Articles

BY JULIA GLEDHILL – WILLIAM D. HARTUNG Photo by Erwan Hesry On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon. Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in militar...

BY KATHY KELLY Photo Credit: Hellenic Coast Guard Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son, Arsalan. The young family has resettled in Mértola, a small city in southern Portugal. They looked forward to celebrating World Refugee Day as part of a project which the Portuguese government lauds as a model for refugee resettlement. I had first met Frishta in 2015 when she was a volunteer teacher, in Kabul, Afghanistan. At a school for “street kids” she helped young child laborers gain literacy and math skills, while also learning basic ideas about nonviolence. The children could be rowdy and boisterous, but when Frishta entered the classroom, they were ea...

BY DAVID SCHULTZ Photograph Source: Chad Davis – CC BY 2.0 Two recent reports describe challenges for policing specifically for Minneapolis and Minnesota more generally.  The first report was the Department of Justice’s Report on policing in Minneapolis which ties into a federal consent decree for reform in that city.  The second report is mine regarding what we know about policing across the State of Minnesota. Minneapolis and the Department of Justice Report The Department of Justice initiated an investigation into police practices in the City of Minneapolis (MPD) after the murder of George Floyd.  The report is perhaps the most comprehensive ever done on policing in Minneapolis, with a more detailed analysis and use of statistics than ...

BY KARY LOVE It does appear America has gone insane. Kids shoot up their schools and kill their classmates. Other kids steal Kias and Hyundais and drive ’em like crazy people, damaging more property and injuring bystanders. Others shoot up people at celebrations of grown men playing kids’ games for obscene amounts of money while public school teachers have to spend their own money to educate kids in their classes. It seems decades of using the “Bully Pulpit” to preach the gospel of criminal invasion and the distribution of war worldwide has finally taken hold. Congratulations America! No other nation in the world comes close! We are the world leader in violence, not only purveying it abroad, but championing it at home. Teach your children well, indeed. Now I must admit up fro...

BY NORMAN SOLOMON Photograph Source: Cmichel67 – CC BY-SA 4.0 When Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday, the world lost a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve. Ellsberg’s renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, “I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever.” ...

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR Photo by Alec Favale Artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s going to change the world is a popular topic of conversation these days. There is concern that it will generate ever-more deceptive imagery that can upend people’s lives or create propaganda that can fuel mass fear. There’s the ultimate fear of human extinction from the increasingly sophisticated evolution of AI. These are valid worries. Then there’s the seemingly more mundane threat that AI poses to employment. It is expressed in the form of countless stories that have some iteration of the headline: which jobs are at most risk of being lost to AI? Most analysts predict that AI will replace graphic designers, co...

BY RALPH NADER Photograph Source: Universal Studios, NBCUniversal – Public Domain Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and number-cruncher for Public Citizen, who is known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding Presidency. (Biden less than Trump). His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “Sorry in Advance!” Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms. Claypool is not engaging in hyperbole or horrible hypotheticals concerning Chatbots controlling humanity. He is extrapolating from what is already starting to happen in almost every sector of our society. I challenge you to read his report without experiencing cognitive dissonance a...