Why I am Going to Venezuela!
Hope.
That's it, in one word. And there's more!I am writing this because many people have been asking – and have been worried – about my planned trip to Venezuela with a political delegation of 20 people from 7 countries that will be there from March 28 through April 7.
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Facing 2020 and Bernie 2.0
Four years ago this May I was the first to brand Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as 2016's Democratic sheepdog candidate. As I explained then,
"The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside of the two-party box."
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The Path to Climate Justice Passes Through Caracas
It is critical to understand how blocking the regime change agenda with respect to Venezuela is integrally connected to confronting the challenge of climate change.
Fighting the Media War
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Iran wants peace. Will the US allow peace?
We just returned from nine days in Iran with a 28-person peace delegation organized by CODE PINK. It is clear that people in Iran want two things:
To be respected as an independent, sovereign nation
To have peace with the United States without threats of war or economic sanctions seeking to dominate them.
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The US must grow up and respect Iranian independence
One of the lessons from our recent visit to Iran as a Peace Delegation is that Iran is a mature country. It is 2,500 years old, ten times as old as the United States and one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations with settlements dating back to 7,000 BC. It was an empire that controlled almost half the Earth for over 1,000 years. It is hard not to see the US-Iran relationship as one between an adolescent bully and a mature nation.
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War, what is it good for?
Edwin Starr, in his 1970 hit single asked "War, what is it good for?" His catchy answer was "absolutely nothing!"
On the face of it Mr. Starr's point seems obvious. But if so why has the United States engaged in seemingly endless war in places like Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan and Iraq, since Mr. Starr's song hit the charts? Why are policy makers in Washington D.C. fomenting for more war in Venezuela and Iran? Apparently, war is good for something as the U.S. continues engaging it.
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Report on the Venezuelan Crisis
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King
This essay represents a snapshot of my own understanding of the Venezuelan crisis. It started as a very limited effort to better educate myself in order to write my representatives and argue against a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela, however I soon uncovered far more than I had anticipated when I began, and furthermore discovered that most of this information flatly contradicted what we are reading in the mainstream press and hearing from most politicians. All of the opinions expressed are my own and they are based upon reading the references provided for the reader in this report.
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A Green Perspective on the ‘Green New Deal’
The Green New Deal has recently become a popular and controversial topic of conversation since New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey introduced HR 109. This is a non-binding House Resolution to transition the country to 100 percent clean energy by 2030 while providing high-wage jobs to millions of workers and addressing “systemic injustices.”
Republicans are calling the “completely outrageous” proposal a “socialist fantasy” whose goal is “ending air travel, destroying American energy and banning cow farts” while secretly rejoicing that it will seal the doom of Democratic economic policies.
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Democrats’ Green New Deal leaves lots of room for improvement
Much fanfare and criticism have accompanied the announcement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-Mass.) Green New Deal. Both are necessary. It is positive that the idea of a Green New Deal is receiving attention, but the actual resolution falls far short of what is needed to address the climate crisis. As Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, said, “At the moment, the Green New Deal is a mirror that allows anyone to see their own interest."
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Forget Red vs. Blue: The Paradigm for the 21st Century is Orange, Purple, and Green
By now, most of us have noticed a paradigm shift that has made traditional political labels obsolete.
Red versus Blue (Republican conservative right-wing versus Democrat liberal left-wing) seemed to work for the last century, but it’s not working for the mess we’re in now.
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