Keeping this president busy’s a good idea: Let’s Just Let Trump Spend the Whole War Department Budget on Building Walls

By Dave Lindorff

Liberals are upset that the new Supreme Court, packed with conservatives, has decided President Trump can have $2.6 billion of the Pentagon’s new FY 2020 $738 billion budget to build some wall along the Mexican border.

But I think they’re thinking  all wrong about this. Instead of complaining and fighting a losing battle against Trump’s nutty idea of walling off the southern border (most immigrants come into the US by plane, or read more

What’s to celebrate?: US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home

By Dave Lindorff

            As I set out to fly home from the UK on Monday following a short film project in Cambridge, I found my boarding pass, which I had been blocked from obtaining online the night before, carrying a bold-faced  stamp in the lower right corner. Asking about it I was told by the British employee at the United check-in counter, “That is because you are on a US Department of Homeland Security list, sir.”

            read more

Breaking the Grip of Militarism: The Story of Vieques

Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants.  Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, with the world’s brightest bioluminescent bay and wild horses roaming everywhere, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists.  But, for about six decades, Vieques served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Navy, until its outraged residents, driven to distraction, rescued their homeland from the grip of militarism.

Like the main island of Puerto read more

Credit where credit’s due: Trump Does Something Right for Once

By Dave Lindorff

It’s entertaining to read and watch the collective horror being expressed in the US media and the Congress as President Trump unexpectedly calls for a quick end to US military involvement in Syria, where for years US forces and CIA-trained fighters have been wreaking havoc and death and sowing chaos in a doomed effort to oust Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad from power.

There’s the New York Times, still grimly trying to gin read more