Advertisement

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.

Map

Imagine your ancestors’ burial sites being concreted over so to make way for a factory that builds killer flying robots. As surreal as this sounds, that is exactly what could happen as defense contractor Anduril, the Pentagon, and certain State of Ohio offices rush to build the Arsenal-1 factory.

Anduril’s autonomous drones may be flying over northern Pickaway County and southern Franklin County within a few short years. The defense contractor coveted the location for Arsenal-1 because it is adjacent to Rickenbacker International Airport, ten miles south of Columbus.

But the mad dash to build Arsenal-1 might not entirely be about defending freedom. It could be about slipping a fast one past our First Nations, who would demand the project be delayed or canceled altogether if Native American burials were discovered.

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

Logo

Global EV Sales Rose 20 percent in 2025
Last year global electric vehicle adoption grew by 20 percent. There was significant growth in every major region except for North America, according to the research firm Rho Motion. Global consumers bought 20.7 million EVs, an increase of 20 percent from the prior year. China accounted for the majority of that total, with 12.9 million cars and light trucks sold within its borders, up 17 percent.

The highest percentage growth was in Europe, which was up 33 percent with 4.3 million in sales. In North America, where the market was hurt by the cancellation of tax credits for EV buyers, sales of new EVs hit 1.8 million, down 4 percent. To put this in perspective, in 2025 approximately 16.2 million light vehicles were sold in the US.  EVs accounted for approximately 11 percent of all vehicles sold within that region.

Details about event

Wednesday, January 21, 8pm
Zoom
Register here

Students All Out January 23! Ice Out Of Minneapolis. Abolish Ice. Fund Free College For All

Trump and his billionaire donors have declared war on working people in the US and around the world. While billionaires hoard wealth, they bankroll cages, deportations, and policing instead of schools, healthcare, and a livable future. We refuse to accept that.

On January 23, a coalition of unions, immigrant rights groups, and community organizations is mobilizing for a one-day strike to shut down ICE. Students everywhere must show up in solidarity with Minneapolis by building for walkouts, rallies and mass marches across the country and making it impossible to ignore.

This is how we build toward a national strike called by unions, to shut down ICE, Trump, and the whole capitalist system.

Details about event

Watch video here

Ohio State University ignored community and student demands that the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and Border Patrol be banned from the January 20 Career Fair on campus. So, students showed up and drove the DHS recruiters away. In the meantime, however, three were arrested although they were not breaking any laws.

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:

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS