Author: David Swanson

Submitted by David Swanson, April 16, 2019

I was more surprised that your commission contacted me with a kind-of, sort-of invitation to speak than that you ultimately decided not to include me. I thank you for inviting me to submit testimony.

You had read my article, “Draft Registration Will Be Either Ended or Imposed on Women.” I’ve included it below.

I understand that you had already booked these four speakers and then managed to add a fifth: Edward Hasbrouck, Diane Randall, Jude Eden, Mark read more

The U.S. government gets little credit for it, doesn’t even like to brag about it, but as of 2017 provided military “aid” to 73% of the world’s dictatorships. Ocassionally, the U.S. turns against one of its dictators and chooses that moment to tell everyone about him: Hussein, Noriega, Gadaffi, Assad. Sometimes it loses a dictator for other reasons: the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak.

Sometimes the U.S. imposes a U.S. dictator on a foreign colony: as historically in the Philippines, or Haiti, read more

By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War

1. Governments’ (monstrous and criminal) behavior should not be secret. People should know what their government is doing, and what a powerful foreign government is doing to their own countries. The actual results of the work of WikiLeaks have been hugely beneficial.
2. If U.S. courts were to get busy prosecuting the crimes exposed by WikiLeaks, rather than trying to turn the act of revealing them into some sort of crime, they would simply

read more

Maria Zakharova is an activist and public lecturer based in Odessa, Ukraine. She has been a strong supporter of the Council of Mothers of May 2, which represents relatives of the scores of progressives murdered at Odessa’s House of Trade Unions by a right-wing mob on May 2, 2014, just a few months after the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Ever since the massacre, Zakharova has been promoting the demand by the Council of Mothers for an international investigation read more

The head of NATO is visiting the White House and Congress next week to be publicly praised by the U.S. President and both big political parties. For more on how they love NATO, keep reading.

The foreign ministers of the NATO nations are meeting at the State Department on April 4th.

We’re planning to unwelcome them, and to throw a party for peace and for the nonviolent activist, racial-justice, economic-justice, and peace vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: No read more

Trump wants to leave 31% of discretionary spending for all things non-military, while Bernie wants to move some unspecified amount of money from militarism to human needs, and Elizabeth Warren believes a budget is a statement of values.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no presidential candidate has now or within living memory ever produced a proposed federal budget, or ever been asked in any debate or interview, to even approximate — give or take $100 billion — what they’d like spent where, read more

Marcela Mulholland is a 21-year-old organizer with Sunrise Movement. Her personal experiences with the impacts of sea level rise in her hometown, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. motivate her to fight for coastal communities everywhere that will be devastated by climate change. She is currently a senior studying Political Science and Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to being a student, Marcela is an organizer with Divest UF a group dedicated to financially disentangling the read more

Back before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article called “Fantasies About Russia Could Doom Opposition to Trump.” Perhaps it is less quixotic, or perhaps it is more, to hope that, after more than two years of being barraged with those fantasies, but with their main focus having publicly flopped, more people will now be open to trying something else. That pre-inauguration article read:

“Trump should be impeached on Day 1, but the same Democrats who found the one nominee who could read more

Here’s the description of an event planned for April 2nd at the University of Virginia:

“His Excellency Daniel Mulhall, Ambassador of Ireland to the United States, will speak as part of the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Ambassador Series in the Rotunda Dome Room on April 2 from 3:30-4:45 p.m. Ambassador Mulhall will address the relationship between Ireland and the United States with emphasis on the countries’ Declarations of Independence for which Ireland celebrates its 100th read more