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The Myth about Hiroshima by John M Repp Of all places to hear someone talking about Hiroshima and implying that the atom bomb caused the Japanese to surrender. But that’s what I heard in Seattle at the 2018 event “From Hiroshima to Hope”. http://fromhiroshimatohope.org/ I heard it not from the organizers, not from the speakers or musicians, but from a person standing around waiting for the lantern-lighting ceremony to begin. I also once heard the same myth from an old man who told me his life was saved by the bomb. He was about to be drafted when Japan announced their intent to surrender on August 15, 1945. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945…

Larry Kerschner letter to the editor of 6/20/18 The Trump Administration’s ripping children from their parents is a heartless method of blackmail to gain leverage against immigrants who come to the US for asylum.  Trump makes this plain in his statement of “No Wall – No Children” The ACLU released a report documenting the abuses that minors face in US detention facilities including being sexually assaulted, denied medical care, and run over by vehicles. Actor George Takei stated that the situation in these internment camps are worse than the camps he and his family were forced into during WWII. Jenn Budd, 47, a US Customs and Border Protection officer from 1995 to 2001 says there is no excuse for current…

President Trump’s tariffs are not really the point China isn’t “cheating” on trade. They are playing a different game: advancing the interests of their nation, rather than global corporations. America’s new trade policies should advance the interests of our people. By STAN SORSCHER first published in The Stand August 6, 2018 http://www.thestand.org/2018/08/trumps-tariffs-are-really-not-the-point/ We pay too much attention to President Trump’s tariffs. We’ve missed the point of what China is doing, and what we want. Ronald Reagan told us that markets are good, government is bad, and we should let free markets solve all our problems. Winners will prosper, and gains will trickle down to workers and communities. At the global level, this meant free trade policy that blurs national boundaries,…

UN Report Says US is a “Shithole Country” Instead of corporate media basically ignoring the UN report, there should be screaming headlines. By John M. Repp, first published on Common Dreams, Friday June 15, 2018 https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/15/un-report-says-us-shithole-country   Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled to the United States last December to some of our most destitute communities such as Skid Row in LA, poor African American areas in the Alabama, impoverished coal communities in West Virginia and to Puerto Rico. He issued his report on June 1, 2018. It should be front page news. Five million live in the absolute deprivation we usually associate with the developing world. The report is a terrible indictment…

Reflections on Gina Haspel’s Confirmation In short, accountability will not come from the top by Robert Crawford It is appalling that the Senate would approve for CIA Director someone who was directly involved in carrying out torture. Haspel should have been disqualified from the beginning, no matter what she told the Senators during and after her confirmation hearing.  Despite crucial information held back by the CIA, Senators had sufficient knowledge for an informed decision. The majority, which included six Democrats, chose to ignore what they knew. Torture is a war crime. The Senate is now on record for approving a war criminal to run an agency with a long record of engaging in unlawful acts. The dangers of this confirmation…

Better answers on trade, America’s economy Free-market orthodoxy has failed. It’s time to consider our public interest. by Stan Sorscher, labor representative for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), IFPTE 2001, first published in The Stand, May 24, 2018.  (May 24, 2018) — In 2016, President Trump prevailed over 17 establishment opponents. He is a disrupter. In particular, he disrupted establishment trade policies that have failed millions of Americans. Too many workers and communities have been left behind. Too much mistrust has grown regarding the way we’ve managed globalization. Wages have fallen far behind the growth trends of previous generations. The neoliberal free-market free-trade trickle-down orthodoxy, which we have followed for decades, is exhausted — socially, politically,…

a short review of Daniel Ellsberg The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017) by John M Repp Daniel Ellsberg is the whistle blower who exposed the lies of both Democratic and Republican Presidents about the American war of aggression in Southeast Asia that we call the Vietnam War. Few knew Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner in the Kennedy Administration and that he also wanted to blow the whistle on the nuclear war plans of the United States. He copied all the secret plans he had access to (and he had access to nuclear war plans that members of Congress did not even suspect existed) but those documents were lost. Because essentially the main concepts of nuclear…

The Senate Should Reject Gina Haspel and Mike Pompeo The warning signs of another major Middle Eastern war are flashing red. by Robert Crawford, first published on Common Dreams, April 10, 2018 https://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-crawford and the Seattle Times p A9, with a few key sentences removed  “Senate rejection of Pompeo would send a powerful message that the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo war agenda is not acceptable.” caption under a photo of Pompeo The Senate is set to hold confirmation hearings this week on two nominees for high office who, if confirmed, will dramatically shift the balance of power in the Trump administration toward torture, Islamophobia and war. Trump’s choice of Gina Haspel for director of the CIA and Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State, along…

How to Avoid Another Financial Crisis   a review of Steve Keen. Can we avoid another financial crisis? (Polity, 2017) According to one reviewer, Steve Keen was “one of just 18 registered economists, out of a global total of around 36,000, who actually anticipated the global financial crisis” of 2008-2009. Keen’s book lays out where he thinks mainstream economists have gone wrong and what they and the politicians they advise need to learn. Keen is not hopeful either party will actually take a new approach. They relish their positions in society for they are the only “social scientists” who advise the most powerful. They are the priesthood for a corrupt system. The forecast of official economic bodies and the Central…