Charter schools are privatized education arrangements that continually insist on being called “public” while routinely avoiding many public laws, standards, and requirements.
Charter school operators have always wanted to be both public and private for self-serving reasons—public so that they can seize public funds and private so that they can remain unaccountable.
Dr. Michael Mindzak at Brock University in Canada reminds us that, “The purpose of charter schools is to foster privatization under the guise of public education.” The Network for Public Education states that, “There are so many substantive …
There comes a moment in every age when humanity must confront the mirror it has spent centuries avoiding. That mirror does not flatter us. It reveals a species that has mastered the sciences of destruction while neglecting the simple art of living. It reveals a creature that speaks of peace while perfecting the machinery of war — a creature that claims intelligence yet behaves as though wisdom were an inconvenience. And at the center of this contradiction lies a question as old as civilization itself: why does humankind, in its restless hunger for permanence and power, continue to forge instruments …
Executive Order Secures Glyphosate Supply, EPA Regulatory Decisions Shape the Legal Defense, DOJ Supports Bayer, the Supreme Court Takes the Case, & House Farm Bill Advances Chemical Liability Shield
by Elizabeth Kucinich / March 16th, 2026
Healthy soil, water, and ecosystems are the foundation of human life. The health of creation gives rise to the health of life.
Powerful outside interests are using America’s treasury and public policy to advance profit-driven agendas while the health, land, and future of the American people bear the cost.
The same public purse that finances war abroad is now underwriting policies that poison the land at home.
Political energy that should be confronting this system is instead being redirected into advertising, messaging, and branding, while the real decisions are made through law, …
Some catastrophes arrive like explosions; others arrive like a hand on the throat that tightens, loosens just enough to keep the victim conscious, then tightens again. What is happening to Cuba now is the second kind. It is less a “crisis” than the logical endpoint of a relationship Ada Ferrer, in Cuba: An American History, describes as “intimate, explosive, and always uneven”—a history in which the United States could never decide whether Cuba was a neighbor, a colony, or a mirror it couldn’t bear to look into.
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said on the independent news channel Democracy Now! that the current U.S. administration, in a matter of days, has committed war crimes in Iran on a scale he has not seen in his lifetime.
He told viewers that, not for the first time, the U.S. had initiated an illegal war, violated the U.S. Constitution and international law, but that the attacks on Iran, and in the midst …
The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. The Middle East, where US President Donald Trump promised the “forever wars” would end, promises an end to his beginning.
The ledger of losses keeps rising with giddying pace. The US casualty list, for now, remains manageably low, but the military purse is being raided with manic relish. Operation Epic Fury …
I don’t think it’s controversial any longer to proclaim that the ruling class of the US and Israel (USrael™) are idiot psychopaths (idiopaths™). Some around the globe have noticed the two administrations sinking all of us into a possible global economic meltdown / possible nuclear war / probable really shitty 2026 don’t seem to have a “plan” or “strategy” or “inkling” for what happens next. Even the lawmakers who attended a closed-door briefing about the administration’s Persian Incursion exited the room completely baffled as to …
In a major escalation of the war, Trump wrote on Truth Social last night that he ordered the US Central Command to conduct a bombing raid that “obliterated every MILITARY target on Iran’s crown jewel.” He said that “For reasons of decency, I have NOT chosen to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the island, however, should Iran, or anyone else do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Straights of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider.” He described …
When Israeli forces bombed Iran in June 2025, German Chancellor Merz praised them for doing “the dirty work for all of us.” His statement exposes the roots of Europe’s military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israeli genocide and regional aggression. To sustain their “business as usual” policy toward Israel, European governments are criminalizing Palestine solidarity. Our latest visual with The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) depicts this architecture of repression, which we must understand as we build the architecture of solidarity.
If America attacks … Iranians will unite, forgetting their differences with their government, and they will fiercely and tenaciously defend their country.
— Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate1Quoted from David Barsamian (with Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian, Nahid Mozaffari), Targeting Iran, (City Lights, 2007).
The only thing truly epic about the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is the chasm between the facts on the ground and the media spectacle put forth by President Trump and his fawning aides.
Folly is the best term to capture the reality of a president who until very recently presented himself as uniquely qualified to bring …
Ten years ago, Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, said that death threats had forced her to lead a ‘fugitive existence’. Most of the threats came from Desarrollos Energeticos SA (DESA), a company planning a hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River, sacred to Cáceres’s Indigenous Lenca community.
Hired killers were tracking her movements. An attempt to assassinate her on 5 February 2016 was aborted. On 1 March, Cáceres said goodbye to her youngest daughter, who was returning to college. ‘This country is fucked,’ she said, ‘but if anything happens to …
Millions of parents and at-risk young people facing a draft would, like Margery Taylor Greene, be shouting, “Over my dead body!!!!”
by Dave Lindorff / March 13th, 2026
Driving home from my coffee at the local food co-op in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, I passed by the gas station at the local 7-ll store. Now owned by a Japanese company, 7-11 is one of the largest gas chains in the US.
I found myself thinking how back in the early years of this century, when Venezuela was headed by the hugely popular radical leftist President Hugo Chavez, a brash and charismatic former junior officer in the Venezuelan Army who was elected and re-elected four times to …
“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
by Edward Curtin / March 13th, 2026
Anyone who is not sick at heart and raging over the slaughter of over 165 young Iranian girls at a school by the American-Israeli monsters waging war on Iran is depraved and evil. It sickens me to state something so obvious, but I am afraid it is true that many are not distraught by the news. A nod to “how terrible” and on with the war is a common response for those who even know about it, not just because of moral indifference, but because of the acceleration of digital news reporting that disappears today before it has become tomorrow. …
DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod, who teaches Political Science at Moravian University, is the guest on Berks Community TV’s “Centering on Peace” program. In this episode titled “Origins of the Current US/Israeli War on Iran,” Farbod traces the origins of the current war from the beginnings of the 20th Century to today. The host is John Hoskyns-Abrahall. The program was recorded on March 9 and aired on March 10.
Not so long ago, the Iran war could still be treated as a “shock” to the system—a sudden, violent anomaly that spooked traders, sent a few charts vertical, then, we were told, would be absorbed. Oil would spike and settle. Gasoline would lurch higher and then ease. Fertilizer prices would jump and “normalize.” Shipping would reroute. The machine would shudder, spit smoke, and then grind on.
By mid‑March, that story already sounds tired. The Strait of Hormuz is not just “at risk”; it is intermittently choked, with tankers idling or turning away …
The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.
With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success through sheer force, the Trump administration is struggling to keep up appearances. Through an approach of existential attrition, the clerical regime in Tehran is now causing shocks and tingles in the global market, striking where influence is strongest: the petrol …
You may know that in Macedonia the academic disciplines of international relations, geopolitics, and international security were introduced long after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything started from scratch, and I would say that these fields are still in their infancy. With rare exceptions. In global terms, we are Lilliputians. Our academic community is small, our resources limited, and our institutional infrastructure fragile. Yet when I watch television debates where journalists and self-appointed “analysts” confidently discuss grand strategy, nuclear deterrence, or great-power rivalry, I cannot remain indifferent. After all, there …
Jeff J. Brown: Thomas, knowing your erudite expertise on Christianity, I have a question for you:
When did Jews get control of the Vatican?
I know it was at least in 1942, when the Jewish psychopath Rothschild clan created the City of London Vatican Bank.
T.P. Wilkinson: I will check on your query before I give you an answer. However, I think it must have been around the Reformation because the Calvinists are traditionally strong Old Testament followers. There is a theory that Calvin (as opposed to Luther) was crypto-Jewish.
One should consider that both Waldensers and the radical Christians of Southern France (Albigensians/ …
President Trump’s recent attempt to reassure the American public how the war against Iran was going relied on the President’s assertion that the US is winning the war. Relying on the lame claim, the President said “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” as well as telling Axios that “Any time I want it to end, it will end.”
Speaking from his Doral Florida golf club, the President added that “If they do anything bad, that would be the end of Iran and you’d never hear the name again,” leaving open speculation that the US was prepared to …
In addition to the widening of the war on Iran to the whole Middle East and beyond, this conflict risks deliberate use of nuclear weapons.
by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes / March 12th, 2026
President Trump has been on quite a roll.
Since just the beginning of the year, he has kidnapped the Venezuela president, threatened to invade Greenland and Colombia, and has in just the last week dragged the U.S.—and seemingly much of the Middle East—into a new war by joining with Israel to attack Iran, something that even the biggest hawks among recent U.S. presidents have managed to avoid. That’s on top of bombing seven countries in 2025.
The 2024 campaign promises of a peace president who will end the forever wars have evaporated, only to be replaced by unrestrained use of military force and a seeming …
You notice your pulse first. It normally moves quietly, on time, somewhere below your notice. Now it presses forward, beats harder; it has something to say.
The pulse is yours. It doesn’t belong to the drunk guards outside your cell, bent over a rough wooden table, slapping down cards in the dim light. They’re cursing over Aces and Kings, and getting rivered out.
Thunder breaks in the distance. Storm’s coming. You draw a breath. In that small space, something settles.
You win.
The kind of victory that happens quietly. A dream you went after has finally found ground. It lives in you now. It …
In Part One of this planned series of articles, I wrote about the historical timeliness of a ‘third force’ strategy. I said, “This isn’t something pulled out of the air, or someone’s lofty dreams. It is grounded in historical experience in the United States over the last 60 or so years.”
A progressive “third force,” one that is both activist and electoral, that does day-do-day community, workplace and school organizing, that brings together those who see themselves as independents, who are critical of both the dominant sector of the Democratic Party and …
“Put three Cubans in a room together, you’ll have five different opinions,” a Cuban friend of mine likes to joke. He was referring to debates in the town-hall meetings during Cuba’s constitutional convention process of 2018. But I immediately thought, of course, of any Nochebuena celebration at my dad’s house, just a few hundred miles north. Siblings, cousins, babies, abuelas, family, and friends of all ages and political opinions gathered around a brilliant feast. Between the devouring of lechón, yuca, plátanos, and flan, a flurry of back and forth between English and Spanish. Everyone hugging, praying, laughing, and occasionally yelling. …
Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, with Laura Kuenssberg
On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK:
‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of the regime. Thousands of people were killed. …
In late 2020, Beijing did the unthinkable: it attacked its own champions. Trillions in market value vanished, the world’s largest IPO was halted, and entire industries were banned overnight. Western investors called it “economic suicide,” but they were looking at stock prices while China was looking at its society. This episode explains why the “Golden Goose” had to be caged and how China is pivoting from consumer apps to the “Hard Tech” of the future.
US President Donald Trump’s photo is set on fire during a demonstration in front of the American consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 1, 2026 IMAGE/asin Akgul/AFP/Middle East Eye
US-Israel attack Iran
On February 27, 2026, talking with a friend, I mentioned that the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked embassy staff to leave Israel. Also, the Reuters report on February 24 stating that Iran will buy Chinese-made CM-302 anti-ship cruise missiles pointed toward an Israel-pushed-US probable strike on Iran that weekend. …
One day, March 8, International Women’s Day just doesn’t do justice for most girls on planet earth in the global south who will not reach womanhood.
Example:
The Israeli-American strike on a school that killed at least 180 children, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12, on the first day of the illegal war on Iran was deliberate.
The Shajereh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab, in Hormozgan province of Iran, near …
How “America First” Became “Israel First, Tehran Next”
by Nolan Higdon / March 11th, 2026
“I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars,” President Donald Trump declared during his 2021 farewell address. Throughout the 2024 campaign and into his second term, Trump consistently branded himself as the “Peace President.” It was a title he maintained even as his administration conducted military strikes, bombings, or specialized operations in at least six different countries.
Benjamin Netanyahu is losing patience. Israel is being battered by Iran’s missiles and drones, while Israel’s defense shield is nearly depleted, and ineffective even when used. They can continue to attack Iran (although it’s often uncertain which attacks are Israeli and which American) but when it comes to Israeli airspace, they are even using anti-aircraft artillery which at least makes it appear that they are putting up a defense. This is despite the fact that Iran is apparently attacking incrementally, using its older, less advanced stocks of weapons before graduating to its latest, more advanced models, so …
