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donald tusk
NATO Article 4 Declaration Puts Poland 'Closest to Open Conflict Since WWII'
The decision by Prime Minister Donald Tusk came after the Polish military shot down several Russian drones that entered its airspace, marking the first time a NATO member has fired shots in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Sep 10, 2025
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty on Wednesday after 19 Russian drones flew into Polish territory late Tuesday night and into the early morning hours.
Speaking to Poland's parliament on Wednesday, Tusk said that it is "the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II," though he still said there was "no reason to believe we're on the brink of war."
The Polish military, along with NATO forces, shot down several of the drones, marking the first time a NATO-aligned country has fired a shot since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022.
According to Polish officials, the drones entered the nation's airspace amid a series of airstrikes directed at Western Ukraine. Though some damage to at least one home has been reported due to falling drone debris, there are no immediate reports of casualties, according to the New York Times.
Following what he called a "large-scale provocation" by Russia, Tusk took the significant step of invoking Article 4 of the NATO treaty for just the eighth time since the alliance's founding in 1949.
Short of the more drastic Article 5, which obligates NATO allies to defend one another militarily at a time of attack, Article 4 allows any member to call on the rest of the alliance to consult with them if they feel their territory, independence, or security is threatened.
Russia, for its part, said it had "no intentions to engage any targets on the territory of Poland." However, as German defense minister Boris Pistorius said in a quote to AFP, the drones were "clearly set on this course" and "did not have to fly this route to reach Ukraine."
In comments to The Guardian, Dr. Marion Messmer, senior research fellow at the foreign policy think tank Chatham House, agreed it was "unlikely that this was an accident" and said that Russia was likely "trying to test where NATO's red lines are."
European leaders issued statements of solidarity following the attack.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it an "egregious and unprecedented violation of Polish and NATO airspace" and pledged to "ramp up the pressure on [Russian President] Putin until there is a just and lasting peace." The UK's secretary of state for defense, John Healey, said he would ask British armed forces "to look at options to bolster NATO's air defense over Poland."
French President Emmanuel Macron called it a "reckless escalation," adding that France will "not compromise on the security of the Allies."
Tusk asserted that "words are not enough" and has requested more material support from Poland's allies, which could point to the risk of further escalation.
While the invocation of Article 4 does not always presage a hot war, Yasraj Sharma writes for Al Jazeera that it "would serve as a political precursor to Article 5 deliberations."
Following the attack, the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said in a post on X that the United States "will defend every inch of NATO territory," suggesting a possible willingness for the US to become more directly involved in the hostilities after providing over $128 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine since Russia first attacked in 2022.
The US has roughly 10,000 troops stationed in Poland as part of a permanent military presence in the country.
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, wrote in an uncharacteristically brief post on Truth Social: "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go!"
Trump plans to speak with Poland's president, Karol Nawrocki, on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The drone attack came shortly after Trump threatened to impose harsher sanctions on Russia following its ramp-up of attacks on Kyiv over the weekend, yet another policy shift by the US president after he appeared interested in cutting a deal favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit last month.
In the New York Times, Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski writes that with Russia's entry into Polish airspace, along with its more aggressive attacks on Ukraine, "Putin is signaling that he will not compromise on his core demands even as he claims that Russia is still ready to make a deal."
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European Leaders Condemn Musk's 'Ominous' Push for Germany to 'Forget' Holocaust
"We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. "Evil, violence, and contempt cannot triumph anew."
Jan 27, 2025
Billionaire enterpreneur Elon Musk insisted at a far-right rally in Germany over the weekend that the European country must move "beyond the past" and leave behind the memory of one of the deadliest genocides in history—but as leaders on the continent marked the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation on Monday, several made clear that Musk's advice was not welcome.
Musk's comments on "'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Sunday. "Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on the social media platform X, "I couldn't agree more."
The country's ambassador to Israel said that while Musk claimed German children are treated as "guilty of the sins" of the Nazis during World War II, the government simply wants "them to grow up informed and responsible and to apply the lessons of Germany's past."
As Common Dreams reported, the Tesla CEO and key adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump made the remarks at a rally for Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Saturday, five weeks before Germans are set to vote in federal elections.
AfD is currently polling at 19%, trailing the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is in first place at 28%. But leaders across Europe, including Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Scholz have warned that Musk appears to be angling for the spread of far-right ideologies—including neo-Nazism—in European countries.
The AfD has been designated a "suspected extremist" group by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and one of its candidates for public office last year said that "not all" Nazis who worked for Adolf Hitler's government were criminals.
The party has been ostracized in Germany, with other political groups including the CDU ruling out the formation of a coalition government with the AfD, but last week CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he would push for tougher anti-immigration proposals even if they were submitted by the AfD.
Scholz, who represents the Social Democrats, told Stuttgarter Zeitung in response to Merz's comments that "the firewall to the AfD must not crumble."
As Tusk oversaw the liberation of Auschwitz anniversary on Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he alluded to Musk's comments at the AfD rally.
"We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past," he said on X, which is owned by Musk. "Evil, violence, and contempt cannot triumph anew."
Musk's comments came days after he appeared to flash a Nazi salute twice at an event for Trump's inauguration.
In the U.S. on Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker addressed Musk's remarks at the AfD rally on CNN, asking why Trump hadn't spoken out against them.
"President Trump ought to be calling that out," said the Democratic governor. "If he doesn't agree with Elon Musk, if he doesn't agree with two Sieg Heils at his own rally, and backing a party that backs Nazis, then he ought to say so. Why isn't Donald Trump speaking out?"
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Will the US Choose Democracy or Extreme Wealth Concentration?
This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if we can purge our political system of big money.
Jan 17, 2024
So, Donald Trump won Iowa. A crazed billionaire who wants to “suspend the Constitution“ and claims the right to a murder his political enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Imagine.
Fox “News” shuts down (or just decides to only tell the truth), and most of the steam goes out of the right-wing populist MAGA movement which its billionaire owners helped create in the U.S. Insurrectionist members of Congress find themselves in jail facing sedition charges, as the previous leader of the country is under criminal investigation for taking help from Putin’s Russia. The government begins the process of decriminalizing abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is overturned and, without the flow of billionaire money directing their votes, Congress begins to actually pass laws that reflect the desires of the majority of the people.
Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”
Unless you read international newspapers like the Financial Times, odds are you have no idea that same scenario is now playing out in Poland which, for the previous eight years, had been suffering under a Trump-like administration.
Last summer, progressive Polish politician Donald Tusk promised he was going to clean up that country with an “iron broom.” Few took his promise seriously, but after being sworn into office last month, he’s actually doing it. As Maciej Kisilowski writes for the Financial Times, just a few days after Tusk became prime minister:
…Poland’s politicized public television station, notorious for its xenophobic, homophobic, and racist messages, abruptly went dark. Tusk’s culture ministry summarily dismissed the station’s board and stopped broadcasts to prevent the outgoing leadership from inflaming tensions by airing live the takeover of the group’s headquarters.
Last week two of the top right-wing politicians in Poland were arrested for abuse of power during the previous regime, while only a few hundred people showed up to protest the end of right-wing programming on the nation’s main television network.
Last Thursday there was a march to protest the new progressive prime minister, but the reaction was both tepid and nonviolent. As Kisilowski writes for the Financial Times:
These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists. In the U.S., for example, there is intense debate about whether the protracted legal cases against Donald Trump are serving to boost his campaign to return to the White House. Perhaps Tusk’s approach offers hope.
Dislodging the death grip the GOP has on American politics will be more difficult than in Poland, in large part because five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision.
The 2020 election cost over $14 billion. The 2016 election was only $6.5 billion. But in 2008, two years before Citizens United, it hadn’t even hit $1 billion: total spending with a mere $717 million. As the executive director of the money tracking opensecrets.org, Sheila Krumholz, said:
Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle—we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020.
Right-wing fascist-adjacent billionaires have used that open door to severely corrupt our political system, leading to massive gridlock when it comes to anything average people want.
Meanwhile, billionaires got tax cuts and deregulation making them vastly richer at the same time the companies that made them rich refuse to even commit to paying their workers a living wage (fewer than 1% of the world’s top companies have made such a commitment).
As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”
On the other hand, the new American system created by Republicans on our Supreme Court works quite well for the morbidly rich. The people Gilens and Page refer to as the “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.
They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy, like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:
[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
So, here we are.
If, in a zoo somewhere, a single chimpanzee had risen up and taken all the food from all the other chimpanzees and was hoarding it without being challenged, scientists from all over the world would be trying to figure out what was wrong with that chimpanzee and why the others tolerated his theft.
As Oxfam International pointed out in a report timed to correspond with the kickoff of the billionaire love-fest at Davos this week, the five richest men in the world—four of them Americans—saw their net worth more than double over the past three years from $405 billion to $869 billion.
Since those five corrupt Republicans on the Court also ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” with nearly-full access to the Bill of Rights—including the right to use money to pay off politicians (the Republicans on the Court call it First Amendment-protected “free speech”)—the corporations that are producing these billionaires are also gouging American consumers as hard and fast as they can.
As Oxfam noted (keep in mind, “profit“ means, essentially, “the money that’s left over after all of our business expenses, including payroll, that we, the owners, get to split up and keep for ourselves”):
Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52% jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion.
That money isn’t going to workers, though, who’ve seen their real, inflation-adjusted wages fall worldwide in the same period. Instead:
The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders… It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.
Thanks to Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, Americas are not getting what they want. Which is another way of saying the morbidly rich and the judges and politicians they’ve bought are actively breaking our democratic republic.
On the eve of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, the Progressive Change Institute did a nationwide survey of likely voters. The results were stark:
— 84% want the government to negotiate drug prices.
— 79% support expanding Social Security (which Haley and DeSantis both just last week promised to cut).
— 78% want “fair trade” that ends shipping our jobs overseas.
— 77% want to tax corporations that have moved jobs overseas.
— 77% want universal free pre-kindergarten.
— 74% want all Americans to be able to buy into Medicare-for-All.
— 71% support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges and putting people back to work.
— 70% want free college at all public universities.
— 68% want a guaranteed minimum income.
— 67% want the government to be the employer of last resort to end unemployment (like FDR did).
— 66% want the morbidly rich to pay at least a 50% income tax (currently the average American billionaire pays around 3%).
— 65% want the big banks broken up and a return to local banking.
— 64% want net neutrality so your billion-dollar corporate internet and email providers can’t monitor everything you do online and sell that information.
— 63% want public financing of elections to get billionaire money out of them.
— 60% want the Post Office to offer inexpensive public banking.
President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress got some of the infrastructure work done and tried to end much of America’s nearly $2 trillion in student debt (until they were blocked by Republican lawsuits and six Republicans on the Supreme Court), and a small bit of the “Green New Deal” was incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act, but otherwise there’s a lot that Americans want and deserve that they’re not getting.
Why? Because the morbidly rich control much of our political process right now, and most of our media.
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said:
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if Citizens United can be legislatively overturned and we can purge our political system of the cancer of big money.
Democrats almost did it in 2022: The For the People Act would have reversed significant parts of Citizens United and provided for public funding of and more transparency around elections. It passed the House and got enough votes to pass the Senate under the Constitution.
Even the Republican filibuster could have been overcome if we hadn’t been betrayed by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. If we do well this in this year’s elections, next year might be much better legislatively.
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote. The stakes have never been higher.
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