Author: Common Dreams

A political battle over transit plans in other cities by Koch-funded interests offers insight into methods used by critics of Milwaukee’s streetcar, and foreshadows the methods to hinder its planned expansions. The city of Phoenix dealt a decisive blow to a Koch Brothers-backed measure on August 27 when voters rejected a proposition that would have banned any expansion of the city’s light rail system. For years, Phoenix’s public transportation plans have included a network of light rail lines connecting downtown to the suburbs, cutting air pollution and carbon emissions in a city dubbed the least sustainable in the United...

“We cannot sit by and allow corporations, billionaires, and demagogues to destroy the Fourth Estate, nor can we allow them to replace serious reporting with infotainment and propaganda.” – Senator Bernie Sanders Warning the “decimation of journalism” by big business and billionaire executives poses a major threat to democracy, Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday unveiled a plan to stop the long-running corporate consolidation of American media, take anti-trust action against tech giants like Facebook and Google, and bolster independent news. “Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read,...

Rights groups reacted with horror and outrage on August 21 after the Trump administration unveiled a rule that would allow the federal government to detain migrant families for an unlimited period of time. “This is yet another cruel attack on children, who the Trump administration has targeted again and again with its anti-immigrant policies,” Madhuri Grewal, policy counsel with the ACLU, said in a statement. “The government should not be jailing kids, and certainly shouldn’t be seeking to put more kids in jail for longer.” The new rule, announced on August 21 by Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan,...

“We live in a country where the mass shooting that took place in El Paso, Texas is not the top story because there was another mass shooting overnight in Dayton, Ohio.” Within 13 hours in two U.S. cities, El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. at least 29 people were killed in mass shootings on Saturday, August 3 and Sunday, August 4. Police in Dayton, Ohio were gathering information on Sunday morning about a shooting that took place in the city’s downtown Oregon neighborhood at about 1:00am. Nine people were killed by a gunman who used what one eyewitness described...

Despite of overwhelming evidence, history books have yet to fully embrace Richard Nixon as a traitor. The previous release of extended versions from Nixon’s papers confirmed the long-standing belief, usually dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by Republican conservatives. It was later substantiated by none other than right-wing columnist George Will. Records showed for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, Nixon ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon’s interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams’s 1797 Logan Act, banning private...

The proposal aims “to show the absurdity when a woman tries to regulate a man’s body” as anti-choice legislation regulates women’s bodies. In a direct rebuke to laws designed to take away a woman’s right to control her own body, Democratic Georgia state Representative Dar’shun Kendrick has proposed new “Testicular Bill of Rights” legislation that would, among other things, require men to get permission from their sexual partners before obtaining erectile dysfunction medication and institute a 24-hour “waiting period” for men who want to buy porn or sex toys. The legislative proposal comes in response to HB 481, a...