Archiv: Common Dreams (independent media)


27.05.2026 - 13:13 [ Common Dreams ]

In California, Vote Against the Forces Destroying Democracy

It is painful that the one person who has spent the past decades aggressively supporting democracy, fighting for immigrant rights, fighting the tendency toward oligarchy in our politics, and challenging the fossil fuel industry is himself a billionaire. But the facts are that Tom Steyer will not veto the billionaire’s tax, has pledged to support closing the Water’s Edge Tax loophole, and has pledged to not take fossil fuel money.

08.04.2026 - 09:19 [ Common Dreams ]

Truly Evil Trump Must Be Stopped—Now!

It is our responsibility as citizens of this nation to say unambiguously that what Trump is now threatening is truly evil. It’s our responsibility as human beings to demand that Trump repudiate this threat to other human beings. It is our responsibility to call on all other Americans, in whatever capacity, to stand up against this despotic act of pure immorality.

Write. Phone. Shout. March. Trump has moved beyond indecency into the realm of insanity. This must be stopped.

26.03.2026 - 17:41 [ Common Dreams ]

Nuking Iran Would Mean Stepping Beyond the Brink of Evil

One alleged reason why we’re waging a war on Iran is because it has nuclear “capability,” which we need to obliterate for our own safety. Apparently, only the boss countries—the world leaders, the conquerors and colonizers—can be trusted to have nukes. USA! USA! This club also includes Israel, which in fact possesses a large number of nuclear warheads and may actually use one if the war it started comes back at it with too much ferocity. In other words, if Iran’s retaliation is too successful: “…winning against such insatiable enemies could provoke a cornered Israel to turn the war nuclear,” according to the publication Jacobin. “A Trump adviser recently warned that Israel might use a nuclear weapon against Iran.”

21.03.2026 - 22:17 [ Common Dreams ]

No Bigger Hypocrisy in the World Than Israel Complaining About Iran’s Lawbreaking

International humanitarian law was never meant to protect only one side’s people. It protects civilians precisely because it binds all parties equally. When powerful states defy those rules, they do more than harm their adversaries; they weaken the only framework that can protect their own civilians in return. If governments truly want to safeguard their people, the answer is not selective outrage but consistent compliance: uphold the law, apply it universally, and defend it even when it constrains your own actions.

05.03.2026 - 15:19 [ Common Dreams ]

5 Things to Know About Trump’s Illegal War on Iran

Whatever criticisms one may have of Iran’s government, they do not justify this deadly act of aggression.

02.03.2026 - 17:40 [ Common Dreams ]

President-From-Hell Trump Brings Us Ever Closer to a Point of No Return

Someday, this president may be known as the End-Times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren.

01.02.2026 - 16:36 [ Common Dreams ]

Leaked DHS Memo Reveals ICE Claiming Expansive New Warrantless Arrest Powers

Stanford University political scientist Tom Clark questioned the validity of the memo, which appears to directly conflict with the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which requires search warrants as a protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“So, here’s how the law works,” he wrote. “People on whom it imposes constraints don’t get to just write themselves a memo saying they don’t have to follow the law. Maybe I’ll write myself a memo saying that I don’t have to pay my taxes this year.”

29.01.2026 - 19:22 [ Common Dreams ]

US Senate, Do the Right Thing and Refuse to Fund ICE

More Americans now support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, than keeping it.

05.01.2026 - 20:19 [ Common Dreams ]

Global Protests Tell Trump and His Cronies: ‘Hands Off Venezuela’

Demonstrators took to the streets of Brussels, Madrid, Ankara, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and other major cities worldwide to voice opposition to the US assault on Venezuela and Trump administration officials’ pledge to “run” the country’s government for an unspecified period of time, a plan that Venezuelan leaders have publicly met with defiance.

05.09.2025 - 21:59 [ Common Dreams ]

We Must Stop Israel From Starving the People of Gaza—Here‘s How

(September 2, 2025)

Under the „Uniting for Peace“ mechanism, when the Security Council is deadlocked, the authority to act passes to the General Assembly. After a Security Council session and the almost inevitable US veto, the issue would be brought before the UNGA in a resumed 10th emergency special session on the Israel-Palestine conflict. There, the General Assembly can, by a two-thirds majority not subject to US veto, authorize a protection force in response to an urgent request from the State of Palestine. There is a precedent: in 1956, the General Assembly authorized the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) to enter Egypt and protect it from the ongoing invasion by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom.

At the invitation of Palestine, the protection force would enter Gaza to secure emergency humanitarian aid for the starving population. If Israel were to attack the UN protection force, the force would be authorized to defend itself and the Gazans. Whether Israel and the US would dare to fight a UNGA-mandated force protecting the starving Gazans remains to be seen.

25.08.2025 - 19:14 [ Common Dreams ]

Israel‘s Conduct in Gaza Amounts to Genocidal Acts With an Intent to Commit Genocide

Israel is committing genocide beyond a shadow of doubt, and all states party to the Genocide Convention “have an obligation to prevent and punish genocide,” says Dr. Melanie O’Brien, a renowned scholar of International Law, in the interview that follows. O’Brien is Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Western Australia; President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; and Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Law Center.

10.08.2025 - 16:25 [ Common Dreams ]

In Swipe at UK, Huckabee Cites Allied Bombing of Dresden to Defend Israel‘s Gaza Genocide

U.S. and British warplanes indiscriminately bombed Dresden with munitions including 4,000-pound „blockbusters“ and incendiary explosives over two days in February 1945. The heat generated by the inferno melted human flesh, turning many victims into piles of goop. Men, women, children; the sick and the elderly; refugees and Allied prisoners of war—even the animals in the city zoo—were incinerated together.

Acclaimed author Kurt Vonnegut—an American POW imprisoned in Dresden at the time, whose seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five was inspired by the firebombing—later described the attack as „carnage unfathomable.“ After viewing images of the bombing, then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked: „Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?“

As the old adage posits, „history is written by the victors,“ and no Allied officials were ever held accountable for atrocities committed against their Axis enemies. However, after the war, the Nuremberg trials, Fourth Geneva Convention, and Genocide Convention sought to ensure that horrors like Nazi and Japanese war crimes and what the British described as the „terror bombing“ of Germany never happened again.

06.07.2025 - 03:35 [ Common Dreams ]

Designed To Enact Suffering

The Senate‘s barely-there approval – fuck Shady Vance – of Trump‘s heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, „a tipping point between normality and fascism,“ also pours over $170.7 billion into „a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past,“ funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country‘s work.

It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy – electric bills will soar 30% – costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it‘s said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.

30.03.2025 - 16:26 [ Common Dreams ]

Majority of Democratic Voters: Current Leaders Failing to Combat Trump, Defend Working Class

„Democratic voters are sending a clear message: They want leaders who will fight Trump and put working people first,“ said Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of Data for Progress, the progressive think tank behind the surveys. „The base is tired of weak opposition and business-as-usual politics.“

„This level of discontent is unsustainable for a party looking to build back in the wake of major losses—at a certain point, Democratic leaders will need to show voters that they are taking a stronger stance against Trump, or step aside for someone who will,“ Deiseroth added.

28.02.2025 - 12:32 [ Common Dreams ]

Petition to Support a Party of Working People

So here‘s a fresh question: What would you think if a million workers said they would be willing to back a new political effort?

One million names on a petition would show that the effort has a far wider reach than a fringe group or a self-promoter. One million names would signal to the political actors that there is mass support for building a new working-class political home. One million names might even push some Democrats to support pro-worker legislation.

Mobilizing a petition drive would cost relatively little and could start with a few progressive unions circulating one that read: …

05.02.2025 - 22:48 [ Common Dreams ]

Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza Is a Brutal Form of Colonial Capitalism

The colonial creation of private property from stolen land is the American way, from the theft of Indigenous people’s lands to the urban renewal clearance projects that built the modern New York City in which Donald Trump was able to thrive and build wealth. There can be no shock that the developer president’s first public words on Gaza would celebrate the old method of generating “demolition sites” (terra nullius, or empty land). In a way, Trump actually is daring those of us who support Palestinian sovereignty to understand the interdependence of capitalism and genocidal colonialism. There must be a people, and there must be a land. One without the other presents a windfall to the developers.

01.02.2025 - 19:32 [ Common Dreams ]

Biden‘s Enduring Legacy: Awful. No Worse

If ever there was a searing, sanctimonious self-immolation in presidential politics, this was it and the costs are incalculable. The damage will reverberate for decades and might never be recovered.

It will be all but impossible for the Democratic Party to accept responsibility for the catastrophe it has inflicted on America, through its head, Joe Biden, and the complicity of all of the party’s upper echelon. It will, thus, ensure that nothing will change. We desperately need a new party that reflects the interest and needs of the American people, and not those of the party’s corporate owners. Change cannot come too soon.

18.01.2025 - 15:12 [ Common Dreams ]

No, Biden Wasn’t Unable to Stop the Gaza War—He Was in on It

The truth of the matter is that every day for the past year, Biden could have secured a cease-fire by using America’s vast leverage, and every day for the past year, from all the evidence we have today, Biden chose not to.

10.11.2024 - 18:05 [ Common Dreams ]

By Criminalizing UNRWA, Israel Is Delegitimizing the United Nations

Israel‘s banning of UNRWA should represent an opportunity for those concerned about the standing of the United Nations, to remind Israel that U.N. members who have no respect for international law deserve to be delegitimized. This time, words must be accompanied by action. Nothing else will suffice.

07.11.2024 - 14:04 [ Les Leopold / Common Dreams ]

Why Did the Democrats Lose? Because They Gave Up on the Working Class 40 Years Ago

The Democrats assumed the working class had nowhere else to go. They were wrong!

06.11.2024 - 15:02 [ Common Dreams ]

Erasing ‚Any Sign of Life,‘ Israeli Demolition Teams Razing Entire Villages in Lebanon

Satellite photos examined by The Washington Post, Reuters, and the Financial Times showed vast destruction caused by Israeli bombing and controlled demolitions of towns and villages, many of whose residents are among the more than 1.2 million people forcibly displaced by the war. (…)

„We‘re a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home,“ Lebanon Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Lubnan Baalbaki told Reuters after viewing satellite images confirming the destruction of his family home.

„If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what‘s in that house,“ Baalbaki added. „It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life.“

27.09.2024 - 22:06 [ Common Dreams ]

Mass Walkout as ‚Global Pariah‘ Netanyahu Addresses UN General Assembly

Journalists and critics of the „global pariah“ shared photos and videos of people filing out of the hall before Netanyahu‘s address—which came just a day after 25 anti-genocide protesters were arrested for blocking his motorcade in Manhattan.

While there was some audience applause from the sparsely populated room on Friday, Al Jazeera Arabic‘s Rami Ayari explained that „the people you hear cheering the PM during the speech are in the gallery who he brought for that purpose.“

19.09.2024 - 19:11 [ Common Dreams ]

In Overwhelming Vote, UN General Assembly Demands Swift End to Israeli Occupation

„The vast majority of countries have made it clear: Israel‘s occupation of Palestine must end, and all countries have a definite duty not to aid or assist its continuation,“ said GJN‘s Tim Bierley. „To stay on the right side of international law, the U.K.‘s dealings with Israel must drastically change, including closing all loopholes in its partial arms ban and revoking any trade or investment relations that might assist the occupation.“

09.05.2024 - 00:00 [ Common Dreams ]

Anti-Genocide Students Are Fulfilling Their Duty to Prevent War Crimes; Will You?

In a world order in which the Great Powers and many lesser ones are turning to war and genocide, popular enforcement of international law is one of the few means for protecting ourselves and the world against a cataclysmic plunge into unlimited military destruction.

By virtue of the U.S. Constitution, international law and international treaties are explicitly a part of U.S. law. U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson stated, “The very essence of the Nuremberg Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.” So, obligations under international law are also obligations under U.S. law.