KATHERINE HUGHES-FRAITEKH – Waging Nonviolence and Solidarity 2020 and Beyond are launching a new webinar series featuring experienced grassroots activists from a broad array of international struggles.
Tag: COVID-19
An Open Letter to the National Democratic Leadership
PETER BERGEL – In the wake of the COVID epidemic, the movement to ensure that Black Lives Matter, the inadequacies revealed in our health care system, the movement to address climate change and the growing disgust our people feel for the U.S.’s ongoing foreign wars and international bullying, the time has come for system-wide changes.
Mending the Broken Femur: Listening for Each Other’s Humanity
WIM LAVEN – We will start healing as a country, as a people as soon as we start finding the humanity in each other. We are so busy angrily shouting at each other that we have forgotten to listen; let’s take our power back, find our shared humanity, and take care of ourselves—we’ve got work to do.
OR Providence Hospital Workers Call for Livable Wages
ERIC TEGETHOFF – Health care workers at an Oregon hospital say they are rallying for livable wages. Members of the Service Employees International Union local 49 are urging Providence Hospital management in Milwaukie to complete bargaining with workers.
US and Other Arms Sales Prolong War, Yemenis’ Misery
KATHY KELLY – The cries against war in Yemen fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn–and quickly–to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The World has Loved, Hated and Envied the US. Now, for the First Time, We Pity it.
FINTAN O’TOOLE – Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
As We Focus on Racism, Don’t Forget MLK’s Two Other “Giant Triplets”
ANDREW BACEVICH – The nation’s current preoccupation with race, as honorable and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.
‘The Conversation is the Protest’ – How Black Lives Matter Forced us to Imagine a World without Police
ERIC STONER – Momentum organizer Nicole Carty discusses how the Black Lives Matter movement built consensus on racial justice and the strategy needed to make the goal of defunding police a reality.
Comparing Responses to Ebola and COVID Reveals Trump’s Mismanagement
CAROLINE HURLEY – Security, claim peace scientists, is the experience and expectation of well-being. Analyzing management of the major 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is instructive given Covid 19’s global rampage. Despite internal UN dysfunction, especially the veto system pitting members at cross-purposes, that organization proved its worth.
Can We Achieve Nuclear Adulthood?
ROBERT kOEHLER – In the linear world of geopolitics, militarism and mysteriously determined “national interest” rule and security means — though it is never put this way — playing games with Armageddon. This is called realism. And those who claim to be realists never — ever, ever — allow a word like “disarmament” into the conversation, much less into the realm of political choice.
Bernie Sanders: Big Changes Are Needed in This Land
BERNIE SANDERS – On this May Day 2020, I wanted to give you an overview of what working people are going through in this country and throughout the world and where we need to go from here.
This is a Good Time to Think About Our National Sins
MIKE FERNER – If we can expand our consciousness and compassion, we can begin to comprehend our government’s behavior in the world and come out of this pandemic demanding to be better members of the human family.
Cutting Military Spending to Fund Human Security is ‘THE LEAST’ World Leaders Must Do after Pandemic – Gorbachev
CENTER FOR CITIZEN INITIATIVES – The Covid-19 pandemic shows that governments that think of security in mostly military terms are simply wasting money, Mikhail Gorbachev has said. Defense spending must be cut globally to fund things that humanity actually needs.
Coronavirus Is a Historic Trigger Event—So Let’s See a Social Movement Rise
PAUL ENGLER – There are times in history when sudden events — natural disasters, economic collapses, pandemics, wars, famines — change everything. They change politics, they change economics and they change public opinion in drastic ways. Many social movement analysts call these “trigger events.” During a trigger event, things that were previously unimaginable quickly become reality, as the social and political map is remade
A Tale of Two Stockpiles
BRIAN TERRELL – “I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” said Dr. King. 52 years later, our very existence as a species is at risk and the radical revolution of values that he preached is our best hope.
Former UK Commanders Call for Nuclear Cuts to Address Covid-19
MOVE THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS MONEY – Three former UK Royal Navy Commanders sent a letter to all UK parliamentarians on April 1 questioning the policy of maintaining a continuous at sea nuclear deterrent. The commanders note that the £2 billion a year cost of maintaining this nuclear posture and readiness for war appear to be unjustifiable, especially as the economic costs of the coronavirus pandemic are mounting
Sanders Releases Extensive Plan to Deal with Coronavirus Crisis
BERNIE SANDERS – This is a moment that we have got to be working together and going forward together. What I wanted to do is talk about a series of proposals that we are working on and that we will introduce to the Democratic leadership about how we can best go forward.
Sanctions Against Iran Worsen a Bad Situation, Threaten Everyone
KATHY KELLY – U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. “maximum pressure” policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.