What do you choose?

Two versions utilizing the same message in song. Though the images have an all too traditional appearance for my own visual communication preferences, I have gotten to the place where I no longer care about how you vote, or what camp of belief with which you identify. I care about how you feel. Whether you are well. Are your needs getting met? Do you feel safe? Are you feeling respected?
Not only are we each responsible for living our lives coming to understand ourselves well and clearly enough, to understand "what" we might choose for world peace and prosperity_ we must also begin to understand "how" we might choose that will have direct individual impact.
Then "how" we might choose, and "how" realistically we each can participate with one another to learn "how," to choose as a group of any sort, to constructively contribute to the welfare of our world.
"How" the broader impacts of choosing contribution to the welfare of our world in groups, in varying sizes, on various cultural, economic, political scales impacts the welfare of our world.
One starting place, is an inner recognition of concentric circles that expand from one's own center of realization ever outward, through the course of the entire life journey.
How much courage does this commitment require of (any) one?
Has anyone thought about cognizantly documenting the direct human relationship to guns?
What our struggles as human groups are, when we are in direct contact with them or even the idea of guns?
What human behaviors actually look like without fear, without war, the threat, or the idea of war?
Then, look at the process of grooming a national consciousness to fear in the modern era... "how" does this look, feel, behave?

News, independent poll results, familial loss, & Seasons Greetings from the Kucinch team

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

ESPECIALLY NOW, vote your heart and let your heart win for the heart of this country

"Tired of careerist, conciliatory Dems who become darlings of the media? The media conspires to promote these people who bolster the corrupt, capitalist status quo. The media thus tells us who is "electable" - who the "real" candidates are. Media is about business and this business systematically and forcefully derails great human endeavors - such as the ideas expressed by Dennis Kucinich because they endanger the privileges reserved for the few by a political system gone terribly wrong." as posted on Youtube, by mstalcup

Thank-you Michael!

Benazir Bhutto

A link to past experiences for consideration now.

Benazir Bhutto's Last Interview...

On the part of the interviewer, this is a classic example of horizontal hostility; "There is no greater oppressor than the oppressed:"



The purpose in life is not materialism over non-materialism, nor gender or any other sort of prejudice, but rather the purpose is to learn to recognize the best in all schools of thought and belief that facilitate the best in each one of us. The best without attachment or aversion... wake up human beings all, wake up. Do not react and get stuck in that churning of addiction to sensual ignorance_ learn what it takes for each individual person. Only wake up. This truly is all.

'Simple' = profound awareness, rather than 'simplistic' = ignorant

A Local Strike

A Challenge to Mr. Bush... will the metaphor illude you?

A lightness on these things...

More visual fun for the holidays anytime of the year!

Wish you were here- Happy Holiday Season in the best of ways for you

Never stray far from vigilance

For eDan

... and then I saw! be still all you ranting ragers, and be mystified

it was a dark and... stumbling through the internet

Why I post the most truthful reflections of our collective human consciousness

More stuff and resources to tap into, and consider in these all out backlashing times...

http://www.streetroots.org/index.php- Portland

http://www.realchangenews.org/- Seattle

Weatherman blast survivor recalls turbulence and triumphs
by Joe Martin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Wilkerson

http://www.kboo.fm/


Review: 'Flying Close to the Sun,' Cathy Wilkerson

BY SCOTT McLEMEE | Special to Newsday (warning: some denigrating sarcasm included!)
November 11, 2007


FLYING CLOSE TO THE SUN: My Life and Times as a Weatherman, by Cathy Wilkerson. Seven Stories Press, 422 pp., $ 26.95.





When Bill Ayers published "Fugitive Days" in 2001, his memoir of life as a leader of the Weather Underground received a lot of attention, as might be expected. But one commentary in particular went beyond the familiar bromides about '60s idealism, countercultural extremism, and the lure of violence. It appeared in Z Magazine, a leftish journal that usually manages to be both strident and soporific - though in this case the editors had a bit of luck, for they got hold of a review of Ayers by one of his peers from the Underground, ex-fugitive Cathy Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, who is now a schoolteacher in New York City, had survived when the pipe bombs her comrades were building in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded one morning in March 1970. It was her father's townhouse; he was away on vacation. Three Weathermen died in the blast. Wilkerson and another woman crawled out of the rubble, contacted Weather's leaders, and disappeared into the American landscape, though their pictures were on "Wanted" posters everywhere. (She eventually turned herself in and did some prison time.)

Now Wilkerson has published her own account of the experiences and decisions leading to that terrible morning. The testimony is interesting in its own right, of course. But a couple of supplementary documents might have improved the book considerably - one of them being Wilkerson's review of "Fugitive Days," for her criticisms of that memoir provide some useful perspective on what she sought to do in telling her own story.

Ayers, she complained, treated the whole experience of radical activism in the 1960s as a kind of gonzo adventure: the product of revolutionary machismo, lacking much serious thought, let alone doubt or soul-searching. By contrast, "Flying Close to the Sun" seems alive to all the contradictions and questionable choices involved in Wilkerson's development.

To go from a proper Quaker upbringing to support for the civil rights movement was perhaps not such a huge step. But being arrested for the first time during a protest meant placing moral commitment ahead of middle-class mores. That was followed by another series of steps (uncertain, experimental, but necessary) as she tried to understand how opposition to racism and to the war in Vietnam might be part of the same struggle.

Then a few more steps - reading Franz Fanon and Regis Debray on the liberating potential of revolutionary violence, for example, and wondering whether it might ever apply in the United States. Before you know it, friends have created a bomb factory in your basement. But this does not happen overnight - and it involves really complicated and unstable combinations of deep seriousness and self-delusion.

"Ironically," Wilkerson writes about her state of mind in 1968, "having rejected my parents' belief that 'progress' would fix all, I was now tempted by a solution that was different in its particulars, but which shared a comforting veneer of certainty."

In "Fugitive Days," wrote Wilkerson in her review, Ayers treated the Weather members who died in the townhouse explosion as a cell out of touch with the West Coast leadership of the organization.

But in so doing, Wilkerson wrote, he failed to accept responsibility for his own role as leader - as someone who had upped the ante of violent rhetoric in the months preceding the blast, when the "Weather Bureau" (so the group's central committee was cutely known) issued apocalyptic calls for urban guerrillas to "bring the war home," in the organization's notorious slogan of the day.

Wilkerson's status within the group was that of a mid-level leader - not a member of the Weather Bureau, like Ayers, but an important functionary involved in organizing demonstrations and editing New Left Notes, the central publication of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1969, she wrote an important Weather document called "Towards a Revolutionary Women's Militia" (the other text I wish had been reprinted here) that certainly played its part in stoking the fires of paramilitary enthusiasm.

But that manifesto also criticized the Weather leadership's failure to confront the ideology of male supremacy. One of Wilkerson's recurrent points in "Flying Close to the Sun" is that a revitalized feminist consciousness had been growing steadily amid the civil rights and anti-war movements. This is well known to historians - but the popular understanding of the '60s tends to skip from Betty Friedan to bra-burning without considering how the idea of a "women's liberation movement" was influenced by discussions of "national liberation movements" in radical groups.

"Flying Close to the Sun" is valuable as an account of how these various currents intersected in one woman's experience - and how some of them led her to a place very far from the values she thought she was upholding.

"Now it seems fantastic," she writes, "that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy by making the assumption that rational, responsible planning lay behind the wild proclamations." But this is does not mean that she blames the Weather Bureau. While rather more flatly written at times than "Fugitive Days," Wilkerson's memoir embodies a much more thoughtful engagement with questions of personal responsibility.

"Rather than listening closely to what people had said," she writes, "I tried to manipulate them into adopting the organization's current perspective, into carrying out the organization's wishes in order to protect my own standing. Rather than facing the complexity of problems, I had settled for simplistic solutions and for the fiction that we, the authors of those solutions, were somehow superior to those we sought to guide."

And that blindness led to disaster, to terror. If only people with far more bombs than Weather ever had would realize as much.

More articles

Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.

Stuff to think about...

Click on this link to watch a fascinating video to think about

an activist's holiday deed! Buy the DVD...

from a newsletter I receive...

Wisdom is everywhere. How will you see or hear it?

on becoming... "Your whole past was but a birth and a becoming." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) We know that the nature of life is to grow. And so here we are. And we couldn't have gotten here without everything that has happened in the past. It is the same way for society as it is for individuals. Whatever has happened throughout history has had an impact on how we have grown and changed as a nation, and as a planet. We're all connected. And the more that we grow as individuals, the greater the impact will be on our communities and our countries. -Lissa Coffey

Frontline 2007: Don't get stuck in reaction_ what do you THINK?

Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the investigations over wiretapping and U.S. attorney firings, FRONTLINE examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney's way of looking at the Constitution.

"The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman tells FRONTLINE. "He believes the president should have the final word -- indeed the only word -- on all matters within the executive branch."

After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their vision -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority.

"Through interviews with key administration figures, Cheney's Law documents the bruising bureaucratic battles between a group of conservative Justice Department lawyers and the Office of the Vice President over the legal foundation for the most closely guarded programs in the war on terror," says FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk. This is Kirk's 10th documentary about the Bush administration's policies since 9/11.

In his most extensive television interview since leaving the Justice Department, former Assistant Attorney General Jack L. Goldsmith describes his initial days at the OLC in the fall of 2003 as he learned about the government's most secret and controversial covert operations. Goldsmith was shocked by the administration's secret assertion of unlimited power.

"There were extravagant and unnecessary claims of presidential power that were wildly overbroad to the tasks at hand," Goldsmith says. "I had a whole flurry of emotions. My first one was disbelief that programs of this importance could be supported by legal opinions that were this flawed. My second was the realization that I would have a very, very hard time standing by these opinions if pressed. My third was the sinking feeling, what was I going to do if I was pressed about reaffirming these opinions?"

As Goldsmith began to question his colleagues' claims that the administration could ignore domestic laws and international treaties, he began to clash with Cheney's office. According to Goldsmith, Addington warned him, "If you rule that way, the blood of the 100,000 people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."

Goldsmith's battles with Cheney culminated in a now-famous hospital-room confrontation at Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside. Goldsmith watched as White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card pleaded with Ashcroft to overrule the department's finding that a domestic surveillance program was illegal. Ashcroft rebuffed the White House, and as many as 30 department lawyers threatened to resign. The president relented.

But Goldsmith's victory was temporary, and Cheney's Law continues the story after the hospital-room standoff. At the Justice Department, White House Counsel Gonzales was named attorney general and tasked with reasserting White House control. On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied Congress for broad authorizations for the eavesdropping program and for approval of the administration's system for trying suspected terrorists by military tribunals.

As the White House and Congress continue to face off over executive privilege, the terrorist surveillance program, and the firing of U.S. attorneys, FRONTLINE tells the story of what's formed the views of the man behind what some view as the most ambitious project to reshape the power of the president in American history.

an alternative take:

Dennis Kucinich Campaign Coverage_ This campaign IS an Online-Networking, Support Process!

Strength through Peace; only a quietly confident country can follow through THIS way

This Thanksgiving hear the history of the holiday, the voices of the veterans, the politicians, the screamers, the doubts deployed again, and again...

I wish all of us sanity, courage, skill to bridge our perspectives well enough to hear one another as fellow human beings, with far more in common, than we have differences with each other.

What we truly have in the USA in 2007, is the stuck habit of reactionism.

False pride is not courage.

Politics, social labels, ideologies, agendas, factions, or camps of like-mindedness aside, what I care about is you, no matter who you are.

I care about how you are feeling.

I care about how your health is; mentally, emotionally, physiologically.

I care about your health spiritually_ NO MATTER what or how you define or practice this for yourself.

I care about whether you feel fundamentally safe, and respected.

I care that these conditions are mutual, fairly for all, without condition.

May this holiday season begin the seasonal turn toward a hibernation that is deeply restorative for your soul, every one.

Ode to One Rable Rousing Lady!

Anita Roddick: A great heart in a tiny frame



By Elspeth Thompson
Last Updated: 2:29am BST 17/09/2007

Dame Anita Roddick - environmentalist, human rights campaigner and founder of The Body Shop - died suddenly last week, aged 64. At her Sussex home shortly before her death, she gave this poignant interview to Elspeth Thompson, looking back over an eventful life and discussing her plans for the future.


What struck me first was how small she was. That famous untamed mane of hair, not to mention her outspoken views and public persona, had led me to think of Anita Roddick as a tall, even Amazonian presence - yet the woman walking to meet me was only just over five feet, with a tiny, bird-like frame. And I hadn't expected her kindness.




I'd driven down to her house, in West Sussex, from London on a hot, muggy day, with a friend, my small daughter and dog in tow - they were to drop me off and meet up later.

But the dog slipped out of the car and began barking at a huge bronze sculpture of a man at the top of the drive.

Clearly amused, Anita insisted we all stay, poured cool drinks for everyone (including the dog) and whispered to my three-year-old: "Do you like toys? I've got a great big box of toys that my grandchildren like to play with."
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Only when the toy chest had been located did our interview begin.

I'd heard Roddick could be prickly with reporters - after selling The Body Shop to L'Oreal for £652 million, last year, she was accused of betraying all she had stood for.

But, instead, she seemed chatty and relaxed, leading me through the cavernous house and the 12-acre grounds.

Bought in 1999, gutted and restructured on a spectacular scale, it is just a few miles from Littlehampton, where she was born and set up the first Body Shop in 1976 with a £4,000 bank loan secured by a friend.

There was no obvious sign of the debilitating hepatitis C, contracted from a post-natal blood transfusion but diagnosed 35 years later - her celebrated energy seemed undiminished as we toured the garden.

After her death, her daughter, Sam, compared her to "a hurricane, a tornado - a weather system that reached every horizon and every corner of the world", and remembering how her conversation swooped from politics to education to the meditative benefits of weeding, it seems an apt analogy.

Roddick's mother had died, at 94, days before, and we discussed her wake: "It was always her wish to be sent into orbit to music, so somehow I'm going to get her ashes incorporated into fireworks. It will be an amazing party. She'd love it."

I imagined Roddick as a feisty nonagenarian herself, trundling up to Number 10 in a wheelchair to protest against nuclear weapons, or hanging out with the elders of rainforest tribes.

In spite of the public attacks on her integrity, Roddick was clearly enjoying the post-business phase of her life: indeed, the house and garden were planned around it.

"I'd told the designer to make my previous garden look and feel like a 40-year-old woman - ripe and vital, in full glorious bloom but just about to drop," she told me.

"Because that was me then, raising children, being creative, incredibly busy. But when we moved here, nine years ago, my life had changed.

"The children had grown up and gone, my work was taking a different direction. This time I wanted a peaceful, open place where we could host the family, our friends, have parties, ceremonies, big business meetings."

There had already been many parties, including her daughter's wedding, in a big barn constructed for the purpose, with organic champagne from her husband's vineyard.

"We get 1,500 bottles a year, and as all the endless regulations mean we can't sell it, we drink it ourselves and give it away - believe me, it goes extremely fast."

As we walked, we encountered sculptures, from huge, expensive bronzes to smaller pieces by local artists. Some reminded Roddick of stories from her life.

A crowd of life-size figures emerging from the trees conjured up the silent party that greeted her off the plane when she went to Nigeria in support of the Ogoni people against Shell, while teepee-like shapes brought back visits to Native Americans.

There was also a hilarious tale about her attempt, aged 49, to try for a "rainforest baby" in the middle of the Amazon.

"A medicine man fed me special herbs and placed leaves on my womb and the women of the tribe led me out to sit alone in a river for hours and hours drinking a tea made from the bark of a tree," she said.

Nothing came of it, but she said she enjoyed the experience: "What struck me as I sat there was all the millions and millions of different shades of green all around me - in the trees, in the water, in the plants, everywhere. I've never forgotten it."

She had not travelled so much lately, although she shot rapids in the Yukon, a month before she died.

Back inside the house, she had been busy archiving, and took me down to the basement, which is lined with photographs of her, smiling, wild-haired, trying out beauty products with indigenous women around the world.

Stacks of the many books published through her new company, Anita Roddick Publications, were piled high on makeshift shelves.

'Though I've stepped down from the business side of things, the campaigning work is stronger than ever, via the books and my website, where I post a new dispatch each week," she said.

"I'm always looking out for grassroots leaders doing remarkable things and seeking to give them the support they need. The Body Shop was an amazing network for spreading the word but, as I've grown older, I've become even more radical and passionate.

"I need a broader, freer space than the corporate umbrella could provide. I'm keen on helping causes such as the Angola Three [former members of the Black Panthers imprisoned in the US] who are maybe too controversial for conventional campaigns.

"I'm into more creative solutions now, definitely a lot less confrontational than I was."

I did sense, though, that Roddick missed her more public profile.

She jumped at my suggestion that she should write a newspaper column ("Really? You really think so? Oh I'd love that!") and, when asked what her ideal job would be, replied:



Anita & Thom Yorke of Radiohead for The Trade Justice Movement outside London's House of Parliament

"Minister for Public Spaces - I'd give every town its Day of Delight. There'd be pianos in the squares, music and dancing, and mad, unexpected sculptures everywhere."

My impression was of a woman full of life and ideas and plans for the future - and her energy was infectious.

"The most exciting time is now!" she declared, as we prepared to leave. And it was easy to believe that, of ourselves as well as her, as we sped down the drive. It is lined with chestnut trees - some ancient, some planted when Roddick moved in.

Typically impatient, she tried to stop the designer planting small trees: "I'll be dead before they're fully grown!" He persuaded her that they would grow quickly. What a sadness that she will never see that happen.


AnitaRoddick.com

"Political Awareness and Activism must be woven into the fabric of business--to do otherwise is to be not merely an ostrich, but criminally irresponsible."

BUSINESS HERO: ANITA RODDICK
by Wendy Jewell

ecotricity.co.uk

"I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science, it's about trading: buying and selling. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 26 years on The Body Shop is a multi-local business with 2010 stores serving over 77 million customers in 52 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here."

Anita Roddick was born in Littlehampton, in 1942, the daughter of Italian immigrants. She always helped out in her family's business and learned early lessons of war-time frugality from her mother. Lessons: Re-use, Re-fill and Re-cycle, that would become the cornerstore for her Environmental Activism. Anita says she was a natural outsider. (Her childhood idol was James Dean.) Spending time in a Kibbutz in Israel led to an around the world working trip where she was exposed to many other cultures and beauty rituals. These experiences planted the seeds of how she would do business after she started The Body Shop in a tiny shop in Brighton, England. Frustrated that she couldn't buy small sizes of every day cosmetics, she started her own small cosmetics company, using natural products, sold in inexpensive plastic bottles. The rest, as they say, is history. "I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too. The Body Shop arrived just as Europe was going green."

Over the years, the International success of the Body Shop allowed Anita to "dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.""For me, campaigning is about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practises or human rights abuses." She believes that one of the bravest things The Body Shop ever did was to challenge the huge multi-national SHELL. At a United Nations Human Rights Conference in 1993, Anita met a delegation of Ogoni tribespeople from Nigeria. They were seeking justice and reparations against Shell for ravaging their lands thru oil exploration. Working with other NGO's, The Body Shop took on their cause and 4 years later Shell revised their way of doing business and committed the company to human rights and sustainable development. Tragically, Ken Saro-Wiwa(the key Ogoni spokesperson) and 8 others were executed in 1995 by the Nigerian government, but, eventually 19 others were released.

Anita Roddick walks her talk. She is an activist, entrepreneur, wife, mother, author, a lady, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and on and on. She has helped create and push forward so many things and won so many awards and backed so many worthy campaigns. Her vision keeps on growing and changing to fit what she sees happening around her and to help provide solutions to those injustices. "My sharpest focus has been matters of globalisation, because the "free trade at all costs" agenda is behind pretty much all of the issues I've spent the last 25 years campaigning on."After witnessing firsthand the chaos at the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999, she realized her campaign for human rights, abused and ignored by trade rules, had only just begun. It is why she helped start The Trade Justice Movement, a fast growing group of organisations including aid agencies, environment and human rights campaigns, fair trade organisations, faith and consumer groups that are campaigning for trade justice - not free trade - with rules weighted to benefit poor people and the environment.

Anita has made getting involved on a global level as easy as a click of your mouse. I think she explains it the best. CHECK IT OUT. ABOUT ANITARODDICK.COM "I've always said that travel is the best university; getting from one place to another means more than physical movement. It also entails change, challenge, new ideas and inspirations. The Internet is a perfect platform for this kind of extra-ordinary travel. Think of this Web site as a kind of global travel agency for your heart and mind, with me as your humble guide. Take a trip with me into the worlds of activism, ethical business, human rights, environmentalism, womanhood, family, and so much more. One day, you'll be able to visit a women's co-operative in Ghana, the next, a black family farm in Alabama. One day, I'll be talking about beauty rituals in Japan; another I'll be having a go at the US government's willful ignorance about the wonders of industrial hemp, the crop of the future. In other words, this Web site is a grab-bag of ideas. But isn't that how we learn to appreciate life? Join me: I want to connect with people who share my outrage over the menace of global business practices, and who, like me, are seeking solutions. But I also want to tell -- and hear, from you -- stories that lift our spirits, that celebrate how glorious our planet is. Outrage and celebration -- let's run this gamut together."




RELATED LINKS

GREENPEACE Greenpeace is a non-profit organisation that exists because this fragile earth deserves a voice. It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs action. Click here to find out how you can get involved. GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL

CHILDREN ON THE EDGE Children on the Edge is a dynamic organisation committed to working on behalf of marginalized and vulnerable children; often orphaned or victims of war.

THE RUCKUS SOCIETY RUCKUS is a non-violent direct action organisation that uses wit, humour and courage to ensure those who seek to turn a blind eye to the impacts of business operating without a conscience or a heart get the message.

FRIENDS OF THE EARTH FRIENDS is an environmental campaigning charity that inspires solutions to environmental problems which make life better for people. FRIENDS OF THE EARTH INTERNATIONAL

EXTRA INFORMATION

BOOKS

A REVOLUTION IN KINDNESS (edited by Anita Roddick)

What would our world look like if we valued basic human kindness above all other ideals, such as wealth and power? How would our most familiar institutions -- our health-care system, our governments, our businesses, our schools, our prisons, our churches -- be transformed?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

With the help of celebrities, politicians, homeless street vendors, political prisoners, activists, and entrepreneurs, this book redefines "kindness" to give it a new vitality that is far from "random." Featuring essays by Annie Lennox, Philip Berrigan, Ralph Nader, David Korten and many more.

Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits: A Spiritual Activists Handbook (Published in 2003) Written by Brooke Shelby Biggs Conceived by Anita Roddick

You know the names Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, but have you heard of Roy Bourgeois or Neta Golan? They, and the wealth of spiritual activists in this book are the heirs to a great tradition of faith-based activism. This book profiles environmentalists, war resisters, gay-rights activists, labor agitators, and child advocates. They are Buddhists and Catholics, Hindus and Muslims, Jews and Quakers. The stories of these modern-day prophets of positive change will inspire you and provide the resources you need to put your own beliefs to work in the world.

Take it Personally (USA Edition): How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World (Published in 2001) By Anita Roddick

Globalisation isn't just an amorphous idea: it affects everyone. In this stunningly designed new book, Anita invites the top thinkers in the struggle for humanitarian trade policies to weigh in on the problem, and to give citizens the tools and inspiration to do work for constructive solutions.

Contributors include David Korten, Julia Butterfly Hill, Vandana Shiva, Paul Hawken (author of Natural Capitalism), Naomi Klein (author of No Logo), and Ralph Nader.

CATCH THE TV SHOW TAKING IT PERSONALLY ON LINK TV


My new television show, "Taking It Personally with Anita Roddick," is part talk-show, part celebration, part dissent. My hope is to bring a new perspective to television by presenting under-represented views and under-reported stories into living rooms usually bombarded only by the corporate media and its dishonest messages. I've decided on the theme 'The Joy of Dissent' for the first episode, and invited as my guests Medea Benjamin of CodePink, John Sellers of the Ruckus Society and Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange to help me explore the power of humour and laughter and joy in protest.

Why I will never return to my 'life inside the fortress'

On becoming an artist in alternative culture:



It is vital for all people, inside and outside the experience of war and its "inevitable reality or benefits," either directly or indirectly to begin to consciously understand what all American warmongering, as the only "final" response to 'resolving' differences, really means.
The documentary-video trailer, "The War Tapes," excellently formatted through the eyes and experiences of the soldiers who go into war, provides us all with "an inside out" perspective from which to consider the complexity of choices concerning intolerance for differences. These very considerations are at the heart of our collective evolution of human consciousness. This documentary provides a chance to look at ourselves concerning individual interpretation, understanding and participation in an active definition of quality of human life while we each are here in this grand opportunity to wake up.
A chance like 9/11 was a chance to wake up to the consequences of every decision, and every choice we each make every minute of every day, together and "separately!"

I am anti-war because of my father's ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam, the hierarchic traditional Christian church, and my mother's complex history of abuses done to her as a child. I began recognizing the building blocks of this fortress-of-violence legacy in childhood, as providing me with the gift of eventually choosing to find the support I needed to get clear of this layered-in-pain family background. To intimately examine who I was and where and from whom I had come, and why my people continue to be are who they are.
After twenty years of building over again, I participate in this consciousness evolution by skillfully NOT passing on a historical family legacy of deeply painful abuses to anyone on my limb of the family tree.
In community, I personally live to pass on those lessons I've learned as a 'thrivor' away from 'life in the fortress.' One person's intentionally built life as potential for those who are looking for resources that confirm their own healthy, informed, and as a result, robust efforts to turn living in general away from violent historical family affect, one generation to the next. Turning away to courageously live consciously choosing peace, especially a peaceful life that colors outside the lines of traditional society.
May my one life continue to learn, and as a result serve as perhaps a small example of possibility, to understand the personal and inter-personal more responsibly, and to participate in building a more broadly developing human consciousness evolution. Developing one person to another through art, health consciousness in many forms, feminism that has an entire world of good information for everyone, and cultural history mirroring such as I do here.

Free Access to the sum of all human knowledge_ Donate!

The world's most dangerous man! A man responsible for incalcuable damage to the mental health of a nation!

Sally Field Uncensored, Gidget! How you've aged strong and graceful!!

So far, the turn out against this war, at last!- from Seattle!!

Don't be fodder for the Corporations.. listen to the heavy-weights speak_

The Post Secret Community Art Project

Portland Art Center

May All Beings Have Happiness...

...and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from sorrow and the causes of sorrow.
May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrow-less.
May all live in equanimity without attachment or aversion
Believing in the equality of all that lives.



Our hearts, prayers and actions are with those in Burma, and the capitol city, Rangoon.

World-wide Burma Events

Perhpaps a well-intended friend has been targetted_ check your sources!

A message from David W. Forrest, Ph.D (Texas A&M)

(Check the very interesting link above, attached to the name of Dr. Forrest!)

The original message is from the Texas Cattle Feeders Association. American cattle producers are very passionate about this:
McDonald's claims that there is not enough beef in the USA to support their restaurants. Well, we know that is not so. Our opinion is they are looking to save money at our expense. The sad thing of it is that the people of the USA are the ones who made McDonald's successful in the first place, but we are not good enough for whom to provide beef.
We personally are no longer eating at McDonald's, which I am sure does not make an impact, but if we pass this around maybe there will be an impact felt.
Please pass it on. Just to add a note, all Americans who sell cows at a livestock auction barn had to sign a paper stating that we do NOT EVER feed our cows any part of another cow. South Americans are not required to do this as of yet.
McDonald's has announced that they are going to start importing much of their beef from South America. The problem is that South Americans aren't under the same regulations as American beef producers, and the regulations they have are loosely controlled.
They can spray numerous pesticides on their pastures that have been banned here at home because of residues found in the beef. They can also use various hormones and growth regulators that we can't. The American public needs to be aware of this problem and that they may be putting themselves at risk from now on by eating at good old McDonald's.
American ranchers raise the highest quality beef in the world and this is what Americans deserve to eat. Not beef from countries where quality is loosely controlled. Therefore, I am proposing a boycott of McDonald's until they see the light.
I'm sorry but everything is not always about the bottom line, and when it comes to jeopardizing my family's health, that is where I draw the line.

I am sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) .. and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers!

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you?

Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

David W. Forrest, Ph.D
Department of Animal Science
Texas A&M University
(979) 845-3560
2471 TA! MU Fax (979) 862-3399
College Station, TX 77843-2471

The National Initiative_ does this facilitate true democracy?

What do you say America? Are people ready to handle their fair share of responsibility for their freedoms...

A GREAT Interview- Into the Wild- on Charlie Rose!

NARAL's ad campaign to "cuntermand" the Global Gag Rule!!

Help Say Goodbye to the Global Gag Rule TODAY!

Thank you for your continued support. By donating today, you can help us in our grassroots effort to alert pro-choice Americans about this important opportunity to say goodbye to Bush's global gag rule. It's expensive and it won't be easy.

NDRC Ad Campaign Fund Raising- Help US!

Help Call Off the Guns by Broadcasting Our TV Ad in All 50 States!
Our new, hard-hitting TV ad will reveal what the Bush Administration doesn't want America to know: instead of protecting wolves, they're about to allow hundreds of wolves to be gunned down in cold blood. Help us Call Off the Guns by making a donation that will alert millions of people in all 50 states and build an outcry that can stop the massacre.

Bon Nuit Le Prince Du Mime- Marcel Marceau (1923-2007)

Elizabeth A. Sackler Wing, Brooklyn Museum

The mark of successful art is in the responses it illicits.

Martha Wilson at the Brooklyn Museum

Yes, I am allowing some personal references from my art blog to spill over to the culture blog, because the film format, etc., is what gets posted to this blog idea!

Democracy Under Siege

I am venting my frustrations about the marketplace, at not finding cooperation where I seek meaningful employment.

There are no real terrorists_ only formerly democratic governments that have gone to bed with corporate greed. Greed that is the disease of full-on growth that has only it's own antiquated model of the market economy as we know it, for its own sake.

Populations are being held hostage, and force-fed consumerist indoctrination that dictates: consume because "we" will hire violence to terrify and control you and all your access other-wise.

When will people stop being so afraid about material security, and rise up concerning their own empowerment?!

Money does think, feel, breathe, create. It is OUR tool. We infuse money with our myths and fears, or we see that it is in essence a symbol of our own conscious transactions.

How conscious are your transactions?

Bill Moyers- Media Reform, Pt. 1

Part 2

Yes! Magazine

Fall 2007: Stand Up to Corporate Power


Who Will Rule?
by Michael Marx and Marjorie Kelly


Citizen movements are proving that we can take on corporate power, and together build a future that works for all life.


Corporate power lies behind nearly every major problem we face—from stagnant wages and unaffordable health care to overconsumption and global warming. In some cases, it is the cause of the problem; in other cases, corporate power is a barrier to system-wide solutions. This dominance of corporate power is so pervasive, it has come to seem inevitable. We take it so much for granted, we fail to see it. Yet it is preventing solutions to some of the most pressing problems of our time.

With global warming a massive threat to our planet and a majority of U.S. citizens wanting action, why is the U.S. government so slow to address it? In large part because corporations use lobbying and campaign finance to constrain meaningful headway.

Why are jobs moving overseas, depressing wages at home, and leaving growing numbers under- or unemployed? In large part because trade treaties drafted in corporate-dominated back rooms have changed the rules of the global economy, allowing globalization to massively accelerate on corporation-friendly terms, at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment.

Why are unions declining and benefits disappearing? In large part because corporate power vastly overshadows the power of labor and governments, and corporations play one region off against another, busting unions to hold down labor costs while boosting profits, fueling a massive run-up in the stock market.

Why were electricity, the savings and loan industry, and other critical industries deregulated, contributing to major debacles whose costs are borne by the public? In large part because free market theory, enabled by campaign contributions and lobbying, seduced elected officials into trusting the marketplace to regulate itself.

With all this happening, why do we not read more about the pervasiveness of corporate power? In large part because even the “Fourth Estate,” our media establishment, is majority owned by a handful of mega-corporations.

Big corporations have become de facto governments, and the ethic that dominates corporations has come to dominate society. Maximizing profits, holding down wages, and externalizing costs onto the environment become the central dynamics for the entire economy and virtually the entire society.

What gets lost is the public good, the sense that life is about more than consumption, and the understanding that markets cannot manage all aspects of the social order.

What gets lost as well is the original purpose of corporations, which was to serve the public good.


A Movement for the Public Good
The solution is to bring corporations back under citizen control and in service to the public good. The main components of such a movement already exist—including organized labor, environmentalists, religious activists, shareholder activists, students, farmers, consumer advocates, health activists, and community-based organizations.

We’ve seen the power of ordinary people working together on the streets of Seattle in 1999, challenging the World Trade Organization. We’ve seen them achieve impressive results curbing sweatshop abuses, limiting tobacco advertising, challenging predatory lending practices at home and abroad, and protecting millions of acres of forests, to name just a few successes.

We’ve also seen the growth of community-friendly economic designs like worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, and land trusts that, by design, put human and environmental well-being first.

Focus on Corporate Power
Each of these movements advocates for healthy communities, for a moral economy, and for the common good. If they acted together, they would possess enormous collective power. But as yet there is no whole, only disconnected parts. Despite many achievements, the gap in power between corporations and democratic forces has widened enormously in recent decades.

Activists and citizens are beginning to turn this around. We can build on this work. But if we are to close the gap in power, our strategies must evolve. We need to dream bigger, to speak with one voice across issue sectors, and to act more strategically. We need to focus less on symptoms of corporate abuse and more on the underlying cause—excessive corporate power. We must recognize that ultimately our struggle is for power. It is not just to make corporations more responsible, but to make them our servants, in much the same way that elected officials are public servants.

We need what the movement now lacks: a coherent vision of the role we want corporations to play in our society and a strategy for achieving that vision. It’s about putting We the People back in charge of our future, rather than the robotic behemoths that set their sights on short-term growth and high profits, regardless of the consequences.

The streams of many small movements must flow together into a single river, creating a global movement to bring corporations back under the control of citizens and their elected governments. The urgent need for unified action impelled a small group of organizations to initiate a long-term Strategic Corporate Initiative (SCI), of which we are a part.


A Way Forward
Over the past 18 months, the SCI team interviewed dozens of colleagues and progressive business executives to develop a coherent, long-term strategy to rein in corporations. Three major strategic tracks emerged:

1. We need to restore democracy and rebuild countervailing forces that can control corporate power.

At the community level, this means elevating the rights of local municipalities over corporations. Communities should have the right to determine what companies will do business within their jurisdiction, and to establish requirements like living wage standards and environmental safeguards.

At the national level, restoring democracy means separating corporations and state. Corporations and the wealthy should no longer be allowed to dominate the electoral and legislative processes.

At the international level, the task is to create agreements and institutions that make social, environmental, and human rights an integral part of global economic rules.

2. We need to severely restrain the realms in which for-profit corporations operate.
Most extractive industries (fishing, oil, coal, mining, timber) take wealth from the ecological commons while paying only symbolic amounts to governments and leaving behind damaged ecosystems and depleted resources. The solution is to develop strong institutions that have ownership rights over common wealth. When commons are scarce or threatened, we need to limit use, assign property rights to trusts or public authorities, and charge market prices to users. With clear legal boundaries and management systems, the conflict over the commons shifts from a lopsided negotiation between powerful global corporations and an outgunned public sector, to a dispute resolved by deference to the common good.

3. We need to redesign the corporation itself, as well as the market system in which corporations operate.
Companies’ internal dynamics currently function like a furnace with a dial that can only be turned up. All the internal feedback loops say faster, higher, more short-term profits. And maximizing short-term profits leads to layoffs, fighting unions, demanding government subsidies, and escalating consumerist strains on the ecosystem.

To prevent overheating, the system needs consistent input from non-financial stakeholders, so that demands for profit can be balanced with the rights and needs of employees, the community, and the environment.

To end “short-termism,” company incentives—including executive pay—should be tied to measurements of how well the company serves the common good. Stock options that inflate executive pay should be outlawed or redesigned. Speculative short-term trading in stock should be taxed at significantly higher rates than long-term investments. Companies should be rated on their labor, environmental, and community records, with governments using their financial power—through taxes, purchasing, investing, and subsidies—to reward the good guys and stigmatize the bad guys.

At the same time, we need to celebrate and encourage alternative corporate designs, such as for-benefit corporations, community-owned cooperatives, trusts, and employee-owned companies.

The paths outlined here do not represent impossibilities. With a citizens’ movement, we could turn these musings into reality in 20 years.


Building a Global Citizens’ Movement
How can we change laws regulating corporate behavior when corporations dominate the political process? The answer is that change begins with the people, not their government. It always has. Civil society organizations and communities can align their interests to produce a wave that government leaders must either surf upon or drown within.

The people control the vital issue of legitimacy, and no system can long stand that loses its legitimacy, as fallen despots of the 20th century have demonstrated. Corporations have already lost much of their moral legitimacy. Business Week in 2002 found that more than four out of five people believed corporations were too powerful. A national poll by Lake, Snell, Perry, and Mermin two years ago concluded that over three-quarters of Americans distrust CEOs and blame them for the loss of jobs. An international poll by Globe Scan recently found corporations far behind NGOs in public trust.

Trigger events lie ahead that will create further openings for change. We can expect to see new global warming catastrophes, unaffordable energy price spikes, and new corporate scandals. We can capitalize on these openings if we can help people connect the dots—making the link, for example, between excessive CEO pay, companies’ short-term focus, and the inability of the private sector to manage long-term problems like the energy crisis and global warming.

We also need conceptual frames that link various movements together into a common effort. Currently our economy is dominated by a Market Fundamentalism frame, based on the belief that when self-interest is set free, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will create prosperity for all. Also dominant is the Private Property frame, which justifies actions by executives and shareholders to exploit workers, communities, and the environment in order to maximize the value of stockholder and executive “property” in share ownership.

We can advance new frames. “Moral Economy,” for example, is a frame that puts the firing of thousands of employees and simultaneous awarding of multimillion-dollar bonuses to executives in a moral context. Suggested by Fred Block of the Longview Institute, the Moral Economy frame invites the introduction of new system forces into market dynamics in order to protect the moral order, and to counteract the amoral, short-term, self-interested behavior promoted by Market Fundamentalism.

Within the overarching framework of a Moral Economy, other frameworks like Community and the Commons challenge the supremacy of individualism and self-interest in the Market Fundamentalism frame. Community well-being becomes the standard by which business practices are judged, and communities themselves the arbiters of whether standards are met. The Commons represents our shared property and wealth, which is not to be exploited for the selfish benefit of the few.

Imagine ... Responsible companies protect the environment as though there is a tomorrow, and they view worker knowledge and company’s reputation in the communities where they operate as their greatest assets.

New conceptual frames, trigger events, a crisis of legitimacy—elements like these can serve to help build a citizens’ movement. But we cannot simply wait for this movement to form spontaneously. At the international level, we need regional organizations to come together to agree on overarching priorities. At the national level, we likewise need discussions that forge strategic priorities. At the community level, we need to create a network of municipalities working together to challenge corporate rights, to promote alternative business forms, and to inventory and claim our common wealth assets. Communities can also take the lead in creating public financing of campaigns, and in tying procurement and investment policies to corporate social ratings.

The idea is not that people will drop their issues and adopt new ones, but that we can learn to do both at once. We can knit ourselves into a single movement by adopting common frames and by integrating strategic common priorities into existing campaigns. For example, campaigns covering any issues from the environment to living wages could demand that targeted companies end all involvement in political campaigns.

As individuals, we can relegate our identities as consumers and investors to secondary status, elevating to first place our identities as citizens and members of families and communities, people with a stewardship responsibility for the natural world and with moral obligations to one another. We can stop buying the story that government is inefficient and wasteful, grasping that the real issue is how corporations and money dominate government. We can stop thinking that the solution is more Democrats in power, and realize it is more democracy.

The transformative changes we need will not be on any party’s agenda until a citizens’ movement puts them there. It’s up to us to build that movement. By joining together—by taking on the common structural impediments that block progress—we can make it possible for all of us to achieve the variety of goals we’re currently struggling for.

How would reducing the underlying power of corporations affect today’s issue campaigns? Ending corporate campaign contributions and political advertising would benefit a great many public interest causes. How often in recent years have initiatives to protect forests, increase recycling, provide healthcare coverage, and raise minimum wages been defeated by corporations who outspent their civil society opponents by a ratio of over 30 to one? We’ve all witnessed elected leaders move to the political center once they started receiving a steady flow of corporate contributions.

Likewise, if we could reduce the 13,000 registered corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. and end the revolving door between government regulators and corporations, would a handful of companies be allowed to own the lion’s share of our media? Would savings and loan, energy, transportation, and tobacco companies still have been de- or unregulated? Would oil and coal companies still drive our national energy policy?


Imagine ...
Imagine what it might be like in 20 years if our efforts are successful and people could once again govern themselves. A line would be carefully drawn between corporations and the state, reducing financial influence over elections and lawmaking, making possible a whole new generation of progressive elected officials committed to social transformation.

In 20 years, imagine that the institutions of the global economy are overhauled so that labor and environmental issues are integrated into trade policies, and impoverished nations are freed from unpayable international debts. Trade and investment rules promote fair exchange, and national governments have the policy space to support social and environmental goals at home. Transnational corporations that take destructive action are held accountable in a World Court for Corporate Crimes.

In 20 years, imagine community self-governance has become the new norm. No longer can companies open new stores in communities where they are unwanted, or play communities off one another to extract illegitimate public subsidies. We value and protect our precious common wealth, from ecological commons like air, water, fisheries, and seeds, to cultural commons like music and science.

In 20 years, imagine that it is a violation of fiduciary responsibility for corporations to pay CEOs obscene amounts, or to aggressively fight unions and lobby against environmental safeguards. Responsible companies protect the environment as though there is a tomorrow, and they view worker knowledge and company’s reputation in the communities where they operate as their greatest assets. Imagine such companies receive preferential treatment in government purchasing, taxation and investment policies, while irresponsible companies find themselves barred from government contracts.

Imagine we have a new national policy to make employee ownership as widespread as home ownership is today. And alternative company designs—like cooperatives and new, for-benefit companies—grow and flourish.

Imagine, in other words, that We the People are able to reclaim our economy and society from corporate control. Daring to dream that such a turn of events is possible—and charting the path to get there—is a critical challenge of our new century.

Michael Marx is director of Corporate Ethics International (CEI) in Portland, Oregon. Marjorie Kelly is with the Tellus Institute in Boston and the author of The Divine Right of Capital. They are part of the Strategic Corporate Initiative, a group unifying efforts to curtail corporate power, and igniting change toward a more humane, sustainable democratic society and economy.

Read more about the SCI and read their full report: “Strategic Corporate Initiative: Toward a Global Citizens’ Movement to Bring Corporations Back Under Control.”

Americans Who Tell the Truth

New England artist Robert Shetterly began painting portraits of Americans he admired at a time when he was deeply saddened and angry at what was becoming of the US. "My repsect and love for these people and their courage helped to transform that anger into hope and pride and allowed me to draw strength from this community of truth tellers."


Judy Wicks _ "I am helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth_ one which would replace corporate globalization with a global network of local, living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good."

All the power is in the arts

'The soul force, the light, the way home. It's in the arts. It's how the Divine gets into the world...through our hands, our voices, our songs, our poems and stories. Don't hold back anymore. Quit that job if you must. Work part time. Sell some things. Move. Do whatever you must to be true to the creative intelligence inside that came here with purpose, on purpose, FOR a purpose. The world is on fire. Get your hose, spill out your genius, spray us with your light till we're drenched and laughing. The queen-dom is here. Nirvana now!'_ paraphrased from Museletter

We are all connected

Whitehouse ghouls, and gargoyles

Come Back! Come Back!

A New Human Inspiration

What you Eat_ She is a natural Ambassador against Codex Alimentarius

Click here to go the website: www.healthfreedomusa.org

from Democracy to Dignitarianism

As an artist, it seems that the youthful nation: America is trying to emerge into her own national aesthetic identity.
Check out New Dimensions Radio on your local NPR affiliate station. This program has been dedicated to the ongoing conversation around the work of leading edge thought for over twenty-five years_

Nancy Keenan, President of NARAL_

WATCH PBS this WEDNESDAY, 4/24, @ 9:00PM!

Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Speaks out for For America's Sake, 1/2007

A Compelling Journalist's Broadcast Presentation saying aloud, and directly to this false Presence in the Capitol, what every rational Citizen seeks as Relief from six years threat due to Tyrannically Dysfunctional Control_ Free At last! Free At Last...

Do these two have a similar look to you?

Daily updates on the movements for our democratic take-back from the email-network front

Below is a cut and paste copy of the email I sent out to everyone in my primary email address book today. I share it here with the rest of the world to find out about one more American's (six years late) citizen-level, collective participation action:

Hi Everyone,

Please forgive the anonymity with which the email is begun as I send this invitation to respond, out to everyone in my address book.
Respond to what, you might say? Some might... to the clean-up work ahead of a country that is clearly divided over the realities of the past six years.
Many of you I know share in the similarity of feelings as I about these issues, and in that vain I forward the following information on which to take empowered action.

What I know from here, is that religious fervor will not die back this time, however, I also know that over the past thirty years of the cultural revolution in America, those differences were never intended to be extinguished. So, the interpretation for sharing a religiously diversified and more actively tolerant landscape appears to me, to hold corridors of infantilized skill-deficits on coping with fundanmental change. It is as though one must support the growth of a group of people's perspectives who only seem to know how to vocalize a belief that only one view, can hold an authoritative voice concerning the holy path... of course, this voice is intolerance for differences in action. But it is the path to penetrate that view of intolerance that is intriguing to me, as an artist.
I want people to hold on to their views, AND to grow to learn, then know how to live next door to differences peacefully, without an internal sense of threat of any kind. 'Course these are my desires, yet, there must be a place_ an environment conducive to the cultivation for this sort of interchange between highly charged differences... a manner in which the most fundamental, or lack of education would feel inclined to assume themselves included in this great dialogue on building, and bridging differences more peacefully more often. (The "CCC" blog below has some resources to address this concern, if you share it.)

So, here's the stuff: (following, check out my Corvallis Cultural Creatives blog for the entry yesterday, titled: "In their own words..." for more opportunities to participate in empowered actions on a petition circulating to help choose those veterans' film clips for a nation-wide ad against further troop escalation in Iraq!)

We must keep the faith!

Kerrie

"The Washington Post editorialized in favor of the war 27 times, and published in 2002 about 1,000 articles and columns on the war. But the Post gave a huge anti-war march a total of 36 words..."

By David Swanson

Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq War to the American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge.

I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9 to 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes on this will actually save you time, because you'll never watch television news again – not even on PBS, which comes in for its share of criticism.

. . . a great many pundits, not to mention presidents, look remarkably stupid or dishonest in the four-year-old clips included in "Buying the War" . . .

Moyers shows brief segments of an Oprah show in which she has on only pro-war guests and silences a caller who questions some of the White House claims.

Just in time for the eternal election season, Moyers includes clips of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry backing the war on the basis of Bush and Cheney's lies. But we also see clips of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy getting it right.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/21146

(below is the auto-signature in all my emails)

http://ducorps.blogspot.com
http://kerriebwrye.blogspot.com
http://corvallisculturalcreatives.blogspot.com (X= you are HERE!)

I challenge my destiny, my time
I challenge the human eye

I will sneer at ridiculous rules and people
that is the end of it: I will fill my eyes with
pure light, and swim in a sea of unbound feeling

I have challenged tradition and my absurd position,
and I have gone beyond what age and place allow.

_ Al-Taimuriya, from Hilyat al-tiraz (Embroidered Ornaments, 1909)_from my studies of 100 years of Muslim Feminism!








Shirts with this image are currently illegal in Louisiana and Oklahoma!

Bali Institute for Global Renewal, only the empowered need apply_ pssst: that means EVERYONE is capable!

Bali Institute for Global Renewal

In their own words...

Sam Schultz,
Andrew Horne
Rose Forrest
John Bruhns
Michael Breen
Brendan Duffy
Robert Loria
Peter Granato
Shelly Burgoyne
Brian Van Riper

VoteVets

Dear America, (my opening greeting words on this blog site, the contents of the email in my in box are quoted verbatim),

Today we're launching an important new project with MoveOn that will use the power of internet video to help spread the truth about how veterans and military families feel about the war and want to begin a course that leads to a responsible redeployment.

The project is called VideoVets and it contains some of the most compelling stories about this war that you've ever heard, many from VoteVets.org's own ranks. Please watch these videos and tell us which one you think is the most compelling. Academy Award winning director, Oliver Stone, will take the video that you choose and turn it into a TV ad-spreading this message even further.

Click here to watch now:


There are over 20 interviews, each less than 2 minutes long.

Pay special attention to the videos of Sam Schultz, Andrew Horne, Rose Forrest, John Bruhns, Michael Breen, Brendan Duffy, Robert Loria, Peter Granato, Shelly Burgoyne, and Brian Van Riper, all of whom are proud VoteVets.org members!

The administration tries to call anyone who criticizes their policy in Iraq 'anti-troop,' but these stories show that 'supporting the troops' does NOT mean supporting an endless war. The voices of these veterans and military families are often missing from the debate in Washington. Together we can make sure they become a vital part of the national dialogue.

Click here to watch the videos and tell us which one Oliver Stone should turn into an ad.


Thanks for supporting the Voice of America's 21st Century Patriots, like these!

Sincerely,
Jon Soltz
Iraq War Veteran
Co-Founder and Chairman, VoteVets.org

Note: The views expressed in these interviews do not necessarily reflect the views of VoteVets or MoveOn.org Political Action. They are the views of interview subjects only.

Stop the war in Iran today, Sign the petition!

Paid For By VoteVets.org. Not authorized by any candidate or any candidate's committee.