Progressive Democrats Sonoma County

That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions.

Some highlights:

“There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.”

Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize … and then making a false case for war:

Read the Full Story Here

By Norman Solomon
December 10, 2009

Eloquence in Oslo cannot change the realities of war.

As President Obama neared the close of his Nobel address, he called for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination.” Yet his speech was tightly circumscribed by the policies that his oratory labored to justify.

Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.

A few months ago, when I visited an Afghan office for women’s empowerment, staffers took me to a pilot project in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods. There, women were learning small-scale business skills while also gaining personal strength and mutual support.

Read the Rest Here

Applying the Lessons of Beyond Vietnam

By Ernest Canning
December 7, 2009

“Somehow this madness must cease.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam April 4, 1967.

On Jan. 18, 2010 our nation will observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, commemorating the extraordinary life of an intellectual and moral giant. The corporate media will fill the airwaves with excerpts of his uplifting August 28, 1963 I Have a Dream speech in which Dr. King called upon us to judge one another by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. And, during that same holiday, the corporate media can be counted upon to ignore his April 4, 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech just as they have every year since the first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1986.

Read the Rest Here

Norman Solomon
November 30, 2009

Take Action: Tell Congress: In Afghanistan, don’t escalate—remediate

An underlying conceit of the new spin about benchmarks and timetables for Afghanistan is the notion that pivotal events there can be choreographed from Washington. So, a day ahead of the president’s Dec. 1 speech at West Point, the New York Times quoted an unnamed top administration official saying: “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”

But “eventually” is a long way off. In the meantime, the result of Washington’s hollow politics is more carnage.

Read the Rest Here

Ed. Note — Rep. Lynn Woolsey is a co-sponsor of Rep. Barbara Lee’s HR 3699; Rep. Mike Thompson is not. HR 3699 prohibits any increase in the number of members of the United States Armed Forces serving in Afghanistan and it is the subject of the Action Alert above.

Good Morning! I am Dr. Margaret Flowers. I am a pediatrician and the Congressional Fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program. I also serve on the steering committee of the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care and on the board of Healthcare-Now, a national single payer grassroots organization.

Members of Physicians for a National Health Program (known as PNHP) educate and advocate for a single payer national health system, also known as Medicare for All. PNHP performs ground breaking research on the health crisis and the need for fundamental reform and contributes scholarly articles to peer-reviewed medical journals. PNHP takes pride in providing information that can inform legislators and the public about the reasons why Medicare for All is the optimal solution to provide necessary medical treatment to everyone in a way that controls health care costs.

Listen to the October 14, 2009 talk by Norman Solomon on his trip to Afghanistan which aired on Alternative Radio.

(program recorded at October meeting of Progressive Democrats Sonoma County)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

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http://tr.im/FFWw

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November 22, 2009, Bay Area, CA

• 10-11 a.m. protest at John Yoo’s (Torture Professor) house, 1241 Grizzly Peak Blvd., Berkeley, CA

Followed by events on David Swanson’s book tour: “Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union”

Over 40 people joined Tuesday, November 10th’s End War and Occupations, Redirect Funding call with guest Norman Solomon. Norman, co-chair of PDA’s Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, gave an update on Afghanistan, answered questions about strategies for raising public awareness about the costs—in money and in lives—of the war, and led into the discussion about the Brown Bag Vigils, the next step in the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. Steve Carlson, who is coordinating the Brown Bag Vigils, explained the actions and discussed vigils being held outside House representatives’ offices next Wednesday, November 18, to protest escalation in Afghanistan and lobby for support for HR 2404 and HR 3699.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

By David Swanson
November 13, 2009

The last time I was on Laura Flanders’s GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest — some Washington, D.C., “progressive” — argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn’t know anything about Afghanistan.

When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don’t know any better.

When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.

Read the rest here

by Norman Solomon
November 12, 2209

Disputes are raging within the Obama administration over how to continue the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. A new leak tells us that Washington’s ambassador in Kabul, former four-star general Karl Eikenberry, has cautioned against adding more troops while President Hamid Karzai keeps disappointing American policymakers. This is the extent of the current debate within the warfare state.

During a top-level meeting Wednesday afternoon in the White House, the Washington Post reports, President Obama “was given a series of options laid out by military planners with differing numbers of new U.S. deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops. None of the scenarios calls for scaling back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan or delaying the dispatch of additional troops.”

Read the rest here

By David Swanson

Join PDA’s End War and Occupations, Redirect Funding Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here.

Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers’ health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.

Read more

By NORMAN SOLOMON
Press Democrat
November 4, 2009

On election night a year ago, celebrations across the North Bay included dancing in the streets. The voters had spoken — loudly — for Barack Obama, who won 74 percent of ballots in Sonoma County and 78 percent in Marin. Spirits were sky high, and so were expectations.

That evening, as he spoke to the nation from Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama repeated his campaign mantra: “Yes we can.” But a year later, the words are less uplifting.

Click Here to Read More

http://blog.pdamerica.org/2009/10/crunch-time-and-a-grassroots-view-of-the-%E2%80%98robust%E2%80%99-public-option/

By PDA-Chicago Steering Committee: Bill Bianchi, Lorin Klugman, Arlene Gloria Hirsch, Allan Nowakowski, and Jim Rhodes
October 27, 2009

The PDA-Chicago Steering Committee wants to weigh in on the controversy that has arisen over something called a ‘robust’ public option. We all know, the term ‘public option’ has become toxic to many single-payer supporters, and it’s become difficult to discuss this issue calmly.

A short film in two parts by Brad Friedman…

So we went out to Griffith Park out here in L.A. on Sunday to check out the kick-off day for the new “Tea Party Express II” national tour. Thought we might meet some interesting people and file a quick video report. Met alot of interesting people, and so ended up making a short film of sorts. Enjoy. Spread the word. Go tell the story (“both sides”)...

CLICK HERE TO VIEW

Wednesday, Oct. 28, 7:30 p.m.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, will draw the connections between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare,and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950’s. Based on four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, she will explain how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies – did not begin with September 11, 2001.

Sonoma State University, The Cooperage
($2.50 parking fee)
$15 general admission, free to SSU students, faculty and staff
Information – 664-2382

by John Nichols
The Nation
9-01-2009

Republicans are horrified, horrified, horrified by the bluntness of Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson.

The tough kid from the Bronx (and Harvard Law School) who represents an until recently Republican Orlando-area district pulled no punches Tuesday, when he declared on the House floor:

“The Republican health care plan is this: Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.”

After his GOP colleagues recovered from the shock of a Democrat actually calling them out, they demanded an apology.

Grayson returned to the House floor to announce that:

“I would like to apologize, I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

Read the rest at the PDA Blog (with video)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! — PDSonoma County will be hosting David Swanson’s appearance in Sonoma County on Wednesday, Jan. 13. Details TBA.

Introduction to FireDogLake Book Salon by Glenn Greenwald
September 27, 2009

Over the last eight years, David Swanson has been one of the most tenacious and effective activists against the transgressions of the Bush presidency. As Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, Communications Coordinator for ACORN prior to that, a tireless anti-war activist for Democrats.com and, most notably of all, as the indefatigable spearhead behind the campaign to publicize the incriminating “Downing Street memos,” Swanson has been a living, breathing illustration of what vibrant citizen activism and independent, adversarial investigative journalism should be.

Read more here

I say to those who reproach me: Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

By Muntadhar al-Zaidi
September 18, 2009
Published by McClatchy Newspapers.

BAGHDAD — Muntadhar al Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at former President Bush last year in an act of protest that gained international notoriety, was freed from an Iraqi prison Tuesday after nine months behind bars and gave a passionate defense of his actions.

Read the Full Story Here, with video

Michael Lighty, Policy Director for California Nurse’s Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee on Grit tv.

CLICK HERE to view the video

By Norman Solomon
September 1, 2009

Yesterday, I met a little girl named Guljumma. She’s seven years old, and she lives in Kabul at a place called Helmand Refugee Camp District 5.

Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

CLICK HERE to watch video

Marilyn Clement, a leading progressive activist and organizer whose life spanned the history of the modern progressive movement, died yesterday (Monday, August 3, 2009) after a prolonged illness.

She died as support for the last great “interest” of her remarkable life – — universal health-care — has now become the consensus among people in this country and just as Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would entertain a House floor vote on the single payer initiative (the option Marilyn struggled for). ......

Link to Original

By Norman Solomon
July 24, 2009

“I want to cover everybody,” President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday night. “Now, the truth is that unless you have a—what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody’s automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual. . .”

The same conventional wisdom keeping single payer off Washington’s table has been spinning for various “reform” plans with such accelerated RPMs that at this point the nation’s “healthcare debate” is suffering from a severe case of vertigo.

Read More Here