By David Swanson
Remarks at Peace Center, Los Angeles, January 18, 2020
Video

Like perhaps most people who visit Los Angeles, I consider it my duty to offer a brilliant new idea for a film script. My idea is in the genre of science-fiction mafia, a genre that I think has not been sufficiently exploited. In this film, the protagonist wakes up to the fact that without knowing it, he has somehow joined the mafia. I expect people to be able to relate to the story because I believe that this entire read more

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Lately, we Americans have had little choice but to think about this country’s imperiled Eastern border. No, I don’t mean the Atlantic coast. What I had in mind were those borderlands in the Middle East where another 4,500 American military personnel have recently been sent and perhaps read more

Why has the hash tag #CNNisTrash been popular since this week’s presidential primary debate? There was nothing new about the corporate, militarist, anti-progressive slant of the debate “moderation.” What was new was the level of blatant bias so extreme that even viewers who knew nothing about the issues couldn’t miss it, plus the amount of time CNN focused on expressing its hostility toward a single candidate, Bernie Sanders.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 15, 2020

There really only is one option when it comes to nuclear weapons, and that is to do everything we can to abolish them before they abolish us. New York City Council will be voting on January 28, 2020, to do its part by voting on two measures that already have enough sponsors to give them veto-proof majorities.

One is read more

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

Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, offers us a striking look read more

South Korea cannot choose to make peace with North Korea without the consent of a foreign power that keeps thirty thousand troops in South Korea, makes South Korea pay much of the cost of housing them, commands the South Korean military in war, holds veto power at the United Nations, and is not accountable to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice.

The same foreign power has troops in almost every nation on earth, significant bases in about half the nations on earth, read more

An important job of any U.S. president is to propose an annual budget to Congress. Shouldn’t it be a basic job of every presidential candidate to propose one to the public? Isn’t a budget a critical moral and political document outlining what chunk of our public treasury should go to education or environmental protection or war?

The basic outline of such a budget could consist of a list or a pie chart communicating — in dollar amounts and/or percentages — how much government spending ought read more