Press Action

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Palin heaps praise on unrepentant 'terrorist'

Sarah Palin continues to closely associate with and praise celebrated “terrorist” John McCain, who terrorized the Vietnamese people in the 1960s by participating in bombing campaigns against that nation.

McCain and his colleagues were members of a military that terrorized the Vietnamese through the criminal Operation Rolling Thunder and other bombing campaigns. The U.S. government brutally murdered millions of Vietnamese and other people in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.

The unrepentant “terrorist” McCain, whose military aircraft was shot down over Hanoi during a bombing run, was released by the Vietnamese government in 1973 after more than five years in prison. Today, a member of a foreign military captured in the United States after engaging in numerous bombing missions over the United States would face, at best, life in prison, marked by continuous torture at the hands of his U.S. captors, or more likely the death penalty.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 10/05.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

No White Flags

Four years ago, many leftists waved a white flag of surrender by abandoning their political principles and embracing Sen. John Kerry’s campaign for president. The Nobody But Kerry crowd lectured disgruntled leftists and anti-imperialists to vote for the Democratic nominee because, even though Kerry was a despicable candidate, his policies would be slightly less fascist and imperialist than George Bush’s. This fraction of a difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates, the Nobody But Kerry supporters argued, perhaps would result in a few more lives spared in foreign countries under attack by the American war machine. It would be irresponsible, they argued, not to take into account the possibility that a Kerry regime would kill a few less Iraqis each year in its occupation of that country and would harass a few less Americans in the so-called war on terrorism.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 10/04.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Quack Journalism

In recent weeks, dozens of ducks have died in the reflecting pool in front of the U.S. Capitol. According to the National Park Service, the ducks died of avian botulism, a disease that occurs when water temperatures reach at least 68 degrees for an extended period of time, allowing bacteria to grow in organic pond material and in the surrounding soil.

Even though dozens of ducks are dying and suffering, Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable wants her readers to know up front that they have nothing to worry about, that the disease is not contagious to humans. Phew! Millions of D.C. area residents can rest easy now because, right there in the lede of her July 27 article, Constable explains it’s “a disease caused by bacteria in hot water that is not contagious to human.”

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Comments (3) | Posted on 07/27.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Standoff in Manassas: 'We Will Not Be Your Slaves of the 21st Century'

Here’s what Gaudencio Fernandez wrote on a sign, 40 feet long and 12 feet high, that sits on his property in Manassas, Va., a town in Prince William County, Va., where local police authorities have become more aggressive in harassing people based on where they were born:

PWC and Manassas City: The National Capital of Intolerance

European American exterminated millions of Native Americans in order to steal America, they were the first illegal aliens. European Americans have a 500-year history of rape, theft, murder, slavery, artificial borders, Jim Crow laws and deportations of Native Americans.

Since 1866, the KKK rode at night to torture, lynch and kill blacks, Native Americans, and other people of color. Today the actions of PWC and Manassas City Council are similar to the collaboration between local governments and the KKK in the 1900s.

On 2.25.08, Manassas City Mayor Douglas S. Waldron said I am proud that finally we came to an agreement with PWC to implement 287g, because we care about our community. What community!? 287g is an agreement with immigration and customs enforcement to detain and question Native Americans by police officers at their discretion.

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Comments (4) | Posted on 07/02.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

10 Reasons Why Obama Represents Business As Usual

1. Obama supports tough diplomacy (and admires George H.W. Bush’s advisers)

2. Obama bashes Vietnam War-era activists (and those opposed to imperialist wars of aggression and occupation)

3. Obama loves Israel (and defends atrocities committed by the apartheid state)

4. Obama favors eviscerating the Fourth Amendment (and empowering federal agencies to implement authoritarian surveillance policies)

5. Obama supports the death penalty (and voted to expand the list of death-eligible crimes)

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Comments (0) | Posted on 06/22.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

T. Boone Pickens Speaks the Ugly Truth

I assume most Canadians already understand what’s at stake in the oil sands (or tar sands) region of Alberta and how the U.S. government and Corporate America believe that they are entitled to the oil that’s being produced there. In case there are some Canadians who don’t understand who will ultimately control the oil produced in this region, T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil and gas man from Oklahoma, set the Canadians straight in a recent interview, explaining that Corporate America views this resource as its own.

Speaking on CleanSkies.tv, an online television network bankrolled by natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy Corp., Pickens said:

“There are two things that should be working very well for us. One, are the Canadian oil sands. That oil comes to the United States. We need to be sure that it’s not exported to some other country because there’s 250 billion barrels in the Canadian oil sands.”

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Comments (0) | Posted on 06/08.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Solidarity is a Weapon: A Benefit for Marie Mason

Derrick Jensen - Live! via Webcast speaking on impending ecological collapse, the Green Scare and the radical environmental movement.

Saturday - June 7, 2008 at 7:00 p.m.

At St. Stephen’s Church, 1525 Newton Street NW (On the corner of 16th and Newton), Washington DC 20010

$10 - 20 sliding scale donation to benefit Marie Mason. No one turned away for lack of funds.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 06/03.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Zoo Culture: Superficial Relationships of Domination and Control

“When I was a child I always both loved and hated zoos. I loved them because I got to see real live animals, as opposed to animals on television, and I hated them because the animals were so obviously unhappy.”
- Robert Shetterly, painter and author of Americans Who Tell the Truth

“Everything is far worse than I am making it seem.”
– Derrick Jensen

My wife saw Derrick Jensen’s new book Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos on the coffee table in our living room and picked it up. It had just arrived in the mail earlier in the day from Amazon.com.

After leafing through only a few pages, she put the book down, wishing she hadn’t seen the book’s photographs of zoo animals in cages. I asked her if she planned on reading the book. “No,” she answered. “It looks like a book filled with sadness. I already know zoos are terrible places.”

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Comments (1) | Posted on 06/01.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Utah Phillips: My Body Is My Ballot

Amy Goodman played an interview with Utah Phillips on her Democracy Now! radio show this morning in memory of the folk musician and activist who died on May 23. Goodman interviewed Phillips in January 2004 at the beginning of the primary season to that year’s presidential election.

Near the end of the interview, Goodman asked Phillips whether he planned to vote in the 2004 presidential election and whether he was endorsing any candidate. In response, Phillips told the beautiful story of his friend, fellow anarchist Ammon Hennacy, who “never went to the polls.” But Phillips explained that “you couldn’t tell him you hadn’t voted. He did vote. Ammon’s body was his ballot. And he cast it in behalf of the poor around him every day of his life. And he paid a terrible price for that.”

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Comments (0) | Posted on 05/27.

Monday, May 26, 2008

A Cunning and Conniving Adversary

Arlington County, Virginia, is home to a large number of government agencies and private companies involved in fighting the “the global war on terror” or “global struggle against violent extremism,” or whatever propaganda catchphrase politicos in Washington are using today to describe the U.S. government’s campaign to prop up its crumbling world empire. The Pentagon complex is the most notorious member of this group. Aside from the Pentagon, the Defense Department has many divisions housed in other office buildings scattered across Arlington, as do the CIA and other federal police and intelligence agencies.

The government outsourcing trend has gained momentum during the past 30 years, and Arlington has served as a popular location for many of these Beltway Bandits to set up shop, given its proximity to Washington. Many of these companies specialize in military and intelligence contracts. One of the best known Arlington-based contractors is CACI International, a company that has performed a variety of contract work for the U.S. military in Iraq, including providing intelligence analysis, background investigations, screenings and interrogation.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 05/26.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Perception Management

John Grisham’s new book The Appeal and David Baldacci’s latest The Whole Truth are quick and entertaining reads.

In The Appeal, Grisham tells the story of a chemical company that’s on the losing end of a civil lawsuit filed in a Mississippi court. Facing tens of millions of dollars in punitive damages and a plummeting stock price, the head of the company decides to “buy” a Mississippi Supreme Court justice in the state’s next election. The company would probably lose on appeal under the court’s current make-up. If only Mississippians would elect a fifth Supreme Court justice who does not believe in holding companies accountable for crimes of murder and environmental despoilment, then the company would not have to pay a dime to the residents of a Mississippi small town, where the company dumped tons of deadly chemicals that contaminated the town’s water supply.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 05/25.

Rolling Thunder 2008

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the United States so that must mean thousands of Harley Davidsons and other motorcycles with loud pipes will be thundering through the streets of my Arlington neighborhood on their way to the Pentagon a few miles down the road.

Back in the 1980s, a group of Vietnam veterans organized a group called Rolling Thunder to lobby the U.S. government on the issue of U.S. soldiers being held prisoner in Vietnam. Since then, the group has broadened its scope to remember all U.S. soldiers taken prisoner or killed in U.S. wars.

Sadly, the group chose to give itself an extremely offensive name, Rolling Thunder, which was the code name given to the U.S. government’s bombing raids in North Vietnam and portions of South Vietnam controlled by the National Liberation Front from 1965 to 1968.

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Comments (13) | Posted on 05/25.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Weather Bombings

Dan Berger, in his 2006 book Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, writes about the bombing campaign waged by the Weatherman/Weather Underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The bombings were targeted strikes against American centers of power involved in committing horrific, systematic, large-scale violence in Vietnam, Chile and here in the United States. The only Weatherman bombing that turned deadly occurred when explosives in a Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally ignited on March 6, 1970, killing Weatherman members Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins and Ted Gold.

Berger examines the group’s 1973 release of Prairie Fire, a book that, according to group member Bill Ayers, sought “to consolidate our political organization and to forge unity with progressive activists.”

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Comments (0) | Posted on 04/20.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Nader's In: Let the Whining of the Democrats, Liberals and Leftists Begin

Which side are you on?

The corporate criminals, the big banks, Wall Street, the credit card companies, the nuclear power industry, the war profiteers, the agribusiness giants, the health insurance industry, the polluters, the drug companies, the unionbusters, Big Oil, the corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans?

Or with people fighting back?

Apparently, many Democrats, Liberals and leftists are on the side of the former. Here’s what some folks are saying about Ralph Nader’s announcement today that he is once again running for President:

KellyVision

I hate Ralph Nader. I really do. I mean, here’s the thing, he has to know that he’s never going to be elected and all he’s going to do is hijack votes from the real candidate.

I have a theory that he’s actually a Republican/blackmailed by Republicans.

And you can tell me that crap about voting your conscience instead of your fears all you want, but my conscience says that we do not need another four years of Republican leadership. (Need proof? I submit George Bush.)

Yes. This may actually be my bitchiest post ever.

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Comments (2) | Posted on 02/24.

Who Killed the U.S. Anti-Globalization Movement?

In a recent interview with the Spanish anarchist website Alasbarricadas, Infoshop’s Chuck Munson comments on how the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and the International Socialist Organization worked to shut down the U.S. anti-globalization movement in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:

One thing that is probably unknown to people outside the U.S., and even most American anarchists and activists, is that some of the people leading the anti-war movements deliberately worked to kill off the U.S. wing of the anti-globalization movement in the hours after the September 11 attacks. It was inevitable that this would happen, as there were groups such as the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Paty USA, and the International Socialist Organization who had been frustrated by the anarchist nature of the anti-globalization movement. They had all notoriously “missed” the Battle of Seattle and the movement had resisted all of their attempts at entryism. The WWP responded to the September 11 attacks by quickly forming the ANSWER coalition, which started as a front group packed with their front groups and allies. They correctly guessed that the U.S. response to the attacks would lead to a war which would generate a new peace movement, As a small authoritarian organization, they were able to organize a “coalition” without having to deal with any democratic messiness. The WWP was able to position ANSWER as the leading anti-war coalition through a series of mass protests in Washington, DC and San Francisco. These protests didn’t make much news, nor did they do anything to stop the war, but they impressed an American left which was feeling powerless after the U.S. invaded Iraq. ANSWER stuck with a series of mass mobilizations every six months, which were conducive towards building credibility for their organization, but ANSWER never strayed outside a comfort zone that limited itself to permitted spectacles in large cities.

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Comments (0) | Posted on 02/24.