Anything War Can Do, Peace Can Do Better

William James’ idea of the need to create a moral equivalent of war first struck me, decades ago, when I read about it, as about as sensible an idea as inventing a new way to punch yourself in the face. This was not purely because times have changed, because weapons have become more powerful, because the earth’s climate is collapsing, or because nonviolent activism has become widely understood as requiring courage, sacrifice, camarderie, dedication, discipline, and strength, without read more

U.S. Bases in Okinawa Are a Threat to Freedom

By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
Remarks at Rally outside White House, January 7, 2019.

There are a number of problems with the idea that maintaining and expanding giant military bases in other people’s countries protects freedom in the U.S. or in the occupied land.

For one thing, the United States maintains these bases in everything from the most brutal dictatorships to the most liberal so-called democracies. Are the U.S. troops in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia protecting the same freedoms read more

Do We Really Need Billionaires?

According to numerous reports, the world’s billionaires keep increasing in number and, especially, in wealth.

In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories.  Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year.  Americans led the way with a record 585 billionaires, followed by mainland China which, despite read more

Claiming a ‘national emergency’ to justify building a $5-billion wall: At Last! A Workable Reason to Impeach the MF

By Dave Lindorff

Liberals have been calling for the new Democratic House to file articles of impeachment against Donald Trump ever since winning the House in the Nov. 8 election in 2016, but there has been this obstacle:  Nobody believes that Republicans who control the Senate will allow a House impeachment to move to a trial in the Upper House of Congress, much less contribute the needed two-thirds of the vote to convict and remove him from office.

But read more

A Green New PayGo Shutdown

“She’ll cut your head off.” That’s Nancy Pelosi’s daughter’s praise for her mother.

I guess you’re supposed to imagine it always being somebody else’s head and to really hate all those somebody elses.

But then, what is PayGo? This looks like a deal aiming a big ole Pentagon bone saw at so many heads that our powers of hatred are likely to fall far short.

Pelosi’s PayGo rule says that any money spent must be made up for by cutting other spending or raising revenue. This must sound read more

Requiem for a Free Press in the US: Where Did the Tradition of Journalists Speaking Truth to Power Go?

By Dave Lindorff

            It’s easy to let time and nostalgia get in the way of remembering what American journalism was really like back in the last century. Certainly it was not all Watergate and Pentagon Papers exposés, and even those two prime examples of the media’s standing up to government threats and taking on the powerful were not easy to get past the owners and managers of the media and into print and on the air.

read more

            read more

Anti-imperial ideas and my Cassandra complex: Revise the National Security Act of 1947

By John Grant

Robert Kaplan is too much of an imperialist-military cheerleader for my taste. His 2005 book, Imperial Grunts, was an account of travels around the world reporting on the US military in all those 700-plus foreign bases. “I wanted to cut myself off from civilians as much as possible.” If one likes that sort of thing, it’s an excellent book about the “grunts” who fight US wars. Personally, after four read more

The Hidden Structure of U.S. Empire

My father was a doctor in the British Royal Navy, and I grew up traveling by troop-ship between the last outposts of the British Empire – Trincomalee, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, Aden, Singapore – and living in and around naval dockyards in England and Scotland.

The British naval bases where I grew up and the fading empire they supported are now part of history. Chatham Dockyard. a working dockyard for over 400 years, is now a museum and tourist attraction. Trincomalee Dockyard, where I was read more