In the USA many billionaires pay no taxes. Meanwhile in the Pioneer Valley town of Orange, due to budget cuts, music will be gone from the public schools – unless activists get the music money back into the budget. On July 8 there was a rally in Orange. About a dozen people were there. Stephanie Parker organized the rally. On July 9 she told the Valley Post, “School committee members need to think seriously about music. We want to push them to put it on the agenda.”

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Hadley, Massachusetts borders Northampton. On July 7, the Hadley select board fired the chair of the conservation commission, Paulette Kuzdeba. On July 9, Kuzdeba told the Valley Post, “I will not be running for select board, as I am now a high school teacher at a charter school and have long hours. The commission was a lot of work, but it was a labor of love. My understanding there is groundswell for removing the two select board members who are up for re-election and I will support that to the fullest. Why they (the current select board members) are on the board? Good question to ask them. Based on recent actions it is not for the good of the town, but for the vested interest of a select few.”

The USA is losing 6,000 acres of open space to development every day.

Lawyer Bill Dwyer is on the Hadley planning board. That's an elected position. On July 9 he told the Valley Post, “We have the most protected farmland under the (state's) Agricultural Preservation Restriction program of any town in Massachusetts. The select board is unpaid.” Dwyer said townspeople at the annual town meeting could choose to pay the select board enough that more people would seek election.

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Haiti has been at the top of the news in recent weeks. Missing from most or all of the coverage on NPR and in the New York Times is history. The 1791 Haitian Revolution won black independence. It's the most successful slave revolt in world history. According to a July 13 email from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, “The Biden administration has already deported over 2,000 Haitians under a continuation of a Trump policy known as Title 42. Thousands more remain trapped at the Mexican border. The new political turmoil in Haiti underscores the need to halt all deportations, release all Haitian nationals who are currently in detention centers in the U.S and instead welcome families and children fleeing danger.”

Some 13,000 years ago, through luck, white people ended up in the area now known as Iraq, which at the time had better farmland than the area where black people lived. This allowed white people to store surplus food, and allowed some members of their society to spend time doing things like inventing steel. This and other innovations are why white Europeans later took black Africans as slaves, rather than the other way around. This story is told in the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond.

Today, the USA uses its military to steal oil and other resources from Africa, and to keep dictators in power. With 4 percent of the world's population, the USA spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.