Duty to Warn

I attended the United for Peace and Justice conference in Chicago, on June 6-8, as a delegate of a local group Columbus Campaign for Arms Control ("over 500 participants attended, from 38 states and approximately 350 organizations," according to UFPJ). I'm happy to have attended the conference, meeting many organizers and intellectuals whom I wouldn't have been able to meet otherwise (networking is always the best part of any conference). More or less, I got what I bargained for. I chose to go to the UFPJ conference, rather than the May 17-18 International ANSWER conference (which about "850 activists and organizers" attended, according to ANSWER), because I thought that whether or not I attended the ANSWER conference would make no difference in its outcome. The politics of ANSWER is clearly determined by its steering committee, whose members are strongly united by a principle of anti-imperialism. For better and worse, there wouldn't have been much to be discussed at the ANSWER conference. UFPJ, a coalition of national and local groups with divergent perspectives on many issues, is another story.

Sometime during the week of July 21, your representative will be voting on an amendment to the 2004 foreign aid bill that would cut or reduce military aid to Colombia.  The last time an amendment was offered to cut Colombia military aid, it lost by only seven votes—we are very close!  Please help make it a reality this time-- send an e-mail to your representative asking them to support the amendment.

To send an e-mail to your representative go to: capwiz.com/voice4change/issues/alert/?alertid=2882061&type=CO

If you have trouble with our Action Center please copy and paste the following sample letter and E-mail to Representative.

If you need to find out who your Rep. is go to www.house.gov

Sample Letter:

The Honorable__________
US House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Representative _______________,

The superstar columnist George Will has an impressive vocabulary. Too bad it doesn’t include the words “I’m sorry.”

     Ten months ago, Will led the media charge when a member of Congress dared to say that President Bush would try to deceive the public about Iraq. By now, of course, strong evidence has piled up that Bush tried and succeeded.

     But back in late September, when a media frenzy erupted about Rep. Jim McDermott’s live appearance from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week” program, what riled the punditocracy as much as anything else was McDermott’s last statement during the interview: “I think the president would mislead the American people.”

     First to wave a media dagger at the miscreant was Will, a regular on the ABC television show. Within minutes, on the air, he denounced “the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime.” But the syndicated columnist was just getting started.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. If this thing turns into Vietnam simply because that man is too vain and arrogant to admit that Gen. Eric Shinseki was right when he said we would need "several hundred thousand soldiers" over there, I hope Rumsfeld rots in a hell worse than the one he's making.

            Now is not the time to stand back timidly hoping it will work out well in the end. The population of Baghdad is broiling through the 115-degree summer without electricity or water for much of the time. Given the background poverty and generally hideous conditions, the place is a major riot waiting to happen.

MoveOn.org is organizing a campaign to defeat Bush and the Republicans in 2004. The Republicans are already well under way in their re-election effort, we need to get started too. Read the MoveOn.org campaign letter and consider signing on to the campaign.

To sign up, click here: www.moveon.org/pac/newpres/

MoveOn will keep you updated when opportunities for action come up.

These are days when it seems sanity has left us. Civic neurosis is maintained by keeping us living in a constant state of color-coded mental emergency. The besieged mind then retreats into thinking only of those most basic human needs: safety and security. Leaders who promise to provide and protect these needs are then revered.

However, it is during times like these that enormous change is possible. Humans are only willing to change if they are uncomfortable, and, for one reason or another, most Americans are not at all comfortable with what they see happening in their country.

We're discovering that more security does not make us more secure. We're realizing that respect garnered out of fear is not admiration. And we're remembering that in all human history, war has never really brought the promised peace.

We're watching the income gap widen into a chasm. We're trading the export of good jobs for the import of cheap trinkets. We're accumulating debt faster than our children can ever hope to pay it off. And we're glimpsing what only recently seemed a bright future now being thrown into the shade.

       AUSTIN -- Congratulations to the Supreme Court on its 6-3 decision in the Texas sodomy law case and to all those, including the gay rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, who have fought so long and hard to rid the legal system of this manifest injustice. The Sunday chat shows featured a number of curious contentions over this legal decision: It was interesting to see rank bigotry against gays trying to disguise itself as a legal argument.

        Justice Antonin Scalia was foremost in this camp, throwing a public tantrum devoid of legal reasoning over the decision. Talk about lack of judicial temperament. Some advanced the argument that the law should have been left in place because it is rarely enforced. In fact, it was enforced, that's why there was a case in front of the Supreme Court, and under what principle is rarity an excuse for injustice? Because we relatively rarely execute people who are innocent, does that make it right? Slavery rarely occurs in this country, but it is still illegal.

  Media critics often say that visual images trump words. The claim makes some sense: Pictures have major impacts on how we see the world. And we’re apt to pay less attention to photo captions or the voice-overs that accompany news footage on TV screens.

     But when images meet the eye, our reactions depend on our sense of context. The same news outlets that select certain photos and video snippets also influence how we look at what we see. The pictures can have political clout because of prevalent assumptions and attitudes largely shaped by media.

     Many people reacted strongly to President Bush’s “top gun” imitation when he jetted onto an aircraft carrier near San Diego a couple of months ago. Bush fans and pliable journalists swooned. More skeptical observers noticed the shameless manipulation. But everyone was looking at identical images. The determining factor was not the choreography of the photo-op but the outlooks of those who watched.

The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton's path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party's presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to "middle class" Americans -- while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

 AUSTIN, Texas -- You've got to hand it to those clever little problem-solvers at the White House. What a bunch of brainiacs. They have resolved the entire problem of global warming: They cut it out of the report!

            This is genius. Everybody else is maundering on about the oceans rising and the polar icecaps melting and monster storms and hideous droughts, and these guys just ... edit it out.

            "The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, and could threaten health and ecosystems," reports The New York Times. Presto -- poof!