What If Governments Obeyed Laws?

Do we need new laws or adherence to the old ones?

Yes.

Both.

The United States has an ancient Constitution. It doesn’t ban slavery as punishment. It doesn’t ban bribery as campaign funding. It doesn’t protect the natural world. It doesn’t guarantee basic human rights to food, shelter, education, healthcare. Its system of “representative” government doesn’t fairly represent. New laws are needed.

On the other hand, the United States has numerous laws on the books that just aren’t enforced. read more

Health Professionals Tackle War

When I discovered that militarism is one of the top destroyers of the natural environment, I piled that onto my case against war. I did the same when I found out war wasted more money than anything else, was a major promoter of bigotry and racism, was the primary justification for government secrecy and the erosion of civil liberties, was the top barrier to the rule of law and global cooperation, militarized local police, etc., etc. When I came to see how counterproductive war was, increasing read more

Giving Resistance a Good Name

It’s popular to refer to the political line of a major corporate party in the United States as something like “the resistance” when the other of the two parties is on the throne of what both parties have, over many decades, actively converted into an unconstitutional position of something wildly beyond old-fashioned royal powers. Around 2004 the Democratic Party line was to pretend to oppose wars. Around 2018 it wasn’t. So the “resistance” of that party’s followers included war opposition read more

Latin America’s Second World War

Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War is an engaging, extensive, well-researched, well-written account of a topic that still manages to offend me. World War II is sacred history in the United States, the ultimate clash of pure good and evil, the fundamental origin myth of the military industrial complex. It is the top subject of books, films, and shows. Finding a novel angle on World War II that has not yet been exhaustively covered is, at this point, a significant feat. Finding a whole read more

Leave Syria the Hell Alone

Last weekend I was on Iranian TV being asked about the meeting in Tehran at which the presidents of Iran and Russia had refused to agree with the President of Turkey to stop bombing people in Syria. I said Iran and Russia were wrong.

I also said that nobody involved, least of all the United States, was right.

Not only would the United States and the world be infinitely better off if in response to 9/11 the U.S. government had done nothing at all, as Jon Schwartz tweets each year, but Syria would read more

How Do Weapons Makers Sleep at Night?

A new report by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies “focuses on the five largest U.S. arms manufacturers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics — and their dealings with three repressive nations: Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.”

This may prove to be a very valuable approach. The three nations reported on use U.S.-made weapons from the companies listed above to kill, injure, and traumatize huge numbers of innocent people both in other countries and in their read more

Legalizing Peace Is Far from Simple

As the U.S. government simultaneously threatens the International Criminal Court for even acting as if it might prosecute the United States for crimes in Afghanistan (a topic “investigated” for years now, while the ICC has yet to actually prosecute any non-African for anything) and (with little apparent cognitive dissonance) uses read more

Petition and Events to Say No to an 18th Year of War on Afghanistan

The United States is threatening sanctions against judges at the International Criminal Court should they continue their years-long investigation into the U.S. war on Afghanistan — a war which, in less than a month, will begin its 18th year.

A long list of prominent U.S. citizens and organizations, and thousands of additional signers, have put their names to a letter asking President Donald Trump to live up to his read more