Julian Assange is a superhero genius who looks like a Batman villain, and this press conference is world historical:
Category: Undersung Heroes
“If anyone has a better [corporate friendly] approach… let me know.”
February 10, 2010:
As a Senator campaigning for the Presidency, Obama called himself “a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.”
Even after being elected Obama admitted, in passing, that single payer would be the only way to insure every U.S. citizen – but moved instead to strike (not-so-secret) deals with big PhRMA and completely drop any challenge to the for-profit, private health “care” system.
This is what makes his recent State of the Union request for “a better approach” to healthcare reform so completely disingenuous:
OBAMA: “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.”
Pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers took Obama at his word and went to the White House the next day with a letter urging the revival of the idea of a “single payer” or a “medicare-for-all” system.
The Secret Service turned her away, but she tried to respond to the president’s request again the next day in Baltimore where she was arrested for trespassing.
Congratulations, Dr. Flowers, you are The World’s Got Problems Undersung HeroTM of the Month!
Hear her interviewed by Bill Moyers here.
Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010)
January 29, 2010:
Before Zinn was a historian, he was a U.S. Air Force bombardier who dropped bombs on people Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany and France during World War II, and was involved in some of the first military uses of Napalm.
The experience left him with lingering questions regarding the ultimate justice of that “good war”, and such critical self-reflection led him to study history under the G.I. Bill.
As a professor of history, he went on to radicalize the students at Spellman College on the eve of the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement, wrote the first book arguing for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and helped Daniel Ellsberg hide the Pentegon Papers.
He was even part of a diplomatic effort to North Vietnam during the war, and helped secure the release of some U.S. POWs. While there he witnessed the effects of U.S. cluster bombs on Vietnamese toddlers.
He then spent the rest of his long life writing and teaching history, including the best introductory history of the United States ever written.
I always associate Zinn with that other great writer who died recently, Kurt Vonnegut. Although Zinn writes history and Vonnegut writes fiction, the work of both were animated in large part by their experiences in World War II. They both played a role at the military edge of the American Empire at its historic “best” – during its fight against fascism – but came away with deep misgivings about the whole enterprise, which required a personal evolution beyond nationalist patriotism and towards a more universal concern that made their books so radical and so valuable.
(He died hours before Obama’s first State of the Union address, but not before giving his own assessment of the President’s performance so far.)
UNANIMITY
December 10, 2009:
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, Barbara Lee received death threats and charges of treason for being the only person in Congress to refuse to grant, as she put it, “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events – anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.”
“In granting these overly broad powers,” she continued, “the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.”
The exercise of those broad powers have indeed ended many innocent lives and are still quite operational – the current President appealed to them when he announced his latest plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan:
“Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaeda and those who harbored them – an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.”
Lee was that lone voice in opposition to the blank check for Bush and his successors, and is still in office and sticking to her (opposition to) guns – she opposed Obama’s first Afghanistan troop “surge” and is now opposing this latest one as well – even going so far as to sponsor a bill to cut off funding for the war.
Congratulations, Rep. Barbara Lee, TWGP’s Undersung HeroTM of the month!
ANOTHER UNDERSUNG HERO
December 23, 2008:
Simply by waving a bidder’s paddle, Tim DeChristopher disrupted the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s auction of scenic public land to private oil companies.
Although he had no money to pay for it, DeCristopher won 13 parcels totaling 22,500 acres and drove up prices for others. The land he won bids for will not be able to be re-auctioned until the next administration is in power.
Amy Goodman interviews Tim DeChristopher, who now faces federal charges, here.
UNDERSUNG HEROES
December 21, 2008:
Muntadhar al-Zaidi:
“Thisis the farewell kiss, you DOG! This is from the widows, the orphans andthose killed in Iraq. You are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis.”Watch it with subtitles here.
Desiree Farooz:
“War Criminal! War Criminal! Take her to the Hague!”
Farooz confronted Condoleeza Rice with bloody hands as she was about to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committe in October 2007. Video here.
Alina Lebedeva:
On November 8, 2001, 16-year-old Alina Lebedeva slapped Prince Charles’ face with a red carnation while he was visiting Riga following the US/British bombing of Afghanistan. “I’m against the Afghan war,” she told reporters.
Although Lebedeva originally faced a maximum sentence of 15 years for endangering the life of a senior official, she was eventually let off the hook. Here is an update page.
DARK ANNIVERSARIES
April 4, 2008:
Welcome to The World’s Got Problems. This space will serve as a catalog of the world’s problems, and also to creative aesthetic responses to those problems.
For now, each post will cover a world problem, categorized under a general name. Since today is the40th anniversary of MLK’s assassination, we’ll start with the main targets of his career: imperialism and racism. Future posts might be about elections mechanics, environmental degradation, sexism,consumerism, and so on. Let’s begin.
Race, Class and Empire
MLK giving the Beyond Vietnam speech 41 years ago today, and his assassination 40 years ago today.
41years ago today at Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech. This speech turned the establishment media against him and exactly one year later – 40 years ago today – he was assassinated.
Today’s republican candidate for president voted against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday when he was a 47 year old senator in 1987.
McCain went to the site of MLK’s assassination today to apologize for his opposition to the MLK Day Holiday Act. You can see the crowd mildly heckle him here.
Representative John Conyers, who originally authored Act, responds to the news of McCain’s campaign apology here. Perhaps McCain has learned not to oppose the MLK holiday. But the imperialist McCain, who finds the idea of a century long military occupation of Iraq unobjectionable, has clearly not digested King’s anti-imperialist message. (Nor, it seems, has either of the Democratic candidates.Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and both Clinton and Obama have consistently voted to fund the occupation. Consider this essay on Obama’s record.)
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of both his anti-imperialist speech and his assassination, here is a brief review of the 6 main reasons King gave for opposing the Vietnam war, followedby quotes from the speech. Judge for yourself how many of these reasons can apply to the occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan.
1. The war dismantles poverty programs.
“[Before the war, it] seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor– both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were someidle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
2. Disproportionately high numbers of the dispossessed were used to fight a war that was not in their own interest:
“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”
3. As an advocate of nonviolence, King could not be silent about the violence perpetrated by his own country.
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
4. Civil Rights = Anti-imperialism.
When people criticized him for jeopardizing the Civil Rights movement by speaking on Vietnam, he responded that Civil Rights should not only apply to black people in the United States, but to everyone in the world. So opposing the violence in Vietnam is part of the larger civil rights movement.
5. His own responsibility as a Nobel Prize winner:
King won the Nobel Prize in 1964: “And I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.”
6. He felt bound by his own a commitment to “the ministry of Jesus Christ”:
“Tome the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?”
Hear the whole “Beyond Vietnam” speech here.
