Author: David Swanson

It’s often hard to report on U.S. politics and government with a straight face. It’s even harder to report on the usual reporting on U.S. politics and government with a straight face. So much of it is beyond the reach of parody. Yet it also opens up opportunities to shock people with basic facts.

The stock market going up is not a good thing. Wars don’t expand human rights. Loony newfangled schemes to give everyone healthcare and education have been tried for many decades in many countries, read more

Richard Sanders is a researcher/writer/activist who has engaged full-time in the peace movement since 1984 when he escaped academia with an MA in cultural anthropology. His efforts to debunk Canada’s peace mythology began when coordinating Ottawa’s Peace Resource Centre, producing a community anti-war radio program for almost 20 years, and being a local organizer with the Alliance for Nonviolent Action. In late 1988, he founded the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT.ncf.ca). read more

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War

Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.

This is a demonstration read more

Elections, I think most of us can agree, usually bring out the idiocy, superficiality, and illogic in everyone who can muster any. Imagine supporting, as many did, Sanders and then Trump because they were both “outsiders.” On Tuesday, I heard somebody on CNN announce that Sanders and Klobuchar were both “change candidates” (because you’d have to change every bit of the platform of one of them to match that of the other?). Tokenism no longer embarrasses voters or even the candidates who read more

Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and investigative reporter. Over the last 35 years he has served as Washington correspondent for The Nation and Salon and as editor and reporter at the Washington Post and Washingtonpost.com for 15 years. He is the author of three books of non-fiction history: The Ghost, a biography of legendary CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton; Snow-Storm in August, the untold tale of a white riot that swept read more

Charles Kenny’s book, Close the Pentagon, has an endorsement from Steven Pinker despite wanting to close something that Pinker rarely acknowledges exists.

This is a book to answer the question: What if someone who believed that war was only committed by poor, dark, distant people, and had therefore almost vanished from the earth, were to encounter the U.S. military and the U.S. military budget?

The answer is basically a proposal to move the money from militarism to human and environmental needs read more

Annette Brownlie is a mother and a life-long peace organiser and activist, arising out of the experiences of her father in WW2 and her own experiences as a teenager opposing the Vietnam war. Annette has had leadership roles in anti-nuclear, environmental, and peace organisations in Brisbane. She is a recipient of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and the United Nations Association of Australia Community Peace Award. When the announcement was made in 2012 to host U.S. Marines read more

Margaret Kimberley has been Editor and Senior Columnist for Black Agenda Report since its inception in 2006. Her first book, Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, will be published by Steerforth Press on February 4, 2020. She is a contributor to the OR Books anthology, In Defense of Julian Assange. She has also produced original work for Consortium News, Counterpunch, the Dallas Morning News, and the American Herald Tribune. Ms. Kimberley read more

When it comes to foreign policy, it ought to go without saying that Trump, Biden, and Buttigieg are walking catastrophes. A bit of research suggests that Elizabeth Warren is pretty much a true believer in slightly modified catastrophe. But what about Bernie Sanders?

I think that, as he is right now, Sanders would, overall, if pressed a typical amount, be a dramatic improvement over 45 out of 45 past U.S. presidents. But that’s a low bar. I’m delighted with his domestic policies and with the read more