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Hear Peace Activists from Russia, India, U.S. discuss Nuclear Disarmament
Hear Peace Activists from Russia, India, U.S. discuss Nuclear Disarmament
To Al Johnson
 |
Nuclear Disarmament in a Changing World: Russian and Indian Peace Movement Perspectives
Tuesday, May 7
7:00-9:00 PM
Community Church
of Boston
565 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
Dear Al,
Join two Russian and one Indian peace and disarmament movement leaders for an in-depth discussion of US-Russia relations, India-Pakistan relations, and the challenges to peace posed by each.
The speakers are in the U.S. to participate in the “Growing Nuclear Risks in a Changing World” conference in New York on May 4.
 Boris Kagarlitsky, born in Moscow in 1958, was a dissident and political prisoner in the USSR under Brezhnev, then a deputy to Moscow city council (arrested again in 1993 under Yeltsin). Since 2007, he has run Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements in Moscow, a leading Russian leftist think tank. He is the editor of the online magazine Rabkor, author of numerous books, of which the two most recent to appear in English areEmpire of the Periphery (Pluto) and From Empires to Imperialism(Routledge). He is an associate of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and a contributor to The Nation magazine. |
 Oleg Bodrov graduated from the Physics & Mechanical faculty of Leningrad Polytechnic University in 1976 and worked on testing nuclear reactor units. After a visit to the Chernobyl contaminated area (Autumn 1986) on an investigatory mission, and the state’s limitation of dissemination of information about nuclear safety and its impact to the environment, he joined the environmental movement. The focus of his activities is the promotion of a nuclear free future, nuclear and environmental safety, renewable energy and energy saving on the basis of public participation and involvement of all stakeholders in decision-making process. He is the producer and director of eight video-documentaries about decommission challenges and positive international decommission experience. Oleg Bodrov is the author of a monograph and dozens of scientific and socio-political articles. |
 Achin Vanaik is a retired Professor of “International Relations and Global Politics” in the Political Science Department of Delhi University. He has authored or edited 12 books ranging from studies on contemporary India’s politics/economy/foreign policy to matters of religion, secularism, communalism and nationalism to issues of international politics and nuclear disarmament. He is a founder-member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), India, a member of the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (InCACBI), and have repeatedly been invited as a panelist at international conferences organized by the ‘UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People’ first set up in 1975. He is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam). He was co-recipient of the Sean MacBride International Peace Prize for the year 2000 given by the International Peace Bureau, the world’s oldest international peace organization, for work and activities for South Asian and global nuclear disarmament. |
All three speakers will also speak at the State House on Wednesday, May 8, at 10am, and at a fundraising event on Thursday evening. For more information call Massachusetts Peace Action - 617-354-2169.
 | Yours for Peace, |
| Jonathan King Chair, Nuclear Disarmament Working Group |
Visit our website to learn more about joining the organization or donating to Massachusetts Peace Action!
We thank you for the financial support that makes this work possible.
Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169 • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter
617-354-2169 • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter
Massachusetts Peace Action Email
unsubscribe Great news! Congresswoman Norton's nuclear weapons abolition and energy conversion bill introduced as HR-2419.
Great news! Congresswoman Norton's nuclear weapons abolition and energy conversion bill introduced as HR-2419.
From Ellen Thomas, Co-Chair US WILPF Disarm Committee via PvS
GREAT NEWS! DC's Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced a new and improved version of her bill, the "Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act" ( HR-2419), so now let's begin calling, writing, and especially meeting with our Representatives to urge them to become co-sponsors of the bill.
The WILPF-US Disarm Committee sent Ms. Norton a letter in January requesting some revisions to the legislation she has introduced each session since 1994, changes which reflect the existence of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and remove some unnecessary clauses.
We believe this version of the bill is much stronger ... and so does Beatrice Fihn of ICAN, who was with Ms. Norton when the bill was introduced, as were Timmon Wallis and Vicki Elson of NuclearBan .US, who have been enthusiastically supporting the revisions.
Beatrice Fihn was quoted in the press release that Norton's office issued, "Congresswoman Norton has been one of the few voices showing courageous leadership on this issue for several years.... We now have a nuclear ban treaty that provides a clear path to realize the vision the Congresswoman has been presenting. Her strong support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is an example for all US political leaders and an important message to other nations who are leading on this issue."
“Our bill is as timely as ever,” Norton said. “Although the United States possesses one of the largest nuclear arsenals, there are still plans to spend trillions of dollars more on these doomsday weapons while urgent domestic needs, including health care, infrastructure, and clean energy, face funding shortfalls. The United States can reestablish our moral leadership in the world by redirecting these funds to urgent domestic issues, not preparing for human extinction.”
Keep up to date with what's happening at http://prop1.org, where you can find links to online and paper petitions supporting Norton's legislation in the House, as well as to the WILPF-US online and paper petitions for Senate support of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Thanks!
Ellen Thomas
202-210-3886
www.avg.com
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Their super PACs vs. our Super PACK BernieSanders.com
Their super PACs vs. our Super PACK
Alfred -
Donald Trump has a super PAC. And shortly after Joe Biden announced his campaign, news broke: his well-connected backers were starting a super PAC as well.
Well, we don’t want any part of that. Bernie’s not going to have a super PAC.
But what we do want to build is a Super PACK of supporters — the small percentage of people who give a monthly contribution to the campaign.
Join Bernie’s Super PACK with a $50 monthly contribution to our campaign.
If you've saved payment info with ActBlue Express, your monthly donation will go through immediately:
When you join Bernie’s Super PACK, we’ll send you this limited-time sticker for your phone, computer, car, or anywhere you want to put it to send a message that you’re part of the fight to take on the billionaire class of this country.
Monthly contributions are so critical to our campaign. The reason we're asking you to give monthly is because it gives Bernie's campaign a sustained, predictable source of revenue.
Knowing that every month we'll be able to count on contributions from our Super PACK means that we can build the organization we need to win.
The billionaire class shouldn't be able to buy our democracy. But they are, and you can bet they’ll wade into this Democratic primary, as well.
But the good news is that together we are more powerful than they could possibly imagine.
Can you join Bernie’s Super PACK with a contribution of $50 per month?
If you've saved payment info with ActBlue Express, your monthly donation will go through immediately:
Thank you for powering this campaign.
All my best,
Faiz Shakir
Campaign Manager
Campaign Manager
From The Archives To Be Young Was Very Heaven-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967 In Mind
To Be Young Was Very Heaven-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967 In Mind
By Social Commentator Zack James
[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. Over the next fifty years that explosion was inspected, selected, dissected, inflected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the huge anti-Vietnam War movement later and maybe even just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, the kids who were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came.
This series came about because my oldest brother, Alex James, had recently taken a trip to San Francisco on business and notice on a passing bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”
When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in Riverdale, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and the world. So I wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly of my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]
1967: Blowin’ Your Mind, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1990
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Byrds Filimore West-driven classic wa-wa song, So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star .
Phil Larkin, now road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty (and, occasionally, secret delight, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan, damn him, for one of some girl classmates), to full-fledged merry prankster now sits on a 1967 be-bop night San Francisco hill with his new flame Butterfly Swirl, and his old flame, Luscious Lois, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead center. (Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing epidemic as not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Yes, remind me.) A nameless hill, nameless to first time ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland the sea out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.
But enough of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams. Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil, Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case you forgot, or we not paying attention) are a “family,” or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry pranksters (small case, so as not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay) who just yesterday hit ‘Frisco and have planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs of Golden Gate Park after many months on the road west, and some time down south in La Jolla. After hearing the siren call they have now advanced north to feast on the self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will not use the oink word) from the Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story) just about a year ago.
Or has he? Well, sure Phil’s hair is quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more manly, his tattered Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his weight is way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and fearful barely eaten four in the morning open hearth stews, and not much else. And as he sits on that nameless hill with his “ladies” he no longer has the expectation of just trying LSD for the hell of it, having licked it (off a blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times down in La Jolla, watching the surf (and surfers) splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964 except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.
Just that nameless hill minute though, and to be honest, while in the midst of another acid trip (LSD, for the squares just in case you forgot), Phil sensed that something had crested in the Pacific night and that just maybe this scene will not evolve into the “newer world” that everybody, especially Captain Crunch, keeps expecting any day now. Worst, now that he knows he can’t, no way, go back to some department clerk’s job, some picket-fenced white house with dog, two point three children, and a wife what is to happen to him when Butterfly, Lilly Rose, and even Captain Crunch “find” themselves and go back to school, home, academic careers, or whatever. Heavy, man, heavy.
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!-March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books! - All Out On May Day 2012
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker • Passed Resolutions No comments
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Markin comment:
Wage cuts, long hours, steep price rises, unemployment, no pensions, no vacations, cold-water flats, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines. Well, yes. But these were also the conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the “one percent” were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half, so they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed. What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive, revive big time, that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the one percent.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people, the so-called middle class for those who frown upon that previous more truthful designation, has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that the working class and its allies have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” Moreover a new inspired fight like the action proposed for this May Day 2012 can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in the 1930s but there is something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.
We ask working people to join us this day in solidarity by stopping work for the day, and if you cannot do that reasonably for the day then for some period. Students-Out of the class rooms and into the streets! The unemployed, homeless and others who have been chewed up by this system come join us on the Boston Common. Look for further details on the Occupy Boston website. All out on May Day 2012.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker • Passed Resolutions No comments
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Markin comment:
Wage cuts, long hours, steep price rises, unemployment, no pensions, no vacations, cold-water flats, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines. Well, yes. But these were also the conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the “one percent” were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half, so they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed. What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive, revive big time, that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the one percent.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people, the so-called middle class for those who frown upon that previous more truthful designation, has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that the working class and its allies have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” Moreover a new inspired fight like the action proposed for this May Day 2012 can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in the 1930s but there is something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.
We ask working people to join us this day in solidarity by stopping work for the day, and if you cannot do that reasonably for the day then for some period. Students-Out of the class rooms and into the streets! The unemployed, homeless and others who have been chewed up by this system come join us on the Boston Common. Look for further details on the Occupy Boston website. All out on May Day 2012.
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