Martin and me: Spending a Night in the Concord Jail When Martin Luther King, Jr. was Assassinated

By Dave Lindorff

I never met Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., or attended a march or rally where I could hear him speak, but on the evening night of April 4, 1968, an hour or so after he was assassinated, I was in a jail cell in Concord, Mass. writing a freshman paper about King, Gandhi and Thoreau, and their shared ideas about the power of non-violent political protest.

It had all started out when I found myself blocked, unable to get started on an end-of-the-term paper for my philosophy class read more

An activist who cared: Winnie Mandela: Never Half-Stepping on the Road to Freedom

By Linn Washington, Jr.

In many ways Winnie Mandela – the iconic South African anti-apartheid activist – was the appropriate choice for keynote speaker at the historic October 1997 ‘Million Woman March’ in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Winnie Mandela, the second and best-known wife of the legendary leader Nelson Mandela, courageously confronted issues from racism to sexism, classism to capitalism. Those issues were embedded in the impetus for staging read more

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New “Long War”

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Someday, it may seem like history’s classic example of imperial overstretch. There was, after all, only one superpower left on this planet after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was challenged by… well, next to no one. Or rather by a single jihadist, his modest set of followers, and an investment of perhaps $400,000-$500,000. read more

Talk Nation Radio: Keeping the F-35 Out of Burlington

Our guest, James Marc Leas, is a Vermont attorney and a past co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Free Palestine Subcommittee. He has been a leader of a campaign to block the stationing of F-35 jets in Burlington, Vermont, and of the formation of a Vermont chapter of World Beyond War. Jimmy Leas, welcome back to Talk Nation Radio.

Petition to cancel the F-35:
https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12514

How to contact the Mayor of Burlington and politely ask him not read more

Don’t Deport Non-Veterans Either, Unless It’s Donald Trump

We’re hearing a lot about U.S. veterans being deported, just as we hear about healthcare and retirement and homelessness and countless other topics as impacting veterans in particular. The implication, and often the explicit assertion, is that we should especially care about injustice when it hurts veterans, because they’ve especially earned the right to be treated decently, by participating in the greatest mass-murdering crime sprees of recent decades — the wars that most of us (and may read more

Who Calls Anyone “Civilized?” – Cathy Breen

Photo: Building in Mosul decimated by bombing, March 2018. Abu Mohammed.

March 31, 2018

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead
read more

A crazy thought: Is Trump Going Off the Rails or Possibly Getting Back on Track?

By Dave Lindorff

            Here’s a bizarre contrarian thought — one admittedly based on limited and dubious evidence and that flies in the face of a more than a year’s contrary evidence, and that is more along the lines of a desperate hope than reality, but what the hell. Bear with me:

read more

            Suppose for a moment that President Donald Trump, a narcissistic man of little intellect read more