Ilhan Omar for Peace

Ilhan Omar is the second person this year to win a Democratic Party nomination for Congress in a Democratic Party district with a platform advocating peace in a way not seen inside the Beltway. The first was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, whose advocacy for peace I wrote about. Ilhan Omar has just won the nomination from Minnesota’s Fifth District.

I am making zero predictions as to whether having peace on a campaign website will, in the case of Ocasio-Cortez or the case of Ilhan read more

Tomgram: William Hartung, Gunrunning USA

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

When it comes to guns and Americans, here (thanks to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) are a couple of stats for you: every year an average of 17,102 children and teens and 116,255 Americans overall are shot in “murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by read more

“I Survived Because . . .”

“I survived because I was walking to a building that was behind a small hill that faced downtown. I was standing in such a way that the building was to my right and the stone garden was to my left. It was my daughter’s wedding day and I was pushing the wedding dresses in a wheelbarrow to the wedding hall. All of a sudden, for no obvious reason, I was just knocked to the ground. I never heard the bomb. . . I was about to get up when suddenly wood and debris fell from the sky and hit me on the read more

Yemeni Children Matter

We’ve been given a rare opportunity. While the United States military has slaughtered innocents by the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East over the past couple of decades, almost never have U.S. television viewers seen images of the victims, in particular images of them alive just moments before death rained down on them.

Now we have video footage of dozens of little boys on a bus less than an hour before read more

Canada vs. the Rule of Law

I’m aware that Canada, unlike its southern neighbor in which I live, has just recently, ever so slightly, stood up to certain of the horrors of the Saudi government. I’m aware of the role Canada has played, albeit imperfectly, as refuge for people fleeing U.S. slavery and U.S. wars and general U.S. backwardness. I’m aware of how many times through history the United States has attacked Canada. I’m aware that just several yards in front of me as I sit in my outdoor office (the downtown read more

Best National Government in North America: Mexico

At least that’s the hope of those who elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, aka Peje, on a platform of sweeping out the corruption — a platform promoted in Obrador’s book, A New Hope for Mexico. That Barack Obama did not permanently decommission the word “hope” for credible electoral campaigns on this continent may be the least of the book’s surprises.

Thus far 14,000 people in the United States have signed read more

Should Al Qaeda Be Made the 51st State?

Hear me out.

While Saudis have threatened Canada with a 9/11 attack, the U.S. has moved on to blaming 9/11 on Iran.

Al Qaeda, despite being Saudi in origins and ideology, was easily tied to Afghanistan, then Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, the Philippines, and Yemen, and now Iran. The potential is almost as endless as with Communism in the good old days.

Without Al Qaeda the United States would not be whole. With it, all is in perfect balance. If there were no Al Qaeda we’d have to invent one.

In read more

Talk Nation Radio: David Gallup on World Citizenship

David Gallup is President of the World Service Authority, a global public service human rights organization founded in 1954. Previously he was a Dean’s Fellow at the Washington College of Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, where he researched asylum and international human rights issues, developed and maintained a human rights document library, coordinated a human rights education workshop and represented asylum applicants. For fifteen years, he was the Secretary of the United Nations read more

Mystery of the underpaid American worker: Economists ‘Can’t Understand’ Why Workers Can’t Get Paid More in a ‘Booming’ Economy

By Dave Lindorff

            Economists say they are stumped by a mystery: Since the US economy is doing so well, and unemployment is down to below 4%, which many argue is close to “full employment” in historic US terms, why is it that wages are not growing, and in fact, are lower in real dollars than they were in 1974, almost half a century ago.

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            Reading articles like these read more