Against robbery: unity of “opposites” – March 13, 2011 (SOAPBOX #90) – Cindy brings you “two-fers” featuring 1) “conservative”
Audio: Karen Kwiatkowski and David Swanson on Cindy Sheehan's Radio Show Read More »
It’s a simple point, but an important one, and one that gets overlooked. Whether or not you think a particular war is moral and good, the fact remains that war is illegal. Actual defense by a country when attacked is legal, but that only occurs once another country has actually attacked, and it must not be used as a loophole to excuse wider war that is not employed in actual defense.
Needless to say, a strong moral argument can be made for preferring the rule of law to the law of rulers.
War Is Illegal – Even in Libya Read More »
Sunday, March 20th
2-4 p.m.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
http://www.wpc.org
Pennsylvania Ave. & North Rodney Street
Wilmington, DE
Sponsored by Pacem in Terris
David Swanson & Dahlia Wasfi & Dave Lindorff
Dave Lindorff is a veteran investigative reporter, author of “The Case for Impeachment,” founding editor of the online newspaper ThisCantBeHappening! and is a regular columnist at Counterpunch and Truthout. He will speak on “Afghanistan:
Be in Wilmington, DE, on 3/20 Read More »
Letter to Editor
Thanks for you excellent review of David Goldfield’s argument that the Civil War was unnecessary and pointing out that every other nation that ended slavery did it without a civil war. Goldfield is right that we must get our view of past wars right if we are to avoid future ones.
One way in which our views must change is away from the worldview that allowed you to print this sentence: “The Civil War is still the most costly war we’ve ever waged in terms of loss
Letter to the Daily Progress Read More »
Dear Friend/Supporter
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox wants to extend our deepest sympathy with the people of Japan after the quake and tsunami last week. We also fervently hope that Japan does not suffer another nuclear disaster.
Why nuclear power plants are built on or near fault lines when it is a very filthy energy, anyway, is beyond belief!
The president of this country is pro-nuclear power and pro-off shore drilling. All of the billions of dollars in damage, loss
Listen to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox this Sunday Read More »
Dave Swanson joins Coy to discuss the latest on the outcry in Wisconsin over cuts to collective bargaining rights and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder seeking emergency powers.
Audio: Wisconsin and Michigan Discussed by Coy Barefoot and David Swanson Read More »
Michigan governors aren’t breaking entirely new ground in the ongoing U.S. collapse into fascism. Sure, they’ll be able to overthrow local elected governments and install cronies and corporations to rule over Americans without the pretense of public servants mediating. But the president of the United States can already do that to the entire country. I wonder if anyone remembers these lines from Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment for George W. Bush:
“In
Michigan Fascism Not New in DC Read More »
Wouldn’t it be kind and generous of us to send the US or NATO or a UN-approved military into Libya to bloodlessly prevent the vicious slaughter of masses of people by a truly evil lunatic?
Would it?
In a study called “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examined major uses of violence and nonviolence against tyrannical governments around the world between 1900 and 2006. They found that violence succeeded 26 percent of the time. I think they were taking
Kindness, Generosity, and Bombing Libya Read More »
A quick glossary:
Partisan: a loyal supporter of the Democratic, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or other party, whether through ignorance or willingness to compromise.
Independent: an isolated member of the majority.
Bipartisan: a subspecies of the Democratic Partisan native to Washington, D.C.
Nonpartisan: someone content with no representation in exchange for no taxation.
Antipartisan: One who would transfer power from parties to people.
Transpartisan: an American interested in introducing humanity
You Might Be a Transpartisan If . . . Read More »
Most people are just living along
Humming a song
Trying to get by
A gleam or a tear in their eye
But they’re not helping push the world back the other way
Yet there will come a day
And maybe it’s this one
When every shoulder joins in
And then the world begins again
But this time — damn it — we’re in charge of the production
And we’re writing the script
And if you’ve slipped we’ll help
Who's Running This Hallucination? Read More »
Brilliant and humane playwright Karen Malpede has produced another play that grabs this country by the lapels, shakes it, caresses its cheek, and kicks its ass. The play is called “Another Life” and the life it leaves me thinking about is the life of our dreams.
The play is not so much a national nightmare or a national fantasy as a surreal reproduction of the mixture of horrors and hopes that most dreaming is: the most gruesome and graphic and taboo of our collective fears without
Another Life Focuses This One Read More »
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that other nations are doing a better job of propagandizing the world and that the United States needs to do more. However, we already invest far more in foreign propaganda than in domestic public media, and virtually nothing in domestic media trust busting. The distinction between our domestic and foreign public media is part of what makes them both so weak in credibility (the other part is the size of the lies they tell), and Bob McChesney is
Clinton Wants More Propaganda; I Want Less Read More »
War is a crime.
Joining an ongoing war is a crime.
Joining on the side of a friendly lunatic dictator is an immoral tragedy.
Joining on the side of violent rebels who capture and expel British troops there to “help” is an immoral comedy.
Joining on the side of our own nation would be opposed by both of the existing sides plus our own nation.
Limited warfare is limited murder.
Limited warfare almost always traverses the limits.
The military
People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain an op-ed full of documented lies and published last Friday over the byline of two Democratic senators, Carl Levin and Jack Reed?
The headline was “The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs.”
Manchurian Senators Read More »
Statistically speaking, virtually nobody in the United States of America knows that we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined, that we could eliminate most of our military and still have the world’s largest, that over half of the money our government raises from income taxes and borrowing gets spent on the military, that our wars (outrageously costly as they may be) cost far less than the permanent non-war military budget, or that most of the financial woes of the
People v. U.S. Govt. Read More »
Sweden banned censorship and guaranteed free speech in 1766, 10 years before the Declaration of Independence in the American British colonies, and — apart from shameful episodes of caving in to dictatorships and Nazis — has pretty well kept it in place.
Sweden banned the death penalty and has not used it since 1910.
Now, Sweden has an opportunity to punish the speech of a Nobel Peace Prize nominee with the death penalty by extraditing Julian Assange to the United States to be put on
Will Sweden Kill Assange? Read More »
There’s a video available online that has created quite a scandal this week. It shows a fashion designer in Paris telling someone he loves Hitler and that their mothers and forefathers would have all been gassed to death.
I think the staying power of Hitlerian madness is more easily understood when we properly understand that Hitler and the Nazis didn’t invent it out of whole cloth but built on a deep tradition that had long dominated European and U.S. culture. I wrote about U.S.
"Your Forefathers Would All Have Been Gassed" Read More »
Many discussions of lies that launch wars quickly come around to the question “Well then why did they want the war?” There is usually more than one single motive involved, but the motives are not terribly hard to find.
Unlike many soldiers who have been lied to, most of the key war deciders, the masters of war who determine whether or not wars happen, do not in any sense have noble motives for what they do. Though noble motives can be found in the reasoning of some of those involved,
Why Wars Really Happen Read More »
