Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Contemplating an Unfounding Father

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

You should know that things are already not going well in your country when a majority of the Electoral College, if not of Americans, elects a con man as president, a “businessman” whose greatest success was landing on his feet, money in hand, after his five casinos went up in flames. read more

Talk Nation Radio: Enough Blood Shed, End the Arms Trade

Mary-Wynne Ashford is a retired Family Physician, with a specialty in Palliative Care. She was Co-President of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War for four years, and President of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) for four years. IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She has received many awards for her work and her book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror, and War. She has been teaching thousands of high school students read more

Tomgram: William Astore, Stamping Out War

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made an appearance. In election year 2020, however, it’s back, not as a global phenomenon or as a general term, but very specifically connected to the more than read more

Bernie Finally Puts a Number on Cutting Military Spending

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has published a fact sheet on how everything he proposes can be paid for. On that fact sheet we find this line in a list of items that collectively will pay for a Green New Deal:

“Reducing defense spending by $1.215 trillion by scaling back military operations on protecting the global oil supply.”

Of course there is an obvious problem or mystery about this number, namely, isn’t it too damn good to be true? The full cost of military spending including numerous agencies read more

The attack on Medicare for All is on: Saying Government-Funded Healthcare’s Too Costly is Nuts…Unless You Think the US Uniquely Can’t Do It

y Dave Lindorff

The new corporate media and conservative Democratic argument against front-runner Bernie Sanders’ eminently logical proposal for creating a single-payer government health insurance program that he calls “Medicare for All” is that it would destroy the huge health insurance industry and put 1.8 million insurance industry employees out on the street.

That is about the stupidest argument for not making an urgent reform of an outrageous pirate-capitalist system I can read more

Trump Betrays His Promise to Protect and Fight for American Workers

Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump promised that, if he was elected, “American worker[s] will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.”

Has he kept this promise?

When it comes to protecting workers’ health and safety, his administration has been a disaster.  Once in office, Trump packed the leadership of U.S. regulatory agencies with pro-corporate zealots, read more

Nonviolent Action for Peace

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War
​https://worldbeyondwar.org/howwewin

George Lakey’s new book is called How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning. On its cover is a drawing of a hand holding up two fingers in what is more often considered a peace sign than a victory sign, but I suppose it is meant as both.

Perhaps nobody is better qualified to write such a book, and it’s hard to imagine one better written. Lakey co-wrote a similar book in the 1960s read more

No brokered convention!: If Sanders Wins a Big Plurality of Delegates, He Must Be the Democratic Presidential Nominee

By Dave LIndorff

        At the end of the Nevada debate on Wednesday evening, each of the candidates on NBC stage was asked one last question:  If nobody has a majority of delegates after the primaries, should there be a brokered Convention? All the candidates answered yes except for Bernie Sanders, who as the acknowledged front-runner in the polls was asked last. “No,” he responded, to loud cheers from the audience. “I think the people should decide.”

Sanders, who saw the nomination read more

Bloomberg Has Spent Enough to Give a Nickel to Every Person Whose Life He’s Ever Damaged

A review of Michael Bloomberg’s political career should not be limited, I think, to the fact that he has the debating skills of a baked potato. Nor does it matter much that he focuses his sales pitch on being a great “manager” but clearly can’t manage to hire anyone to tell him he has to prepare for a debate. His use of non-disclosure agreements to hide undesirable stories deserves the criticism it’s getting, but just begins to scrape the toxic moldy surface.

My colleagues at RootsAction.org read more