David Swanson's Blog, page 201

October 22, 2011

Unable to Get Simeone Fired, NPR Drops "World of Opera"

Yesterday, NPR's PR flack was haranguing me on the phone about how NPR had nothing to do with getting Lisa Simeone fired from an independent program called Soundprint.  This was despite NPR having gone public with its concerns over Simeone's "unethical" participation in democracy, and Soundprint's referencing of NPR's "ethics" rules in firing Simeone.  It was also despite NPR's clear intention to get Simeone removed from our airwaves.


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Published on October 22, 2011 08:35

October 21, 2011

Goodbye Iraq? Not Exactly

By David Swanson, RootsAction.org


I just got an email from Huffington Post telling me that Obama was keeping his campaign promise to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.  Not quite.  Here's a video of Obama's promise.


In that 15-second video he says: "I will promise you this: that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do.  I will get our troops home.  We will bring an end to this war.  You can take that to the bank."


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Published on October 21, 2011 11:21

October 20, 2011

What You Gave Obama Could Have Been Put to Good Use

The most remarkable thing about the Occupy Movement is that it is happening without funding.  Yes, donations are starting to pour into Occupy Wall Street, but not at the level that could really boost this campaign to replace plutocracy with popular participation.  And most of the other occupations around the country are poor or penniless, with their futures in some doubt because of that status.


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Published on October 20, 2011 21:59

The Two Occupations of DC

The occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC was planned for several months to begin on the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan War.  It was planned prior to and quickly endorsed and supported the planning for Occupy Wall St.  In numerous blog posts through the summer I described it as an occupation.  Here is a video of me demanding an occupation of DC and George Galloway demanding an occupation of London.  This is from June:



I bring this up because there are now two occupations in DC, both of them wonderful.  I wish we had three!  For the most part they support each other and work together well.  But there are some persistent people in one of them, the occupation of McPherson Square, who -- rather than protesting the plutocracy -- have devoted themselves to the hopeless crusade of getting everyone to stop using the word "occupation" in connection with the occupation of Freedom Plaza.


Despite having planned an occupation for the better part of a year and described it with that word from Day 1, we tried to accomodate our brothers and sisters in the OccupyDC encampment in McPherson Square.  We repeatedly told all media outlets to call us October2011 or Stop the Machine or at least the Occupation of Freedom Plaza rather than of DC or even of Washington.  To no avail.  We will forever be understood as a spin off of Occupy Wall Street and as the Occupation of Washington, DC.


And, I'm sorry, but who the hell cares?  If the energy devoted to pestering me about the proper names for our two occupations were devoted to nonviolently resisting the work of the 1% government in Washington, we might pull this country and this world back from the brink.


Let's think of our priorities.


Let's work together.


Let's be glad they aren't calling us worse things.


Let's invent new things to be called.


Let's make them inclusive things.


If we are the 99% we are the 99% together as one movement, even if we have multiple general assemblies.


Onward!


 


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Published on October 20, 2011 08:10

October 19, 2011

NPR Gets Radio Host Fired for Occupying

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who produced a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been participating in a nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., organized by October2011.org.  That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR.


This frantic email was sent to all NPR staff:


From:NPR Communications
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 6:12 PM
Subject: From Dana Rehm: Communications Alert


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Published on October 19, 2011 21:08

October 18, 2011

We the 99% Demand a Totally Different Federal Budget

[image error]


We can fit our demands on a bumpersticker: "Majority Rule" or "People Over Profits" or "Love Not Greed."  But we don't want to.  Our government is doing everything wrong, and we should be allowed to present the full list of grievances.  We can, however, give the world a thousand words' worth in an image, a pie chart to be exact.  Our federal budget funds the wrong things.  We want it to fund the right things.


Here are pie charts produced by some of us members of the 99%: gallery.


Here's where you can make your own: start.


You'll have to register and log in, which prevents spam.  Then you'll have a chance to fill in the percentage of the federal budget that you'd like devoted to various areas.  This budget tool -- the programming for which was done by Karl Anliot -- will let you know if your total adds up to 100%.  You can do this in 60 seconds, but I recommend giving it some thought and really making this into your vision for future activism.


After you create your own ideal budget pie chart, you can compare it with the actual government budget and with the ideal budgets created by the rest of us.  I suspect the biggest gap is going to be between the government and everybody else.  You can also go back in and edit your budget.  You can link to it.  You can facebook it and tweet it.


Below is an image of my ideal federal budget.  I might still change it, but I'm pretty certain of the basics here.  This is discretionary spending, so Social Security and other mandatory spending are not included.  A trust fund into which we pay, trusting that we will be paid back, should never be placed on the chopping block.  Discretionary spending, as the name suggests, is spending over which Congress has discretion each year.


David's Budget


The inner pie chart is broad categories, and the outer layer subcategories for spending.  The yellow-orange area in the lower right is sustainable policies, including job training, mass transit, pollution control, green energy research, etc.  The blue areas include education and research.  The green slices are elements of friendly foreign relations.  The purple is hostile foreign relations, including the military and wars.  The raspberry colored sections cover basic governance, and the little black slice on the right goes to big agriculture and transportation.


Now here's an actual government budget, specifically a budget proposed by the Obama White House for 2015.  The first thing you'll notice is that the military and wars have swallowed everything else.  The rest of the funding areas are all crammed together in teeny little slices over on the right.


White House Budget
The National Priorities Project has produced a very similar pie chart using 2012 numbers, but the numbers used here come from the White House's proposed 2015 budget, also used in this survey which inspired this budget tool.


As much as I sympathize with cries of "jobs not cuts" I wonder if awareness of the state of our budget would lead us to demand that money be moved, that money be cut in one place and added to all the other sectors.  Of course it could also be added to by taxing billionaires and corporations.  But whatever size the pot, our public funds ought to be distributed fairly, humanely, and sustainably.  Perhaps this online tool can help us develop the vision we need moving forward.


Make your own budget here: start.



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Published on October 18, 2011 23:30

October 17, 2011

Svonson o protestima u SAD

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Published on October 17, 2011 06:45

October 16, 2011

Obama vs. Jobs; Hope vs. Reality

Last week, President Obama racked up several more broken campaign promises as he pushed through Congress three new job-killing corporate trade agreements.  The Senate Finance Committee was quite open about the fact that these agreements will kill off more jobs and eager to mitigate the damage with band aids attached to the treaties.  Some of us who were in the hearing room felt an obligation to speak up and ask why in the world the senators -- with perfect bipartisan harmony -- insisted on causing the damage in the first place.  And for that we were thrown in jail.


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Published on October 16, 2011 07:43

October 13, 2011

Occupied -- What Now?

Thanks in large part to the New York and national corporate media a massive campaign to shift power away from giant corporations and into the hands of the people is now afoot all across this continent. It was inspired by peoples' nonviolent uprisings in other countries and sparked by courageous nonviolence on Wall Street.


Can we keep it going and growing despite the unreliability of the corporate media? When the television networks created Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, for us -- following the courageous stand taken by Cindy Sheehan -- they later turned against the movement and against Cindy. Already they are working to depict our occupations as violent, misdirected, undirected, and impotent.


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Published on October 13, 2011 07:53

October 12, 2011

How 99% Prevented Senators from Working Yesterday

At exactly 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday a few hundred people began preventing any work that might have been done in the Senate Hart Office Building.  Until sometime past noon, the noise of incessant chanting and the spectacle of banners, flags, and flyers actually flying down into a large atrium directed the attention of staffers and corporate lobbyists in every window away from their work.  For another half hour or so, the police worked to clear people out of hallways and quiet them down.  The police closed off access to the building for visitors. 


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Published on October 12, 2011 06:12