David Swanson is a longtime peace and justice activist and author of War Is a Lie and Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
'Support Killing People or Lose Your Job'
"Ban the bombers are afraid of a fight "Peace hurts business and that ain't right "How do I know? I read it in the Daily News" --Tom Paxton PBS (the P stands for "Pure" I think) is concerned that if the U.S. government stops funding the war in Afghanistan, the ...
If you like the idea of an independent online force for peace and social justice, join us now. This video is the first in a series -- intended to generate independent progressive activism in the run up to the 2012 Presidential election and beyond. RootsAction is part of a growing ...
U.S. newspapers sometimes print what they call the total death count from one or more of our wars, and all the dead who are listed are Americans. They aren't all the Americans. They don't include contractors or suicides or various other categories of dead Americans. They certainly don't include those ...
What Osama bin Laden, Troy Davis, and You Have in Common
So, the United States invaded Mexico, lied about it, killed, raped, pillaged, and stole half the country for the cause of expanding slavery in our growing continental empire. Then a devastated rump Mexico was invaded by the French who wanted their debts repaid, but the Mexicans won a big battle ...
The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said. Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for ...
Alan Simpson Just Asked Me to Leave Rich People Alone
I'm feeling pretty guilty. I hadn't known I was causing billionaires so much suffering. The former co-chair of President Obama's deficit (a.k.a. catfood) commission just asked me during a public event to stop going after rich people. Then he came up to me after the event to make sure I'd ...
How Americans Can Get Up and Stand Up
In December 2009, psychologist Bruce Levine published an article at Alternet called "Are Americans a Broken People?" His timing couldn't have been better. Americans of good will and bad analysis were suffering a severe fit of Obamanation withdrawal. The article was reposted everywhere, commented on endlessly, and responded to voluminously. ...
The Cure for Plutocracy: Strike!
How do you get politicians living off legalized bribery to criminalize bribery? How do you persuade the corporate media to report on the interests of flesh-and-blood, non-corporate people? How do you take over a political party when the only other one allowed to compete is worse? These are not koans, ...
On Friday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, congress members spoke in defense of Medicare, Social Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other programs that by almost anyone's definition are socialist, programs that were denounced as socialist by opponents of their passage in decades past, programs that ...
Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren't You?
Written for the forthcoming collection, "Why Peace?" More than any other description, except for perhaps husband and father, I have been for the past six years a peace activist. Yet, I hesitate on the question of how to tell my personal story of experience with war. I recently visited Afghanistan ...
Lesser-Evil Math Doesn't Compute: Freedom Plaza Has the Same Name as Tahrir Square
In an electoral system corrupted by money, media, and parties, the U.S. people are offered a choice every four years between two hideously awful candidates for an office that increasingly resembles an imperial throne. And increasingly the primary motivation of voters is to oppose the candidate they believe is the ...
I may soon have an opportunity to meet with nonviolent activists in Afghanistan, an area of the world we falsely imagine has earned the name "graveyard of empires" purely through violent resistance. I was educated in the United States and learned in some detail about the lives of several morally ...
People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain ...
Sweden banned censorship and guaranteed free speech in 1766, 10 years before the Declaration of Independence in the American British colonies, and -- apart from shameful episodes of caving in to dictatorships and Nazis -- has pretty well kept it in place. Sweden banned the death penalty and has not ...
They Only Lock Up Heroes at Quantico
If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first "detained" at Quantico. In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by ...
Nonviolent Activism Is Middle Eastern
Muslims can look back to the classic nonviolent struggle against British empire waged by the Pashtuns from 1930-1934 in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. The leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement makes every list of campaigns chronicling the development of modern nonviolent activism. Nonviolence ...
Rumsfeld Gets "Defending the Constitution" Award
February 10, 2011, 4:00pmMarriott Wardman Park HotelWashington, DCThat's where you should be to help present Donald Rumsfeld with a very serious award for his noble defense of the mythical document the Tea Party refers to mysteriously as "The Constitution," not to be confused with any document available in print.This PDF ...
60 Minutes: Putting the BS in CBS
The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of Wikileaks is that they have read or heard about the material that Wikileaks has helped to make public. The CBS program "60 Minutes" has just published video of ...
The future will be here in April and Code Pink: Women for Peace has already won it (thus answering President Obama's State of the Union call to "win the future"). The color coded threat warnings our government has been bombarding us with since shortly after September 11, 2001, will be ...
Why Pentagon Claims MLK Would Love War Today
According to the Pentagon's lawyer, Martin Luther King Jr., if alive today, would view the US war on Afghanistan as both the act of a Good Samaritan and as necessary self-defense.Jeh C. Johnson, the "Defense" Department's general counsel, said, on the one hand:"I believe that if Dr. King were alive ...
Fifty years ago this Monday, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell address in which he famously warned of the dangers of influence on our government by the "military industrial complex." Our current Secretary of War, Robert Gates, has proposed to retire this year and has recommended that his successors stop ...
Human Rights' Day Has Not Yet Dawned
"I think there is a proliferation of rights. I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances. . . . I have to admit that I am one of those people that still thinks a dishwasher is a miracle." --Supreme Court Justice Clarence ...
Wars Are Not Prolonged For the Good of Soldiers
An excerpt from David Swanson's new book War Is A Lie. We learn a lot about the real motives for wars when whistleblowers leak the minutes of secret meetings, or when congressional committees publish the records of hearings decades later. War planners write books. They make movies. They face investigations. ...
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May 22nd, 2013
Connecticut Advances Conversion from War to Peace Economy
The Connecticut legislature has sent to the governor to sign a bill that would create a commission to develop a plan for, among other things:"the ...
May 20th, 2013
CIA: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone
There's a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises. Our government is, in significant portion, made ...
May 13th, 2013
Why We Allow the Destruction of Our Planet
It's not enough to point out that our political system is completely corrupted by money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. ...
May 8th, 2013
Most of the world's governments no longer use the death penalty. Among wealthy nations there is one exception remaining. The United States is among the ...
May 5th, 2013
Some Don't Pay Their War Taxes
This past Saturday morning felt like mid-winter in Asheville, North Carolina, but was actually some weeks past tax day, and dozens of people were gathered ...
April 29th, 2013
The Revolution That's Not Being Televised
Hundreds gathered in Dallas to reject the Bush Lie Bury, and three went to jail. I flew from Dallas to Syracuse, where hundreds protested Obama's ...
April 23rd, 2013
Dallas Morning News Claims Bush Never Lied
George W. Bush should be given an indictment, not a library. An online email action is letting the Department of Justice know the facts about ...
February 9th, 2011
Nonviolent Activism Is Middle Eastern
Muslims can look back to the classic nonviolent struggle against British empire waged by the Pashtuns from 1930-1934 in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. ...
May 19th, 2011
'Support Killing People or Lose Your Job'
"Ban the bombers are afraid of a fight "Peace hurts business and that ain't right "How do I know? I read it in the Daily ...
June 24th, 2011
Fifty years ago, freedom riders traveled by bus into the U.S. South. Now American freedom riders are joining their allies from around the world on ...
September 2nd, 2011
No, not 29 million job offers. I'm no better at applying for jobs than you are, and my town offers nothing but dead-end McJobs or ...
July 1st, 2011
How We Really Get Rid of Clarence Thomas
Am I the only one who noticed that ex-Nixon lawyer John Dean's article "John Dean Knows How to Get Rid of Clarence Thomas" concludes thus: ...
May 2nd, 2011
The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government ...
May 13th, 2013
Why We Allow the Destruction of Our Planet
It's not enough to point out that our political system is completely corrupted by money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. ...
'Dirty Wars' by Jeremy Scahill
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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