Author: Common Dreams

A major “Washington Post” investigation released on December 9 is a confirmation of the peace movement’s message that “there’s no military solution in Afghanistan.” That assessment is according to Paul Kawika Martin, senior director of policy and political affairs at Peace Action, replying to The Afghanistan Papers. The report exposes how top officials spanning the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations waged a deliberate misinformation campaign to conceal the total failures of the 18-year war in Afghanistan. The bombshell from investigative reporter Craig Whitlock “broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers,” and it is based on over 2,000 pages of...

Along with allies from across the globe, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer engineer credited with inventing the world wide web, has unveiled a new global plan designed to restore and enshrine some of the key principles of the revolutionary technology that he and his colleagues believe have been subsumed by government censorship and surveillance as well as a rapacious corporate appetite for endless data, monetization, and profit. Called the Contract for the Web, the project sets out a bold set of principles designed to save the web from the forces that have stolen its potential and in many cases...

A new report from Amnesty International accuses Facebook and Google of having a “surveillance-based business model” that threatens users’ right to privacy and other human rights. The tech giants, said Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of Amnesty International, have amassed “unparalleled power over the digital world by harvesting and monetizing the personal data of billions of people. Their insidious control of our digital lives undermines the very essence of privacy and is one of the defining human rights challenges of our era.” Facebook and Google, according to the report, deserve to be singled out of the so-called Big 5 for...

A false “balance” infects the entire mainstream media and makes it puke out nonsense as if it were legitimate news in the public interest. The other day, while listening to that liberal bastion, NPR, the newscaster mentioned that another witness had given testimony that would be damaging to Trump in the House’s impeachment inquiry. In a transition so seamless it was an integral part of the story, the anchor immediately went on to say that Republicans claim the process is flawed, illegitimate, and partisan. Well, yes. But is this news? Of course, they object to the process. Don’t criminals...

Donald Trump’s use of the term “lynching” to describe the ongoing impeachment inquiry in the House naturally sparked bipartisan outrage. The president and his shameless apologist, South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, defended the use of the word, with Graham calling the investigation a “lynching in every sense.” Surely Graham, who comes from a state that, the Equal Justice Initiative reports, lynched 187 black people between 1877 and 1950, should know better. He was a member of the Senate when it voted unanimously in December 2018 to make lynching a federal crime, calling it “the ultimate expression of racism in...

Any American who has paid the price of a patent-protected medicine knows the core flaw in the U.S. prescription drug system: our elected leaders have handed over control to profit-hungry corporations. And for-profit corporations gonna for-profit, as the kids would say. That is especially true when the corporations are gifted with long-term monopolies on life-essential medicines, which gives them the leverage to set take-it-or-leave it prices that net billions in revenue extracted from all of us. It does not have to be this way. That is the message of an exciting new report, Medicine for All: The Case for...