March 2012

New York City Tuesday Night: David Swanson, John Horgan, Jackson Lears, Mark Crispin Miller: Peace in Age of Empire

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News from Underground: “Imagining Peace in an Age of Empire”

WHEN: Tuesday, April 3, 2012, 7:00 p.m.    WHERE: McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St, New York, N.Y. 10012-3309   Free and Open to Public and Media  

David Swanson (When the World Outlawed War), John Horgan (The End of War), and Jackson Lears (Rebirth of a Nation) will talk about war and the need to stop it. The conversation will be moderated by Mark Crispin Miller.

Miller, a professor at NYU and author of many books on politics and cultural history, hosts News from Underground, a monthly series at McNally Jackson. In these tense times, there are many topics of extreme importance that the corporate media tends to 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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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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Talk Nation Radio: When a War Veteran Tortures His Daughter, and She Survives

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Michelle Brown survived a childhood of ongoing abuse and torture at the hands of her father.  She is the author of “This Girl’s Life: Being the Child of a War Veteran.” Brown discusses her experience, her understanding of what caused it, and her advice to others.

The image at right from the book’s cover shows the author with her husband.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.

Producer: David Swanson.

Engineer: Christiane Brown.

Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get read more

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Taking a Mother's Child Away

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One of the good things about speaking at big conferences is that people come up to you afterwards believing you have the power to change the world. 

One of the bad things about speaking at big conferences is that people come up to you afterwards believing you have the power to change the world.

A mother with tears in her eyes just asked me to help free her son, a young man with an IQ of 78 who was apparently set up by the NYPD.  He is Muslim.  This was 8 years ago.  He’s read more

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To the NYPD Officers Reading My Emails

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On Thursday I was on a train to New York and received an email announcing a protest at the offices of New York’s two U.S. Senators over their cosponsorship of an AIPAC-driven bill that would move the United States closer to war on Iran.  I wrote back, saying, hey, I happen to be on my way to New York and will try to get there. 

When I got there, there was a small gathering of protesters, divided into two groups, those choosing to comply with police requests to stand inside a free-speech-cage read more

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The Drone

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Listen.

Listen.

Listen to the endless steady droning

To the buzzing almost moaning

Of the invisible unmanned plane,

The imminent howling pain,

Or is it death?

Or will that omnipotent thing refrain?

Will the humans who make it kill

Change their minds and make it stop?

     It buzzes still!

It’s the sound of murder unseen,

The sound of the dying of the American dream,

The relentless sound of streets unclean

Full of homeless people and limousines.

It is the sound of the war machine.

It read more

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The Shifting Strategies of Empire

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Remarks at the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference:

President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go?

Eric Holder this month explained that it’s legal for a president to kill anyone anywhere, or to imprison them, or to spy on them. I started to get upset about this, but then I remembered that Holder is a Democrat. That made me feel much better.

Leon Panetta told Congress this month read more

The Shifting Strategies of Empire Read More »

Why I'm Now Endorsing Occupy the RNC

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Three weeks ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because both groups were refusing to state that they opposed violence.

Occupy the RNC has now put this on its website:

“We are not organizing actions, especially violent ones. That would just be stupid. We exist to provide information and facilitate logistics for people resisting the RNC.”

Not how I would have put it.  Nor would I have added:

“Don’t fuck with us. We’ll sue you.”

But foreswearing read more

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