Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World
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What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk
What happens when people no longer want our money?: Papering the World with Benjamins
By Allen Baker
Benjamin Franklin was a prolific inventor and a brilliant thinker. But even he would be amazed at the vast profits that arise simply from printing his portrait on the U.S. hundred-dollar bill.
Here’s how it works: Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing rolls out roughly a billion crisp new hundreds bearing Franklin’s image. (Think of a goose laying golden eggs.) It then sells those bills to banks. The U.S. pockets, well, $100 billion
CNN: Sanders Is The Most Electable
Remember CNN’s attack-debate last week? CNN did what it could to end Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president.
Well, just after that, CNN conducted a poll to measure its success. According to its own report on its own poll, CNN failed miserably.
Among “Democrats/Democratic-leaning independents who are registered to vote” the leading candidate is Bernie Sanders, up 7 percentage points since the previous CNN poll, with Biden and Warren each down 2.
Also, when asked which candidate they would
Talk Nation Radio: Phill Gittins on Educating to End War
Phill Gittins is World BEYOND War’s Education Director. Phill has lived, worked, and travelled in over 50 countries across 6 continents; taught in schools, colleges, and universities in eight countries; and led experiential training and training-of-trainers for hundreds of individuals on peace and conflict processes. Other experience includes work in youth offending prisons; oversight management for youth and community projects; and consultation for public and non-profit organisations on peace,
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, A Recipe for Disaster
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In late December 2018, when James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as secretary of defense after President Trump announced that he was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, it was a hell of a story.
Tomgram: Greenberg and Dratel, The Gitmo Era
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In these years, Washington has, in a sense, tortured history.
Early in this century, the Guantánamo Bay detention facility would become the crown jewel of a mini-gulag of torture and mistreatment that the CIA and the U.S. military — remember those infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in
How Do You Blow the Whistle on a Whole Society?
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
Speaking Truth to Empire
On “Speaking Truth to Empire” on KFCF 88.1 independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno, Dan Yaseen interviews Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange. Topics of discussion include worsening U.S. – Iranian crisis and the fallout from Trump’s ill-advised murder of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Medea is a human rights advocate, an author and a peace & justice activist. She has worked for social justice and human rights in Asia, the Americas, and
Warren, with CNN help, plays wronged-woman card against Sanders: Could We Be Witnessing the Demise of Identity Politics?
By Laurie Dobson
In the current race for the Democratic presidential nomination, there have been two prevailing narratives. One is the battle between the so-called “moderates” (actually neoliberals) vs. “progressives,” in which candidates like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang and, at least until recently, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, are pitted against “lefty” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The other is a contest between the two “progressives”: the