We protest the G-8 and NATO, but not Bilderberg. Why?
Do you have to be xenophobic, paranoid, isolationist, or libertarian to protest a secretive gathering of over 100 billionaires, industrialists, media barons, and politicians working to shape our public sphere, or has the left dropped the ball? Is it time for Occupy to step in?
From May 31 to June 3, 2012, at the Westfields Marriott Washington
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
Hopelessly Devoted Read More »
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
Bank of America Prepares for Shareholders Meeting as if Under Assault Read More »
“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.
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
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
Liberals Cry Out: Tax the Rich! Fund More Wars! Read More »
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
Why We Should Outgrow "Diversity of Tactics" Before Protesting NATO Read More »
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
The Statues in Our Public Spaces Lie Read More »
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
Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities Read More »
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
Why I've Refused to Endorse the Protests of Either the RNC or the DNC Read More »
