VIJAY PRASHAD – Jared M. McKinney and Peter Harris, in s widely circulated paper from the U.S. Army War College, published in November, 2021, wrote, “The United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. This could be done effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, While Taiwan’s minister of defense Chiu Kuo-cheng responded to Moulton’s statement about a military strike on TSMC, in fact, the U.S. government has already attacked the ability of this Taiwanese company to remain in Taiwan.
Category: May 2023
A Highway to Peace or a Highway to Hell?
WILLIAM J. ASTORE – Together, it’s time to find an exit ramp from the wars and weaponry highway to hell that we’ve been on since 1953 and look for the on-ramp to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s highway to peace.
How Workers in the South Are Defying History
TOM CONWAY – Workers at Blue Bird Corporation in Fort Valley, Georgia, launched a union drive to secure better wages, work-life balance, and a voice on the job. The company resisted them. History defied them. Geography worked against them. But they stood together, believed in themselves, and achieved a historic victory that’s reverberating throughout the South.
Understanding the Debt Ceiling Crisis and the Way to Avoid Disaster
BERNIE SANDERS – The debt ceiling is about paying money that has already been appropriated and spent. It has nothing to do with future budgets and future spending. Yet, Republicans have hijacked the debt ceiling process to impose savage cuts on the needs of working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. President Biden has the authority and the responsibility under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to make sure that we continue to pay our bills.
Our Times Call for Managing Complexities, Not Solving Problems
APRIL M. SHORT – How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.
Georgia’s Nuclear Plant is a $35B Boondoggle. We Need New and Better Solutions for a Carbon-free Grid.
PATTY DURAND – Urgent utility business model reforms are needed to create a 21st-century, people-centered grid that delivers affordable fossil-free solutions.
Stepping Over the Border, Onto Planet Earth
ROBERT C KOEHLER – We belong to the Earth rather than to a nation.
US Refuses to Face the Reality of a Multi-Polar World
DEREK ROYDEN – The U.S. never wants war on its own soil, but seems perpetually eager to generate massive profits for its overwhelmingly powerful armaments industry by supplying weapons to the world in conflict. The rest of the world may at last be rejecting that war footing, if the signs from new initiatives are an indication.
Is It Irrational to Be Afraid of Guns?
WIM LAVEN – Fear of guns is rational; unbiased research is clear: they kill innocent people all the time; it is time we did something about it.
Tell the Three Presidents to Stop the War
PETER BERGEL – A coalition of dozens of peace and justice organizations (https://bit.ly/StopWarOrgs) is collecting signers on a statement to Presidents Biden, Zelensky and Putin telling them that the time has come to end the war in Ukraine.
How Corporate Greed Leads to War
BRAD WOLF – Today, the actual and still-flourishing and prospering Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits and stock buybacks follow.
Why Julian Assange Is at the Vanguard for World Press Freedom
PRABIR PURKAYASTHA – We celebrate World Press Freedom Day in May as a reminder that the role of news organizations is to speak truth to power. Not for manufacturing consent—to use Chomsky’s famous words—for the government and the ruling classes. It’s an occasion to remember three people who exemplify the need to speak the truth: Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks; and also of Chelsea Manning, without whom we would not have the proof of what the United States was doing, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but all across the globe. In doing so, I will also deal with the changing nature of government “secrets”, what outing them means then and now.
Ukraine, the Deepening Euro-Atlantic Crisis, and Common Security Possibilities
JOSEPH GERSON – The Ukraine War is about far more than Ukraine. It’s not simply a criminal Russian war of aggression, which it is. But as the recent U.S. National Security Strategy informs us, “The post-Cold War era is definitely over, and competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” The war, its devastations and nuclear threats, and its catastrophic climate fallout are major elements of the collapse of the bi-polar world disorder, the birthing of a new multi-polar order, and the resulting global competition for power and privilege.
Governments alone will not deliver us peace, nuclear disarmament, or deeper international cooperation and unity. Those goals can only be achieved with pressure from below.
How the War in Ukraine Is Shaking up the Global Arms Industry
JOHN P. RUEHL – The struggles of Russian weapons manufacturers have added to historic shifts in the global arms market.
Violence and Nonviolence in Sudan: Democracy Under the Knife
HALEY MORROW and TOM H. HASTINGS – The peace movement in the US lobbies for a cessation of military aid, including to the current Sudanese combatants. Lethal aid, paid for by our taxes, is sold or given away, the profits go to military corporations, and the regular tax-paying citizens pay to be part of the bloody business overseas. To the extent we can stop this flow of deadly force, we can help empower nonviolent people power and increase the chances for peace and democracy.
How a Tribal Rights Lawyer Is Winning Back the Rights of Nature
ARIC SLEEPER – Attorney Frank Bibeau found a way to legally protect nature by suing the state of Minnesota in the name of manoomin, or wild rice, sacred to the Ojibwe people.