Early in the morning of October 22nd last fall several hundred people quietly arrived on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Many of us were organized into affinity groups. There was the anti-capitalist bike block. There were Iraq Veterans Against the War. There was the group of people dressed in polar bear costumes agitating through a portable sound system. There were the young people from Students for a Democratic Society in their yellow Campus Climate Challenge t-shirts. There was the Separate Oil and State group. And there were Code Pinkers, some wearing giant bobble-heads of Cheney, Bush and Rice.

We were united behind the short but clear slogan: No War, No Warming!

*End the war for oil in Iraq and all future wars for oil and natural gas.

*End the addiction to oil--and coal and natural gas--that are driving the heating of the earth, the climate disruption which will inevitably lead to more and more wars as our ecosystem and economies are devastated.

*Shift government resources--our tax money--from support of fossil fuels to support of a deep- and wide-ranging, jobs-creating, clean energy revolution

In November, 1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton defeated Republican incumbent President George Herbert Walker Bush for the presidency by running his campaign on a simple theme: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” The Bush Recession of 1990-1991 had largely disappeared by late 1992, but millions of manufacturing and middle-class jobs had disappeared, replaced largely by fast-food and service employment at minimum wages and without health care for workers. All Clinton had to do was to cal for the federal government to create employment growth opportunities.

Sixteen years later, we now have another Bush in the White House, who presides over a failed economy. What’s truly bizarre is that all of the Republican presidential candidates who are running to replace Bush are in deep denial that America has lurched into an “economic recession.”

Several years ago I was walking home to my Manhattan apartment from Columbia University, just having delivered a lecture on New York state’s notorious “Rockefeller Drug Laws.” The state’s mandatory-minimum sentencing laws had thrown tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders into state prisons with violent convicts. In my lecture I had called for more generous prisoner reentry programs, the restoration of felons’ voting rights, increased educational programs inside prisons, and a restoration of judges’ sentencing authority.

A white administrator from another local university, a woman, who I had always judged to be fairly conservative and probably a Republican, had attended my lecture and was walking along with me to go to the subway. She told me that my lecture about the “prison industrial complex” had been a real “eye opener.” The fact that two million Americans were imprisoned, she expressed, was a “real scandal.” Then this college administrator blurted out, in a hurried manner, “You know, my son is also in prison … a victim of the drug laws.”

South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.

South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our President, or at least the Democrat's idea of a President. According to CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black population vote their pride (for Obama) or for "experience" (Hillary)? In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.

Canine. It’s what’s for dinner.

We pride ourselves on our devotion to the principle of equality here in the United States, so it’s time to put our values where our mouths are, so to speak. Pigs, chickens, cows, and the like already endure abject suffering so we can consume their flesh, so it is only fair that we include “man’s best friend.” How could they better prove their deep loyalty to us than by sacrificing their lives to feed us?

There is plenty of room on our plates to accommodate a few slices of Lassie. Even here in our resource-hog of a nation people experience hunger. Why not run a hundred million or so Rovers through the meat industrial complex each year? We have no reservations about torturing and slaughtering billions of other sentient beings to satiate our lust for meat. Research has indicated that pigs are actually more intelligent than dogs and thus would be more conscious of their misery. So there is no valid moral objection.