War Is A Crime

Short talk at Poor People’s Campaign, Detroit, 26 Jan 2018
Let me talk about war.

How many of you believe war is bad? And I, after my time in war, totally agree with you.
War is not about conflict resolution it does not resolve conflicts.
War is not about national security it does not make us secure.
It is always a rich man’s war run on the blood of poor people. War can reasonably be visualized as a giant machine that grinds up the working people to feed the rich man.
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Did you hear the one about the “safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent”? There is, of course, nothing safe or secure about producing, maintaining, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nor is there evidence that they have ever deterred anything that the United States wanted deterred.

Trump’s State of the Union gave this justification for building more weapons:

“Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, read more

By John Grant

                        Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying read more

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

There’s no way to measure just how cheery this period really is — not if you’re the CEO of a major company. Just as the World Economic Summit was opening in Davos, Switzerland, and President Donald Trump was flying in to put his mark on the moment, PwS, a global consulting firm, released its annual survey of 1,300 CEOs. “The report,” wrote read more

Day after day, year after year, your government murders people and sows terror and misery on the people of the Middle East and Africa – while most of you do nothing to stop it.

On January 13, 2018, warplanes for the U.S.-led Coalition in Syria, fired missiles on Hajin city, in the eastern suburbs of Deir Ez-Zour of that devastated country, killing five civilians. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, their names were read more

A high school teacher is no longer teaching, and is receiving threats, because of how he spoke about the U.S. military. To read the news reports, you’d think that all he said was that people who join the military are stupid.

He did say that. He was wrong to say that. It isn’t true, and it’s bigotted.

He also said many things that are demonstrably true, valuable, useful, and generally censored:

1) The U.S. military doesn’t win any of its wars. (In the course of saying this he made bigotted read more

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

If I were to pick a single decision by an American president and his team in this century as our own August 1914, I would choose the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Of course, in that era of the “sole superpower,” there were no other great powers (as in the World War I moment) ready to leap into the fray, so the unraveling that followed across a significant read more

Ken Hughes is an expert on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, read more

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, could be criticized for how little it seems to focus on the Second Amendment, and how much on topics familiar from the author’s past writing. But the topics are radically unfamiliar to most U.S. Americans and extremely relevant to understanding what the Second Amendment was and is.

I’ve argued in the past that the Second Amendment read more

Photo: U.S. Speaker Ryan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – U.S. House Speaker’s Office

January 30, 2018

On January 23rd an overcrowded smuggling boat capsized off the coast of Aden in Southern Yemen. Smugglers packed 152 passengers from Somalia and Ethiopia in the boat and then, while at sea, reportedly pulled guns on the migrants to read more