Remember to Forget the Alamo

Mexico once had a problem with a local provincial government promoting illegal immigration from the United States into Mexico in order to engage in the illegal slavery of illegally trafficked people. The locality involved was called Texas. For years, Mexico let Texas get away with its lawlessness and immorality, including not paying taxes, and including killing Mexican soldiers. Then it sent an army to lay down the law. Texans warned each other that soldiers were coming “to give liberty to our read more

Speaking Truth to Empire

Wednesday, June 16 – 3:00 to 3:30 pm

“Speaking Truth to Empire” on KFCF 88.1 independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno, Dan Yaseen interviews Kathy Kelly, a peace and justice activist; and a 3 times Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. She cofounded and coordinated Voices in the Wilderness and Voices of Creative Nonviolence. She has helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct actions in many cities in the United States and in many other countries.

They will discuss the read more

Building more atomic bomb triggers is the ‘pits’: Time to Stop Modernizing America’s Nukes and to Start Negotiating Peace

By Dave Lindorff

The Biden administration, in its proposed military budget, is calling for a restart of something the US arms industry has not produced in any significant quantity since 1992: nuclear “pits” — the spherical plutonium-based core of implosion bombs like that dropped on Nagasaki. 

In his record-breaking $753-billion National Security Budget, $715 billion of which is for the Pentagon, is another $38 billion for the portion of the Energy read more

Goodbye to an AUMF

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 17, 2021

With the U.S. House voting and the U.S. Senate promising to vote on repealing an AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force) from 2002 (essentially a sort of weasely pseudo-permission for President George W. Bush to decide on his own whether to attack and destroy Iraq in violation of the UN Charter and Kellogg-Briand Pact, among other laws), we could end up saying good-bye to a shameful piece of legislation. And without a replacement AUMF read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, It’s Time to Touch the Third Rail

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

As French journalist and novelist Anatole France so aptly wrote in his 1894 novel The Red Lily, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” More than a century and a quarter later, that could easily have been written by Mitch McConnell and pals, or just about any Republican read more

Beware Atlantic Charters

The last time the U.S. President and UK Prime Minister announced an “Atlantic Charter” it happened in secret, without public involvement, without Congress or Parliament. It laid out plans for shaping the world upon the conclusion of a war that the U.S. President, but not the U.S. Congress and not the U.S. public, was committed to taking part in. It decreed that certain nations would need to be disarmed, and others not. Yet it put forward various pretenses of goodness and fairness that have read more

Abolishing Police and Abolishing Militaries

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 10, 2021

The similarities between the movement to abolish war and the movement to abolish police and prisons jump out at me anew when reading Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, which is about police and prison abolition. The book has a foreword by Naomi Murakawa that includes this:

“Police push millions of people into the criminal punishment system, where ant-Black death-dealing rises through each circle of hell. Black people comprise 13 read more