BRETT WILKINS – “Nearly 200,000 Americans are dead and more than 6 million have been infected with Covid-19 because of the administration’s disastrous response, but Trump’s top priority is showering giant corporations with deregulatory special favors,” says Matt Kent of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Category: Analysis
American Workers Have Been Given a Raw Deal Throughout the Trump Era
LAWRENCE WITTNER – It’s hard to take seriously Trump’s claim that U.S. workers have thrived during his presidency. Indeed, even before the disasters wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, American workers received a raw deal.
Voting – Our Most Basic Patriotic Duty
CRAIG CLINE – When we vote, we strengthen our Constitution — the foundation we stand upon together. Every American should protect it, preserve it, and keep it from crumbling.
The Israel-UAE Agreement: Good for a Few, Bad for Most
MEL GURTOV – Commentators evidently desperate for good news are touting the Israel-United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreement as a welcome path to Middle East peace. The agreement trades Israel’s promise not to annex portions of the West Bank for the UAE’s recognition of Israel. One conservative writer for the Washington Post actually thinks Trump’s role in helping bring the agreement about makes him a Nobel Prize candidate. But hold on.
An Open Letter to the National Democratic Leadership
PETER BERGEL – In the wake of the COVID epidemic, the movement to ensure that Black Lives Matter, the inadequacies revealed in our health care system, the movement to address climate change and the growing disgust our people feel for the U.S.’s ongoing foreign wars and international bullying, the time has come for system-wide changes.
Mending the Broken Femur: Listening for Each Other’s Humanity
WIM LAVEN – We will start healing as a country, as a people as soon as we start finding the humanity in each other. We are so busy angrily shouting at each other that we have forgotten to listen; let’s take our power back, find our shared humanity, and take care of ourselves—we’ve got work to do.
“Reluctant Democracy” Abets Election Theft
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – America’s reluctant democracy: It demands a lot more of us than we’re taught to believe. Yes, voting is important (if you can), but claiming the right to vote and have your vote counted — and being able to vote for more than simply the lesser evil and the maintenance of the status quo — requires continual struggle in the face of lies and teargas. Election season never ends.
Dropping Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Was Unnecessary
GAR ALPEROVITZ and MARTIN SHERWIN – The overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.
People of Color Are Not Alone in Facing Lethal Discrimination
MENTAL HEALTH ALLIANCE OF PORTLAND, OREGON – While we are doing everything we can to battle the systemic racism that has built up over hundreds of years, we must help those who are struggling with mental health and addictions, and are most likely right now to face excessive police force.
US and Other Arms Sales Prolong War, Yemenis’ Misery
KATHY KELLY – The cries against war in Yemen fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn–and quickly–to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.â€
“Steadfast Commitment” Needed to Preserve and Expand Voting Rights
ANDREW MOSS – For many people, the thought of this November’s general election inspires anything from apprehension to outright dread. Writing in the Atlantic recently, Adam Harris warned of a “voting disaster,” as historic forms of voter suppression disproportionately affecting minority voters (precinct closures, long waiting lines, onerous restrictions on vote-by-mail balloting) are now colliding with the immense challenges of conducting the election during a pandemic.
A Wake-Up Call: The Nuclear Threat!
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL – Americans know how to engage. In the past four years alone, we’ve seen a groundswell of grass-roots activism on threats from climate change and gun violence to racial injustice and gender inequity. Today, we must add one more to the list: the threat of nuclear weapons. As Collina said, “Nuclear disarmament must be part of the new mass movement.â€
Ten Reasons Why Defunding Police Should Lead to Defunding War
MEDEA BENJAMIN and ZOLTAN GROSSMAN – If we find indiscriminate state violence in our streets appalling, we should feel similarly about state violence abroad, and call for divesting from both police and the Pentagon, and reinvesting those taxpayer dollars to rebuild communities at home and abroad.
Humans Are an Endangered Species: Will They Act to Save Themselves?
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Although there is not much time left before the world succumbs to one or more catastrophes, human beings have been able to alter their behavior and institutions. Let’s hope they will rouse themselves and do so again.
The World has Loved, Hated and Envied the US. Now, for the First Time, We Pity it.
FINTAN O’TOOLE – Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
US Policy Toward Israel and Palestine Is Inconsistent and Unjust
RUSSELL VANDENBROUCKE – What term should citizens apply to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s half-truths, insinuations, and misleading assertions about Palestine and Palestinian aspirations and negotiating stances, especially when repeated insistently enough by government officials to become enshrined, not simply as the party line, but as truth itself? How do we speak truth to power when power hunkers inside an echo chamber where it hears only its own truth?
George Floyd’s Murder Has Everything to Do With Rampant Militarism
WINSLOW MYERS – Militarism is found in the rhetoric of all those, from the president to Rush Limbaugh, who push a joyless, simplistic us-and-them worldview that tries to negate the existential reality that we are in this together, all challenged to acknowledge our interdependence and steward the life-support system that sustains us. For this great task, militarism is obsolete.
Recent Events Reveal the Bankruptcy of US Arms Addiction
KATHY KELLY – The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our arriving cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners. We must resist signing contracts with weapon makers profiting from endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war. Such contracts, inked in blood, doom every corner of our world to perish as a battleground state.
Time to Move Federal Funds Away from Military “Security” In Order to Provide Real Security
DAVID SWANSON – The past month’s activism has changed a great deal. One thing it’s helped with is brushing aside the tired old argument over whether government should be big or small. In its place we have the much more useful argument over whether government should prioritize force and punishment, or focus on services and assistance.
The Limits to Police Authority Must Be Specified and Enforced
WIM LAVEN – Police departments all across America keep proving the same point: they are not training officers to honor the protection of human life.
California’s Internal Democratic Leadership Struggle Has National Implications
NORMAN SOLOMAN – After events of 2016, when facts emerged showing that the Democratic National Committee put anti-Sanders thumbs on the scales, many progressives have become acutely sensitive to shortages of fairness in party proceedings. The last thing we need are fresh examples of powerful politicians opting for self-serving actions over democratic principles.
As We Focus on Racism, Don’t Forget MLK’s Two Other “Giant Triplets”
ANDREW BACEVICH – The nation’s current preoccupation with race, as honorable and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.
The Civil Rights Act of 2020
CHARLES M. BLOW – Feel-good gestures from politicians and the police shift no power. Real change lies within a system overhaul.
Corporate Media Are Focusing on Race — and Dodging Class
The last two weeks have opened up a lot more media space for illuminating racial cruelty. But what about economic cruelty?
Putin Announces Updated Russian Nuclear Strategy Policy; Emphasizes Defense
By Vladimir Kozin On 2 June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 355 on the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Area of Nuclear Deterrence. The adopted document, which has the status of a…
Nuclear Arms Control: What Happens when US and Russia let it Lapse?
FRED WEIR – In less than a year, the world could enter a period free of nuclear arms control treaties for the first time in more than a half-century. Is such a state of affairs sustainable?
What Will It Take…
KATHY KELLY – After the onset of COVID-19, Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, had this message for the world: “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown….. Put aside mistrust and animosity. Silence the guns; stop the artillery; end the airstrikes. End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world. That is what our human family needs, now more than ever.â€
Check Amy Klobuchar’s Record Before Supporting Her for VP
NORMAN SOLOMON – With Amy Klobuchar now on Joe Biden’s short list for vice president, the gruesome killing of George Floyd has refocused attention on Klobuchar’s history of racial injustice.
The Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse
ANDREW MOSS – Albrecht Durer’s woodcut, “The Four Horsemen” (1498), which represents scripture’s Four Horsemen — conquest, war and violence, famine, and death, continues to startle, displaying the horsemen’s combined energies, and inspires thought about the collective energies of our own apocalyptic horsemen: economic oppression, racism, militarism, and environmental injustice.
Comparing Responses to Ebola and COVID Reveals Trump’s Mismanagement
CAROLINE HURLEY – Security, claim peace scientists, is the experience and expectation of well-being. Analyzing management of the major 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is instructive given Covid 19’s global rampage. Despite internal UN dysfunction, especially the veto system pitting members at cross-purposes, that organization proved its worth.
Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility
ROBERT REICH – American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that.
Can We Achieve Nuclear Adulthood?
ROBERT kOEHLER – In the linear world of geopolitics, militarism and mysteriously determined “national interest†rule and security means — though it is never put this way — playing games with Armageddon. This is called realism. And those who claim to be realists never — ever, ever — allow a word like “disarmament†into the conversation, much less into the realm of political choice.
We Honor What We Value–Entertainers Over Saviors
RALPH NADER – For long-term fighters for justice, up against cruel or reckless corporations and their political toadies, there are few accolades, almost no recognition, and no citizen Hall of Fame.
‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership
KATRIN BENNHOLD – The coronavirus pandemic is shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism. This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.
Bernie Sanders: Big Changes Are Needed in This Land
BERNIE SANDERS – On this May Day 2020, I wanted to give you an overview of what working people are going through in this country and throughout the world and where we need to go from here.
How can Nations Best Prepare to Face a Pandemic or Climate Crisis?
GEORGE LAKEY – People trust a system that reliably supports security, solidarity and individual freedom to make major life choices. They learn that trust — or don’t — through how well the system comes through for them. The contrast between Nordics and Americans these days reveals their contrasting systems.
Coronavirus Makes Clear Why Bioweapons Must Be Renounced
KARY LOVE – It is curious that today the USA has engaged in a great deal of research and development of germ warfare weapons. As reported in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the USA has an unknown number of bioweapons capable labs, run in an apparently haphazard fashion, with a history of error, and is building more. We must put an end to this practice.
Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt
DAVID FRUM – Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is prioritizing the Republican Party rather than the American people during this crisis.
This is a Good Time to Think About Our National Sins
MIKE FERNER – If we can expand our consciousness and compassion, we can begin to comprehend our government’s behavior in the world and come out of this pandemic demanding to be better members of the human family.
US Opinion is Shifting in Favor of the Nordic Model – Can Activists Keep Up?
GEORGE LAKEY – A big-city, mainstream editorial board is talking “system change.†We activists need to be able to answer such an invitation not with piecemeal policies, but with a system alternative — one that delivers what the pandemic has shown that we need.
Cutting Military Spending to Fund Human Security is ‘THE LEAST’ World Leaders Must Do after Pandemic – Gorbachev
CENTER FOR CITIZEN INITIATIVES – The Covid-19 pandemic shows that governments that think of security in mostly military terms are simply wasting money, Mikhail Gorbachev has said. Defense spending must be cut globally to fund things that humanity actually needs.
Vote-by-Mail Could Cost Dems the Election
GREG PALAST – Unless America radically changes the way we send, receive and count mail-in ballots, the massive switch to postal voting, and the mountain of uncounted minority votes it will generate, could lead to Trump’s re-election—no matter the will of the voters.
After this Pandemic Passes, America Needs a Reckoning with its National Security
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL – After this pandemic passes, there must be a profound reckoning. I’m not referring to President Trump’s abysmal performance in the crisis; the election in November will render citizens’ judgment on that. No, there must be a reckoning with the profound failure of the United States’ domestic and foreign policies and priorities, a failure that was apparent even before covid-19 revealed the catastrophic bankruptcy of our national security strategy.
UN Ceasefire Defines War As a Non-Essential Activity
MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES – When the pandemic is over, let’s insist that the U.S. honor the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, which wise American leaders drafted and signed in 1945, and start living at peace with all our neighbors around the world.
A Tale of Two Stockpiles
BRIAN TERRELL – “I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,†said Dr. King. 52 years later, our very existence as a species is at risk and the radical revolution of values that he preached is our best hope.
Prophetic Voice Urges World to Change Its Ways
MIKE FERNER – We are constantly told to thank “the troops†for their service, no matter how problematic their actions. But what about all the people who serve but who don’t put on fatigues and carry guns — nurses, doctors, teachers, bus drivers, postal workers and grocery stockers among others? During this pandemic, they are the ones keeping us alive and helping make sure society functions while the rest of us shelter in place. If we emerge from this pandemic with a very different idea of whom we should be grateful to for their service, we will be the better for it.
Newsweek: ‘National Security’ is Too Crude to Protect Us From Pandemics. It’s Time to Shift to Human Security Instead
JONATHAN GRANOFF and BARRY KELLMAN – As the coronavirus pandemic spirals around the world, and as militaries lie helpless before it, it’s appropriate to ask whether we would be better off if more resources and attention were pooled and devoted to addressing threats to human security.
COVID-19 is a True Terrorist but the National Security State is Helpless and Useless
ANDREW BACEVICH – Deferred for far too long, Judgment Day may at long last have arrived for the national security state.
Power in a Time of Coronavirus
NORMAN SOLOMON – Every day now we’re waking up into an extreme real-life nightmare, while responses are still routinely lagging far behind what’s at stake. Urgency is reality. The horrific momentum of the coronavirus is personal, social and political. In those realms, a baseline formula is “passivity = death.†The imperative is to do vastly better.
Sanctions Against Iran Worsen a Bad Situation, Threaten Everyone
KATHY KELLY – U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. “maximum pressure†policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.