SHIMRI ZAMERET – Ordinary people can fix the broken postwar international system and deliver global justice to Palestinians and oppressed people worldwide.
Tag: Martin Luther King
It’s Time to Stop the MAD-ness!
JOHN MIKSAD – Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed 77 years ago this week. The two bombs the United States dropped on those cities killed some 200,000 human beings, most of whom were civilians. Comparing those bombs to the weapons of today is like comparing a colonial era musket to an AR-15. Now we can snuff out the lives of billions with the push of a button. When you consider the other species we’d annihilate, the number of lives lost “mushrooms” into the trillions. The result would be the destruction of a large portion of life on the planet.
Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a Capitalist Virus
ASHLEY SMITH – The COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating as the death toll climbs ever higher around the world. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews epidemiologist Rob Wallace about the global capitalist roots of the current pandemic, the likelihood of future pandemics, and the types of organized resistance necessary to prevent them.
Columbus Day in Pretend America
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – The scariest part about the legacy of Columbus, and Europe’s “Age of Discovery†— ah, the white men break out of their cage and find the rest of the world — is that it’s still alive. And while there’s a growing demand that we should dump Columbus Day as a national holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think something else is necessary as well: We need to look deeply at the legacy of Columbus and begin to own it. No more whitewash!
The Civil Rights Act of 2020
CHARLES M. BLOW – Feel-good gestures from politicians and the police shift no power. Real change lies within a system overhaul.
Can now really be the best time to be alive? A dialogue across generations
YOTAM MAROM and GEORGE LAKEY – A worried young organizer confronts a movement elder who believes that now — in the midst of deep crisis — is our best chance to make big progressive change.
What Does it Mean to Teach Peace?
ELLEN BIRKETT LINDEEN – What does it mean to teach peace and how would one do it? I think the why is obvious.
Breaking Badlands: National Park Service Goes Yugely Rogue, Insists On Pesky Facts
ABBY ZIMET – Well this is cool: Trumpian efforts to block information on climate change – ’cause who needs science and/or a planet? – have sparked fierce, creative, heart-stirring resistance by the National Park Service and its many friends, suggesting the Revolution may yet be tweeted.
Scientists Set Doomsday Clock Closer to Armageddon
ROBERT F. DODGE, M.D. – The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just announced its latest nuclear Doomsday Clock moving ahead the minute hand to three minutes till midnight. The clock represents the count down to zero in minutes to nuclear apocalypse – midnight. This significant move of two minutes is the 22nd time since its inception in 1947 that the time has been changed.
Apocalypse Now: Seriously, It’s Time for a Major Rethink About Liberal and Progressive Politics
DON HAZEN – We are losing badly to the corporate state. Here’s what we need to do.
What Would It Take to Start a Peace Army?
STEPHANIE VAN HOOK – Nonviolent Army: to many, this would seem like an unnatural contradiction. Armies are by definition violent; nonviolence is too passive and weak to be of any use in societal defense. But . . . soldiers are only conditioned to use violence, . . . and nonviolence does not mean passivity; it means active, creative courage that goes beyond refraining from consciously harming others toward building a community where everyone belongs–where no one is “other.â€
A Movement Too Big to Fail
CHRIS HEDGES – There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking.
12 Honor MLK with Arrests at Trident Protest
LEONARD EIGER – Last Saturday, January 15, the Seattle Raging Grannies set the mood for honoring Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday at the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington. Eighty three people from the Center participated in a vigil at the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale with the help of a full scale, 44 foot long, inflatable Trident D-5 missile. Each D-5 missile, deployed on Trident nuclear submarines, carries up to 8 warheads, each with an explosive yield of up to 475 kilotons. Each D-5 missile costs approximately $60 million.
It’s Time to Escalate the Peace
RANDALL AMSTER: What if they held a war and no one came? No one was out in the streets, no one paid the “big speech” much mind, no one asked for permission to protest, no one wrote an open letter to the President. No one enlisted for it, no one paid for it, and no one watched it on television.