August 2013

Jody Williams’ new book is called My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize, and it’s a remarkable story by a remarkable person.  It’s also a very well-told autobiography, including in the early childhood chapters in which there are few hints of the activism to come. 

One could read this book and come away thinking “Anyone really could win the Nobel Peace Prize,” if people in fact told their children they could read more

Hammer in hand, one sees nails everywhere. Successful unpunished genocide at home in hand, the Pentagon sees Indian Country on six continents.  But don’t imagine the U.S. military is finished with the original Indian Country yet, including Native American reservations and territories, and including the places where the rest of us now live.

Compare and contrast:

Exhibit 1 from the New York Times:

“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little read more

If the U.S. public began to raise a fuss about U.S. missile strikes that blow up large numbers of civilians at wedding parties abroad, it’s not beyond the realm of the imaginable that the U.S. government would begin blaming the explosions on faulty candles in the wedding cakes.  A similarly implausible excuse was used to explain the 1996 explosion of TWA flight 800 off Long Island, New York, and the U.S. public has thus far either swallowed the story whole or ignored the matter.

If you read more

I’m on my way to Madison, Wisconsin, and I hope you are too, and not just for the beer and (veggie) bratwursts.  Here are seven other good reasons:

·      The Student Power Convergence, Aug. 1-5 (ending now, but folks sticking around).

·      The Democracy Convention, Aug. 7-11.

·      The Veterans For Peace Convention, Aug. 7-11.

·      Marking the bombings read more

Video streaming by Ustream

Video streaming by Ustream

If John Kerry was beating his children and promising to stop “very very soon” and then explaining that he meant “very very soon” in a geological sense, he’d be forced to resign his office.

If we even discovered that John Kerry had once beaten one of his children, even many years ago, perhaps shortly after he returned from killing people in Vietnam, he’d be forced to resign.

Imagine if we were to discover that John Kerry was actually murdering children, read more

Remarks at the War Resisters League’s 90th Year Convention at Georgetown University, August 2, 2013.

Videos here.

Congratulations on 90 years! The War Resisters League is almost as old as the Espionage Act and may outlast it yet. 

So I sat down yesterday to think about what connects global hot spots, and the first obvious answer I thought of for a great many of them was the United States military.  By some strange coincidence numerous war-torn places on the globe have been given or read more

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