Political Ideas

Talk Nation Radio: Cindy Sheehan on the Venezuelan Constitution as a Model for the United States

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Cindy Sheehan discusses the new Venezuelan Constitution as a model for reforming the U.S. Constitution in the direction of greater democratic and economic rights, as well as the politics of Hugo Chavez, and her new book, Revolution: A Love Story.  Cindy Sheehan is a leading U.S. peace actvist, a gold star mother, an author, blogger, and radio host.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.

Producer: David Swanson.

Engineer: Christiane Brown.

Music by Duke Ellington.

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Hopelessly Devoted

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You’d never know it from watching television, but there are many thousands of people in the United States who take peace, justice, environmental protection, and government of the people so seriously that they don’t censor themselves whenever the president is a Democrat.

While many others are still debating whether it would be appropriate to criticize or protest President Obama after a mere three and a half years of disaster, the people I have in mind have been openly and honestly resisting read more

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Bank of America Prepares for Shareholders Meeting as if Under Assault

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Bank of America has hired G4S for its shareholder meeting.  According to Wikipedia:

“G4S plc (formerly Group 4 Securicor) (LSE: GFS, OMX: G4S) is a global security services company headquartered in Crawley, United Kingdom. It is the world’s largest security company measured by revenues and has operations in more than 125 countries.[2][3] With over 630,000 employees, it is the world’s second-largest private sector employer (after Wal-Mart Stores).[2][4]”

G4S read more

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How Dare Russia

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“Self-purification through suffering is easier, I tell you: easier — than that destiny which you are paving for many of them by wholesale acquittals in court.  You are merely planting cynicism in their souls.” –Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The United States Congress is outraged.  Russia, it seems, may have wrongly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered a whistleblower.  In the land of the free, our good representatives are outraged, I tell you.  And not just I.  read more

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Torture on Trial

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Legal and Humane Frameworks for Opposing Torture

by: David Swanson
 

Published in the May / June 2012   Humanist

Cases come in by the thousands from all over the world. A man was beaten and whipped. A woman was beaten and raped. A boy was hooded with three empty sand bags in 100-degree heat all day, starved, beaten, and kept in stress positions. Alleged suicide victims had their hands tied behind their backs, had boot prints on their heads, or turned out to have been electrocuted. There read more

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Liberals Cry Out: Tax the Rich! Fund More Wars!

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The shout of the Occupy movement, at least in D.C., has been “End the Wars, Tax the Rich!” in that order and in combination.  Over half of federal discretionary spending goes to the war machine.  We ought to fix that problem first, and then fix the problem that our overlords aren’t actually paying their fair share of the taxes.  My friend Leah Bolger is about to face a possible sentence of months in prison for having read more

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Why We Should Outgrow "Diversity of Tactics" Before Protesting NATO

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The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda  has nothing on its website about using nonviolence, supporting nonviolence, or opposing violence.

The G8 and NATO Protest also has nothing like that, but does have this:

“As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics.”

A month ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because read more

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The Statues in Our Public Spaces Lie

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There are lies of omission as well as commission, and the statues in Charlottesville, Va. — typical of other towns — do both.  We have statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, a generic Confederate soldier, George Rogers Clark, Lewis and Clark (with Sacagawea kneeling like their dog), and on City Hall a triptych with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  We have a monument to the War on Vietnam.  And that’s it.

Here are some things not memorialized in any major statue read more

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Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities

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PREAMBLE

Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not self-enforcing,

Whereas statement of the inherent dignity and of the equal and supposedly inalienable rights of all members of the human family achieves little without a struggle against greed, injustice, tyranny, and war,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights could not have resulted in the barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of humankind without the cowardice, laziness, apathy, and blind obedience of well-meaning read more

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Why I've Refused to Endorse the Protests of Either the RNC or the DNC

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Don’t get me wrong.  I want the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Tampa and Charlotte protested, denounced, shamed, nonviolently occupied, and ideally prevented from occurring, at least until they credibly support peace, justice, and democracy — or pigs fly, whichever comes first.  I’ve said so and encouraged such organizing for months.  I hope to be a part of it.

But when asked to endorse http://protestdnc.org read more

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