West Point Tries to Defend the Idea of a Just War

Villanova University is hosting a West Point Military Academy-supported event about “Just War” theory.

The professor who teaches “ethics” at West Point last year lost two debates on the topic of whether war can ever be justified. Videos: one, two. I admit to being biased, as I was the one debating him, but the first event polled people at the start and finish and found that read more

Talk Nation Radio: Omali Yeshitela on No to NATO — Yes to Peace

Omali Yeshitela is Chairman of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace, and Reparations. The website is at blackisbackcoalition.org

He has agreed to speak on April 4th in Washington DC at the No to NATO — Yes to Peace events. The website for that is NotoNATO.org.

Chairman Omali is also Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party USA and the African Socialist International, and is the founder of The Burning Spear newspaper. See theburningspear.com

Total run time: 29:00
Host: read more

High School Students and Peace Making

Remarks at Student Peace Awards of Fairfax County, Va., March 10, 2019

By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War

Thank you for inviting me here. I’m honored. And I’m reminded of lots of happy memories of Herndon High School, class of 87. If there was encouragement back then to take on the sort of projects that our honorees today have taken on, I missed it. I suspect that some improvements have been made in high school education since my day. Yet I did manage to learn a lot at Herndon, and read more

A Green New Basic Income Guarantee

U.S. military spending eight years ago was at $1.2 trillion per year, when one added in the nukes in the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, interest on debt, veterans’ care, etc. Now it’s at $1.3 trillion. In the years since military spending has been dramatically increased, the United States has been made less safe, less read more

Building a movement: Social Security is the Key to Progressive Change in America

By Dave Lindorff

            Probably the most important single legacy of what happened in the period of the Great Depression and the New Deal was the establishment of the Social Security, the federal program that today pays benefits to 63 million US elderly, disabled adults and dependent children left by a deceased bread-winner. That’s one-in-six of all people in this country.

            President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic read more

Has NATO Met Its Match?

Despite claims by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to have defeated its own troops using Facebook (and, really, what plot to take over a high school hasn’t done that?), the biggest challenge NATO will face this year will probably not be nefarious Russian social media posts.

Nor will it be the dreaded Russian military, now sucking down 6 percent as many dollars each year as the war machines of the NATO nations.

Nor is NATO terribly threatened by a U.S. president who demands that its read more

Talk Nation Radio: Roy Eidelson on How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding

Roy Eidelson, PhD,is the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. His work focuses on applying psychological knowledge to issues of social justice and political change. His writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly peer-reviewed journals and other outlets including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He read more

Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Donald Trump, Pornographer-in-Chief

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

He descended that Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential candidacy already bragging about the “great, great wall” he was going to build on the U.S.-Mexico border (“and nobody builds walls better than me… And I will have Mexico pay for that wall”). “When Mexico read more