Global
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence ( http://vcnv.org ) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare. During each of fourteen trips to Afghanistan, since 2010, Kathy Kelly, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She is just out of prison for having protested drone murders at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri. Kelly discusses the state of peace and war.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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If we could see a Mother’s Day
All around the world,
Where mothers lived a day of joy,
Where mothers felt their worth,
Then what exactly would we see
So moms could realize
That their lives are important and
Their own perspectives wise?
The women in Sudan would not
Be flogged for wearing pants.
Their spirits wouldn’t be constrained;
They’d run, skip, sing, and dance.
In Arabia we’d celebrate
No groping of the girls;
They’d drive their cars with elbows bare,
Show ankles under skirts.
As golden rays of morning light
Touched arms tan from the sun,
Brown locks of hair blown by the breeze
From scarves could come undone.
And no false blame on women for
Attracting hands of men,
As if the hands were victims of
The evil feminine.
Instead of yoking women, telling
Them they have to hide,
The men without firm self-control
Would wear handcuffs outside.
The 21st century has skewed off plan and begun to break open. Its self-designated guardians and explainers look on, at times, confused.
“But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires — these are statistics. There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
This is CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewing DeRay Mckesson last week as Baltimore convulsed. Mckesson, an organizer and citizen-journalist — a young, former school administrator radicalized last summer by the death of Michael Brown — stared into the camera and refused to succumb to, or be ensnared in, the anchorman’s agenda. That agenda was obvious: to turn “the riot” into the news, to sever Baltimore’s fury and despair from its cause, a militarized police force and the casual, ongoing murder of African-Americans. The official agenda was to portray the protesters as terrorists.
In November 1993, I was on a mission. At the age of 21, I wanted to change the world, starting with Birzeit University, the second largest Palestinian university in the West Bank, situated near Ramallah, in the heart of the occupied territories.
Back then I had made a name for myself with my nationalist poetry and my first poetry collection was published a year earlier in Gaza. It was called The Alphabets of Decision. Each assortment of verses started with a letter in the Arabic alphabet, going in order. “It was time for the poor and peasants of Palestine to articulate their political agenda, rejecting the entire culture of political defeat,” I wrote something to that effect in the introduction.
Birzeit was my platform and my audience quickly multiplied. My last performance was in front of a crowd of thousands, who cheered, chanted and, once I concluded my call for rebellion against Oslo’s “Gaza-Jericho First” agreement, and the assured defeat it heralded, we marched outside the campus, only to be greeted with Israeli army bullets and tear gas.
There just might be a big boost in government honesty soon, as both houses of Congress have now passed with two-thirds votes and sent to the states for ratification a potential 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution bearing the unofficial title "The Truth in Advertising Amendment." This is the text as passed by Congress:
Amendment 28
Preamble: The first through tenth articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed.
A powerful new film on what's wrong with the U.S. media is now being screened around the country. It's called Shadows of Liberty and you can set up a screening of it as part of an upcoming international week of actions for whistleblowers called Stand Up For Truth. Or you can buy the DVD or catch it on Link TV. (Here in Charlottesville I'll be speaking at the event, May 19, 7 p.m. at The Bridge.)
Judith Miller is on a rehabilitative book tour; the Washington Post recently reported that a victim of Baltimore police murder broke his own spine; and recently leaked emails from the State Department asked Sony to entertain us into proper war support. The proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner was just blocked, for now, but the existence of those mega-monopolies in their current form is at the root of the problem, according to Shadows of Liberty.
Seven prominent national security whistleblowers Monday called for a number of wide-ranging reforms — including passage of the “Surveillance State Repeal Act,” which would repeal the USA Patriot Act — in an effort to restore the Constitutionally guaranteed 4th Amendment right to be free from government spying.
Several of the whistleblowers also said that the recent lenient sentence of probation and a fine for General David Petraeus — for his providing of classified information to his mistress Paula Broadwell — underscores the double standard of justice at work in the area of classified information handling.
Speakers said Petraeus’s favorable treatment should become the standard applied to defendants who are actual national security whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Jeffrey Sterling (who has denied guilt but who nevertheless faces sentencing May 11 for an Espionage Act conviction for allegedly providing classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen).
