Category: Uncategorized

First the good news.

If one of the worst pieces of legislation ever drafted becomes law, there is one small measure in it that we can be pleased with. RootsAction.org and World BEYOND War and many other organizations and activists from Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States and beyond urged Congress through a petition and a variety of lobbying approaches to provide $10 million for the purchase of closed detonation chambers in the clean-up of military contamination in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

This read more

Preetha Gopalan is Reprieve’s Deputy Head of UK Litigation. She works on strategic litigation efforts in the UK which seek to hold the British Government to account for complicity in the death penalty, torture, secret detention and extrajudicial killings abroad. Reprieve has just appealed the decision by the International Criminal Court not to pursue prosecution of war crimes in Afghanistan.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Roger Hallam is of course right in his short book, Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse. While some portion of humanity heaps scorn on the victims of the fossil fuel propaganda who deny climate science, only a much smaller portion points out the equally delusional and disastrous denial of the need for nonviolent revolution.

Facts are facts, as Hallam points out. The current political systems cannot change fast enough. They read more

A nonprofit employer is not necessarily a better boss than a profit-making one.

That sad truth is reinforced by the experience of some 2,200 nurses at Albany Medical Center, who have been fighting for a contract since April 2018, when they voted for union representation.

Even that union recognition struggle proved exceptionally difficult.  The management at Albany Med―a vast, sprawling enterprise with roughly $2 read more

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

In Australia, about as far from Alaska as you can get, rainforests considered too wet to burn have recently been in flames. And that’s no longer an atypical story on this globe of ours. No wonder U.N. Secretary-General António read more

West Point Professor Tim Bakken’s new book The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence, and unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the U.S. military and U.S. governmental policy, and from there into a broader U.S. culture that, in turn, supports the subculture of the military and its leaders.

The U.S. Congress and read more

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

It was at his “homecoming” rally — he was giving up his old stomping grounds in New York City, including Fifth Avenue, that famed street where he could shoot someone and still “wouldn’t lose voters,” for his Mar-a-Lago resort in the swing state that means so read more

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

Many men do monstrous things. And some men are very nearly monsters, capable of killing without compunction or remorse. In the everyday civilian world, we generally seek to lock them up. In war, they have a chance to fully flower. And if they serve in militaries that fight serial conflicts where the laws of war are considered mere suggestions, they can be all that they can read more

David Gibbs is a Professor of History at the University of Arizona and has published widely on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and NATO. His publications have appeared in both academic and popular venues, such as the London Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He also recently debated the topic of humanitarian intervention at the Oxford Union Society in the UK. Professor Gibbs is currently finishing his third read more