Global

I would like to announce the publication of a new book, which discusses the question of how oligarchs maintain their grasp on an excessive share of wealth and power when, as Shelley pointed out, the have-nots are many, while the power-holders are few.

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ye-are-Many-They-are-Few-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

The Peterloo Massacre

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many, they are few!

n ordinary times, Ted Glick would hardly be someone you’d expect to hear urging fellow progressives to vote for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

During the first 18 years of this century, Glick was an active member of the Green Party. He ran for the U.S. Senate as the Green Party’s nominee in New Jersey and put in a long stint co-chairing a local branch of the party. In fact, he recalls, “I have been a member of organizations working to build a political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans since 1975.”

Now, Glick is more than two weeks into a water-and-vitamins-only fast that he plans to continue until voting ends on November 3. As a headline says over his daily postings, it’s all about “Fasting to Defeat Trump.”

The 34th annual AFI Fest is arguably Los Angeles’ biggest and best film festival and this year it is taking place virtually through Oct. 22 (see: https://fest.afi.com/). The closing world premiere of the American Film Institute’s yearly fete is the Showtime documentary My Psychedelic Love Story, wherein Timothy Leary - the High Priest of LSD – meets Errol Morris, the High Priest of documentaries. Their meeting of minds on celluloid is a collision of cosmic consciousness, as Morris is to nonfiction cinema what Leary was to mind expanding drugs.

Leary, of course, was the counterculture’s guru, a psychologist who went beyond Freudian boundaries by adding psychedelic drugs to the study of the brain as part of an elusive odyssey for enlightenment. The enormously famous – and infamous – elder statesman of the Flower Power generation urged American youth to: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

At what is arguably the most important time in human history, with Homo Sapiens confronted by an enormous range of violent challenges that threaten our very survival, the only question of any genuine importance is this: Can we craft and implement a strategy to end the violence, particularly in each and all of its extinction-threatening dimensions, to ensure that humanity has a chance to thrive on planet Earth indefinitely into the future? But few are asking that question.

And, unfortunately, if one candidly considers the evidence in several critical domains – notably the threat of nuclear war, the deployment of 5G technology, the collapse of biodiversity and the climate catastrophe – there is little genuine room for optimism. This, of course, is not a reflection on the efforts of those committed to the attempt but it is a measure of the enormity of the task given the almost endless violence perpetrated by so many human inhabitants of Earth.

Remarks by phone on October 17, 2020, to Indigenous People’s Day event in Washington, D.C., delayed from October 12.

There may be no more important place to mark Indigenous People’s Day than Washington, D.C., the center of global weapons dealing, base building, and war making — the leading hub of nuclear weapons production and environmental destruction, the seat of a national and imperial government that overseas colonies of second-class citizens on Caribbean and Pacific islands as well as in Washington DC itself, while keeping nearly 1,000 major military bases in over 80 other countries, a government that continues to abuse the remaining native people of North America, exploit the land to destroy the sky and poison the water, in a city that after decades of protest is willing to rename its professional concussion-inducing team as long as it can name it for warmakers.

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, someone with a psychological disorder who exhibits symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with greatness, power or wealth.

A sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.

A narcissist isperson who has an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, sexual gratification, applause and a lack of empathy for others.

 A paranoid person or group exhibitsexcessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of other individuals or groups.

A xenophobe is aperson who is fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or of people from different countries or cultures.

“No one cares about the prisoners.” Over the past few years, I have heard this phrase - or some variation of it - uttered many times by freed Palestinian prisoners and their families. Whenever I conduct an interview regarding this crucial and highly sensitive topic, I am told, repeatedly, that ‘no one cares.’ 

But is this really the case? Are Palestinian prisoners so abandoned to the extent that their freedom, life and death are of no consequence? 

Before the fake holiday known as Columbus Day completely disappears for another year, I want to grab hold of it for a moment and look at what it really has to offer us: a dizzying dose of historical realism.

We’re not who we think we are. The social order in which we find ourselves is far more the result of dominance and dehumanization than principled integrity — a reality that demands deep introspection, not celebratory lies and a silent shrug as the worst of who we are continues.

The scariest part about the legacy of Columbus, and Europe’s “Age of Discovery” — ah, the white men break out of their cage and find the rest of the world — is that it’s still alive. And while there’s a growing demand that we should dump Columbus Day as a national holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think something else is necessary as well: We need to look deeply at the legacy of Columbus and begin to own it. No more whitewash!