Lately protests at South Korean consulate offices in support of Gangjeong villagers have been held in Australia and Hong Kong. Now the protest in this video has taken place in the Philippines. People in the Philippines know something about what happens when U.S. military bases take root in one's country.
People are starting to react to the Navy base on Jeju Island. Hopefully more of this will happen in the near future.
Gangjeong villagers and supporters in Jeju City today
Father Moon arrested again at Navy base construction gate
Father Moon filming as Jesuit Br. Pak is arrested at Navy base gate 
I just got home after two days of driving up and down the state. Yesterday I made it to Blue Hill by 3:00 pm to stand with Dud Hendrick (Veterans for Peace) and artist Robert Shetterly (Americans Who Tell the Truth) near the town bridge for an hour and 45 minutes with the Bring Our War $$ Home banner. They held the banner and I held a sign and gave flyers to passing motorists who took the time to roll down their windows. A couple people parked and walked back to where we were standing to take a flyer.
Berkeley in the '60s (1990 - Mark Kitchell) from Stuart Christie on Vimeo.
We got home last night from Virginia and the conference called "Military Industrial Complex at 50". I'd venture to guess there were up to 150 folks who passed through the event during the course of the weekend. Many great speakers and a good hosting by local activists in Charlottesville. Our host family loaned us their second car so MB and I could come and go as we wished. Some wonderful meals were served including an authentic Afghanistan supper the first night prepared by local Afgan restaurant.
Gangjeong village artist and activist Gillchun Koh with Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) yesterday discussing the current fight on Jeju Island to stop construction of Navy base
Activists at a peace festival this past weekend in Denmark were read a statement from the Global NetworkAndre wrote to me, "So you have been published in Danish just like Kirkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen."
After we finished with our meeting at city hall we went to the nearby town of Saco where a pot luck supper was to be held at the First Parish Congregational Church. Since we had some time on our hands before the dinner, and the church sits right on U.S. Hwy 1, I got one of the other walkers (Alex) to join me across the street by the war memorial where we held the Bring Our War $$ Home banner for about an hour. As the rush hour traffic wizzed by I held out a leaflet for anyone to grab - I had about 7-8 takers. One woman passed by in her car and then approached us on foot and asked if she could interview me. Come to find out it was the editor of the local Biddeford Courier newspaper so she took some pictures and asked me some questions. Another reporter had earlier spotted us outside city hall when we arrived for the meeting with the mayor and she invited him to come up with us to her office. So that got covered as well.
The supper at the church was great (some really good macaroni and cheese) and then there was an excellent sharing circle afterwards with the church folks who came to feed the walkers. Church member Tom Kircher invited me to say a few words about the connection between the Walk for Fukushima and the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign. I told the story about the years of dangerous NASA plutonium space launches and how the nuclear industry views space as a new market for their deadly product. I suggested that if we could convert the military industrial complex to building solar, wind, mass transit and the like we could decentralize power production, get rid of the nuclear industry, and have some impact on the coming ravages of climate change. But we're going to have to make strong demands on the political system if we hope to make that happen.
My friend Starr Gilmartin (Trenton, Maine) vigils on the bridge near her home every Sunday. I saw her at the grassroots media confab on Saturday and she said she needed a good 9-11 themed sign for yesterday's vigil. So I suggested "Call 911 - End the wars". She wrote it down and last night I got an email with the photo above - so she used it. Came out good.
Lisa Savage and Steve Burke print Bring Our War $$ Home T-shirts during the WERU Radio's Maine Grassroots Media Conference
I joined the Walk for Fukushima yesterday from our house in Bath to Brunswick - about a 10 mile day. The walkers stayed here the night before and I cooked for them (homemade pasta sauce from my garden veggies and beet burgers). Some others brought food as well including CodePink Maine's Lisa Savage who made a Japanese dish - she lived in Japan four years many moons ago.
There is oil under the Arctic waters - black gold! And serious conflict is underway about who should control it. There appears to be little concern on any side about environmental implications of drilling in the Arctic regions.
Should we not be pushing all the harder for sustainable societies? Should we not be demanding conversion of the military industrial complex to build an alternative energy future?
And who will make this demand? Surely not the Democrats in the U.S. Isn't it time to call for a new progressive political party that unites the Greens, labor, women, people of color and other constituencies. The old go it alone strategy is just not working. We've got to build a truly united progressive block if we have any hope of surviving on this beautiful planet.
Imagine your family has been fishing and farming in a village for more than 300 years. Then the government decides they want your land and coastline for a Navy base. They stage a phony vote with less than 10% of the villagers present, bribe a few people, and then take a vote by having people clap to show they are in favor of the base.
Mie Athearn, a Japanese woman living in Maine and a native of Fukushima Prefecture, is undertaking a "Walk for Fukushima" to deliver a message to the Japanese government appealing for stronger actions to protect children from radiation hazards in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
The Tar Sands Action (smile)
By Ted Glick
My mind has been a jumble the last couple of days as I’ve tried to think about what I would be saying in this column. I knew I would be writing about the historic and amazing Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C.
I am literally smiling as I embark on this writing journey. There was so much positive energy, so many wonderful experiences, so much hope for the future in and around the two weeks of sitting-in and standing-in in front of the White House, August 20-September 3.
One of the things I will never forget is how, day after day, new people kept arriving at Lafayette Park in the morning prepared to walk across the street and get arrested, 1252 of them. Wave after wave, daily, this kept happening. And over the last four days, from August 31 to September 3, the numbers kept getting bigger and bigger each day. On the last day, 243 people crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and stood and sat, first in the rain—most without rain gear--and then in the hot sun, some for four hours, before being arrested.
The vast majority of those arrested had never done so before. They were from all over the country, just about every single state. They ranged from teenagers to grandparents in their 80s, predominantly white but racially diverse, people of faith, landowners, movie celebrities, climate scientists, elected officials and more.
Then there was Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Dakota, speaking Friday morning in Lafayette Park before she and others crossed over and got arrested, speaking from the heart, speaking of the many people close to her who have died of cancer at young ages because of the fossil fuel industry’s poisoning of her community’s air and water. Was there anyone in the audience of hundreds not moved to tears?
There were the young people Saturday morning and afternoon who sang and chanted for hour after hour on the Lafayette Park sidewalk to keep up the spirits and energies of those across the street in front of the White House who kept waiting for hours for their turn to be handcuffed and put into police wagons or buses.
There were the sobering things I learned about the tar sands throughout the two weeks, especially from the Indigenous people from Alberta province in Canada who have been leading this struggle for years: The second-largest area of (extra-dirty and thick, tar-like) oil in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia. The ethnocide of Indigenous people taking place as their land, water, health and millennia-old culture are being devastated as the forests are destroyed and massive strip mines moonscape the land. All of the toxic chemicals that must be added to the thick tar sands oil in order for it to be able to flow through pipelines, which increases the likelihood of corrosion and leaks. The plan for the pipeline to be built over the Ogallala Aquifer, water source for many millions in the US, and the ecologically sensitive Sand Hills of Nebraska.
There was the statement by our nation’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, that if the Keystone XL pipeline is built and the tar sands is fully exploited, it’s “game over” for the planet as far as surviving climate change.
There was all the news coverage, this issue becoming all of a sudden a major national story. In retrospect, the decision of those who called this action for the “dog days” of late August, when Congress and the President are out of town, turns out to have been very prescient. There was lots of press coverage in the first week which then led to even more and more extensive coverage in the second week, including Bill McKibben being on the national PBS news program. Tim DeChristopher reported to friends that the protests were one of the three national news stories on the late night television news he saw in the Nevada jail where he’s currently housed.
There hasn’t been an action like this in the United States for a long, long time. The last ones I know of in terms of comparable numbers were the 1414 people, my late ex-wife and excellent political artist Peg Averill among them, arrested in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977 outside the site where a nuclear reactor was beginning to be built, and the many thousands arrested over several days in early May of 1971 in Washington, D.C. in a Vietnam war protest.
But neither of them went on for two straight weeks.
I know that some of those not in touch with what’s been happening within the climate movement in recent years were amazed to watch the Tar Sands Action unfold over these two weeks. But it didn’t come out of nowhere.
Two and a half years ago thousands of people were prepared to be arrested at the Capitol Coal Plant action in Washington, D.C. Then, more recently, there was the 10,000-person Power Shift conference and actions in mid-April in D.C. and the powerful, week-long March on Blair Mountain of hundreds, and a thousand on the last day, in early June. There was the example and leadership of Tim DeChristopher, who publicly called for just this kind of day-after-day, provoke-a-political-crisis type of action from the stage at Power Shift, three months before he was sentenced to two years in prison. And, without question, there was the exemplary, day-to-day leadership given by Bill McKibben. Without Bill, without his passion, his tireless work, his writing and speaking, this action never would have happened.
But it wasn’t a one-man show, not at all. Scores of mainly young people worked hard leading up to and during the two weeks of the action doing all of the things needed to make this be such a success. When Bill and 51 others were unexpectedly kept in jail for 53 hours after the first day’s action, there wasn’t an iota of letting up or hesitation. On the second day, as those 52 sat in jail, 45 people crossed over to the White House sidewalk, all of them knowing they could receive the same treatment. As it turned out, the willingness of those 45 to not back down, to show the police that we were serious about our plans for scores to get arrested each day for two weeks, led to a dramatic pull-back by the police. They went back to their original plan to use “post-and-forfeit,” essentially a $100 fine on everyone arrested, and then let them go within a few hours of their being arrested.
At the rally in Lafayette Park on September 3rd, it was announced by Bill McKibben that there were plans being developed to keep this movement going. It has to; Obama is supposed to make a decision about the Keystone XL pipeline by the end of the year. One big upcoming date is October 7th, when the last of a number of public hearings around the country on that pipeline will be held in Washington, D.C.
Bill also reported on an action taken in Seattle, Wa. where 40 or so people paid a visit to the newly-opened office of the Obama re-election campaign. A repetition of that tactic would be a way to keep getting the attention of Obama and his people: public visits to such offices all over the country, especially by people who worked for and/or voted for him in 2008, so that the Obama campaign understands that we are serious, that we expect Obama to finally carry through on his promises during the 2008 campaign.
“Let’s be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil.” That’s one of the things Obama said, along with this big applause line, that his election was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
He hasn’t yet delivered. Worse, he and his administration have opened up public lands in Wyoming for coal mining, allowed most mountaintop removal permits to proceed forward, done nothing to stop natural gas fracking, supported the expansion of deepwater ocean drilling beyond the Gulf of Mexico and, so far, given lots of indications that he will approve the Keystone XL pipeline. These methods of extreme extraction of fossil fuels are exactly the wrong direction to be going.
Michael Marx of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Oil campaign gave an excellent speech on Saturday in Lafayette Park. He called for us to help Obama find his “inner lion” so that he can finally begin to do what he promised he would do in 2008, which will only help his chances of reelection. He went on to say that if that is going to happen we need to find our own inner lions and we need to “bare out teeth.”
For those who want to see Obama reelected, for those who are turned off by all of his administration’s many betrayals of his campaign promises and unsure of what they’ll be doing about the Presidential election, and for those who have had it with both Republicans and Democrats, the campaign to defeat the Keystone XL pipeline is a classic unifying issue, an urgent issue. The next few months are key. Let’s keep building the Tar Sands Action momentum and win one for the people and the earth this year. Si, se puede!!
Ted Glick is the National Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He worked on the Tar Sands Action for two months. Past writings and more information can be found at http://www.tedglick.com/ Follow him on twitter @jtglick.
