GERRY CONDON – Nuclear War Is Imminent — Unless the U.S. Embraces Peace – and Soon!
Category: Analysis
Donald Trump’s Reckless Infatuation with Nuclear Weapons
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – Ultimately, the only long-term security for humanity lies in the global abolition of nuclear weapons and the development of a united world community.
This Election’s Impact on Immigration
ANDREW MOSS – With enough engagement and the right kinds of pressure, we might just get the kind of immigration system our nation needs: not the policies that squander tens of billions on a carceral, dead-end deportation machine, but a just system that invests in enough people and the right kinds of processes to minimize backlogs, expedite asylum claims, and provide the legal pathways that will help immigrants begin working and contributing to a land that needs them.
Big Banks Break Their Climate Promises by Propping Up Big Meat
MONIQUE MIKHAIL and WARD WARMERDAM – Massive industrial livestock financing sabotages major U.S. banks’ climate goals.
Why Are Conservatives Undermining the Constitution They Claim to Love?
BOB TOPPER – The right’s strategy to overturn democracy is to make people hate the country they love. For organizations like Fox News and the would-be oligarchs the motivation is financial gain. For the fundamentalists, the goal is an American theocracy, and for Trump it is self-preservation. Strange bedfellows.
Banal Militarism Has Infiltrated Our Entire Society
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – The term is “banal militarism” – that is to say, violence and the preparation for violence so utterly commonplace that most people don’t even notice. Banal militarism is as American as apple pie. It’s also global in scope.
Are the prospects for Small Modular Reactors being exaggerated? Five key characteristics examined
ED LYMAN – Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are being presented as the next generation of nuclear technology. While traditional plants face cost overruns and safety issues, SMRs are seen by their champions as cheaper, safer, and faster to deploy. But evidence casts these claims into doubt. In five sections of this article, the reasons why are listed and analyzed.
Republicans Claiming to Support Minority Voters Suppress Their Votes
ANDREW MOSS – There’s a breathtaking hubris at work when a political party seeks to suppress the votes of an entire people, then claims its leaders are the champions of that same people. You don’t have to look far to find such hubris in the Republican Party today.
Authoritarianism is on the Rise in Many Democracies
MEL GURTOV – Can we draw any general conclusions from these elections? Probably the most important is the authoritarian tendencies of leaders and challengers in these Official corruption, violence against critics, disrespect for domestic and international law, and disregard for public opinion are often features of democratically elected rulers as they are of rulers who are not elected. democracies. We keep learning that winning elections is not the same thing as governing democratically.
How the Military-Industrial Complex is Killing us All
DAVID VINE and THERESA (ISA) ARRIOLA – Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.
The GOP’s Stalinesque Plan 2025 to Shape the Future of U.S. Food and Agriculture
ELIZABETH HENDERSON – The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation wants to rid the USDA
of sustainability, climate change mitigation, and racial equity.
What conflict resolution experts wish universities knew about conflict
MELINDA BURRELL – The protests roiling our campuses reveal a great deal about us as a country. Emotions are easily triggered, many of us are comfortable being angry, and most of us need help to handle conflict constructively. And these emotions are likely to keep running high as we head towards the November election. Understanding the importance of creating forums to listen – and of reaching for help in navigating conflict – are good bets.
Nuclear Power’s Lethal, Larcenous End Game
HARVEY WASSERMAN – Burying the “Peaceful Atom” and its fossil-fueled partners will be the task of our lifetimes, and when it comes to the myth of nuke power helping to fight global warming…there’s no there there.
NOW is the Time for Action to Counter Two Existential Threats
WINSLOW MYERS – Everything has changed in our world; we have begun to become aware that everything I do affects you and vice versa. The nuclear deterrence system and George Will-Donald Trump-style climate denial leaves out too much of our reality.
How the Constitution Fails to Protect the Environment
KATRINA FISCHER KUH and JAMES R. RAY – The absence of clear and broad constitutional authority to protect the environment limits the scope of federal environmental law.
Interdependency Is the Missing Understanding in International Relations
WINSLOW MYERS – New thinking motivates disarmament and accelerates new forms of sustainable energy. The opportunity is for everyone, citizens and leaders, to say no to obvious dead ends like the arms race and yes to new levels of cooperation—including reaching out with endless patience to our adversaries with a larger vision of self-interest that leads to life for all.
Donald Trump’s empty promises on jobs
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Overall, Trump’s record as a “jobs president” was deeply flawed, but also sadly appropriate for an individual who had become famous for telling participants in a reality TV program: “You’re fired!”
A Class Analysis of the Trump-Biden Rerun
RICHARD D. WOLFF – One crucial lesson of the New Deal will have been learned and applied. Leaving the capitalist class structure of production unchanged—a minority of employers dominating a majority of employees—enables that minority to undo whatever reforms any New Deal might achieve. That is what the U.S. employer class did after 1945. The solution now must include moving beyond the employer-employee organization of the workplace. Replacing that with a democratic community organization—what we elsewhere call worker cooperatives—is the missing element that can make progressive reforms stick
Current U.S. Foreign Policy: Militarism Unhinged
PHYLLIS BENNIS, T.J. JACKSON LEARS and JEFFREY D. SACHS – Three insightful analysts of present-day U.S. foreign policy share their thoughts in a roundtable discussion moderated by Norman Solomon.
Latest Huge Transfer of 2,000-Pound Bombs from U.S. to Israel Not Newsworthy to the New York Times
NORMAN SOLOMON – The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war — journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
Biden Is Quietly Funding Nuclear Weapons Upgrades That Could Imperil the Planet
JONATHAN KING and RICHARD KRUSHNIC – The continued funding of nuclear weapons development is a pork barrel of herculean proportions, funneling tax dollars from all Americans into the pockets of the nuclear weapons industry. We suspect that the Biden administration’s silence represents their decision to keep this boondoggle out of public view.
Corporate Profiteering Destroyed the Baltimore Bridge
SONALI KOLHATKAR – It’s critically important to contextualize accidents that are the result of corporations putting profits over safety and people. These incidents are not isolated or unpredictable. They are the cost of doing business—a cost that the rest of us pay for in money and lives.
A One-State Solution Could Transform the World
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free.
The Ugly Origins of Trump’s “America First” Policy
LAWRENCE WITTNER – People’s choice of words can be revealing. That’s certainly the case with respect to one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans, “America First.”
What’s More Powerful Than a Ruling Authoritarian?
WINSLOW MYERS – Everything I do or don’t do affects you, and everything you do or don’t do affects me—authoritarians and would-be authoritarians included. That’s a wrenchingly positive enlargement of our conception of true self-interest. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, and it cannot be repeated too often: “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”
The Tears of War Belong to All of Us
ROBERT KOEHLER – First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! You can kill as many of them as you want. Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world – your world, not theirs – safe. War is such a paradox: killing one’s way to peace. But apparently it’s humanity’s primary organizing principle. Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize.
Empire Decline and Costly Delusions
RICHARD D. WOLFF – The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.
Countering Corporate Propaganda
SONALI KOLHATKAR – We are steeped in the cultural glorification of capitalist exploitation. What if we rejected economic individualism and instead embraced ideas rooted in collective well-being?
When Nukes Are Illegal Only Criminals Will Have Nukes
KARY LOVE – Now that nukes are criminal, only criminals have nukes. That is our reality. That is our world. What to do? Identify those responsible, those profiting, those enabling and haul them into the dock to stand accused as enemies of all humankind.
Black History Illuminates “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome”
WIM LAVEN – Those traumatized by American racism and their descendants can suffer from anxiety, grief, guilt, dysfunctional relationships and the continued fear of racial prejudice and injustice. Not talking about it does not make the problem go away; from my observations it seems to make the problem worse.
Can Democracy Survive the Morbidly Rich?
THOM HARTMANN – Former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1916-1939) famously said: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic
NORMAN SOLOMON – Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking — it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.
Is North Korea Preparing for War?
MEL GURTOV – Two of America’s most prominent North Korea experts, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, begin their latest analysis lwith this sentence: “The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950.” But US policy on North Korea over the last few decades has changed little.” At the least, the US needs to test Kim’s interest in engagement. Now.
Reviving the Concept of Trusteeship as a Stepping-Stone to Peace in the Middle East
SOVAIDA MAANI EWING – Like it or not, our world has become so interconnected and interdependent that events that have hitherto been regarded as regional in nature now threaten our well-being everywhere. The international community must step up and shoulder a responsibility it has, for too long, abdicated: to maintain and restore peace in the world.
Overcoming the Obstacles to UN Maintenance of International Peace and Security
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Clearly, as the history of the United Nations demonstrates, if the world organization is to maintain international peace and security, it must be freed from its current constraints.
War in Gaza and Yemen Incompatible with King’s Message
WIM LAVEN – Martin Luther King never missed an opportunity to speak up for the poor or the voiceless. He was assassinated while speaking up for Sanitation Workers in Memphis. The protesters wore sandwich boards that read “I Am A Man.” Should children in Gaza and Yemen carry signs reading, “I am a child”?
Magical Thinking About Biden 2024 Paves the Way for Another Trump Presidency
JEFF COHEN and NORMAN SOLOMON – Defenders of sticking with Biden glibly dismiss negative poll numbers while noting that polls in January can’t tell us where persuadable voters will end up in November. But there’s a serious problem beyond just polls. It’s the disaffection of activists – pivotal because thousands of talented, hard-working activists are needed to help persuade voters on the fence, and to get-out-the-vote of traditional Democrats who are only “occasional voters.”
The Winter Without Snow – A Wake-Up Call
RIVERA SUN – Let The Winter Without Snow be a wake-up call for all of us. There isn’t a moment to waste. There are countless actions that we can take. And we must take them. Now, not next year.
How The Hell Did We Get Here?
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE – We could have been so much more.
The No-State Solution Becomes More and More Real as Israel’s Permanent Nakba Continues
VIJAY PRASHAD – The U.S. veto in the Security Council and the votes against in the General Assembly are effectively votes for the Permanent Nakba of the Palestinian people, the No-State Solution. At least, that is how they will be read across the world, not only in al-Mawasi, as the bombs get closer, but also in the demonstrations from New York to Jakarta.
Return to an Abandoned UN Precedent for an End to the Ukraine War
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Based on both international law and precedent, the UN Security Council has the authority to impose a settlement of the disastrous Ukraine War. What kinds of international action this would require would need to be determined by the world organization, just as the final terms of a peace agreement would ultimately need to be accepted by the contending parties. But, given the overwhelming support in the UN General Assembly for the withdrawal of Russian military forces from Ukraine and for a lasting peace agreement, such a peace settlement is likely to be a just one.
Time for a Transnational Uprising Against a Reckless Escalation of the Arms Race?
NORMAN SOLOMON – What Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” finds its supreme expression in the routine of nuclear weapons policies, which rely on an extreme shortage of countervailing outcry and activism. The ultimate madness thrives on our daily accommodation to it.
Bloodshed in the Middle East: When Will It End? Some Might Prefer It Didn’t
MEL GURTOV – in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is still in command, blocking roads to peace.
Bernie Sanders: This is Our Future
BERNIE SANDERS – Failure to act in response to the climate emergency will doom future generations to a very uncertain future. For the sake of our common humanity we cannot allow that to happen.
The Israeli Attack on Palestinian Health Workers in Gaza and the Failure of the American Medical Association
RUPA MARYA and VIJAY PRASHAD – Amid Israel’s unprecedented attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza, the AMA censored a resolution proposed by its members to call for a ceasefire.
Israel’s Military Is Part of the U.S. War Machine
NORMAN SOLOMON – In January 2019, House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi was recorded on video at a forum sponsored by the Israeli American Council as she declared: “I have said to people when they ask me — if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it aid — our cooperation — with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.” Even making allowances for bizarre hyperbole, Pelosi’s statement is revealing of the kind of mentality that continues to hold sway in official Washington. It won’t change without a huge grassroots movement that refuses to go away.
Seeing Through the Economic Bait and Switch
SONALI KOLHATKAR – The values of the U.S. public are not the same as those of the wealthy and corporations. It took a UN official—an outsider—to point out the dissonance. Furthermore, evaluations of the U.S. economy by the U.S. media and politicians are based on corporate prosperity while the UN’s evaluation is based on individual prosperity.
If You Love Nuclear Energy, Then You Love Nuclear Weapons
HARVEY WASSERMAN – There is no separation between nuclear power and nuclear war. The “Peaceful Atom” is a radioactive myth. The world’s fleet of atomic reactors is the happy-faced infrastructure for the global radioactive weapons industry.
Biden’s Failure on Gaza Could Cost Him the Election
STEPHEN ZUNES – By refusing to call for a ceasefire as civilian deaths rise, Biden is alienating young and left-leaning voters.
The War in Israel: Costs and Consequences
MEL GURTOV – That Netanyahu is the only top Israeli national security official who has not accepted any blame for the Hamas attack is indicative. Will postwar Israel again be plunged into political chaos? Will the far right be empowered or discredited because of the war? Will Israel after the war continue expansion of settlements and deprivation of Palestinians’ rights in the West Bank? One outcome of the extraordinary violence seems certain: The hope for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, not to mention a two-state arrangement, has been dashed for many years to come.