U.S. Secretary of State, and supporter of wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, a man who once backed dividing Iraq into three countries, proponent of not really ending endless wars, cofounder of revolving-door dealer in shameless profiteering from government connections for weapons companies WestExec Advisors, Antony Blinken made a speech on Wednesday that was quite a mixture, as many Rorschach tests are in U.S. politics. Those wanting read more

By David Swanson

Since the presidency of Richard Nixon that I was born during, and since long before that, there’s not been a president who — in my view — should not have been impeached, removed, and banned from holding office. There’s also not been an impeachment I supported up until the very most recent one. So I’m excessively pro-impeachment or overly selective, depending on your perspective. I’m also disastrously wrong about all of the Democrats or all of read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 26, 2021

The USA Today, drawing on the work of the Cost of War Project, Quincy Institute, David Vine, William Hartung, and others, has gone beyond the limits of every other big corporate U.S. media outlet, and beyond what any member of the U.S. Congress has done, in a big new series of articles on wars, bases, and militarism.

There are significant shortcomings, some of them (such as absurdly low estimates of deaths and financial costs) originating with read more

NATO and various columnists employed by major U.S. newspapers and “think” tanks believe that military spending levels should be measured in comparison to nations’ financial economies. If you have more money, you should spend more money on wars and war preparations. I’m not sure if this is based on opinion polls in Afghanistan and Libya expressing gratitude for war as a public service or some other source of data less imaginary.

The view that gets less promotion from institutions read more

Why should rich people get pandemic survival checks? Why shouldn’t descendants of enslaved people get reparations payments? Why should someone who doesn’t go to college pay taxes to make college free? Why should smokers get health coverage? Why should someone get out of their student debt when I didn’t?

I don’t claim to have a universal answer to all such questions. There are some questions that I would certainly answer differently if they stood alone. If the rotten U.S. read more

By World BEYOND War, February 21, 2021

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s read more