You can't kill an idea

The crowds keep swelling, as though awareness, determination – humanity itself – were rising up from the earth. Einstein observed that we can never solve problems at the same level of thinking that created them. I hear the resonance of a new moral intelligence asserting itself, on the streets of the Middle East, in the United States and around the world.

“You can kill a man,” said Medgar Evers, “but you can’t kill an idea.”

But oh, they try, they try. Hundreds were killed and wounded across the Middle East in recent weeks. “In the southern city of Aden,” AP reports, “Yemeni security forces opened fire on thousands of demonstrators after Friday’s Muslim prayers, wounding at least 19 people.”

Our whole approach to security is built around the assumption that you can kill an idea. Guns, brutality, coercion: This is the common wisdom. It’s sustained by a moral numbness that permeates mainstream culture and is carried along by the corporate media, which perpetuate a facile misunderstanding of the world with the throwaway certitudes embedded in their reportage.

Corporate union busters draw first blood in Ohio

The national corporate campaign to destroy America's public sector unions has drawn first blood in Ohio.

But a counter-attack centered on one or more statewide initiatives or constitutional amendments has become highly likely.

While thousands of protestors chanted, spoke and sang inside and outside the statehouse for the past two weeks (SB 5 Rally), the Ohio Senate voted 17-16 on Senate Bill 5, a bill that will slash collective bargaining for state workers by banning strikes and giving local officials the right to settle disputes. The bill, among other things, also eliminates all paid sick days from teachers.  

The vote came amid shouts of "shame on you" and widespread booing from the diverse crowd of teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, state employees and more. 

 Photograph by Bob Studzinski

Bush did the crime, he must do the time

Send a letter to Attorney General Holder: 'Prosecute Bush for torture'

George W. Bush has publicly admitted that he authorized torture. He must be held accountable. We are part of a worldwide movement to make sure this happens.

With open torture investigations in Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada, Lithuania, Poland and the United Kingdom, Bush and his cronies have fewer places to hide.

For our movement, this is just the beginning. The American people have a special obligation to make sure Bush is prosecuted for his crimes right here in the United States. Can this happen? You bet. The people and laws of the world are on our side.

Click here to send a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding the prosecution of Bush for torture. After sending your letter, help us spread the word using the Email, Facebook and Twitter buttons at the top of this email.

Of the radical and the quaint

Remarks in Boca Raton, Fla., February 26, 2011
I really want to thank Nancy Parker and everyone who helped put this event together. I would have come just to hear the other two speakers. I've learned a lot from Sandy Davies and consider his book required reading for all Americans. And it's an honor to speak together with Ben Ferencz who has been advancing the rule of law since the age when -- more so than not -- the United States was a proponent of international justice.

Today's Palm Beach Post's article about Mr. Ferencz and this event begins with this sentence:

"War is such a widespread force in the world that the very idea of treating it as a crime seems both radical and quaint."

As the proprietor of a website called War Is A Crime .org I have always strived to be radical and quaint. I don't dispute the Post's description, but I find it intriguing. How can an idea be both radical and quaint? One definition of quaint is "pleasingly or strikingly old-fashioned or unfamiliar." Another is "having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm."

Rev. Jesse Jackson in Columbus

A BURGESS BULLETIN- 2/23/11
With polls showing 61% of Americans supporting public employees’ right to bargain collectively, the Rev. Jesse Jackson showed up Wednesday morning at the Local 413 Teamsters Hall to help the crowd of union members and community leaders shout and chant their agreement, and their opposition to Republican attempts to take away those rights. It was vintage Jackson —excellent insights into the workings of our economic and political systems, punctuated with slogans, some brilliant, all irresistible:

I know you’re tired, “One day more! One day more!”
“ Egypt learned from us…They were disciplined and peaceful.”
“Collective bargaining, not collective begging! Collective bargaining, not collective begging!”
“It’s not just about bargaining. It’s not just about Democrats. It’s about democracy!”
On the “misadventures” in Iraq and Afghanistan : “We love the soldiers, but not the veterans.”
“Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!”

Surrogate mothers offered everyone an "efficient embryo"

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Police are investigating an international "efficient embryo refining" syndicate after discovering 15 women who were allegedly inseminated and kept in a house during their pregnancies so an Internet-based company could sell their babies.

Photographs of "Oriental Selected Egg Donors" showed young, cute Asian women in coy poses on the Babe-101 Eugenic Surrogate website (Baby-1001.com website).

For at least $35,000 anyone could go online and rent a surrogate mother, which included a payment for sperm or an "ovum donor" of their choice who was either "Eastern race" or "Caucasian," with a selected "complexion" of either "Yellow," "Caucasian," "Brown," "African," or "Red."

The company was apparently administered on the island nation of Taiwan with surrogate homes in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

On Wednesday (March 2), the Public Health Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Vietnamese embassy, Thai Immigration Department, and Royal Thai College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were coordinating how to respond.

Huge labor rally at the Ohio Statehouse

Harvey Wasserman interview with Amy Goodman
Ohio labor rallies

Civil resistance to the wars continues: Veterans return to the White House for March 19 Iraq invasion observance

"We should not think that the destruction and suffering unleashed by war is limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. Individuals and whole cities here at home have become 'collateral damage.' Millions of people are thrown out of their jobs and then out of their homes. Pressures cascade onto state and local governments as the stagnant economy and frustrated voters further decrease funds for essential services. Our infrastructure isn't bombed, it just slowly rots."

The imperial wars rage on. U.S. drones rain missiles down on innocents in Pakistan; hundreds of children die daily in Afghanistan because of the war; contrary to what the President says, the occupation in Iraq continues. The devastation and misery caused by these wars has not even begun to be addressed. Rather than bringing democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is destroying their countries — perhaps beyond repair.

The Push of Conscience and Secretary Clinton

It was not until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked to the George Washington University podium last week to enthusiastic applause that I decided I had to dissociate myself from the obsequious adulation of a person responsible for so much death, suffering and destruction.

I was reminded of a spring day in Atlanta almost five years earlier when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strutted onto a similar stage to loud acclaim from another enraptured audience.

Introducing Rumsfeld on May 4, 2006, the president of the Southern Center for International Policy in Atlanta highlighted his "honesty." I had just reviewed my notes for an address I was scheduled to give that evening in Atlanta and, alas, the notes demonstrated his dishonesty.

I thought to myself, if there's an opportunity for Q & A after his speech I might try to stand and ask a question, which is what happened. I engaged in a four-minute impromptu debate with Rumsfeld on Iraq War lies, an exchange that was carried on live TV.

That experience leaped to mind on Feb. 15, as Secretary Clinton strode onstage amid similar adulation.

The Tunisia effect

On one weekend in February of 2003, an estimated 10 million people in 60 countries took to the streets to protest the looming Iraq war. Never before in history had there been such massive, public opposition to a war before it began. But the war began anyway and the people — their numbers misreported in much of the media by a factor of ten, their opposition seemingly irrelevant — went away.

Are they back now?

None of the world-shaking protests of recent weeks — in Tunisia and Egypt, in Libya, Bahrain, Iran, in Wisconsin and around the U.S. — ostensibly have anything to do with the wars on this planet, except the ones that governments, including those in various state capitals, are waging against select segments of their own populations. What makes the current protests different from the protests that briefly flickered around the globe eight years ago is that they aren’t really protests anymore. They’re acts of self-defense. And that’s the link between Cairo and Madison.

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