Two fierce labor struggles are currently raging in New York's capital district:  a lockout of unionized workers at the Honeywell plant in Green Island and a strike by the unionized workers at the Momentive plant in Waterford.  Each results from the efforts of wealthy and powerful corporations to maximize their substantial profits by forcing concessionary contracts on their employees.  This article, located on pages 5-6 of the newsletter of the Albany chapter of United University Professions, provides the background.

Although nuclear disarmament seems to have ground to a halt, the world's 15,500 nuclear weapons remain exceptionally dangerous, enormously costly, and a spur to the development of nuclear weapons by other nations.  Unilateral action to reduce nuclear arsenals has been taken numerous times in the past by nations, including the United States, with no adverse consequences.  With even the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in favor of such action, why not try it again?

There is certainly plenty of waste in U.S. government spending.  But it is found in the military sector, which already absorbs 54 percent of the federal government's discretionary spending and will increase to 63 percent in the event that Donald Trump reaches the White House.

Thanks to a growing revolt by the non-nuclear powers against the failure of the nuclear powers to honor their commitment, under the 1968 nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, to disarm, the UN General Assembly will soon be voting on the beginning of negotiations for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.  But will a negotiated nuclear weapons ban follow?  

Thanks to the strong challenge by Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, the Democratic Party, as it moves into the final stage of the presidential race, has a remarkably progressive platform.  Progressives shouldn't throw away the opportunity to demand its implementation.

China, Russia, and the United States are unusually violent nations -- not only judged by their militarism and wars, but by their murder rates and state-sponsored executions.  Is this really the best that these large, economically productive, educationally advanced, and technologically sophisticated nations can do?

The United States, armed with the latest in advanced weaponry, has more military might than any other nation in world history.  Moreover, it has begun a $1 trillion program to refurbish its entire nuclear weapons complex.  Even so, given political realities, U.S. military spending seems likely to increase in coming years.

Democratic socialism used to be a vibrant force in American life, especially during the first two decades of the twentieth century.  But, in the following years, it suffered such serious body blows -- ranging from government repression, to Communist rivalry, to co-optation by the Democratic Party -- that it collapsed and almost disappeared.  More recently, though, it has made a startling comback.

Political bias is nothing new in American newspapers.  And the Albany Times Union continued this tradition by failing to report Bernie Sanders's upset Democratic Presidential primary victory in New York State's 20th Congressional district -- the area it covers and where almost all its readers reside.

Isn't it rather odd that America's largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades -- $1 trillion to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear weapons complex -- has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates?  If Americans would like more light shed on their future president's response to this enormously expensive surge in the nuclear arms race, it looks like they are going to have to ask the candidates the trillion dollar question themselves.