Peter Certo

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies. He edits its Foreign Policy In Focus and OtherWords services and coaches writing in the New Economy Maryland Fellowship program. He’s a former associate editor of Right Web, a project that monitors efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy, and helped coordinate the first annual Global Day of Action on Military Spending.His writings have appeared in The Nation, The Washington Spectator, The Washington Examiner, and The Kansas City Star, among many other outlets. He’s also the coauthor of a chapter in the Verso collection The Wikileaks Files.

Plutocracy

The Only Winners in This Trade War Will Be Trump and His Fellow Billionaires

Peter Certo

Trump’s erratic tariffs aren’t a recipe for an industrial comeback. They’re a recipe for corruption. By Peter Certo | April 30, 2025 ( Otherwords.org ) – President Biden left behind an economy that was pretty healthy, conventionally speaking. Unemployment was low and wages were rising, but stubbornly high costs of living opened a door for […]

Immigration

Why the Far Right Lies about Immigrants

Peter Certo

( Otherwords.org ) – When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000. Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and […]

Iran

A Renewed Yemen Truce Is No Substitute for Justice

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The news that Saudi officials, who have been leading a bombing campaign in Yemen for eight years, met with the Houthi officials who control much of the country on April 9 to possibly renew a truce that ended in October is positive. But […]

Bush

20 Years On, What Did the Iraq War Truly Cost?

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | – ( Otherwords.org) – The war claimed more than lives and treasure — it claimed a future’s worth of lost opportunities. Now, younger generations are demanding them back. By Peter Certo | Most of us who were alive then remember where we were on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. As […]

Authoritarianism

Why isn’t US Media Screaming that the Republican Party Is Now Openly Against Democracy?

Peter Certo

( Otherwords.org ) – If you’re the sort of person who follows the news, you’ve probably heard a good bit lately about podcaster Joe Rogan, Neil Young’s fight with Spotify, and maybe a little about Russia and Ukraine. All that’s good grist for the mill. But did you also hear former President Trump admit that […]

Left Politics

A Few Magnificent Things That Happened in 2021

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | – ( Otherwords.org) – It would be easy to survey the end of 2021 and see another year in wreckage. There’s the pandemic that won’t end. Rising inflation. Climate disasters. A democracy that looks creakier by the day. And that was before West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hit the brakes on […]

Epidemics

How Greed is Prolonging the Pandemic – Unless the World is Vaccinated, Variants will Keep Emerging

Peter Certo

( Otherwords.org) – Stop me if this sounds familiar. It’s been kind of a hard year, but I felt optimistic about the holidays. My wife and I had just scheduled our COVID-19 boosters. Even better, we’d been able to get our young child vaccinated. We imagined a cautious return to simple family pleasures like indoor […]

Afghanistan

Why Biden Is Right to End the War in Afghanistan

Peter Certo

Now our obligation is to those Afghans living with the consequences of our four decades of intervention

African-Americans

We Can Have the Filibuster or Democracy, But Not Both

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | ( Otherwords.org) – The American political system is complicated, but fixing it doesn’t have to be. Voters of all stripes broadly agree on the kinds of changes they’d like to see. We need less money in politics. It should be easier to vote — early, in person, or by mail. And […]