Global

In the United States you can attend a local “peace and justice” group meeting in almost any city and find people generally open to any new way of thinking or evidence of success that could help advance the causes of peace or justice.

But if you go to too academic a “peace studies” event you are likely to find people very focused on aid and development in distant poor nations selected from the list of those the United States is not heavily bombing at the moment — that, and a general resistance to organizing activism to end U.S. wars.

If, on the other hand, you go to a peace event organized by a national coalition you will typically find people excited to do peace activism as long as it takes the side of and is not overly confrontational toward elected Democrats.

It’s routine for right-wing outlets like Fox to smear progressive activists under the guise of “news” coverage. But why the New York Times? And why the special venom for Bernie Sanders?

After the horrific June 14 shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise and three other participants in a Republican baseball practice, the media floodgates opened for slimy innuendos. Before the day was done, a major supplier of the political sewage was the New York Times, which prominently published a left-blaming article that masqueraded as news reporting.

Remarks at United National Antiwar Coalition in Richmond, Virginia, June 17, 2017

Did you hear about Trump calling up the mayor of Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay and telling him that, contrary to all appearances, his island is not sinking? I want to focus on one element of this story, namely that the guy believed what he was told, rather than what he saw.

Did you hear about Secretary of War Mattis telling Congress that for the 16th year in a row he would produce a plan for “winning” a war on Afghanistan? Congress either believed it or has been paid to act as if it believes it. Congress members Jones and Garamendi have a bill to defund this endless act of mass-murder. We need a movement that can nonviolently shut down Congressional offices until they do so.

It’s June in L.A., so that can mean only one thing (besides “June gloom,” that is): Hollywood Fringe Festival is taking place through June 25! This year, 2,000 performances and 375 (count ’em!) different shows are being staged - and dare I say, upstaged - in various venues across Hollywood and West Hollywood. As Hamlet (who but of course presented his own unauthorized play) put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

According to the Fringe’s ambitious, 226 page program: “The Hollywood Fringe Festival is an annual, open-access, community-derived event celebrating freedom of expression and collaboration in the performing arts community… Participation in the Hollywood Fringe is completely open and uncensored. This free-for-all approach underlines the festival’s mission to be a platform for artists without the barrier of a curative body. By opening the gates to anyone with a vision, the festival is able to exhibit the most diverse and cutting-edge points-of-view the world has to offer.”

Los Angeles, June 15, 2017 – The Los Angeles Workers Center and Hollywood Progressive co-present the revolutionary classic Arsenal.

Reactionaries howl in outrage at Kathy Griffin’s photo of the comedienne holding a faux severed, bloody head of the president and against Shakespeare in the Park’s modern dress version of Julius Caesar, wherein the assassinated emperor is a Trump look-alike. Of course, these condemnations of exercises in free expression are spewed by the same cry babies waging holy war against whatever they perceive as “political correctness.” Trump and his minions denounce efforts to protect religious, ethnic and LGBTQ minorities from public insults and hate speech as infringements on their First Amendment right - but cry bloody murder whenever their sacred cows are mocked and raked over the coals.  

The word, inappropriately uttered, has the news value of a bullet fired off at the mall. One word. It’s the ticking time bomb of American history. It pulsates with paradox.

I want to take a moment to honor at least that: the paradox. How come its meaning changes depending on who says it? Some Americans can say that word with a sort of joyous irony, indeed, find a triumphant sense of empowerment in its use, while others can’t say it even in solidarity without risking an avalanche of censure?

For the past many years and for many years to come, “extremism” has been unacceptable in U.S. politics. One must be in favor of more fossil fuel pipelines under certain strict conditions, not against them entirely. That would be extreme.

The moment when extremism becomes acceptable, or ceases to be extremism, will be the instant before the last human being breathes his or her last breath on a baked and ravaged planet. On that last breath may be the words: “I’ll be a leftist now, I suppose.”

Today, of course, one must be in favor of the good wars and against the bad ones — but not too much against the bad ones. One must not try to abolish war entirely. That would be extreme. So would be banning nuclear weapons.

But in that moment when we know that the nuclear missiles have been launched by the dozens, someone may have the presence of mind to mutter: “Perhaps banning them might have been sort of pragmatic after all. Of course it’s not something worth voting for a third party over. I loved you. Good bye.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's belief in
lying Vietnamese spies, "ghosts," "slicky boys" and "marketplace mush"
contributed to America losing its Vietnam War in 1975, according to
James Parker, the last CIA officer to evacuate Vietnam.
   When asked in an interview about CIA-run Vietnamese spies who
fabricated information for the CIA's reports during the war, Mr.
Parker, 73, replied:
   "Ah, the lying spy syndrome."
   When the CIA operates in any country, "you cannot get intel [CIA
intelligence] operatives to stay in a battle zone for more than a
couple of years at a time, so the occupational problems of fabricators
was unavoidable.
   "I was in Afghanistan [during] 2010 and 2011," Mr. Parker said,
describing one of his most recent CIA assignments.
   "The best intel service there was probably the Israel Mossad,
wouldn't you think?  Because they had been operating in that area for
years."
   Worldwide, for the CIA, "it's hard to recruit spies, to find them,