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Vision statement by former Columbus resident, now candidate for 15th Congressional District, Florida

Dear Editor:

As an orthodox Catholic, I find much that is disagreeable in the standard Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative political ideologies. There is a greater vision for America, and we have only to look to our past to find some keys to our better future.

I am inspired by such policy initiatives as the New Deal, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, and the Apollo project. The New Deal brought the government into the hands of those more interested in the common good, than the special interests of amoral financial speculators, and greed-driven elites. Government, churches and charities all have a role to play in addressing the rights of all people to live a life worth living.

The Manhattan Project had an immoral end of developing a nuclear weapon, but it represents the idea that the government has a key role to play in bringing together the greatest minds in the world. In today’s money, a like Project would cost us $20 billion. Imagine if we gathered the world’s best researchers to work on perfecting energy technologies such as nuclear fission/fusion, or any number of brilliant

Chicago pro-immigrant, anti-HR4437 rally

CHICAGO -- On March 10, 2006, approximately 100,000 people converged in downtown Chicago under the slogan "We are America." The overwhelmingly immigrant crowd demonstrated for immigrants' rights and protested U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner's (R-WI) bill HR 4437, which would "...amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance border security, and for other purposes" via means such as increased legal penalties for illegal immigrants and employment eligibility verification programs. A number of politicians and community activists spoke in support of the rally, including prominant Democrats Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, pictured in this set.

View the photographs

The most dangerous Black professor in America

Back in 1919, in the chaotic aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration sought to suppress radical and progressive intellectuals here at home. Government agents harassed W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. Copies of African-American socialist A. Philip Randolph’s militant journal, The Messenger, were seized and destroyed. When President Wilson was given a copy of The Messenger, he declared that Randolph must surely be “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

Randolph later went on to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, the first successful African-American labor union. In the 1930’s. Randolph conceived of the National Negro Congress, a black united front that challenged the racism of Jim Crow segregation and the inadequate programs of the Roosevelt administration in dealing with black unemployment. In 1941 Randolph pressured Roosevelt with the call for a “Negro March on Washington, D.C.,” resulting in the desegregation of defense industry jobs generated by federal contracts. Randolph was indeed “dangerous” to the enemies of black freedom.

Why did J. Kenneth Blackwell seek, then hide, his association with super-rich extremists and e-voting magnates?

The man who stole the 2004 election for George W. Bush -- Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell -- has posted a picture of himself addressing the white supremacist ultra-right Council for National Policy (CNP). He then pulled the picture and tried to hide his participation in the meeting by removing mention of it from his website, kenblackwell.com.

First discovered by a netroots investigator (uaprogressiveaction.com), Blackwell's photo at the CNP meeting was found on Blackwell's website on Monday, March 6. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Blackwell has ample reason to hide his ties to the CNP. When the Free Press investigated the CNP and its ties to the Republican Party, Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates told the paper that the CNP included "a former Ku Klux Klan leader and other segregationist policies." Berlet emphasizes that these "shocking" charges are easy to verify.

Berlet describes CNP members as not only traditional conservatives, but also nativists, xenophobes, white racial supremacists, homophobes, sexists, militarists, authoritarians, reactionaries and "in some cases outright neo-fascists."

The ultimate movie monster may be the Military-Industrial Complex

Reviews of:

WHY WE FIGHT
A film by Eugene Jarecki

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Directed by Jonathan Demme

As our nation lurches sickeningly toward outright fascism, it's both liberating and disturbing to see a complete, coherent take on the core of the problem.

WHY WE FIGHT is a deeply clarifying and profoundly saddening summing up of the domination of the United States by what Dwight Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex."

Eisenhower himself was hardly without blame for its rise. He was a great general who defeated the Nazis in Europe. He also raised serious questions about the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. And at the end of his eight-year presidency (1953-1961) he famously warned of the power of the armed services in combination with the pull of the huge corporations that profit from them.

Antiwar activists arrested at House Appropriations Committee meeting

Washington, D.C. - March 9 – Two peace activists were arrested last night for disrupting the House Appropriations Committee hearing on additional funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Mike Ferner and Ed Kinane of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, interrupted the hearing called to consider the $67 billion “supplemental” appropriation which was ultimately approved by the committee.  Ferner and Kinane were released early this morning after being charged with disrupting a Congressional committee hearing.

During the hearing, one of several amendments to the funding bill was offered by Rep. James Walsh’s (R-NY), to shift funds earmarked for Veterans Administration hospitals.  As soon as votes were cast on Walsh’s amendment, Ferner rose and told the committee members that as a former Navy Hospital Corpsman during the Viet Nam war, “the best way to stop creating more wounded and disabled veterans is to stop this war.”

Democrats: When the war was lost

Here we are, in early 2006, and the headlines are briefly given over to the disclosure that the oil companies have been underpaying their royalties from drilling on U.S. public lands by $7 billion.

There was a time, a generation ago, when people here in the United States thought and wrote about the underpinning of the U.S. economy -- the energy industry -- in a serious way. In the mid-'70s, the country was bustling with groups pushing for public control, for extending the regulatory powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over natural gas prices, for break-up of the oil companies.

In came Carter, and up went the solar collectors on the White House roof. Aside from that it was downhill all the way. The oil companies spend millions to winch themselves out of the public relations debacle of the oil embargo of '73-'74, in which the public rightly perceived them as eager coconspirators with OPEC in price gouging and profiteering.

The First Amendment

http://mattbors.com

In the spirit of Lysistrata

The perpetual war on women’s lives continues unabated. The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows protestors to continue to terrorize women at abortion clinics and South Dakota’s ban on virtually all abortions (with other states threatening to do the same) are the latest assaults on women’s human rights in this country. In addition, almost immediately after signing the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), President Bush promptly turned around and submitted a budget that proposed cutting funds to the vital services that are provided for by this important piece of legislation.

The arrogant disregard for women’s human rights however is a global phenomena. Hundreds of women die every year from AIDS the complications of childbirth because there is no profit in helping them survive. Women throughout the world are also victimized by a perpetual pandemic of sexual violence including infanticide, female genital mutilation, rape and sexual slavery.

And everywhere, women’s lives are used as the battlegrounds of men’s wars. Several weeks ago, the human rights organization Madre reported that an

Port insecurities

As a progressive ‘yellow-dog’ Democrat who happens to work in the Ports for New York Harbor find it urgent to speak on the current Dubai fiasco. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have taken aim at this takeover of the operations at six U.S. Ports to a company owned by Dubai Ports World, of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Dubai Ports World is buying the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a British-owned firm which has contracts to run cargo terminals in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and New Orleans.

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