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Life in Prison for a Poem
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Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami’s crime consisted of reciting a poem extolling the courage and values of the popular uprisings in Tunisia. For that he's been sentenced to life in prison.
We have the opportunity to join with a remarkable list of prominent poets from around the world in urging the court in Qatar to reconsider.
Rather than making itself an instrument for cracking down on dissent, we believe that the Court should uphold Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami’s right to free speech. The poem he recited called for an end to intolerable conditions, a demand that for the past two years has been aired by millions throughout North Africa and the Arab world.
In this spirit, we poets and non-poets who perceive the need for worldwide change at the social, political and ecological level, call on the Court to review the appeal, stop siding with repression and lend its ear to the movements that have sprung up all over the world for dignity, social justice and freedom, virtues that poets all over the world are endeavoring to voice and deliver using the beauty and power of poetry.
Please sign the petition and share it with like-minded friends.
First signatories:
Michael Rothenberg, Terri Carrion cofounders 100 Thousand Poets for Change
Michael McClure, Poet/ Playwright, USA
Sam Hamill, Poets Against War, USA
Sarah Browning, Split This Rock, USA
PEN American Center
Code Pink
Abraham Entin-Move To Amend Sonoma County, founder
Susan Lamont-Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County, coordinator
Philip Levine, United States Poet Laureate (2011-2012)
Ron Silliman, Poet/Silliman's Blog
Alice Walker, USA
Pina Piccolo, 100 Thousand Poets for Change-Bologna
Roberto Malini, Genoa, Italy
Naomi Shihab Nye, USA
Sergio Rotino, Italy
Adam Vaccaro, Milanocosa, Italy
Steed Gamero, Peru/Italy
Rebeca Covaciu, Italy
Alessandro Brusa, Italy
Shailja Patel, USA/Kenya
El Habib Louai, Morocco
Natalia Molebatsi, Azania
raphael d’abdon, Azania/Italy
Jack Hirschman, San Francisco, USA
Agneta Falk-Hirschman, San Francisco, USA
Gabor Gyukics, Budapest, Hungary
Karam Youssef, Cairo, Egypt
Kristaq Shabani, President of the I.A.P.W.A "Pegasi" Albania
Robert Priest, Toronto, Canada
Eliot Katz, Hoboken, New York, USA
Lance Henson, Cheyenne/USA
Ipat Ciuraro, Italy
Fabio Petronelli, Italy
Alexéi Tellerías Díaz, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Betty Esperanza, Montreal, Canada
Alfredo Gonzalez-Baranquilla, Colombia
Nana Nestoros,Volos, Greece
Mariposa de la Rocio, Montevideo, Uruguay
Chapal Saha-Bogra, Bangladesh
Bart Plantenga, The Netherlands
Elliis Ebakor, Nigeria
Pilar Rodríguez Aranda, Mexico City, Mexico
Dean Johnson, Birkenhead, United Kingdom Songwriter/Playwright
Karim Metref, Italy
Antar Mohamed Marincola, 100 Thousand Poets for Change-Bologna, Italy
Mohamed Malih, Italy
Gassid Babilonia, 100 Thousand Poets for Change-Bologna, Italy
Paul Polansky, Serbia
Ed Warner-Poesia, Italy
Marina Mazzolani, 100 Thousand Poets for Change-Bologna, Italy
Patricia Quezada, 100 Thousand Poets for Change- Bologna, Italy
Andrea Garbin, poesiadalsottosuolo, Italy
Chris Abani, USA
Martín Espada, USA
Teresa Mei Chuc, USA
Marcia Lynx Qualey, Cairo, Egypt
Khaled Mattawa, poet USA/Libya
Fady Joudah, USA
Glenys Robinson, UK/Italy
Mitko Gogov, Strumica, Macedonia
RootsAction
Dennis Formento, New Orleans, LA, USA
Carolyn Forché, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA
Patricia Smith, USA
Dear Mr. President, About Killing Children . . .
President Barak Obama
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
Thank you for expressing your grief over the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Your eloquence touched me and, I am sure, most Americans as we try to come to terms with this latest tragedy. I was particularly struck by your mention of how you and Michelle will hug your daughters more closely, and tell them you love them. It is obvious that you feel deeply the senseless killing of these children and school staff. You spoke as a man and as the president of a nation in shock.
While listening to your remarks, I could not help thinking about Tuesday mornings at the White House when you meet with your staff to discuss who to add to your list of people to be assassinated by US airborne drones. I could not help thinking of those men and women, and sometimes children, who are caught up in your policy of killing people you perceive as enemies of this country. I wonder if you think of them with children or parents they hug. I want to believe you think killing these people will protect people in this country. If you do, you are wrong.
Just as I cannot imagine the pain and anger of those parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook, so too I cannot fathom the reaction of the loved ones of those killed by the drones you let loose in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines. I suspect that they react in ways very similar to the people in Newton, Connecticut. Many of them probably want to avenge the deaths. Who else will die in the US and abroad as a reaction to the assassinations you have warranted?
You clearly, and rightly, feel for the lost lives in Newton; those children were cut off before their precious lives could be fully lived. Do not the people you intend to kill, and the people who happen to be near them and die, also have precious lives? Do you have a hierarchy of precious lives; are there those whose lives are somehow less precious and not worthy of your human feeling? Might that kind of hierarchy also exist for those you target? If so, how do you propose to end this cycle of death?
Yours truly,
Vermont Action for Peace
Producer & Host - Gathering Peace
WGDR 91.1 FM WGDH 91.7 FM
www.wgdr.org
Putting the Hammer Down on Guns
By Gar Smith / Environmentalists Against War
"Today is not the day for a debate on gun control."
-- Presidential Spokesman Jay Carney
Note to Jay Carney: "If not now, when?"
Twenty children, ages 5 to 10, are mercilessly gunned down in the protected sanctuary of their Connecticut schoolroom and this does not call for a public debate? Is the US Gun Lobby really so powerful that the White House spokesperson feels his first duty is to call for a ban on public debate -- instead of a ban on the very weapons that created this tragedy?
January 21st Drone Protest at the Inauguration
In DC during the inauguration, join us to say no to the wars which continue under Obama, and are increasingly being fought using drone!!
January 11th: Shut Down Guantanamo
For eleven years now, hundreds of men have languished at Guantanamo prison.
Join us to demand its immediate closure NOW!
The World Can't Wait Needs You
by Debra Sweet, Director of World Can't Wait. I imagine that if Mitt Romney would have won, this e-mail would be very different. In fact, while the crimes being committed would likely be the same, millions of people would be starting to act in opposition once more.
We could imagine the street protest, and people knocking on our office door, calling in, sending in donations, and e-mailing asking what they could do to stop Romney's targeted assassinations, killing and maiming children using drones, indefinite detention here and abroad, or his criminalizing whistle blowers and activists. Instead there is a new wind of passivity, a cold chill in the air. We know many good people who care about what is happening here and around the world. Many of them still feel the "worse" option was prevented and we need to get back to business as usual.
Write to Bradley Manning in prison. He's there for all of us:
Commander, HHC USAG
Attn. PFC Bradley Manning
239 Sheridan Ave. Bldg. 417
JBN-HH VA 22211
The Original Abolitionists
If you're like me, there are some things you would like to abolish. My list includes war, weapons, fossil fuel use, plutocracy, corporate personhood, health insurance corporations, poverty wages, poverty, homelessness, factory farming, prisons, the drug war, the death penalty, nuclear energy, the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandering, electronic voting machines, murder, rape, child abuse, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. I could go on. I bet you can think of at least one institution you believe we'd be better off without.
All of us, then, can almost certainly learn a thing or two from the men and women in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England who abolished first the slave trade and then slavery within the British empire. I highly recommend watching a film about them called "Amazing Grace." If you like it, you'll love a book called "Bury the Chains."
You'll discover that this was in many ways the original activist movement. It created activist committees, with chapters, newsletters, posters, speaking tours, book tours, petitioning, boycotts of products, theatrical props, and investigative journalism -- pioneering all of these now familiar tactics. It achieved great success without voting, as only a tiny fraction of the population could vote. That, in itself, should be a lesson to those who believe elections are the only tool available.
The abolition movement had stamina. Looking back, its gains appear stunningly swift. At the end of the 1700s the world was dominated by slavery. Slavery was the norm. Before the end of the 1800s it had been outlawed almost everywhere. Yet, those who worked night and day against the current of their times to create the abolition movement faced endless defeats. Many of the hardest working activists didn't live to see the final success. And yet they kept working. That too may be a lesson for us.
A war between England and France halted progress, and could have stopped it cold. But the war ended, and the movement was revived -- in large part with a new cast of characters, a younger generation of radicals. Freezing all forward momentum for wars has been the rule over the ages. It's a hard lesson for us to face, as we've now accepted that we live in an era of permanent war. The difficult truth may be that we must escape that era if we are to make headway on numerous fronts.
When the abolition movement sprang into being in England, it was a moral movement demanding rights -- but, unlike most movements we've seen -- demanding rights for other people. The Britons were not demanding their own freedom. In fact, they were willing to make sacrifices, to risk a reduction in their own prosperity, and to boycott the use of slave-grown sugar. This is a useful fact in an age when we are often told that people can only care about themselves. Never mind the dead Afghans and Pakistanis, we're advised, just make sure that Americans know the financial cost of the wars. Perhaps that advice can be questioned after all.
However, Adam Hochschild, the author of "Bury the Chains," believes that Britons were able to appreciate the evil of the slave trade because of their own experience with the practice of naval impressment. That is to say, because they themselves lived in fear of being kidnapped and enslaved by the British Navy and forced to sail naval vessels around the world, and in fear of their loved ones meeting that fate, they were able to imagine the misery of Africans living in fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the West Indies.
Where might this insight lead us? Americans do face random senseless gun violence. Can we appreciate the evil of a drone buzzing over a village and then blowing up a family because we know that our shopping mall or school could soon be the scene of mass murder? Americans have also been taught to fear foreign terrorism. Can we appreciate the need to stop funding foreign terrorism in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, foreign terrorism carried out by the U.S. military?
We do have another tool available to us. We can make use of video, audio, and instantaneous reporting on the victims of war or other evils. Perhaps, understanding that morality can move people, we will figure out a better way to communicate what needs to be abolished. The original abolitionists did not have this ability.
The original abolitionists made great use of newspapers and books which -- unlike those in France and other nations that failed to develop a similar mass movement -- were completely uncensored. (We come back to the need to abolish our corporate media cartel.) The original abolitionists benefitted from the egalitarian organizing of the Quakers, at whose meeting any man or woman could speak -- although they were remarkably slow to make use of the voices of freed slaves who could have spoken of slavery first-hand, and who eventually did so to great effect.
The movement to abolish the slave trade was aimed at Parliament. It did not demand freedom or rights for blacks. It threatened the livelihood of ship captains but not of the wealthy whose investments were in the plantations across the sea. The movement persuaded MPs of just enough to pass the legislation desired -- and even less, as abolitionists slipped through Parliament a bill designed to damage the slave trade but not advertised that way or understood by its opponents until the vote had been taken.
The movement was launched in 1787 and by 1807 had outlawed the slave trade. By August 1, 1838, all slaves in the British empire were free.
The slaves themselves heard of these efforts, of course, and their own struggles for freedom may have done more than anything else to win the day. The rebellions in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Jamaica, and elsewhere had a significant impact on British thinking about slavery. In fact, the first generation of abolitionists, now aging, failed to keep pace with public sentiment. Their proposals for a slow and gradual end to slavery had to make way for the demand of immediate emancipation advanced by younger men and the now very active groups of women. And ultimately a reform bill had to be passed to somewhat democratize the government before the popular demand for slavery's abolition could be answered.
Compensated Emancipation
Activists were somewhat disappointed when Parliament chose to compensate slave owners for the liberation of their slaves. The slaves themselves were, of course, not compensated. They had little but hard times ahead.
But the compensation of slave owners offered a model that might have served the United States better than bloody civil war. During the American revolutionary war, the British had recruited slaves to fight on their side by promising them freedom. After the war, slave owners, including George Washington, demanded their slaves back. A British commander, General Sir Guy Carleton, refused. Thousands of freed slaves were transported from New York to Nova Scotia to avoid their re-enslavement. But Carleton did promise to compensate the slaves' owners, and Washington settled for that.
The original British abolitionists, including Thomas Clarkson, greatly influenced Americans like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas Douglass. But few picked up on the idea of compensated emancipation, which had not originated with the abolitionists.
Elihu Burritt was an exception. From 1856 to 1860 he promoted a plan to prevent a U.S. civil war through compensated emancipation, or the purchase and liberation of slaves by the government, following the example that the English had set in the West Indies. Burritt traveled constantly, all over the country, speaking. He organized a mass convention that was held in Cleveland. He lined up prominent supporters. He edited newsletters. He behaved, in other words, like Clarkson and many an activist since.
And Burritt was right. Britain had freed its slaves without a civil war or a slave rebellion on the scale that was possible. Russia had freed its serfs without a war. Slave owners in the U.S. South would almost certainly have preferred a pile of money to five years of hell, the deaths of loved ones, the burning and destruction of their property, and the uncompensated emancipation that followed, not to mention the century and a half of bitter resentment that followed that. And not only the slave owners would have preferred the way of peace; it's not as if they did the killing and dying.
Virginia
When a former slave found his voice in London, told his story in a best-selling book, filled debating halls, and became a leader in the movement to free all others, he was a man who had been a slave in my home state of Virginia. His name was Olaudah Equiano. He was one of, if not the first, black to speak publicly in Britain. He did as much to end the slave trade as anyone, and it might have gone on considerably longer without him.
I've never seen a monument or memorial in Virginia to Equiano. In contrast, just down the street from my house in Charlottesville is a tree called Tarleton's Oak. Next to it is a gas station by the same name. The tree is not old, having been planted to replace an enormous aging oak that I recall seeing. Under that one, supposedly, during the revolution, British troops camped. They were led by a young officer named Banastre Tarleton. He later got himself into Parliament, and there was no more obnoxious defender of the slave trade than he. Africans themselves, he maintained, did not object in the least to being enslaved. Tarleton lied at tremendous length without a hint of shame. His memory we mark, not Equiano's.
Talk Nation Radio: Erica Chenoweth on the Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
Erica Chenoweth is co-author with Maria J. Stephan of "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict." Their research finds that nonviolent action works against tyrannical rule with a higher success rate than violence and with longer-lasting results. Their book has received the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, as well as the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, which the American Political Science Association gives annually to the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year. Listeners to Talk Nation Radio can pick up the newly-released paperback at a 30% discount from http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15682-0/why-civil-resistance-works by using the discount code WHYCHE. Learn more at http://ericachenoweth.com
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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On Torture Memo Authors John Yoo & Jay Bybee
by San Francisco World Can't Wait. "Let them die and decrease the surplus population." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Scrooge and Company torture health care.The Berkeley Federalist Society has assigned Torture Memo author John Yoo(yes, the guy who defines severe pain amounting to torture as that occasioned by "serious physical injury, such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions") to make the case against what has come to be termed 'Obamacare'.
Thursday, January 10 at 12:40 pm, Boalt Hall, Room 105
on the eve of the 11 year anniversary of Guantanamo.
Almost three years ago Truthout noted that while it may seem like a
stretch to talk about health care and torture in the same breath, there is
a direct link between the two issues. Indeed, it was a Medicare benefits
statute and other health care provisions that were used to form the basis
People of Detroit Seek United Nations Protection
What: UN Human Rights Day Press Conference
When: 12/10/2012, 4:30 PM
Where: Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (2 Woodward Avenue Detroit, MI 48226)
Contact: Elena Herrada
Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities
PREAMBLE
Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not self-enforcing,
Whereas statement of the inherent dignity and of the equal and supposedly inalienable rights of all members of the human family achieves little without a struggle against greed, injustice, tyranny, and war,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights could not have resulted in the barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of humankind without the cowardice, laziness, apathy, and blind obedience of well-meaning but unengaged spectators,
Whereas proclaiming as the highest aspiration of the common people the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want doesn't actually produce such a world,
Whereas nonviolent rebellion against tyranny and oppression must be a first resort rather than a last, and must be our constant companion into the future if justice and peace are to be achieved and maintained,
Whereas governments do not reliably conduct themselves humanely toward other nations' governments or peoples unless compelled to do so by their own people and the people of the world,
Whereas a common understanding of human rights and freedoms is false if it omits the eternal vigilance, struggle, and sacrifice necessary to create and maintain them,
Now, Therefore we proclaim THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES as a common standard of practice for all people, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by energetic use of creative nonviolence to promote the actual observance of what have never been but indeed should be made universal, equal, and inalienable rights and freedoms,
Article 1.
- Human beings are born into every variety and degree of freedom and oppression, privilege and poverty, peace and war. All have a responsibility to work for the betterment of the condition of those around them and those less well off.
Article 2.
- Everyone is obligated to work at building understanding and equality across lines of race, color, sex, ethnicity, sexual-orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, and birth or other status. Everyone is obligated to actively reject the privileging of or discriminating against any such group, whether their own or others', with no exceptions created by the presence of or participation in war.
Article 3.
- Everyone has the responsibility to help organize and take part in resistance to any violation of anyone's right to life, liberty or security of person, whether that violation impacts a single individual or a large number, but in particular including resistance to war of any kind.
Article 4.
- Everyone has a responsibility to work for the swift elimination of slavery and servitude in all their forms.
Article 5.
- Everyone has a responsibility to expose any instance of torture or of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or of any conspiracy to facilitate such acts, and a responsibility to work to end these practices and to prosecute those responsible in a fair and open court of law.
Article 6.
- Everyone has a responsibility to work and to sacrifice something of their own comfort to ensure that every other human being is afforded equal recognition as a person before the law.
Article 7.
- All are obliged to actively oppose any discrimination in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
- Everyone has the responsibility to insist upon, for themselves and all others, an effective remedy by the competent local, national, or international tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 9.
- Everyone has a responsibility to treat the arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile, of anyone else as though it were that of themselves or a loved one.
Article 10.
- Everyone has a responsibility to understand and require for every human being the right to full equality and to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of their rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against them.
Article 11.
- (1) Everyone is obligated to ensure for anyone charged with a penal offense the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which they have had all the guarantees necessary for their defense.
- (2) Everyone is obligated to ensure that no one shall be held guilty of any penal offense on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offense, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed, and that no heavier penalty shall be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offense was committed.
Article 12.
- All are responsible for not taking part in and for working to eliminate and to legally prohibit any arbitrary interference with anyone's privacy, family, home or correspondence, or attacks upon their honor and reputation.
Article 13.
- (1) Everyone has the responsibility to protect everyone's freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
- (2) Everyone has the responsibility to protect everyone's right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country.
Article 14.
- Everyone has the responsibility to protect for all the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution but not from prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes.
Article 15.
- Everyone has the responsibility to protect for all the right to a nationality and the right to change that nationality.
Article 16.
- All are obliged to protect the right of free and fully consenting adults to marry.
Article 17.
- All are obliged to defend the right of all others to own property.
Article 18.
- Everyone has the responsibility to protect freedom of thought for all.
Article 19.
- Every human being has a duty to help communicate to others to the greatest extent possible information about injustice and war, and information about nonviolent efforts to achieve justice and peace. This duty includes a responsibility to work for the creation of meaningful freedom of the press in which the communication of neither current events nor history is dominated or controlled by any privileged group within a society.
Article 20.
- Everyone has the responsibility to frequently exercise or attempt nonviolently to exercise the right to peaceful assembly and association in opposition to injustice or war, and in support of the rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 21.
- Everyone has the responsibility to work for the creation and maintenance of democratic and/or representative government uncorrupted by bribery of any form, by an unfree press, or by arbitrary restrictions on participation as electoral candidates or voters.
Article 22.
- Everyone has a responsibility to struggle nonviolently to alter the political and economic world so as to increase the opportunity for every human being to live, learn, and work in dignity with security from fear and want.
Article 23.
- Everyone has the responsibility to work with others to ensure the protection of one and all to a free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, to protection against unemployment, to the freedom to join a trade union and to strike, to equal pay for equal work, and to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for themselves and their family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Article 24.
- Everyone has the responsibility to work not only at their primary career but also for the betterment of society and the establishment of the rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 25.
- Everyone has the responsibility to work for a more just and less wasteful distribution of resources to ensure that one's own and all future generations can provide every single human being, including every child, a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood.
Article 26.
- Everyone has the responsibility to assist in the education of themselves and others and to work toward the provision of free, high-quality education, including education in civil responsibilities and the history of social change through people's movements, education directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, education that promotes understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and education that furthers the creation and maintenance of peace.
Article 27.
- Everyone has the responsibility to defend and exercise the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits, and the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which they are the author.
Article 28.
- Everyone has the responsibility to organize, agitate, sacrifice, and struggle nonviolently and strategically for sustainable environmental practices, demilitarization, the development of democratic and representative structures of government, and the realization of the rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Bradley Manning, Shakar Aamer, Andy Worthington & Guantanamo, Drones
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by Debra Sweet,Director, The World Can't Wait
Tuesday, we gave you a sense of how much World Can't Wait is appreciated for our role in sticking to principle, and supporting others who do. Today, I want to shout-out to some of the many who show courage and fortitude in the effort to show the rest of the world that there are people living in this country who don't go along with the program of war and repression. I'm concentrating today on people who expose and resist U.S. wars, drone strikes, and indefinite detention.  First, and in a class by himself, is Bradley Manning: |
Talk Nation Radio: Michael McPhearson and Michael Eisenscher on Jobs Not Wars
A coalition of groups has launched a new campaign at http://jobs-not-wars.org
Talk Nation Radio speaks with national coordinator of U.S. Labor Against the War Michael Eisenscher and national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice Michael McPhearson, who is also a board member of Veterans For Peace.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Embed on your own site with this code:
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Books for Loved Ones
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Budget Day Protest -- Cut War Not Welfare: Scrap Trident
Wednesday 5 December 6pm-7pm
Downing Street London
The government's savage austerity policies have cut tens of billions from the public and welfare services, hitting millions of the most vulnerable people, whether it be the disabled, the unemployed or the poor. Health, education and transport services are under huge pressure from government to implement deep cuts in provision.
But chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne is not satisfied. He has signalled he will be cutting tens of billions more from services in his budget announcement on Wednesday 5 December.
One cut he will not be announcing is in the buget for war and for Britain's pointless Trident nuclear missile system. The Afghanistan war -- which everyone knows is futile and lost -- is costing around £6 billion a year. The yearly maintenance costs for Trident are £2.2 billion a year. The cost of renewing the Trident system -- which this gvernment is committed to do -- would cost up to £130 billion. Two aircraft carriers are being built at a cost of £7 billion. Then there's the £15 billion to be spent buying 150 F-35 jets from the US, each of which will cost £85 million plus an extra £16 million for the engine.
Osborne won't mention a word about war expenditure in his budget speech on Wednesday 5 December, because that is one area of public expendidute which is never subjected to cuts.
Which is why Stop the War and CND will join other anti-austerity groups to protest outside George Osborne's home in Downing Street, London, from 6pm - 7pm. Do join us, if you can.
56 Organizations Band Together to Fight Austerity Measures
Jobs Not Wars Campaign: 56 Organizations Band Together to Fight Austerity Measures & Demand Cuts to Runaway Pentagon Spending
Tax payer dollars have been misallocated – we need a new set of priorities. Cut billions from runaway Pentagon spending, end war now, corporations and the wealthy need to pay their fair share. It is unnecessary and criminal to shift the deficit burden onto working and middle class families, the elderly and poor.
Tell Your Congress Member to Sign Lee's Letter to Obama Urging End to War on Afghanistan
Join Bipartisan Letter to President Obama Urging Accelerated End to War in Afghanistan
From: The Honorable Barbara Lee
Sent By: @mail.house.gov
Date: 11/30/2012
Join Bipartisan Letter to President Obama
Urging Accelerated End to War in Afghanistan
Deadline Extended: Wednesday, Dec. 5
Current signers (70): Lee, Jones, McGovern, Adam Smith, Conyers, Grijalva, Kucinich, Woolsey, Holt, Rangel, Slaughter, DeFazio, Olver, Watt, Hanabusa, Rick Larsen, Campbell, Velazquez, Serrano, Sires, Honda, Rush, Loebsack, Lujan, Tsongas, Ellison, Barney Frank, Welch, Schakowsky, Blumenauer, Chu, Quigley, Christensen, John Lewis, Chris Murphy, Mike Thompson, Sarbanes, Markey, McDermott, Towns, Richardson, Cohen, Farr, Waters, Nadler, Stark, Norton, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Michaud, Hahn, Gutierrez, Braley, Speier, McDermott, Yvette Clarke, Garamendi, Moore, Alcee Hastings, Bonamici, Kaptur, Pingree, Edwards, Bass, Polis, Lofgren, Tierney, George Miller, John Duncan, Hank Johnson, Keating, Capps, Cicilline.
Dear Colleague,
Yesterday the Senate passed an amendment by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) by an overwhelming bipartisan 62-33 majority calling for an accelerated end to the war in Afghanistan. I invite you to read this AP article analyzing this groundbreaking vote.
The momentum to end the war and bring our troops home is building, but there are still those working to prolong the war. With the Pentagon due to present alternate long-term option on Afghanistan to the President in the coming weeks, it is critical that Congress catch up with the American people who have long realized that there is no military solution in Afghanistan.
We invite you to become a co-signer to the letter below to President Obama, calling for an accelerated end to the war in Afghanistan. The overwhelming majority of Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, believe it is time to bring a responsible end to the war in Afghanistan.
To join as a co-signer, please contact Teddy Miller in Rep. Lee’s office at 5-2661 or @mail.house.gov.
Thank you,
Barbara Lee Walter Jones
Member of Congress Member of Congress
December 5, 2012
The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
Your military advisors will soon be providing you with a set of military options in Afghanistan. We are writing to urge you to pursue a strategy in Afghanistan that best serves the interests of the American people and our brave troops on the ground. That strategy is simple: an accelerated withdrawal to bring to an end the decade-long war as soon as can safely and responsibly be accomplished.
After 10 years and almost $600 billion spent, over 2,000 American lives lost, and 18,000 wounded - it is time to accelerate the transition to full Afghan control. While NATO and Afghan National Security Forces have made considerable strides, no military strategy exists and morale has been undermined by the proliferation of “Green on Blue” attacks. Sixty coalition soldiers have been killed this year alone by their Afghan allies. To quote a former Commandant of the Marine Corps, “When our friends turn out to be our enemy, it is time to pull the plug.”
This is one issue that overwhelmingly unifies Americans: the desire to bring the war in Afghanistan to an accelerated close. Polls show over two-thirds of Americans, on a bipartisan basis, believe it is past time to end our combat role and bring the troops home.
We write to request that you respond to the consensus amongst military experts, diplomats, and the American people. It is time to announce an accelerated transition of security responsibility to the Afghan government and to bring our troops home as soon as can be safely and responsibly accomplished.
Al Qaeda’s presence has been greatly diminished and Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to the United States. There can be no military solution in Afghanistan. It is past time for the United States to allow the Afghanistan government to assume responsibility for its own security.
While many of us would prefer an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan starting today, there is broad recognition that the primary objectives have been completed. We also would like to remind you that any long term security agreement committing U.S. troops to the defense of Afghanistan must have congressional approval to be binding. In addition, we would like to request a meeting to discuss these issues directly with you and your staff.
We look forward to working with you.
Citizens Are Winning the Battle Over Cops and Cameras
By John Grant
Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Arizona, was walking in Times Square on a cold night in November and came across a New York City police officer giving a barefoot homeless man a pair of all-weather boots he had purchased out of his own pocket. Moved, she took out her cell phone and snapped a picture.
Congress Plans to Work Less Next Year, Making Planning for Protesters Easier
If you want to nonviolently shut down Congress next year, you'll more than likely find Congress not at home, unless you plan ahead. Here's their "work" schedule:
http://www.democraticwhip.gov/sites/default/files/2013Calendar.pdf
CNN Losing Bradley Manning Story: Manning Was Reporting a War Crime, "The Van Thing"
You could have knocked me over with a feather that the major media was talking about the Bradley Manning trial at all, after years of being confined to the progressive Internet, but although it is important for Manning's treatment in virtual isolation be a focus, the real story is being ignored. One of the reasons Bradley Manning is where he is in the first place, is because he was reporting a war crime.
No matter what Manning's treatment, many Americans, not always the most big-hearted people, will believe Manning deserved every bit of it unless context is provided. The CNN reports on the trial which have run so far delve no deeper than his complaints about being forced to stand naked, not being allowed to sleep, and being harassed under a bogus "suicide watch" by being asked every five minutes "are you okay?"
Johan Galtung Workshop with Diane Perlman, PhD: Obama’s Second-Term: A US Policy of Peace?
A Solution-Oriented Policy Think Tank
Effective strategies for Israel-Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, The Americas, The Koreas
Friday, November 30, 2012 11 :00 AM – 5:00 PM
Search for Common Ground 4th floor 1601 Connecticut Ave., NW, Dupont Metro North Exit
11:00 – 1:30 Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Six State Solution - lunch included $50/Students $40
2:00 – 5:00 Afghanistan, Iran, The Americas, The Koreas $40/Students $30
Full Day $75 Students/$50
Coffee, light vegetarian lunch, snacks included
Valuable for congressional staff, policy analysts, conflict analysis professionals, press
& students
* Learn the Transcend Method, a solution-oriented approach to analysis of conflict dynamism
* Explore strategies for reducing tension and reversing cycles of violence and retaliation
* Develop constructive approaches to addressing basic human needs, legitimate goals, and just grievances
* Explore creative, outside-the-box strategies to break deadlocks and transform protracted conflicts
* Dialogue about ways of integrating these productive approaches into the current think tank culture
* Consider possibilities for Obama’s second term, with new congress and new political culture
* Apply knowledge to current conflicts
* Learn about Galtung’s proposal for a Six State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, modeled after the European Community, and an OSCME – Organization for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East
* Understand paradoxical nature of coercive policies, Galtung’s “naïve theory of sanctions”
* Design policies capable of producing stability and enduring security
Dr. Johan Galtung is a pioneer and principal founder of the field of Peace and Conflict Transformation research. He is the founder and co-director of Transcend, an International Peace, Development, Environment Network, http://www.transcend.
RSVP Contact Diane Perlman, PhD by email or phone, dianeperlman@gmail.com, 202 775 0777. Name, email, phone # affiliation. Pay at door. Checks or cash only (no credit cards) Transcend University Press Books by Dr. Galtung with be available for purchase and signing http://www.transcend.
Neither Grand, Nor a Bargain
Liberal groups have been organizing protests of the looming "grand bargain" (a bargain between two political parties aimed at saving us from the fictional "fiscal cliff" by giving more of our money to the super-rich and the war machine). But they've been doing so only in Republican Congressional districts and with messages placing all the blame on "the Republicans," thus telegraphing the message that all shall be tolerated if labeled "Democratic."
We're supposed to be against a bargain, but only against one of the two partners to the bargain. Any bets on how well that'll work?
Meanwhile Obama's senior advisor David Plouffe hypes the danger of the "fiscal cliff," calls for lower corporate taxes and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but says not one word about military spending. He also claims to want to end tax cuts for the wealthy but is much more passionate about the danger of ending those cuts across the board, suggesting -- as did Obama's statements and silences at his first post-election press conference -- that the White House will not in the end refuse to extend the "Bush" tax cuts for everyone, including the multi-billionaires -- just as it's done before. At the same press conference, Obama volunteered that we need "deficit reduction that includes entitlement changes."
Liberal groups have written to the president politely suggesting what they'd like, but with nothing in the way of consequences if they don't get it. And what they'd like is slightly higher taxes on the super-rich, and no cuts to Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. Or else . . . or else . . . they'll be sadly loyal until death do them part.
Neither Plouffe nor Obama nor any liberal activist group mentions that half of discretionary spending goes into war preparations. None proposes to raise corporate taxes, restore the estate tax, remove the cap on Social Security taxes, tax financial transactions and capital gains, tax carbon emissions, massively and urgently invest in green energy jobs, or cut the $1.3 trillion war preparations budget in half.
We are not broke. We are being robbed.
I get emails every day now on the "This isn't what we voted for" theme. "TPP is not what we voted for." "Drone kills are not what we voted for." As if you can ignore the candidate's platform and vote for your own fantasy under his name, and then "pressure" him to become what you fantasized even while swearing your allegiance to his party come hell or high water or hurricanes. Well, guess what, the Grand Bargain is what Democrats and Republicans voted for. But that doesn't mean we have to stand for it. Having voted against it wouldn't have stopped it. Only getting out of our houses and nonviolently resisting it now will stop it.
The peace movement is ready to take to the streets and the suites, but worried that it doesn't have the size to do the job. Of course it does have the size to start something big if it merely finds the determination. But imagine what could happen if Tahrir Square inspired us all again and more seriously, and with four years rather than two years to work with before the next debilitation by the latest "Most Important Election of Your Lifetime." Imagine if liberal organizations and labor unions openly recognized where all the public money is (in the war machine) and demanded it for useful purposes.
The peace movement is in favor of everything they're in favor of: the right to organize, civil liberties, an end to for-profit prisons and drug wars and racism, affordable housing, a living wage, education, healthcare, and a sustainable environment. The enemy of these things is the military industrial complex, and if it remains beyond challenge, a just society will remain unachievable. When Dr. King opposed "racism, extreme materialism, and militarism," he didn't mean for us to ignore the third one. He didn't mean for us to imagine that the three were separable and that we could oppose one or two of them effectively without opposing the combination.
Let's stop obediently opposing the worst bits of a Grand Catastrophe and begin denouncing and resisting the whole charade, replacing it with a grand vision of our own devising. RootsAction.org, created just last year, is already approaching 200,000 active members, and has been flooding Congress and the President with this message:
"Here's a grand bargain we want: expand Medicare and Social Security, invest in green energy, raise taxes on the rich and corporations, and cut military spending back to the level of 12 years ago."
The message is editable, meaning that you can and should add your own comments. I encourage everyone to do so, to ask friends to do so, and to be preparing for serious nonviolent action.
