Global

Judging from opinion polls, the American public has increasingly become largely disenchanted with the bizarre behavior of President Donald J Trump and the clownish entourage that surrounds and encourages him. Last week featured a meeting between Trump and the foreign minister of Denmark as well as his counterpart from Greenland’s legislative assembly. The meeting did not resolve the issue of Trump’s “unacceptable” demand that the United States must have ownership of Greenland, “buying it” if necessary, to maintain its national security against possible invasion coming from Russian and Chinese ships that, per Trump incorrectly, are already infesting Arctic waters to the north. To support his position, Trump has now announced that he is considering punishing with tariffs all countries that do not agree with his position on Greenland, which would be something akin to Washington committing international suicide.

Karl Popper once argued that the defining virtue of democracy lies not in expressing a collective will or fulfilling a historical destiny, but in something more modest—and more radical: fallibility. A democratic society, in Popper’s view, is one that accepts its own capacity for error. It builds institutions that allow rulers to be removed without violence, policies to be revised without catastrophe, and political conflict to unfold through open debate rather than force. Democracy matters not because it guarantees truth or justice, but because it institutionalizes the possibility of being wrong.

This vision of the open society remains one of the most compelling defenses of liberal democracy. Yet today, it is colliding with political and economic realities it was never designed to withstand. Across much of the world, the procedures of democracy persist in form while their substance erodes under mounting inequality, imperial coercion, and authoritarian drift. The result is not simply democratic decline, but democratic hollowing—institutions that survive even as their capacity for self-correction withers.

Vladimir Putin is at the brink of igniting multiple global-scale atomic catastrophes at as many as 19 nuclear power plants in Ukraine.  

Putin’s primary stated goal is to deprive Ukraine of electricity, freezing and starving it in the dark.  

But as Newsweek has just reported: “The International Atomic Energy Agency said electrical substations ‘vital for nuclear safety’ were affected by the massive Russian strike on Ukraine overnight into Tuesday, leading the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to lose all of its off-site power. Other Ukrainian nuclear power plants were also impacted when their power lines were disrupted, the nuclear watchdog said.”

A new Israeli law calls for all Palestinian hostages including children to be executed by hanging, electric chair, and/or poison has been passed. It would be carried out after 90 days of passing laws with no right for an appeal. The law also applies to 20 Lebanese hostages taken in Lebanon last year but the law does not apply to Israeli lawless settlers or IDF terrorist soldiers who murdered Palestinians.

Israel is currently holding about 9,300 Palestinian hostages for many years without charges or trial. 5,000 of them were detained in Gaza during the war while the others were arrested during raids in the West Bank or at checkpoint or re-arrested released prisoners.  

These people are illegally held and they deserve the right to freedom from the Israeli concentration camps. Basic element of democracy required Israel to either charge or release them immediately.

There are a million Iranians in the streets facing bullets and torture who don’t agree that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a poor victim of US and “Zionist” imperialism.

We should take their cue. Don’t let Trump pick our heroes for us. Trump ain’t gonna do a damn thing for the Iranian people. He’s letting them sell oil illegally because he wants the world price to come down. The Iranian people, in his view, despite his saber rattling, don’t mean a damn thing to him.

But they mean a lot to me.

The right to choose our own leaders is not an American right. Freedom is one of the “unalienable Rights” of Americans “endowed by their Creator” — and neither Trump nor Khamenei, as Destroyers, qualify.

Those who cannot choose their own leaders, who are forced by violence to bend to authority, are slaves. In America, we still have, for a moment, a choice: We can be Kings or we will be Slaves. Choose today.

For MLK Day, I will pray that Iran, Ukraine and Minnesota will be Free at Last.

And for Yolanda Renee King, MLK’s granddaughter, playing the piano for me. She is our future. If we dare to dream it.

Hanging on by a Thread of Hope

By Heide Lambert, Mayor of Waldport, Oregon

In a small coastal town of 2,000 people, you wouldn’t expect to see the forces tearing apart our democracy so clearly. And yet, Waldport, Oregon has become a case study in how power, fear, and disinformation corrode civic life—at the local level and far beyond.

Since being elected to a two-year volunteer term as mayor, our town has made national news more than once. First, when the city manager and council unconstitutionally expelled me less than three months into my term. Then, when residents united to stop ICE from housing agents in a rundown hotel. Most recently, we mourned the loss of County Commissioner Claire Hall, whose body succumbed after enduring relentless bullying tied to a recall effort.

I write because the misdirected hate in my county mirrors a much larger crisis—and it has shaken my faith in the systems meant to protect us.

While Trump fires up an oil war in Venezuela, we hear from the heroic STEVE DONZIGER of his astonishing war against Chevron and for the planet & the people of Ecuador.

Steve is a true American crusader for what’s left of American democracy and the vital genius of Greenpeace & its ilk.  NO NUKES /  NO OIL & let’s join Steve saving our only home!!!

Audio link (58 mins.): https://grassrootseporg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/253pt2grnpwrwlns.mp3

This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”

Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were never asked, and the people had been violently taken over years earlier against the will of most of them, it’s true that straightforward conquest went out of fashion around the time of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which became law 98 years ago. But to state so simply the popular wisdom that the United States has supposedly not seized any land in 100 years, one has to pretend that military bases do not exist. Here’s a small sampling of the problems with believing that lie: