Local activists in Omaha made a huge shopping cart yesterday and stuffed it with mock missiles and boxes labeled as depleted uranium and other weapons now being produced by the weapons corporations gathering inside the Quest Convention Center.The convention, called Strategic Space and Defense 2007, is billed as The Global Security Conference for Space and Defense Professionals. Translated that means several thousand uniformed military brass and weapons contractors filed into the convention center yesterday while our group held banners outside. The truck pictured above, with the shopping cart mounted on top drove up and down the street in front of the convention center and pulled a small trailer with hay bales on it. Seated on the hay bales were several activists singing songs calling on the conventioneers to "stop shopping" for war in space. (Click on the photo above for a better view of the shopping cart. It was quite a piece of work.)
One full {bird} Colonel stopped by our vigil for some time and talked, and debated, with several of our folks. In the end he told them that it was true that StratCom is in charge of preparing the attack on Iran and that in order to stop others {like Iran} from having nasty nuclear weapons we have to hit them first and if necessary to suspend civil liberties in the U.S. to ensure full compliance at home. We later heard that as the conference inside began the master of ceremonies started his talk by thanking Nebraskans for Peace for holding their demonstration outside - just once more proving that the military guaranteed our precious right to assemble.
Next time any of you run into trouble getting a permit to protest please just call your local military installation and they will come right over and take care of the situation. Their job, after all, is to make it possible for us peaceniks to protest!
No media showed up which appears to be normal these days for such events as the corporate dominated mainstream media runs cover for the new arms race in space. It is a subject that is not to be publicly discussed, especially the fact that there are people standing outside the convention holding signs and banners. It would be a danger if the tax payers found out that the new arms race was going to be "the largest industrial project in the history of the planet Earth" necessitating the destruction of social progress in order to pay for it.
More protests were planned today but I had to stay in the home of my host to do a 40-minute radio interview with a station in California's Mendocino County. I got a very nice response from the people who called into the show and the host proved to be well studied with excellent questions to lead the discussion. It's always encouraging to see a progressive radio host make an effort to really familiarize themselves with the issue. All the callers were interested and supportive. They just need to learn more about the issue and help others learn about it as well. I suggested they check the Global Network website and turn people onto the Space Video section of our menu.
At 4:30 pm today we do another vigil on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Omaha which has a StratCom facility on campus. I'm told the facility, built largely with public funds, is top-secret and is one more example how our academic institutions across the country are being militarized as is the rest of our culture.
This is the way fascism lives and grows. Secrecy, fear, flag-waving, and aggressive military interventions. The resistance to this growing fascism must grow as well or we will in the end find ourselves in even deeper trouble than we are today.
We have to stop being sheep that are being led to slaughter.
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