that the best food is to be found within the home. The most elaborate, artistic, and expensive, is in restaurants, but the food there is…
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By Arun Gupta (February 21, 2018) I’m convinced the Russian state did/does have the intention to stir the pot in the U.S., sabotage elections, create chaos. But that is mainly because we destroyed their country during the shock therapy of the 1990s. There was a staggering decline in life expectancy on the scale of a full-blown invasion. Then Clinton lent…
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By Arun Gupta (February 10, 2018) If you care about what’s happening in the financial markets, now is the time to panic. But then again, if you care, you are probably in the top 10% in terms of wealth in America as they own 84% of the stock. On Monday, I shrugged at the 4% drop in the markets in…
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By Arun Gupta (February 6, 2018) If you are hoping capitalism is going to implode because the markets tanked today, don’t hold your breath. The drop on Monday, February 5, in percentage terms was far from historic. If you look at the first picture, a six-month chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it looks like it fell off a…
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By Arun Gupta (February 4, 2018) This is an insightful report on how to organize against Trump’s deportation regime. Here are some important lessons. One: Immigration is as much about labor as about race. Trump won by racializing working-class conflict, stoking white nativism and resentment against all immigrant workers from farms to high tech. A few years ago I interviewed Ana…
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By Arun Gupta (January 17, 2018) Trump is a unique danger given everything from embracing neo-Nazis to threatening genocide, but his manners are in no way uniquely offensive for an American president. That great American president loved by liberals, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and implementation of the Great Society, makes…
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