Some people think that U.S. President Trump does terrible things because he isn’t smart enough to know better, but I shall document here (via the links, including the links within linked-to articles), that it doesn’t take any sort of genius to know better than Trump what he is doing and saying.
by National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee / April 9th, 2025
War tax resisters are taking to the streets to call for an end to genocide and protest a president who is exceeding his authority. They are divesting from the taxes that fund war and investing in people, planet, and justice.
The US supports Israel with over $3 billion in military aid each year and has provided more military aid to Israel than any other country since the end of World War II. The endless US war on terror continues with drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen. This is often forgotten, but a certain text thread recently reminded the public of this …
I am not just a survivor, but a witness. A witness to destruction, resilience and countless stories of suffering and survival. So many stories will never be told, so many names will never be remembered.
The Occupier asked us to surrender, but I don’t know what surrender means anymore. The war took away my ability to choose, instead I endured. Every tear marks the beginning of another story, every pain marks the birth of hope. I was pregnant when the war began, and for months all I knew were hunger, thirst, heat …
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Gaza on March 23. It all came to light from a video that the IDF did not intend anyone to see, filmed by Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan in the last minutes of his life. Caught red handed, the wires and levers of justification, mendacity and qualification began to move.
The pattern of institutional response is a well-rehearsed one. First came the official claim that the troops only opened fire because the convoy approached them “suspiciously”, enshrouded in darkness, …
President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But critics say Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.
The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected …
If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces. — I.F. Stone
by Mickey Huff / April 8th, 2025
Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the twentieth century—so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The Project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention—and praise—from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, …
These top Washington think tanks are lobbying lawmakers for sadistic sanctions on some of the hemisphere’s poorest countries while raking in millions from corporations and arms makers.
Sanctions are a form of hybrid warfare that harms or even kills the target populations at little cost to the country imposing them. In Latin America alone, US sanctions (correctly known as “unilateral coercive measures”) have …
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take …
Europe seems to be suffering paroxysms of withdrawal, notably when it comes to international conventions. Many states on the continent seem to have decided that international law is a burden onerous and in need of lightening. Poland, Finland and the three Baltic states, for instance, have concluded that using landmines, despite their indiscriminately murderous quality, somehow fits their mould of self-defence against the Russian Bear. That spells the end of their obligations under the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention. Lithuania’s government has thought it beneath it to continue abiding by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, withdrawing last month. …
Antarctica is coming apart, crumbling into the sea, much, much faster than anybody ever thought possible. After all, it was only a couple of months ago when polar scientists called an extraordinary emergency meeting to discuss shocking developments: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Source: Our Science, “Your Future: Next Generation of Antarctic Scientists Call for Collaborative Action,” Australian Antarctic Research Conference, November 22, 2024).
Another more recent new study using data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program is now overshadowing those panicky voices of polar scientists in November 2024. The new …
Australians will vote to elect a new Federal Government on 3 May 2025. For decent Australians the major issue is the Gaza Genocide, the US-backed, Zionist Israeli mass murder of about 0.6 million Indigenous Palestinian children, mothers, women and men, and unforgivable Mainstream Australian complicity in this appalling and ongoing atrocity. The Australian Labor Government with Coalition support has been complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways.
Mainstream media (with the exception of the Guardian and the Independent) undercount Gaza deaths by a factor of 10 – egregious genocide-ignoring, genocide-denial, …
Over the last several weeks, demonstrations have erupted across Indonesia. They were reported in Medan (North Sumatra), Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Solo, Malang, Surabaya, Makassar and, no doubt, they erupted in other towns as well. Although these demonstrations have not been massive, – ranging from a few hundred to one or two thousand people, they have been notably militant. The incidents include a police post being set on fire, street clashes between students and police, students breaking down gates of government buildings and shattering the Parliament’s compound walls, and the use of few Molotov cocktails. The police have used water cannons …
Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, …
Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing.
I haven’t changed, but America certainly has.
America has become anti-American!
The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest and incarceration. Whistleblowers who try to expose fraud, corruption, and waste in government by making available in public news media forums information of value to American citizens, are likewise harassed and prosecuted.
The Constitution requires the government to promote the general welfare. Yet the benefits of our economic wealth …
The Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2025 was passed after an intense debate for nearly 12 hours on April 4, at 2 a.m. This bill, which had been given the approval of the Lok Sabha, the lower house, just a day before, at 1 a.m. on April 3, brings about a sweeping change in the Waqf property laws-charitable trusts under Islamic law. Titled the Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency, and Development Act or “UMEED” meaning hope in Hindi, this bill has set off fierce contentions, with …
Why Neo-Pagans Should be Anti-Christian and Anti-Capitalist
by Bruce Lerro / April 6th, 2025
Orientation
Christianity’s sinister past against Paganism The very first commandment in the Bible says “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. These Pagan Gods are claimed to be either unreal or false. Pagan statues were therefore fair game to be destroyed or desecrated. The story of the Christian destruction of the Greco-Roman Pagan world has been told by Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians; Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods; Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of The Classical World and Helen Ellerbe, …
I join you in your affirmation of life, and I hope that you have sustained the inward peace that follows a refusal to do that which one considers morally wrong, despite the consequences. Imprisonment of the body is certainly a small price to pay for freedom of the spirit.
— Coretta Scott King, September 1969 letter to me in support of my draft resistance activism
Today, April 4, is the 57th anniversary of the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. King was there to support the labor strike of the sanitation workers of that town, …
This writer recalls back in the mid 80s when I took myself a vacation to Club Med in Martinique. It was discount time, June, so I could afford the week of fun. When I arrived at the facility, man it was a lot hotter than Elmont, Long Island. They placed me in a cottage with a roommate, nice guy from the Philly area, a bit younger than my 35 years. The first night we both were bushed from the trip and the heat. I lay in my bed with the bug net surrounding me. I suddenly realized that the place …
by Medea Benjamin and David Swanson / April 4th, 2025
We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.
Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, …
Host Faramarz Farbod interviews Robert Jensen, professor, journalist, activist, and author of many books, most recently It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics. They talk about how to think freely, speak responsibly, and live authentically in an uncertain world and end with a discussion of contemporary controversies like white supremacy, ecological sustainability, and trans ideology.
On March 26, Congressman Jim Banks sent a letter to Attorney General Pamela Bondi requesting that CODEPINK be investigated for our alleged funding from the Chinese Communist Party. According to him, our activism against the genocide in Gaza is antisemitic and undermines US-Israel relations, and therefore must mean we are acting on China’s behalf.
To state it very clearly: CODEPINK is in no way funded by China, nor any other foreign government or agency. We are funded primarily by donations from concerned citizens that support peace over war. Anyone can check. We pass every audit, unlike the Pentagon.
China …
Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on higher education since the anticommunist loyalty tests of the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of the issues being debated today, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, playing politics with federal funding is a threat to open inquiry. Administrators and faculty are scrambling to respond and resistance is strengthening, although Columbia University’s capitulation to the Trump administration isn’t heartening.
It’s too early to write an obituary for academic freedom, …
When they shelled us with the second missile, I woke up and was surrounded by rubble. I realized that my leg had been cut off…. My father and mother were martyred. My brother Mohammad and my sister Dalia, too. I only want one thing: for the war to end.
The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has made Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” For every child Israel kills, many more are wounded or maimed, causing mass amputations …
Amid growing international chaos, it should come as no surprise that nuclear dangers are increasing.
The latest indication is a rising interest among U.S. allies in enhancing their nuclear weapons capability. For many decades, remarkably few of them had been willing to build nuclear weapons―a result of popular opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear war, progress on nuclear arms control and disarmament, and a belief that they remained secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But, as revealed by a recent article in London’s Financial Times, Donald Trump’s public scorn for NATO allies and embrace of Vladimir Putin have raised …
Liberation Day, as April 2 was described by US President Donald Trump, had all the elements of reality television perversion. It also had a dreamy, aspirational hope: that factories would spring up from rust belt soil in a few months across the United States; that industries would, unmoored from the globe, become vibrant and burgeoning. The world’s largest importer had decided to turn back the tide.
The imposition of what Trump calls reciprocal tariffs was broadly savage. Over 180 countries fell within their scope. A baseline tariff of 10% was applied on goods imported by the US. Countries were then singled …
According to three Australian university academics: “We argue that, contrary to the WEF prediction, an owner-less future would not be a happy one for individuals. Ownership should thus be preserved as a property concept and we offer an aspiration for it that better supports not just human happiness, but also a more socially just, sustainable, and emancipatory future.”
