What 50 countries are backing Guaidó? Who knows? Who cares?: If the Media Claim 50 Countries Reject Venezuela’s Elected President and Repeat It Enough It Must Be True

By Dave Lindorff

American media still refer to Juan Guaidó, America’s hand-picked “legitimate leader” or “legitimate president” of Venezuela, as having an “administration.”

The truth is that his “administration” — consisting of advisors and other opposition leaders — are all either arrested and being held by the government, hiding, seeking asylum in various foreign embassies (Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and Argentinian) in the capital of Caracas, or have fled to other read more

Talk Nation Radio: Marc Eliot Stein on Technology and Peace Activism

Marc Eliot Stein is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. I’m the Executive Director of World BEYOND War. Marc has been a web developer since the 1990s, and over the years has built sites for Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam, the international literary site Words Without Borders, the Allen Ginsberg estate, Time Warner, A&E Network/History Channel, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Center for Disease Control, and Meredith Digital Publishing. He is also a writer, and for years he maintained read more

New TCBH! poem by Gary Lindorff: ‘Leaving Rome’ (written in Ireland)

Let every crack be a place for seeds to sprout,

Let the forest return to this place!
Let the rocks be done wearing our face,
And may every fractured avenue lead out!

Rome is crumbling.

All of the magic
That will save us is outside of Rome.

Inside the empire
Everything is falling.
It’s a magic-vacuum
That has sucked us in for so long
That we began to believe that every road
Ultimately led nowhere!

If you are still in read more

The Last Death in a War is 90% Backwash

They say the last sip of a drink is mostly backwash. The last understanding of a war should be that every speck of it is backwash in the sense used by Ellen N. La Motte in her 1916 book The Backwash of War. La Motte was a U.S. nurse who worked at a French hospital in Belgium not far from a semi-permanent front line at which men slaughtered each other for no discernable purpose for months on end, and the mangled bodies from one side, plus the occasional civilian, were brought into the read more

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Health Care That Makes Us Ill

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

Recently, at a rally in Wisconsin, President Trump implicitly attacked the late Senator John McCain over Obamacare: “We should’ve had health care, but one man decided to vote against it.” He was referring to the Republican Senate’s 2017 attempt at a “skinny repeal” of the Affordable read more

Humanitarian Aid Blocked from Entering Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C.

Two months ago, I heard a story. You heard it too, if you went anywhere near a television or a newspaper in the United States. The government of Venezuela needed to be overthrown because it wouldn’t allow in humanitarian aid.

The story was false, of course. The United States had imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela for years, resulting in 40,000 deaths (with more being added every day) and sought to read more

The Line Between U.S. Prisons and Death Camps

Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.

I say read more