On April 4, 2018 — exactly 50 years after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — seven Plowshare activists entered a major U.S. nuclear submarine base to nonviolently and symbolically disarm nuclear weapons…When they did the action, the activists held up signs: “The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide” and “Nuclear Weapons: Illegal / Immoral.” McAlister explained of the Trident submarines at the base, with all the warheads atop each of their missiles: “If they were ever launched, it is the end of life on earth. I don’t think we have the right to end life on earth.…

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“The tax burden of the wealthy — what they pay out in federal, state, and local taxes relative to their income — has plummeted over the last seventy years. In 1950 the wealthiest 400 families paid out 70 percent of their income in taxes, 47 percent in 1980, and just 23 percent in 2018…Nor has systematically slashing the tax burden of the super rich delivered its promised faster economic growth. Economic growth rates slowed from a rate of 4 percent a year during the 1960s, to 3 percent a year during the 1980s, and then stagnated after the 1990s.”

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“One word describes President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Perhaps he loves and thrives on chaos, which will be its upshot.[Turkish leader Recep] Erdogan, alas, watched Islamic State grow into a threat to the Middle East and the world. Kurds and their Arab allies waged an existential war to rid the world of this menace. Instead of thanking the Kurds and their allies, we are now going to witness their slaughter in the hands of the Turkish army. It is a disaster in the making with ramifications for the world.”

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“In March, Ecuador signed an agreement to borrow $4.2 billion from the IMF over three years, provided that the government would adhere to a certain economic program spelled out in the arrangement. In the words of Christine Lagarde — then the IMF chief — this was ‘a comprehensive reform program aimed at modernizing the economy and paving the way for strong, sustained, and equitable growth.’ But is it? The program calls for an enormous tightening of the country’s national budget — about 6 percent of GDP over the next three years. (For comparison, imagine tightening the U.S. federal budget by…

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“After many years of carefully refusing to launch a single campaign in support of brave whistleblowers who faced vicious prosecution during the Obama administration — including Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, and CIA whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling — MoveOn.org has just cherrypicked a whistleblowing hero it can support…The organization that MoveOn just teamed up with — Whistleblower Aid — explicitly does not support people like Snowden, Drake, Kiriakou, Sterling, and Manning, or the more recent whistleblower Reality Winner. The founding legal partner at Whistleblower Aid, Mark Zaid, has maintained a vehement position…

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“The truth is that America has been meddling and messing with Ukraine so persistently for so many years that no one thinks there’s anything wrong with it. It’s been the normal way of doing things…This latest scandal is just another iteration of this grim history, as both the anti-Trump and Trump sides gleefully try to weaponize Ukrainian meddling and use Ukraine as a proxy war in their domestic fight for the presidency.”

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“Shokin should be taken with a pound of salt. The man was infamously corrupt; his attempt to frame himself as an honest prosecutor punished for tackling shady dealings doesn’t hold water. Additionally, as Bloomberg reported, the Burisma case was utterly dormant. Biden didn’t need to protect Burisma because the company wasn’t under active investigation…In sum, Biden had no incentive to defend Burisma.”

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“It’s certainly possible that Trump engaged in wrongdoing in his statements to the Ukrainian leader, but this is insignificant compared to totally criminal wrongdoing like bombings, assassinations, murders and war crimes conducted by Trump as well as prior presidents. A fidelity to the rule of law would act on the ample evidence to impeach Trump for such criminality. So, we’re seeing political power and calculation here by both Trump and Pelosi more than anything else.”

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“This appointment is obscene. It is not just a matter of the school that O’Brien attended but his assessment of apartheid South Africa condemns him to be a person not from the 21st century, but from the 19th century. Coupled with the offensive and reactionary stand of the Trump administration when it comes to the Palestinian quest — against another apartheid system — for human rights, this appointment is not simply objectionable but displays the flag of the global right-wing populist movement with which Trump is aligned.”

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“As of now we are confronted by two forms of denial: the open rejection of science by the Republicans vs. the ‘yes but’ approach of the establishment Democrats. These approaches reinforce each other in practice…The action of the Democrats in quashing the effort to have in-depth discussion of environmental policy is symptomatic of the corporate-inspired resistance that has to be overcome. They fear debate precisely because any thorough discussion would point toward the need for more radical steps than they are willing to have us even think about — let alone put into practice.”

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