Author: Common Dreams

Is what’s good for the goose is good for the gander? In letting stand Texas’s draconian new anti-abortion law, The Supreme Court allowed states to deputize almost anyone in the world as bounty hunters to go after and punish anyone in Texas taking part in a Constitutionally legal and protected act, namely performing, aiding, or abetting an abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. In her blistering dissent to the Supreme Court’s inaction Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the Texas law “a breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking...

The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention. Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to...

Are social-media companies killing people? President Biden recently said they were. But then he clarified his remarks, explaining that misinformation was the real threat. It is actually the combination of the two that is costing lives. Biden’s comments followed a U.S. surgeon general advisory, which found that the user-engagement model driving businesses like Facebook and YouTube makes it easy for deadly misinformation to spread at a speed and scale never before possible. These online platforms have designed their products in a way that encourages users to share false content—causing people to reject public-health initiatives against COVID-19, attack public-health workers,...