Author: Common Dreams

Voting rights advocates applauded a Wisconsin appeals court ruling on February 28, preventing a voter purge from going forward and sparing more than 200,000 people from having their names removed from voter lists. A three-judge panel unanimously rejected a lawsuit filed by conservative law group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty arguing that the voter purge of about 209,000 should go forward ahead of the 2020 election. The decision represented “good news for democracy for all,” tweeted Mary Kay Henry, president of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The voter purge was put on hold last month...

Americans profess to love “their” troops, but what are they getting in return for all that affection and money? Very little, it seems. The expression “self-licking ice cream cone” was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it is even more apt for America’s military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little else. Thinking about that led me to another phrase based on America’s seemingly endless string of victory-less wars: the self-defeating military. The U.S., after all, has not won...

“This all-out assault on basic safeguards will send our country back to the days when corporate polluters could dump whatever sludge or slime they wished into the streams and wetlands that often connect to the water we drink.” – Janette Brimmer The Trump administration is set to continue its corporate-friendly assault on U.S. environmental regulations by finalizing a rule that will allow companies, landowners, and property developers—including golf course owners like the president—to dump pesticides and other pollutants directly into many of the nation’s streams and wetlands, potentially threatening the drinking water of millions of Americans. “This will be...

The impeachment trial was never going to produce a conviction, of course, but it could have at least served to shore up even a few of the nominal pillars of democracy yet intact. Decades of erosion by chief executives, packed courts, congressional (in)action, and general malfeasance have weakened protective mechanisms in areas from voting and campaign finance to government transparency and individual rights. Now, with the short-circuited process and inevitable outcome of the impeachment hearing, there is another nail in the coffin of a fractured system that still sits on an idealized pedestal. American exceptionalism, when it’s considered at...