Opinion
Peter Kuznick answered the following questions from Mohamed Elmaazi of Sputnik Radio and agreed to let World BEYOND War publish the text.
1) What’s the significance of Honduras being the latest country to join the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?
What a remarkable and ironic development, especially after the U.S. had been pressuring the previous 49 signers to withdraw their approvals. It is so fitting that Honduras, the original “banana republic,” pushed it over the edge–a delicious fuck you to a century of U.S. exploitation and bullying.
2) Is it possibly a bit of a distraction to focus on countries that have no nuclear capability?
Not really. This treaty represents the moral voice of humanity. It may not have a universal enforcement mechanism, but it clearly states that the people of this planet abhor the power-hungry, annihilation-threatening madness of the nine nuclear powers. The symbolic significance can not be overstated.
With the railroaded Supreme Court appointment of Amy Barrett, Team Trump has lit the final fuse on his 2020 coup d’etat. With Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, because they all did it before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.
Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, did it all before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.
As of right now, with the all-but-certain compliance of Supremes Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, and with the agreement of enough Republican-held state legislatures, there is no legal barrier to Trump’s second term, no matter what the voters say.
In real terms, the only practical wall against such a coup might be a massive anti-Trump national vote—-but it would have to be overwhelming enough to make his would-be dictatorship politically unsustainable.
As for the Constitutional path, the road has been cleared. The calculation is simple.
This article first appeared in the Ohio Capitol Journal.
When the controversial nuclear bailout bill known as HB6 first reached the Ohio House floor in 2019, only a handful of Ohioans truly knew what it was and what was in it. This “handful of Ohioans” -- as we would later find out -- was a group of Republican lawmakers and lobbyists who had cooked up a historic pay-to-play bribery scheme, all funded by various energy companies and predominantly led by FirstEnergy.
A Brief History of Fascist Lies is the title of a new book by Federico Finchelstein, the author of a number of books on fascism and populism. Finchelstein both draws distinctions that slot politicians into categories (such as fascist or populist) and points out the overlaps and the shades of gray, the forerunners and the enablers.
Not only have there been politicians who resembled Trump in other countries in recent decades, but the appearance of Trump — I think — depended on the regimes of Bush the Lesser and Obama. And the Trumplike politicians sprouting up today come out of their own countries’ traditions as well as feeding off and feeding into fascist tendencies in the United States.
Trump is supposedly a populist rather than a fascist, because he is elected (even if he cheats?), and because he encourages bigoted violence but has no plan for genocide. Of course he drops tens of thousands of bombs a year on parts of the world not labeled “white,” advances climate collapse, and risks nuclear war, but that stuff can’t make him anything other than “American,” since every U.S. president does those things.
A group of locally-based, high-profiled corporations are financially backing the Issue 2 campaign – for a civilian review board of the Columbus Police – but when asked whether they would officially endorse it publicly, or encourage their employees and customers to vote ‘yes,’, the answer was ‘no.’
The Columbus Partnership, the region’s so-called public-private partnership seeking prosperity for all Central Ohioans, and its biggest players have (quietly) contributed to the Issue 2 campaign. This includes Huntington Bank, Nationwide Insurance, Cardinal Heath and JP Morgan.
But they aren’t putting their mouth where their money is.
Huntington Bank was the only one to respond to repeated emails asking whether they would publicly endorse a ‘yes’ vote to finally bring a civilian review board to Columbus.
As many know, Columbus is one of the largest US cities without a civilian review board to independently investigate citizen complaints against police, and city residents are set to make a historic vote on November 3 to create one within the city charter.
Released in time for the election, Fish in a Barrel is an exposé of how the NRA’s history of alleged campaign violations have stymied popular efforts to make even modest reforms on access to firearms, despite hundreds of mass shootings in the United States over the past two decades. The NRA’s electoral enterprise ended up being gamed by Russian agents of influence in the 2016 election, as detailed in the 2019 U.S. Senate Finance Committee report: The NRA & Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset.
“As mass shootings have continued, the NRA obstructs any effort at reform to prevent future massacres. It’s angering watching politicians tweet ‘Thoughts and prayers,’ then do nothing to stop it from happening again,” says director John Wellington Ennis. “But when I learned that the NRA had become a Russian asset while working to elect Trump, I knew I had to do something.”
The documentary Hopper/Welles, which screened at the 34th annual AFI Fest (https://fest.afi.com/), is to film history what 1989’s When Harry Met Sally… is to romcoms. It consists of a conversation/interview between two renegade actor/directors who made touchstone movies but were nevertheless Hollywood outcasts. Following a stunning career as a radio and Broadway wunderkind, Orson Welles starred in, co-wrote and directed his first Hollywood feature when he was only 25. That 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane scored the Best Writing, Original Screenplay Oscar for Welles and Herman Mankiewicz and received eight more nominations, including in the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor Academy Award categories. But as far as the Tinseltown studio system went, it was all downhill from there in terms of directing for RKO, et al, for poor Orson.
As with many wars around the world, the current war between Azerbaijan and Armenia is a war between militaries armed and trained by the United States. And in the view of some experts, the level of weapons purchased by Azerbaijan is a key cause of the war. Before anybody proposes shipping more weapons to Armenia as the ideal solution, there is another possibility.
In the race for Franklin County prosecutor between longtime Republican incumbent Ron O’Brien and his Democratic challenger, former 10th District Court of Appeals judge Gary Tyack, some progressives are supporting Tyack because of O’Brien’s unimpressive record on police misconduct cases. It’s true Tyack could hardly do worse in that regard.
But based on Tyack’s handling of my 2013 whistleblower case against the state government, I doubt he’s committed to protecting victims of governmental injustice and holding the perpetrators accountable. If Tyack is elected, progressives should watch and pressure him to ensure he doesn’t act like a lapdog and cover-up artist for the Columbus establishment.
The whistleblower case resulted from my employer, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, imposing discipline on me for reporting unlawful, but noncriminal, acts in state government to the Ohio inspector general’s office. During oral argument at the appeals court, Tyack expressed no concern about what the agency did.