MORE FROM WASSERMAN ON NUKES

"This is beyond serious," Harvey Wasserman of NukeFree.org says of the situation surrounding Japan's damaged nuclear facilities. "If all four of those reactors go, the death toll will be in the millions."

SITUATION WORSENS IN JAPAN

STOP RELYING ON THE "EXPERTS"

• The news from Japan seems worse each day. Problems are spreading at the Fukushima nuclear plant as fires have broke out in reactor #4. The Japanese government appears to be down playing the danger to the public about spreading radiation contamination. Protests in Germany and France are building against their nuclear power industry. In the U.S. Obama continues to promote nuclear power in spite of events in Japan. Investors in the nuclear industry are getting a bit skittish though as they fear they'll lose money if the world's public turns against nuclear power. It's crazy that governments are putting the people at such risk....we have to stop relying on the so-called "experts" who keep telling us that nuclear power is safe and clean.
• Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, the highest proportion yet opposed to the conflict, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The number of respondents to the Post-ABC News poll who say the war is not worth fighting has risen from 44 percent in late 2009 to 64 percent in the survey conducted last week. It is obvious that the public is increasingly understanding that the nation can't afford to keep paying for war. While the country might be divided on many issues it is clear that when it comes to endless war the people are largely united in opposition. These numbers should reveal to even the most timid that calling on Obama and Congress to Bring Our War $$ Home resonates with the public.
• The whole Bradly Manning story gets crazier by the day. Now they've got him stripped down to nothing because the military fears he will kill himself with his underwear. Then the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley gets sacked for saying that he thought Manning's treatment was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” Crowley defended Manning's jailing but just thought they were losing the public relations tussle and he was right about that. The Pentagon fears more soldiers going "native" and they are using Manning as a public whipping boy to discourage others. A protest will be held on March 20 at the Quantico, VA. base where Manning is being held. Get details here

MUST REMEMBER OUR HISTORY

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand
By Chris Hedges

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”

Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.

American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.

“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”

As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.

“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].”

Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.” And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.

Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.

The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.

The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.

The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal” news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.

Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.

We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.” And if enough of us say “no,” if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...”

Chris Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class”

THINK FOR YOURSELF

Everyone has their beliefs as to how they fit into the world. However, only those who think for themselves, rather than blindly follow, will truly experience the real world. This animated tale is about one character's journey learning that lesson.

DANGER AND UNCERTAINTY GROWS IN JAPAN

NHK (TV) newscaster announced at 18:22 that the fuel rods of [ No.2] reactor of Fukushima No.1 plant had become almost all exposed out of water level.

The authority in Japan called ' Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency '
http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/index.html admitted that it cannot deny the possibility that some fuel rods have melted, NHK says.

But after a few minutes of this announcement, the NHK anchorman announced the follow-up that suddenly the continuing efforts of pouring seawater became effective ( 19:00), and some seawater was poured into the containment vessel. Then 19:50, some rods were in the water. But some must have been melted, so the situation is still very dangerous, NHK says.

According to experts on TV, when the melted fuel rods drop in water below, it might cause an instant vapor explosion, which will surely much more disastrous than the two hydrogen explosions this plant has had in the facilities of its No.1 (12th) and No.3 ( this afternoon) reactors. That will be true 'melt down.'

A lucky story is that all the reactors of Fukushima No.2 plant have become safe now, as the temperature in their containment vessels have decreased. This is because in this plant, electricity is on.

It was announced early this afternoon that Prime Minister, who was supposed to go to the hard-hit areas to see the situation, would not go, as such areas might be desperate now, his visit might be cumbersome.

Makiko Sato

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Rep. Dennis Kucinich speaking to activists in Madison, Wisconsin. He connects the dots the way all elected officials and the public should be doing.

Notice too how Kucinich uses emotion during his speech and note too how the crowd responds to this emotion. Like Michael Moore, Kucinich comes from the working class and understands that the people are fed up and want someone to tap the root of their justified outrage. One of the reasons the Tea Party has had such success is because they use emotion to mislead the angry working class.

Kucinich offers real and positive solutions during this talk. He uses emotion to guide people in a positive, cooperative and transformative direction.

SUNDAY SONG

Music by the Life and Peace Fellowship as they remain in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island in South Korea giving support to the struggle against the Navy base construction.

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FAKING SOLUTIONS: FIRING ALL THE TEACHERS

When I was on the recent peace walk one night a pot luck supper was held for us at a church in Warren, Rhode Island. One of the women, a teacher, who came to the event told us during the program after supper that she had received a notice of dismissal that day from the city of Providence. She was on the verge of tears as she talked about the growing effort of cities to bring in new teachers with no experience to replace existing teachers because the replacements would be cheaper. The cities don't want to have to pay the higher wages and benefits to veteran teachers.

The woman told us that it takes at least eight years of experience to become a good teacher. She feared for the children who will be thrown to the mercy of rookie teachers.

Local politicians who claim they are doing what is best for their communities and then pull shenanigans like this need to be sent packing. We need to demand that elected officials begin to protect and defend their constituents and one important way to do that is by them having the courage to demand that we Bring Our War $$ Home. By doing this we could solve the fiscal crisis of every city and every state in the nation.

Today I went to the weekly Lenten Peace Vigil at Bath Iron Works and as I was leaving I was speaking to a local high school girl who came to the event. She told me that one of her teachers showed a news clip from CBS's TV news program 60 Minutes that featured a story about the effects of homelessness and poverty on children. The girl told me that during the class discussion after the video she mentioned the numbers she found here on this blog: The total debt of all 50 state governments is now $130 billion. The U.S. will spend $170 billion on our wars in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan this year. Maine's share of war spending since 2001 is now right at $3.4 billion according to the National Priorities Project.

The girl said that it's been difficult to get many of her follow students interested in these issues but when she mentioned those numbers several of them took notice and commented. It just goes to show how sometimes it just takes one of us to have to courage to speak up and make these connections that can help move people from apathy into consciousness and action.

THOUGHTS OF HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI

It was found that three people arbitrarily chosen out of 90 people who were waiting for a rescue helicopter to come on the school ground within 10 km-radious from the plant where the explosion happened are positive with high radioactivity. They are fine but need the whole cleansing of the body.

It is advised that if you live within 20 km-radious from the plant, you throw away your clothes after entering into a room, house, facility, from the outside, especially so if the clothes get wet in the rain.

One of the staff, who got down due to the explosion while doing his utmost to stop the situation from further worsening, died in the hospital in the evening. Details on his death have not been disclosed.

Quakes are still happening, spreading into nearby places. Someone calculated that radioactivity will reach Tokyo tomorrow night. A big oil complex in Sendai has been on fire since the quake in the evening today, following the gas complex still on fire since yesterday.

We don't know how to stop this ongoing energy--nuclear, gas, oil-complex disasters. To me, it is as if Obama's love of ' energy' and ' infrastructure' has been backfired here in Japan, as some Japanese accomplices have made this country greedy, seeking energy abroad.

All the leading politicians, whether conservative or progressive, must have been informed of this probable situation as to Fukushima No.1 & 2 plants already last night, a conviction I gained from still another source. Our Diet (Parliament) should be moved to somewhere near a nuclear power plant.

But in the meantime, the older nuclear power plant in Shizuoka which stands on an active fault would be another threat, especially to Tokyoites.

Makiko Sato

NUKE PLANT EXPLODES

Explosion rocks Fukushima nuclear power plant!

A famous pro-citizen physicist, whom many anti-nuclear power plant citizens deeply trust, says that the containment vessel has already broken and that the next problem is how badly the pressure container inside has been broken. He says this situation is beyond a simple meltdown, and that second criticality is nearing. He says the ultimate problem is how they can contain the situation, which is between Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

He says citizens living nearby should go far away, desirably outside 30 km radius from the accident site, though our government has only extended it from 10 to 20 km radius as to No.1 plant.

And another disaster may be coming at No.2. Let me remind you once more that our government had anticipated this late last night. Citizens around the power plants were not told about the true situations which politicians had been informed of.

Makiko Sato

LATEST RADIO INTERVIEW

SolarTimes editor Sandy LeonVest talks with author and labor, human rights and peace activist Bruce Gagnon about the US warfare state, the economic culture of "endless war" and the prospects and possible ramifications of US military involvement in Libya. They discuss transcending single-issue politics and the importance of coalition building among activists, through finding our commonality and connecting the dots between climate change, social justice and war.

Listen here

DEVASTATION IN JAPAN

NUCLEAR EMERGENCY IN JAPAN

Global Network board member Makiko Sato in Japan sends the latest report following the earthquake in her country.

According to repeated TV news:
No.2 reactor of Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in norther part of Japan cannot be cooled down any more, as its inner diesel-powered emergency electricity supply is now out at 20:00, a few hours after the electricity blackout happened in the area. As for No. 1, No. 3 reactors, they still have some time to run our of electricity for cooling them.

Citizens living within 3 km from the plant were urged to evacuate into some buildings, as radioactive leakage is expected if emergency electricity supplies are out. As last resort, before the blackout would be somehow overcome, eight electricity power trucks of the electricity company's and some of Security Defense Forces were dispatched for the No. 1 plant. The latter arrived at 19:48, but no information has delivered as to the connection went successful and how long one such truck can hold for supplying.

Anti-nuclear power plant groups are circulating their suggestions or appeals, including advice of eating iodine or one specific sea weed rich in it.

Bodies of 200-300 people have been found on streets in Sendai, Fukushima, where the river were inundated with Tsunami.

In Tohoku area, 4.5 million households are still out of electricity. In Tokyo area, there are 3.61 million households without electricity. Japanese government has requested U.S. forces in Japan for help.

Another activist in Japan, Junko Abe, reports that:

Tsunami will grow more powerful. The 2nd and the 3rd stage attacks will be more powerful than the 1st stage ones. It will attack other parts of the Pacific coast, areas such as Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu. The first stage attacks were of 10m high.



UPDATE: Thanks, Bruce, for your concern. So bad. Not look it will be heading for better. Quakes and tsunami never die out. People in the northern parts are still very much endangered, and fires in several cities have not been contained. One of the gas tanks on fire in Ichihara, Chiba, has just exploded, spreading toxic gas around. Nearby residents have been evacuated.

It is a small relief to read that the damages were not so big in Hawai'i, but still, to people on small islands in the Pacific, the fear of Tsunami must be so large. Please take care. Right now, warning of 10m high tsunami at one area has been issued on TV.

(I'm quoting this just as I hear NHK TV news.).....................
The evacuation area around Fukushima nuclear power plant was enlarged from 3 to 10 km early this morning.

Inside the operating room of No.1 ( I heard No. 2) reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant 1,000 times higher radioactivity has been detected.

One expert now appearing on TV is saying that there is a 'minor possibility' that the containment vessel will be broken down. The announcer and the expert are saying a slight radioactivity was detected at the front gate of the plant but that this may not be from the reactor itself but from some broken tubes or something around it. I've just got a Gov. paper from an anti-nuke activist in Tokyo via email who also is a core member of GreenPeace Japan. This was released by the central government at 22:35 last night, which regards Gov. emergency counter-measures to contain damages in every aspect.

The paper says at 21:41 last night our prime minister ordered that in case of evacuation,
residents be over 10 km radius away from the No.1 plant. (Actual evacuation 'recommendation' for expanded area of 10 km-radius was issued around 5:00 this morning. )

One expert fear the repeated quakes in the northern part ( still going on) might trigger ones in the southeastern, and then in the southern area, as has been afraid, but so far, it seems OK.

One of the hard hit area in a Miyagi town at the river mouth, the ground of the whole area has sunk, meaning another Tsunami might endanger people left even on the roof terrace of 3 or 4 story-concrete buildings, so the local authority is right now asking for their help. The fear of Tsunami is still warned as to every part in Japan. Several towns in Miyagi, Iwate, Fukushima have been totally destroyed. Fatalities around Japan may be thousands or more.

Many workers in Tokyo had to stay in nearby public buildings like universities, community centers, and so on, as Japan Rail (JR) trains didn't run because of blackout. Part of transportation including some lines of JR recovered late at night. I'm totally in a safe place, feeling devastated, praying nuclear power plant(s) in Japan might not cause further disaster.

Makiko

LITTLE PIECE OF A BIG SOUL

UNION BUSTING LEADS TO SLAVE WAGES

State troopers unloading riot gear in Madison, Wisconsin

• More than 8,000 people have once again taken control of the state capital building in Madison, Wisconsin and the governor has called in the state troopers. The ACLU in Madison reports that riot gear has just been unloaded and it looks like the governor is going to go for head busting. Look for troops mounted on camels next.
• Wired is reporting that weapons corporations are using prison labor in the U.S. (at 23 cents an hour) to help build Patriot (PAC-3) missiles for Raytheon. Prisoners are also making cable assemblies for the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing F-15, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter, as well as electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. Now you can see why the corporations want to get rid of unions. Why pay workers living wages with health benefits when you can build more jails, move the unemployed into these jails, privatize the prisons, and then get your slave labor to build weapons to kill people in other countries so you can then steal their natural resources. It's called slavery or feudalism. Folks better get hip to what is going down real soon.
• The latest media distraction is to promote mega-rich man, mega-egotist Donald Trump for president. He is daily being interviewed on the mainstream media where he is offering promises that if he was elected he'd return America to its #1 status. Some polls are showing that he would today run even with Obama in a national election.
• According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, a majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money from public retirement and health programs. The poll found 51 percent of Americans support reducing defense spending, and only 28 percent want to cut Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor. A mere 18 percent back cuts in the Social Security retirement program, Reuters says.
  
  In addition, a new Bloomberg poll asked Americans if they would support pulling all troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The poll found an overwhelming 66 percent would favor this action, while only 30 percent oppose it.

CREATING CORPORATE EMPIRE

MOORE: THIS IS CLASS WAR

Michael Moore calls for a non-violent revolt against the class war that is being aimed at working people. Now is the time to be engaged....now is the time to get real. Get off your knees and speak up. We either do it now or we go down the tubes.

Don't be afraid of the emotion - as Dr. Helen Caldicott says, if you are not emotional about all of this then you are not healthy.

LITTLE SISTER GOES LEAFLETTING

A protest in Boston last weekend around Int'l Women's Day

My youngest sister lives in Central Florida and yesterday she called to say that she was considering going to a rally that was being organized by unions to protest their new Republican governor's plan to destroy their pensions and social progress. She's been reading this blog and has my rap down pretty well and thought she might take a leaflet with her that spells out the cost of war. So she went to the National Priorities Project web site and printed out the cost of war to the citizens of Orlando. She made copies and pushed through her nervousness as she'd never done anything like this before.

She called me this morning and was swinging from the chandeliers with excitement. She went to the rally, handed out the leaflets and talked up a blue streak about the cost of war spending. She even volunteered to get involved in the effort.

Former Congressman Alan Grayson, who was swept out of office last November in the Republican tide, was there and she spoke to him as well.

I was proud to hear that my sister took this step. She overcame her fears about talking to people about politics and discovered that she was actually good at it. She did what we all must do more of - go out and talk to the people on the streets in order to provide them with more information so they can better articulate a real solution to the economic crisis. In the case of Orlando the taxpayers there have given over $1.85 billion since 2001 to pay for the wars in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan.

I did two interviews yesterday, a half-hour public access TV spot out of Burlington, Vermont via Skype (you can see it here) and then a one-hour radio interview from the San Francisco bay area.

This evening I drive an hour south to Biddeford where my friend Richard Rhames will interview me on his public access TV show called Out in Left Field. Then on Friday he will drive up here and I will have him on my own public access TV show. Richard is one of my favorite guests. He has a small family farm and understands what it means to struggle for a living. He's been a political activist for a long time and is quite open and direct about telling the truth about how our political system has been corrupted by the corporations that now control both political parties.

BROADEN THE AGENDA

Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and he was the founder of the media watchdog FAIR.