The Interfaith Resource Center for Peace and Justice
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Peace and Justice
Unless the decision of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare is reversed, beginning May 1st people under the age of 60 who have more than $2,000 in savings or seniors with more than $3, 250 in countable assets, despite having very low incomes, will no longer qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/food stamps) benefits. In late December, our state government informed the federal government that it will reinstate the “asset test” for SNAP applicants denying vital food assistance to an estimated 36,000 Pennsylvanians with modest savings.
Hunger Free Pennsylvania and CEO/Weinberg Northeast Regional Food Bank are working with organizations across the Commonwealth to urge Governor Corbett to reverse this decision. We hope that you will join us in this effort. AARP is providing a toll free number to make it easy for all of us to contact the Governor’s Office in Harrisburg from January 23rd through January 31st.
Please call 800-515-8134 today and tell the Governor that you oppose the decision to reinstate the SNAP asset test.
Specific objections to reinstating the asset test include:
• While DPW notes that the asset test is related to an initiative to reduce fraud and abuse in department programs, federal statistics show that Pennsylvania’s SNAP fraud rate is one of the lowest in the nation at one-tenth of 1 percent. • Pennsylvania currently receives $2.5 billion in federal SNAP funds annually. Implementation of the asset test would cause Pennsylvania to lose at least $55 million in federal SNAP dollars, if DPW’s projections of those affected are accurate. Because every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.79 in economic activity, Pennsylvania stands to lose millions of local economic impact under the plan. • An asset test will also cost Pennsylvania additional taxpayer money to administer the program, including technological upgrades, and additional staff training and time. Nearly 850,000 households that currently receive SNAP would also have to file paperwork concerning their assets, which would place further strain on already overworked and understaffed county offices. • Furthermore, asset limits discourage low-income families from saving and force families in need to spend down their savings in order to seek SNAP benefits. However, families must be able to save money in order to achieve self-sufficiency. In addition, it has been found that assets are important to a family’s physical and mental health, as well as its economic and social well-being. • The new asset barrier to SNAP further diminishes the government assistance available to low-income families in Pennsylvania, thus increasing their reliance on food banks, which are already experiencing record demand due to the economic downturn and the high cost of food. Estimates provided by our national partner, Feeding America, reveal a potential increase in demand of 29% at Pennsylvania’s food banks, due to the implementation of this policy, Please call Governor Corbett today (800-515-8134) and speak out in support of our neighbors in need by voicing your opposition to the SNAP asset test.
Making Peace through Justice –a project sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy in cooperation with Equal Exchange, an Interfaith Fair Trade Company.
Enjoy delicious beverages and candy bars knowing you are providing a just wage for the farmers and their families in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; protecting their health and yours because no poisonous chemicals are used in the growing and processing and providing a healthy safe environment for earth’s many other creatures.
COFFEE Percolator Grind: Organic Fellowship Blend—1 lb. $7.25 Drip Grind: Regular: Organic Breakfast Blend—12 oz. $6.40 Organic Mind Body Soul—12 oz. $6.40 Hazelnut Crème, Toffee Carmel, —12 oz. $6.65 Organic Whole Bean Breakfast Blend—12 oz. $6.40;5 2-lb $78 Organic Columbian —12 oz. $6.40 Café Salvador,—12 oz. $6.40
Decaf Organic Decaf—12 oz. $7.40 Hazelnut Crème decaf—12 oz. $7.65
TEA—all teas Organic $2.75 English Breakfast Black Tea (more robust than English Breakfast) Green Mint Herbal—Mint Earl Grey
Cocoa Organic Hot Cocoa Mix—(12 oz can $5.00)
Chocolate Bars $2.50 each Organic plain Very Dark Chocolate--71% cocoa ….. Milk Chocolate with hint of hazel nut…38%cocoa Dark Chocolate/ Almonds --55% cocoa….. Dark with mint chips 67% Dark Chocolate with orange (65% vegan and gluten free) Dark Carmel Crunch with sea salt—55%
Snacks- Organic tamari roasted almonds—5 oz. bag $4.35
I try to keep all items on hand and will order if I don’t have an item you want.
12 Min video on Fair Trade: DVD on The Dark Side of Chocolate available for loan.
All prices are at cost.
If you wish to add a donation, it will be sent to the Peace & Justice Center in Wilkes-Barre and Mercy Farm, Vermont.
Many thanks for your support. Enjoy!
CORPORATE GREED AT COOPER TIRE FLAT OUT WRONG!
Please pass along to your members and delegates. We are asking for a crowd of 50 at this event for 10:00 AM We are Asking for Sign Ups to stay and pass out information for 2 shifts. Please send me names e-mail and Phone Numbers of people who will be participating. Please do your best to engage your membership. Lets Start 2012 Out Correctly. We will need lots of engaged folks this year. Lets start gearing up now!
When Cooper Tire hit hard times, USW Local 207L members in Findlay, Ohio sacrificed: $31.2 million of concessions in the 2008 contract negotiations. Taxpayers in the City of Findlay and the State of Ohio also stepped up with grants and abatements: The state alone has provided Cooper Tire with $2.5 million in subsidies since 2009. Since January 1, 2009, however, Cooper Tire has made $448 Million dollars in Operating Profits and posted an income (before taxes) of $360 million.
JOIN US Cooper Tires Informational Protest Saturday Jan 14, 2012 Pep Boys 450 Wilkes-Barre Blvd Wilkes – Barre, PA 18702 (cross street - Coal St/Highland Blvd/Casey Ave) Kick off Rally at 10:00 AM Informational Hand Outs to Customers Shifts will be: Shift # 1 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM Shift # 2 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Executives have rewarded themselves handsomely:
Its top five executives in 2010 took home more than $9.5 million and bought themselves a shiny, new corporate jet. In addition, two wage increases and double bonuses were given to management personnel.
And what about the workers, the men and women, who build the tires?
The members of USW 207L wanted to continue working while negotiating a fair contract. Instead the company locked them out and is now replacing its highly-skilled workforce with out-of-state workers with who-knows-what kind of expertise.
Cruel and Unusual: A President’s ‘Pardon’ as Dark Parody
By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH
In just a few days, we will once again endure the annual spectacle of the president of the United States pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been fated for the Thanksgiving table. This event is typically covered in the media as a light-hearted bit of fluff — and fluff is what it might well be, if there were not actual humans on death row awaiting similar intervention. In the current American context, however, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners. There is in it an implicit acknowledgment that the killing of these prisoners is a practice that bears real, non-jocular comparison to the ritual slaughter of birds for feasts.
You can tell what a nation is like by the way it treats its turkeys. I am not saying that this slaughter of birds for food is wrong ― not here anyway ― but only that the parallel the presidential ritual invites us to notice is revealing. To riff on Dostoyevsky’s famous line about prisoners: you can tell what a nation is like by the way it treats its turkeys. Obama’s pardoning of one randomly selected bird at Thanksgiving not only carries with it an implicit validation of the slaughtering of millions of other turkeys. It also involves an implicit validation of the parallel practice for human beings, in which the occasional death-row inmate is pardoned, or given a stay by the hidden reasoning of an increasingly capricious Supreme Court, even as the majority of condemned prisoners are not so lucky. In this respect, the Thanksgiving pardon is an acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of the system of capital punishment.
Arbitrariness is generally treated, both by supporters and detractors of the death penalty, as a mere glitch in the system, as something that could in principle be worked out. But what this understanding misses is the historical fact that, until very recently, capital punishment was explicitly arbitrary, and openly cruel: its principal reason for being was to set an example of the infinite power of the state over the lives of its subjects.
It is thus not surprising that in most of the Western world, capital punishment died away, though usually only gradually, along with the decline of absolutism and the shift to democracy. When a person is executed, a message is sent about what the state may legitimately do to its subjects, and it is a message that has proven difficult to make fit with other basic commitments of a political culture that rejects arbitrary absolutism and favors human dignity and human rights. Leif ParsonsIn many countries, including Britain and France, the last vestiges of capital punishment survived for rare cases of treason alone: a fact which highlights the fundamentally political character of the death penalty. The rest of the Western world eradicated capital punishment by the late 20th century, even for treason, while somehow it managed to survive in the United States. Curiously, though, it has survived alongside a redoubled dedication to upholding the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
There has of course been a great deal of controversy over what this phrase means, and whether any imposition of the death penalty is by definition a violation of the ban. Yet in the United States, debates about what constitutes cruelty and unusualness tend to focus on the particular methods of execution, whether it be by firing squad, electrocution or lethal injection. This focus is what has been in part responsible for the continual migration from one method of execution to another: each new method, starting with the guillotine in the French Revolution (perhaps the most vivid, if short-lived, instance of the gross discrepancy between democratic and egalitarian ideals, on the one hand, and state terror on the other), has been introduced as an unprecedently humane way of carrying the punishment out.
With time, though, methods that were once hailed as innovative and humane end up faring no better than their predecessors, and one can’t help but sense that the continual migration from one form of killing to another has to do not so much with real progress toward greater humanity, as with the ultimately groundless whim of fashion.
We are seeking to retain capital punishment in a system that has already done away with corporal punishment. We look at firing squads as barbaric, not because we have any solid reasons for believing that lethal injection is more gentle, but only because they remind us of the past, and we believe as an article of faith that in the past people were less enlightened than we are. One death-row inmate in Utah, Ronnie Lee Gardner, illustrated this point in 2010 with a request to be executed by firing squad in one of the few states in which this was, until recently, still possible, and in which prisoners are free to choose the method of their death. Gardner apparently selected this method out of a simple personal preference, but he sent the state, and the country, into a terrible fit over what to do. Many people assumed that he must simply have been stalling, or that he was seeking to draw attention to his case. Yet few stopped to ask in what respect death by rifle is really more horrible than death by chemicals.
What all the migrations from one method to another have consistently missed is that it might not be the method of killing that is cruel and unusual, but rather, so to speak, the existential consequence of the method’s deployment: the fact that it results in a loss of life at the hands of the state. This focus on methods, rather than on what the methods bring about, makes it appear as though the subtraction of a life is not in principle cruel and unusual, even if it has proven impossible so far to find a way of bringing about the subtraction of a life that is not cruel and unusual. If one pauses to think about it for just a moment, this quest quickly shows its absurdity: we are in effect seeking to retain capital punishment in a justice system that has already done away with corporal punishment.
In such an odd ― and unprecedented ― state of affairs, the only way we could really live up to the prohibition without abandoning the practice in conflict with it would be to somehow subtract souls from existence without having to work through the bodies these souls inhabit. But that can’t work: capital punishment is not categorically different from corporal punishment, but rather a limit case of it. There is no way to have the one without the other, and arguing over the relative comfort of the method of execution employed, acting as if in executing a person one is doing no harm to his body (even going so far as to swab the prisoner’s arm with rubbing alcohol before injecting the chemical solution that will kill him moments later) is nothing but a pseudohumanitarian farce.
In the confusion of the post-9/11 era, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz was enabled to emit a horrible proposal: that the government should start issuing “torture warrants” to federal agents who find themselves in situations in which they could, by getting cruelly and unusually rough, extract information that might save the lives of hundreds or thousands of people. The most lucid objectors to this proposal noted that although agents might very well find themselves in such a situation ― and although, perhaps, when they do they should perhaps just go ahead and start torturing ― what we absolutely do not want is to enshrine into law the possibility of suspending what are otherwise our deep moral commitments.
Similarly, we may acknowledge that some people almost certainly do deserve to die. But for better or for worse, there simply is no person or body that can be entrusted with the grave responsibility of killing them. One of the strongest arguments against capital punishment, in my view, has not to do with its effect upon the criminal who is punished, but with what it does to those involved in the application of the punishment.
In Gardner’s case, one of the five executioners was given blanks to fire, without any of the squad members knowing which of them this was. In this way responsibility for the execution was diffused, so as to ensure that no one member of the firing squad would, with certainty, be tainted by it. This diffusion was also an implicit acknowledgment that to participate in an execution is to risk being tainted.
Execution cannot be fully normalized or proceduralized, and the attempt to do so is in a certain respect more terrifying than the murder to which it is a response: the murder was plainly a transgression, whereas the compensatory execution is allowed for in our books of law, as the culmination of normal procedure-following. The death penalty makes it possible for killing to be encompassed within the normal carrying out of a bureaucratic procedure, rather than remaining a transgression or a suspension of our ordinary commitments. To uphold capital punishment is therefore to make killing itself normal: something that it is not even for the great majority of murderers.
Killing is, in short, cruel and unusual, and this is why murderers are rightly despised. This is also why capital punishment fits so well as part of the system of justice of absolutist states, but cannot, and never will, have an uncontested place in a democracy.
DREAM Act Workshop:
St. Nicholas Parish, Social Concerns Committee, Wilkes-Barre, will sponsor a two-hour educational workshop on the “DREAM Act” on Wed., November 30, 2011 from 7-9 PM in the Community Room. A representative of the national Interfaith Coalition on Immigration will participate and respond to questions. The “DREAM Act” (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) is a bi-partisan bill that would allow a select group of immigrant students to contribute fully to America.
Plan now to attend this educational event! All are welcome.
Hi, You might be interested in the article that recently appreared in NCR. Fr. Bill takes up the last paragraph. Joe Rogan
WASHINGTON -- Even as congressional Republicans prepared to slash funding for federal safety-net programs for the poor in the name of fiscal responsibility, U.S. Catholic leaders said the alarming number of Americans living in poverty demands a response that gives priority to the needs of the poor. In an unusual letter to the U.S. bishops Sept. 15, New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called on bishops, priests and deacons across the country to preach at weekend Masses on poverty as an affront to justice and the God-given dignity of every man, woman and child. The day before, Fr. Larry Snyder, Catholic Charities USA president, said the U.S. Census Bureau’s new report that 46.2 million Americans were below the poverty level in 2010 “is further evidence that the United States of America needs comprehensive reform of the nation’s service delivery system.” Catholic Charities USA, during its annual national conference of Catholic Charities agencies a few days later in Fort Worth, Texas, was chief host of a National Poverty Summit. Involving government, business and charitable and social service leaders, the Sept. 18-19 summit was the first in what Catholic Charities USA intends to make an annual national gathering to “think and act anew” by designing “21st-century solutions for 21st-century poverty.” “Any [economic] recovery -- and strengthening of our society -- cannot overlook the least among us,” Catholic Charities said in announcing the summit, which drew about 600 participants. In his opening talk at the meeting Snyder quoted the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Snyder called for government poverty relief programs to be more innovative and flexible, addressing the individual needs of those who are poor so that “the limited resources at our disposal can be focused to the precise area of need.” Other sponsors of the poverty summit were the American Human Development Project, the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Coalition on Human Needs, Feeding America, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Save the Children, and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Dolan said that following the new Census Bureau report on more than 46 million Americans living in poverty, the U.S. bishops’ Administrative Committee, which met in Washington Sept. 13-14, asked him to write a letter calling on preachers in the nation’s Catholic pulpits to address the issue in their homilies. In his letter Dolan asked the bishops and homilists in their dioceses to call attention to the fact that nearly one-sixth of all Americans and one in four U.S. children now live in poverty. “These numbers are not statistics, but people suffering and wounded in their human dignity. They are parents who cannot feed their children, families that have lost their homes and jobless workers who have lost not only income, but also a sense of their place in society,” he wrote. “The best way out of poverty is to work at a living wage,” he added. Quoting from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”), Dolan said prolonged unemployment “undermines the freedom and creativity of the person and his family and social relationships, causing great psychological and spiritual suffering” and exacerbates a weakening of individual initiative and security as well as the common good. In the current U.S. economy, he added, Hispanics and African Americans face particularly high levels of poverty and unemployment and “immigrant workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation and unfair treatment.” “They also contradict the consistent teaching of the church,” he added. “Our Catholic tradition begins with respect for the life and dignity of all, requires a priority concern for the poor and vulnerable people.” Late this past July, Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, N.Y., chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, and Ken Hackett, head of Catholic Relief Services, sharply criticized comparable cuts in U.S. foreign appropriations -- cuts that disproportionately affected U.S. humanitarian programs designed to assist some of the poorest people in the world’s poorest nations. Another attack on Republican criteria for budget cuts at the expense of programs for the poor came from Faith in Public Life, an interreligious coalition claiming to seek social justice in today’s political environment. In a Sept. 20 statement addressed to the six Republican members of Congress on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction -- the so-called “supercommittee” on debt reduction --Faith in Public Life urged an end to Bush-era tax breaks for the very rich as an integral part of the restoration of federal fiscal responsibility. Members of the coalition asked the six Republican members of the committee to renounce their unanimous agreement to Washington business lobbyist Grover Norquist’s pledge, widely publicized in Republican circles, not to reverse tax breaks for the very rich. One of the coalition signers, Fr. Bill Pickard of Scranton, Pa., vice president of Northeastern Pennsylvania Pax Christi, said, “The current [tax] system as it stands is simply unjust.” “Refusal to raise revenue by implementing reasonable and necessary taxation on the most financially blessed people of our country is both bad policy and a moral outrage,” he said. “We must embrace a fair, positive tax that puts common good over self-interest.” [Jerry Filteau is NCR Washington correspondent.]
Dear Editor:
The 10th anniversary of 9-1-1 is surely a day of mourning, for those who lost their lives that day, and it's a day of remembrance and praise for those who showed great courage and sacrifice to help save others.
Our national media, to their credit, went through great lengths to bring these matters to light.
But what the media showed too little of on that day marking the 10th anniversary, however, was the fact of the entirely dishonorable, disastrous, immoral and destructive US response to the events of that day. We didn't see the media citing the fact the US response has caused more than 50,000 fatalities and woundings to US soldiers (and still we wonder, For what?).
We didn't see the media citing the fact that the US response has caused the deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqis, needlessly, for no reason at all.
Neither did we see the media citing the fact that our invasion of Iraq, as a response to 911, has about as much causal relationship as say, were the US to attack New Zealand, due to global warming. And it's practically a certainty that we didn't see the media citing the fact that the US military response to 911 will rank as one of world history's most destructive, stupid, irrational, cruel and sacrificial acts of war ever undertaken by any nation.
No, it's likely we'll have seen all too little of that sort of reporting by the US media on the 10th anniversary, but, we need to, otherwise, the real sacrifice made by the victims of 911 will never come to light, and again, we'll have learned nothing as a nation.
The Steering Committee of the Peace and Justice Center.
[Shared by Robin Field] But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. -Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913-1960)
--***— NOTICE: The West Pittston Library suffered severe damage to its holdings in the recent flood. The Education Department is spearheading a drive to collect as many books as possible to be donated to them. Please bring all books, with the exception of textbooks, including children’s books, that you no longer need to one of the following collection spots on campus beginning Tuesday, 9/13:
Lobby of Holy Cross Hall Lobby of O’Hara Hall Lobby leading to the Theatre Department in the Administration Building McGowan School of Business Lobby
There will be boxes with signs designating the collection containers. Thank you for your generosity!
Contact: Dr. Laurie Ayre Professor of Education King's College Wilkes-Barre, PA 570-208-5900, ext. 5321 --***— NOTICE: The flood has severely diminished the Commission on Economic Opportunity’s (CEO) ability to prepare and deliver foods to low-income seniors in the area. If you are able to help them package meals at any time today from 1:00—4:00pm, they greatly need volunteers to come to their main office at 165 Amber Lane, in the Heights section of Wilkes-Barre. Please contact Maura Modrovsky at CEO at 760-2832 for more information.
King’s will be coordinating additional emergency flood relief efforts with CEO and the American Red Cross for the rest of the week. More details will follow.
Contact: Bill Bolan
William P. Bolan, Ph.D. Director, Shoval Center for Community Engagement and Learning King’s College 133 N. River St. Wilkes-Barre, PA 18711 OFFICE: 570-208-5900, Ext. 5608 FAX: 570-208-8236 URL: http://shovalcenter.org
Popcorn, Peace, and Justice Film Series
Saturday, October 01, 2011, at 7:00 PM 568 Bennet Street, Luzerne, PA (upstairs of the Betz-Jastremski Funeral Home)
Watch and, if interested, discuss: Lions for Lambs Robert Redford is a professor who does not want his two best students to join the military. The students see the military as a stepping stone in their long-range plans for successful lives. Recruiters, news reporters, policy makers and military commanders have their own objectives.
♦Everyone welcome. If we get a large turnout, we will schedule other films in a larger venue.
♦Popcorn, filtered water, and diet cola provided. You are free to bring and share any other beverage or snack you wish!
♦Sponsored by: the Peace and Justice Center.
♦Cost: Free – however, a free-will donation is encouraged to benefit the Peace Center.
Rod,
Yesterday I went to the rally on the square held by the international students who were tricked into packing Hershey bars for a pittance. I spoke with them and found that the things the Jobs for Justice people said were true. The Times Leader article of today got it mostly right.
I will attach two news items for information for anyone not familiar with the situation. If you would like more details on my conversations with the students, or my experiences with J1 visas - which was NOTHING like what these kids endured, email me.
I urge each of us who can, to contact the Hershey CEO via the methods below. If you don't know what to say or are baffled by Hershey's response (they claim they didn't know that the factory they hired to pack their bars had such bad conditions or that EXEL, whom they hired to bring in these kids, were abusing the J1 visa) try this:
What did you think was going on when your labor costs were so much lower than YOU or your son or daughter would work for? or WHY didn't you know what is going on to pack your bars? or simply I'll never knowingly buy or eat a piece of Hershey's candy until these kids are reimbursed and you make a public promise never to "not know" this again.
Contact Hershey's CEO John Bilbrey 717.534.4200 Fax: 717.531.6161 email: jbilbrey@hersheys.com
Out Come the Wolves: Anti-Immigrant Horde “Testifies” at Rep. Daryl Metcalfe’s PA Hearings Posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 at 7:55 am. Written by Stephen Piggott
Last week, Pennsylvania Rep. Darryl Metcalfe held hearings in his home state to discuss a plethora of anti-immigrant bills that he wants to implement.
Metcalfe invited some of the anti-immigrant movement’s main players to testify on behalf of the anti-immigrant bills. He not only invited national anti-immigrant groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and also Pennsylvanians for Immigration Control and Enforcement, an anti-immigrant group listed by FAIR as a state contact.
Metcalfe has had a long history of being tied to the anti-immigrant movement in the United States, so his litany of anti-immigrant testifiers should surprise no one familiar with him and/or the John Tanton Network of anti-immigrant groups. Metcalfe is the founder of State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), a coalition of anti-immigrant state-elected officials. The coalition works closely with FAIR and its legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), to pass anti-immigrant bills at the state level.
He is also no stranger to controversy. For example, the Philadelphia City Paper recently published a lengthy expose in which Metcalfe and his racist ties are detailed. So, yet again, it is unsurprising that those who Metcalfe invited to testify also have established ties to white nationalist activists and organizations.
For instance, on the second day of hearings last week Metcalfe invited Steven Camarota from CIS to testify. Camarota’s organization was founded by white nationalist John Tanton in 1985. Camarota’s own work has attracted the attention of more than one anti-Semitic organization in recent years, as well. An article written by Camarota was published in two issues of the anti-Semitic newspaper American Free Press in 2009. The fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies features an article written by Camarota. Said journal is published by infamous anti-Semite Roger Pearson who in his 1966 monograph Eugenics and Race wrote:
“If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide….”
Jack Martin from FAIR was also invited to testify on the second day. Martin’s organization, like CIS, was founded by white nationalist John Tanton back in 1979. Martin’s work has also appeared in Tanton’s white nationalist quarterly journal, The Social Contract. Martin’s co-worker at FAIR, Robert Najmulski also testified.
Michael Cutler chose to submit written testimony before Metcalfe’s hearing. For his part, Cutler is a senior writing fellow at the anti-immigrant organization Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS). Mariann Davies of the anti-immigrant group You Don’t Speak For Me also testified. You Don’t Speak for Me was founded by FAIR as a front group aimed at attempting to divide Latinos on the issue of immigration. Finally, Kathleen Appell of the anti-immigrant FAIR state-contact group Pennsylvanians for Immigration Control and Enforcement also testified on the second day. During her testimony, she attacked sanctuary cities extensively.
During the nearly two days of hearings, only one Representative called out the anti-immigrant groups for their ties to white nationalists. Rep. Tony Payton Jr. asked Jack Martin about former FAIR employee Rick Oltman and Oltman’s ties to the white nationalist organization the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC). Payton also went on to quiz Martin about FAIR’s founder white nationalist John Tanton.
Point being, the anti-immigrant movement in the United States was founded on the exclusionary and virulently bigoted principles of white nationalism. And there is simply no place in the immigration debate for groups and individuals with bigoted ties.
The “credentials” of any member of the anti-immigrant movement who testifies before government at any level ought to be closely scrutinized – at the very least – because these individuals and their groups represent a set of principles that, simply put, are completely contrary to all we have been and still are evolving our democracy towards—inclusion over exclusion, understanding over misinformation and rhetoric, opportunity over total lack.
Kathy Kelly's delegation of 28 peace activist have arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan!
They will be supporting our partners the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers in these activities.
March 17th: Several dozen Afghan youth from all ethnicities will celebrate a widespread wish to live without wars by walking hand-in-hand through the streets of Kabul.
March 19th: Afghan Youth will join with the internationals to plant trees of peace and hold a candle light vigil commemorating children who have been killed by war in Afghanistan and throughout the world.
March 20th: Global Day of Listening - Skype-athon with youth in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, Yemen etc about the People’s wish to live without wars. To request a time to "be in on the call" write to: globaldayoflistening@gmail.com or visit The Global Day of Listening website.
March 21st: Candle Vigil for all the youth and People of Afghanistan and the world who have been killed in conflict and in wars.
A visitor to Afghanistan who ventures outside the American security bubble sees pretty quickly that President Obama’s decision to triple the number of troops in Afghanistan has resulted, with some exceptions, mostly in more dead Americans and Afghans alike.
Many of you probably are familiar with PFC Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, regarding abuses by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.
In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.
In my ignorance and gullability, I'd presumed we'd turned back, as a country, from the Shameful Path of Torture - that ignominous rabbit hole we'd ventured down during the peak of the Iraq war, which procedures of interrogation President Bush had authorized. Apparently not. We've done worse. Instead of torturing alleged revolutionaries (which our military & gov't preferred to call "Terrorists"), we now torture our own American citizen prisoners instead, abandoning entirely the rule of law, where accused are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, in full violation of the 8th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment; but take note, for here, regardless of what or how you may deem PFC Manning's present punishment to be, the fact is he is being punished, most severely, before even being proven guilty. The horrible treatment of PFC Manning I submit is a terrible and inhumane crime against humanity which the Peace Center should not ignore.
- brad
Berrigan's message to peacemakers: Persevere Dec. 08, 2010 By Joshua J. McElwee
Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan speaks at Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House on Staten Island, N.Y., Nov. 29. (Photos by Kenan Malkic) STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A breathless hush filled the overflowing room at Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House here as Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan slowly approached the podium. Organizers and audience seemed painfully conscious there wouldn’t be many more times this 89-year-old Catholic peace icon -- whose life has been punctuated with countless arrests and prison time, and guided by an unyielding commitment to Christian nonviolent resistance -- would appear in a public forum. Now frail and bent, he carried with him to the front of the room not only more than a solid half century of peace work but also many associations with other peacemakers, including his late brother, Philip, and, on the 30th anniversary of her death, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day. The Nov. 29 talk was billed as Berrigan’s reflection on Day. But as with any other Berrigan talk, it would cut to the essence and contain a message for his audience. And what would this peace message on this evening be? Persevere. “You have no right to tie yourself in knots because you want to know the outcome of what you are doing. Don’t, no, no. Let it go. Let it go into history. Let it go into Christ. Let it go into generations. Let it go into the children. Play it and pray it well.” This was pure Berrigan, speaking in a soft and wispy voice that those who had gathered often needed to lean forward to hear. Wearing an old sweater and with blue long johns visible under the tattered cuffs of his khaki pants, this unassuming man reached into ancient scripture. He cited the second chapter of Isaiah -- “They shall beat their swords into plowshares” -- as he reflected on Day’s long-ranging impact on him as well as on the wider world. Berrigan noted Day’s cautionary wisdom that “we may never see the good outcome of the good we do,” adding, as Day taught, that we must “do it anyway.” Each of us must think, Berrigan told the audience, that “I am going turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. I may never see the transformation myself. It makes no difference. I shall do it. I shall do it.” Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan speaks with attendees after his talk at Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House Nov. 29.Organizers had worked for months to bring the Manhattan-based priest to neighboring Staten Island, and to the retreat house for what Fred Herron, interim executive director, called “a little moment in history.” The talk also provided an occasion for other Catholics to reflect on and assess Berrigan’s impact on the wider Catholic community. “I’m glad to say that in the long run it’s really coming into focus now,” Jesuit Fr. Ray Schroth said in a telephone interview. “What has Dan Berrigan been to us? Two words come to mind. First: prophet. And then: teacher. ... Dan really takes the fact of God being in the world seriously and feels he’s got to get out there. And over the years he’s compelled us to come with him.” It’s not easy to book Berrigan. He rarely speaks at public events. Herron said retreat center organizers had been trying to get him to speak for years with no success. But this time was different, falling during the 100th anniversary of the center, which, according to Herron, was the first retreat house founded with the principal intention of serving the laity. Maternal pride The talk also allowed late cementing of a special connection between Berrigan and Day. Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books and editor of The Duty of Delight and All the Way to Heaven, collections of Day’s diaries and letters, said that Day thought of Dan and Phil Berrigan as “her children.” “She had relationships with many priests over her life, but the way that the Berrigans courageously took on the peace witness and were willing to go to prison was very important to her,” said Ellsberg in a telephone interview. “She felt a lot of maternal pride in their witness and the fact that they drew so much inspiration from the Catholic Worker.” Speaking to NCR in a brief interview following his talk, Berrigan described his close, sometimes complicated relationship with Day. It began in spurts as the priest brought his students from St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., to the Catholic Worker in New York in the 1940s. It faltered, however, after Berrigan’s arrest in Catonsville, Md., for burning draft records. In May 1968, Berrigan was among nine men and women who entered a Selective Service office, removed several hundred draft records, and burned them with homemade napalm in protest against the war in Vietnam. Berrigan said he and Day didn’t talk much directly about the action, but she said clearly that it wasn’t “the way of the Catholic Worker.” Looking back, Berrigan seemed almost wistful about that separation between him and his longtime mentor. “The more I reflect on it, the more I wish we had talked [more about the action]. Because I don’t think there was that much difference [between us]. I think basic to her thinking was what I might call the cultural atmosphere of the ’60s at the Worker, which was very difficult for her. There was a lot of craziness going on, a lot of sexual stuff. “She was very hurt and bewildered by all this, and I think she carried that over into a sense of bewilderment of ‘Well, what are these people doing now? This is very dangerous. This will result in violence.’ “Which it never did. It never did. We had beautifully trained people who were nonviolent in principle. But I wish we had talked. I think we were closer than she allowed, and that she was influenced by other events.” The daily grind It’s easy to imagine why those “other events” of the ’60s, coupled with the daily grind of life, might have come between Day and Berrigan after Catonsville. As those who have lived and worked in a Catholic Worker house know well, life within is often a mess of constant activity: filling coffeepots, sweeping floors, baking bread, finding a place for an unexpected guest to sleep -- sometimes with little room for rest, let alone relationship. According to Ellsberg, it was precisely that mix of the routine that was the primary context for Day’s entire understanding of her life. “People tend to think of Dorothy Day or the Berrigans as picket lines and jails and protesting and sitting in,” said Ellsberg. “Yes, their lives were marked by those kind of dramatic forms of witness. But just as heroic was the majority of their lives that was spent in very mundane ways, and as you see in Day’s diaries, the whole experience of the everyday was an arena for the practice of holiness.” And what exactly does this mess achieve? What’s the impact? In his talk, Berrigan said the answer is not found in the hope of any immediate outcome, but simply in doing good. “I think Dorothy ... said in effect I may never know the outcome of what I’m going to do, but I’m going to do it anyway,” he said. “We may never see the good outcome of the good we do. Do it anyway. Concentrate on the goodness of the work you’re doing. The outcome will take care of itself. The outcome is no concern of yours.” Working out salvation Berrigan said he now focuses his primary efforts on building community. It is a theme that has resonated through his -- and Day’s -- life. For some, Berrigan might seem to some an odd proponent of community life. His relationship with other Jesuits has at times been tenuous. It’s a relationship that placed him in an exile of sorts to Latin America in 1965 after his provincial became upset with his connections and action within the peace movement and the Catholic Worker community. Recalling an example of the tension between Berrigan and a friend, Schroth said that when Berrigan met Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan for the first time in 1972, he immediately questioned Drinan about his run for a U.S. Congressional seat. Schroth, author of a recently published biography of Drinan, said that Berrigan told Drinan that while he appreciated his opposition to the Vietnam War, “by running for office you involve yourself in the power structure in a way that inevitably is going to compromise you.” In the eyes of some, it may be Berrigan’s struggle within community that has most closely aligned him with Day. Community life was “a context in which [Day] had to work out her salvation,” said Ellsberg. “It was a source of incredible frustration, disappointment and anguish.” Yet, “in community there was a lesson for everybody about what it means to be human and the context in which we are called to achieve our salvation -- because our salvation ultimately depends on love. And you can’t love all by yourself. Love is something that’s worked out in relationship to other people.” More than six decades after Berrigan began introducing others to the Catholic Worker movement, having become personally enamored by Day’s life and dedication to hospitality and nonviolence, the priest quietly pondered a question put to him: “Where do we go from here?” “Everything,” he responded, “comes out of a community sense that we can do something together, that we can face our fears and our future and our families because we are out of community, and our community is at least relatively independent of success.” Pausing, then closing his thought, he added, grinning: “It’d better be.”
[From our good friend Dave Jenkins]
On Sunday, December 19th, at 3pm, the Baha’is of NEPA will gather to pray on behalf of the Baha’is and all the people of Iran during these times of injustice and oppression. Those wishing to add their prayers are warmly invited. For directions, please call 378-3782 or 824-2460. Since 1979, Iran's 300,000-strong Baha'i community has endured a government-sponsored, systematic campaign of religious persecution. Since 2005, there has been a resurgence of more extreme forms of persecution, with increasing arrests, harassment, violence, and arson attacks on Baha'i homes and businesses.
The 8 August 2010 verdict dealt by the Iranian government sentencing Iran's seven Baha'i leaders to 20 years in prison makes even more evident Iran's policy of oppression and systematic denial of rights to members of the Baha’i Faith. The flagrantly unjust sentence has provoked vehement protest from governments throughout the world, along with numerous human rights organizations - including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation for Human Rights - as well as other groups, and countless individuals.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a statement on 12 August 2010, condemning the recent sentencing of the seven Iranian Baha’i leaders each to 20 years in prison and described the act as a "violation of Iran's obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." She further stated that "The United States is committed to defending religious freedom around the world, and we have not forgotten the Baha'i community in Iran."
On December 3rd the US Senate passed a resolution condemning the actions of the Iranian courts. This kind support is sustaining to those unjustly imprisoned. Such words and deeds will help the Iranian authorities understand that they cannot violate basic standards of international human rights unseen by a watchful world and a just and loving God.
SUBJECT: NEW YORK STATE FRACKING MORATORIUM
Even if you do not live in NY State, please call or email New York State legislators in support of a Moratorium on Shale Gas drilling that could serve as a national model to hault fracking.
"I call upon you, an elected official of the State of New York, to impose a moratorium on drilling in shale formations, a decision which will protect the land, air and water of our state. As has been shown in cases across the country, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for natural gas is not safe. I am extremely concerned for our public health and safety and for the integrity of our clean water and air. As the disaster in the gulf continues to unfold and gas drilling accidents are a staple on the news, this is hardly the time to allow industry profit to trump citizen safety. We urge you to pass the strongest possible moratorium bill now so that the health problems, water contamination issues and air pollution problems can be fully assessed by the public and the legislature.
Thank you."
Roses in December
Four Churchwomen of El Salvador
Roses in December
30th Anniversary The Four Churchwomen of El Salvador, 6:30 PM -- 9:00 PM
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010. Time: 6:30 PM Roses in December (followed by Candlelight Vigil). Video Location: Moreau Auditorium 6:30-8:15 PM Candlelight Vigil: Monarch Court 8:30-9:00 PM
For more information: peacewb@verizon.net or Margarita Rose at 208-5900 x5778.
Join us on Wednesday, December 1, beginning at 6:30 PM in Moreau Auditorium, Campus Ministry Center, King's College for “Roses in December”—documentary on the life and death of Jean Donovan, a Maryknoll lay missionary who was killed along with Sr. Ita Ford,Sr. Dorothy Kazel, and Sr. Maura Clarke on December 2, 1980.
At 8:30 PM, there will be a candlelight vigil on Monarch Court, on the King’s College campus, in memory of these women and all who have been killed while struggling to empower the poor.
December 2, 2010, marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of four churchwomen in El Salvador.
On December 2, 1980, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, and Maura Clarke were intercepted on their way home from the airport in El Salvador.
The four women were among 75,000 to lose their lives in El Salvador during the country's 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992. Ford and Clarke were nuns from the Maryknoll Order in Maryknoll, N.Y. Kazel was a nun in the Ursuline Order. Donovan was an accountant before going to El Salvador.
Roses in December is a very poignant documentary, delving into Jean as a person, and how events and people she met would shape her decision to go to El Salvador, and stay, even after seeing many priests and nuns killed, including Archbishop Romero. One of her reasons to stay in El Salvador was to help the children, many who were refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) due to the continuous combat. The Human Rights Watch, which put out this movie, focuses on how war and conflict affect human rights.
Why these murders were committed? Why did the United States government remain passive, despite reports and evidence that the murders were done execution style? There is political intrigue, with clips from Congressional hearing and of US military officers embracing El Salvador officers. This is an important event, whether your interest lies in closing the School of the Americas (SOA), human rights, international policy or missionary work. In addition, it also puts into perspective US international policy, especially 30 years later; even though the area of interest has moved from Latin America to the Middle East, some of the dialogue will seem like déjà vu.
Please join us for this important anniversary.
Friends,
I hope that you will join the movement to challenge the proposed private detention center in Upper Mt. Bethel Township (near Bangor, in Northampton County). I wanted to keep you all updated on the meetings that will be held in the next few weeks, in the hopes that you will show up and speak out about this issue. These proposals move quickly, as the Geo Group (the private corporation pushing this proposal), has lots of experience advocating for prisons. We will need to work together to be able to challenge them. Please do what you can to speak out!
What YOU can do: 1. Show up to the meetings, especially the ones in blue, and share your thoughts! 2. Send this email to your friends and get them involved. 3. Read this comic book to learn more about the private prison industry (http://www.realcostofprisons.org/materials/comics/prison_town.pdf).
Tomorrow, Thursday November 4th at 6:30pm - Northampton County Council Meeting (County Council Chambers, 3rd Floor, Northampton County Courthouse, 669 Washington St, Easton PA 18042): The issue will surely be discussed. Let’s let the county council members know that there is dissent!
Friday, November 5th at 2:30pm - Public Meeting (at the Hispanic Center/Council of Spanish Speaking Orgs: 520 E 4th Street, Bethlehem PA 18105): We will be getting together to discuss and organize some talking points about the wide range of reasons that we are concerned about the detention center (including economic, human rights, due process, and safety issues).
Here is the plan:
1. Create a list of our concerns and learn from other communities who have been affected by private prisons and detention centers in their towns. 2. Let our representatives in the county council and township supervisors’ board know through speaking out at meetings, petitions, phone calls and letters to the editor.
Monday November 8th at 7pm – Mt. Bethel Township Board of Supervisors Meeting (387 Ye Olde Highway, Mt. Bethel PA) Let the board of supervisors know about your concerns to the prison.
Wednesday November 10th at 6pm – General Public Hearing to Discuss Proposed Detention Center – (Bangor Middle School, 401 Five Points Richmond Road, Bangor PA 18013) This is THE meeting to come to, even if you can’t make any of the others. The Geo Group (the private company who would own and operate the prison) will be present to hear our concerns and respond to them, along with the township council. We need to be there in force and with an organized message!
Other meetings: I will be in Mt. Bethel on Sunday November 7th. If you are interesting in meeting with me that day, please get in touch and I would be happy to do so. The next Northampton County Council Meeting is Thursday November 18th at 6:30pm: mark your calendars!
If you got on this list somehow, and aren’t interested in hearing about this issue, please do ask me and I will take you off of the list. Similarly, if you know someone who would like to be involved, feel free to send me their contact information or forward them these notices!
And most importantly, keep your heads up, everyone
Emma Cleveland Community Organizer ACLU of Pennsylvania, Immigrants' Rights Project P.O. Box 663, Allentown PA 18102 484.350.3767 (office) 215.435.1574 (cell)
Please note that some people have been receiving bounceback messages from my account. If you are having trouble reaching me, please send an email to clevelandaclupa@gmail.com.
Thank you!
Please promote this Women’s Studies lecture.
Please click on this link for more info on the Immigration and Education Program
Op-Ed Columnist, NY Times Is This America? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: September 11, 2010
For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, it asserted: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” Mr. Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?
This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.
It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam.
Now that Mr. Bush is no longer in the White House, nativists are back on the warpath. Some opponents of President Obama are circulating bald-faced lies about him that are also scurrilous attacks on Islam itself. One e-mail bouncing around falsely accuses Mr. Obama of lying and adds, “His Muslim faith says it’s okay to lie.”
Or there’s the e-mail I received the other day from a relative, declaring: “President Obama has directed the United States Postal Service to remember and honor the Eid Muslim holiday season with a new commemorative 44 cent first class holiday postage stamp.” In fact, it was President Bush’s administration that first issued the Eid stamp in 2001 and that issued new versions after that.
Astonishingly, a Newsweek poll finds that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” So a majority of Republicans think that our president wants to impose Islamic law worldwide.
That kind of extremism undermines our democracy, risks violence and empowers jihadis.
Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative, Zabihullah, about opposition to the mosque near ground zero: “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations and popular support.” Mr. Zabihullah added, “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get.”
In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims. In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.
One American university professor wrote to me that “every Muslim in the world” believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that “every Jew” knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center.
It is perfectly reasonable for critics to point to the shortcomings of Islam or any other religion. There should be more outrage, for example, about the mistreatment of women in many Islamic countries, or the oppression of religious minorities like Christians and Ahmadis in Pakistan.
Europe is alarmed that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated well, resulting in tolerance of intolerance, and pockets of wife-beating, forced marriage, homophobia and female genital mutilation. Those are legitimate concerns, but sweeping denunciations of any religious group constitute dangerous bigotry.
If this is a testing time, then some have passed with flying colors. Hats off to a rabbinical student in Massachusetts, Rachel Barenblat, who raised money to replace prayer rugs that a drunken intruder had urinated on at a mosque. She told me that she quickly raised more than $1,100 from Jews and Christians alike.
Above all, bravo to those Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who jointly denounced what they called “the anti-Muslim frenzy.”
“We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent,” said Rabbi David Saperstein. “It cannot happen here in America in 2010.”
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick put it this way: “This is not America. America was not built on hate.”
“Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.”
Amen.
Georgetown welcomes Colombia's Uribe
by John Dear, SJ, on Sep. 07, 2010 On the Road to Peace
Last week some of us learned that Georgetown University has appointed the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, to a teaching post at its Walsh School of Foreign Service. Uribe, who is linked to paramilitaries that slaughtered thousands of innocents and who befriended drug traffickers -- bringing them into the political mainstream -- has been named Georgetown's "Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership." He begins work tomorrow, Sept. 8.
Apparently neither the university president nor the faculty nor the Jesuits have been apprised that lawyers are working to bring charges against Uribe at The Hague for human rights violations. Georgetown might just as well have invited the Philippines' Marcos, Nicaragua's Somoza or Liberia's Charles Taylor to teach.
I shouldn't be surprised. Georgetown in particular has a long history of supporting U.S. war-making. It has taken millions from the Pentagon, trained thousands of young Catholics in its ROTC program, hired Henry Kissinger, welcomed the person who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and supported war-makers from the Shah of Iran to Ronald Reagan.
Georgetown's students and faculty have for years joined the campaign to close the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., which these days predominantly trains Colombia's military officers and soldiers under the guise of fighting terrorism. Many of those soldiers then go back to their country and participate with paramilitary death squads in killing and torturing innocent people. I would expect the president, faculty, and Jesuits of Georgetown to know better than to welcome Uribe to join their ranks.
"We are looking forward to having President Uribe join our university community," Georgetown President John DeGioia said recently in a statement. "Having such a distinguished world leader at Georgetown will further the important work of students and faculty engaging in important global issues."
Is this his idea of a world leader? With so many heroes of peace and nonviolence to invite -- from Archbishop Tutu to Mairead Maguire, or leaders here at home such as Kathy Kelly and Jim Wallis -- I'm stunned that he can look forward to the arrival of one of the world's most notorious mass murderers. Is this the kind of global leadership Georgetown teaches?
"President Uribe will bring a truly unique perspective to discussions of global affairs at Georgetown," said Carol Lancaster, dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service. "We are thrilled that he has identified Georgetown as a place where he will share his knowledge and interface with Washington, and I know that our students at the School of Foreign Service will benefit greatly from his presence."
Friends and I have urged Georgetown's leaders to disinvite Uribe and have also begun a campaign to protest his presence. I personally asked Dean Lancaster on the phone to do everything she can to prevent Uribe's arrival. To my chagrin, most everyone I speak with at Georgetown seems to know little about Colombia or Uribe and refers to the State Department's respect for him.
I say this without hyperbole. That should have been their first warning.
We all need to learn about Uribe's eight-year tenure in Colombia, his corruption, the human-rights violations he sponsored, and the widespread impunity. In June 2009 Human Rights Watch issued an open letter to President Obama listing some of the human rights violations of the Uribe administration:
More than 3 million Colombians (out of a population of about 40 million) have been forced to flee their homes, giving Colombia the second-largest population of internally displaced persons in the world after Sudan. More than 70 members of the Colombian Congress are under criminal investigation or have been convicted for allegedly collaborating with the paramilitaries. Nearly all these congresspersons are members of President Uribe's coalition in the Colombian Congress and the Uribe administration repeatedly undermined the investigations and discredited the Colombian Supreme Court justices who started them. Colombia has the highest rate of killings of trade unionists in the world. A clandestine gravesite of 2,000 non-identified bodies was recently discovered directly beside a military base in La Macarena in central Colombia. When the news became public, Uribe flew to the Macarena and said publicly that accusing the armed forces of human rights abuses was a tactic used by guerrillas. These comments put the lives of those victims who spoke at the event in grave danger. Starting in 2008 reports came out that the Colombian military was luring poor young men from their homes with promises of employment, then killing them and presenting them as combat casualties. The practice not only served to stack battle statistics, but also financially benefited the soldiers involved -- as Uribe's government had, since 2005, awarded monetary and vacation bonuses for each insurgent killed. Human rights groups cite 3,000 or more "false positives." Georgetown's appointment of Uribe is "shameful," Jesuit theologian Fr. Jon Sobrino said last week in El Salvador. "Uribe is a symbol of the worst that has happened in the tragic conflict in Colombia. There is a great deal of blood involved here, a very great deal. "
"Does this appointment reflect the mission and the Catholic and Jesuit identity of Georgetown?" Fr. Dean Brackley, a Jesuit professor at the University of Central America in El Salvador, writes. He goes on:
"This will, literally, cause scandal. The U.S. Congress has held up passage of the trade agreement with Colombia because it is a place where the government, under Uribe, has consistently failed to defend labor unionists from death squads. Uribe is widely accused of having had direct links to the paramilitary groups who have massacred countless innocents. Whether or not those charges are true, he has irresponsibly and cruelly accused human rights activists in Colombia of collusion with 'Communist terrorists,' endangering their lives." A few years ago, I traveled to Colombia to see for myself. There I learned about the U.S.-backed war against the poor waged by Uribe under the guise of a "war on drugs." I learned how the repressive Colombian government, under the democratically elected but dictatorial President Uribe, killed some ten thousand people a year -- leaving 200,000 dead in the last twenty years. This war isn't about drugs but about expropriating Colombia's rich land and natural resources, from the indigenous people to the U.S. and multinational corporations.
In Bogota, Colombia, I met one of the world's leading voices for human rights: Fr. Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest whose Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace has documented all the killings and massacres in Colombia. For his efforts he's suffered countless death threats, especially under the Uribe regime. Last week Giraldo wrote to me about the situation and I share his letter here so we can all learn about Colombia and the disgrace of Georgetown's hiring of Uribe:
"I write to you with great concern regarding the fact that Georgetown, our Jesuit University, has hired the outgoing president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, as a professor. I am constantly receiving messages from individuals and groups who have suffered enormously during his term as president. They are protesting and questioning the mind-set of our Society, or its lack of ethical judgment in making a decision of this kind. It is possible that decision makers at Georgetown have received positive appraisals from Colombians in high political or economic positions, but it is difficult to ignore, at least, the intense moral disagreements aroused by his government and the investigations and sanctions imposed by international organizations that try to protect human dignity. The mere fact that, during his political career, while he was governor of Antioquia Province (1995-1997) he founded and protected so many paramilitary groups, known euphemistically as "Convivir" ("Live Together"), who murdered and "disappeared" thousands of people and displaced multitudes, committing many other atrocities, that alone would imply a need for moral censure before entrusting him with any responsibility in the future.
But not only did he continue to sponsor those paramilitary groups, but he defended them and he perfected them into a new pattern of legalized para-militarism, including networks of informants, networks of collaborators, and the new class of private security companies that involve some millions of civilians in military activities related to the internal armed conflict, while at the same time he was lying to the international community with a phony demobilization of the paramilitaries.
In addition, the scandalous practice of "false positives" took place during his administration. The practice consists in murdering civilians, usually farmers, and after killing them, dressing them as combatants in order to justify their deaths. That is the way he tried to demonstrate faked military victories over the rebels and also to eliminate the activists in social movements that work for justice.
The corruption during his administration was more than scandalous, not just because of the presence of drug traffickers in public positions but also because the Congress and many government offices were occupied by criminals. Today more than a hundred members of Congress are involved in criminal proceedings, all of them President Uribe's closest supporters.
The purchase of consciences in order to manipulate the judicial apparatus was disgraceful. It ended up destroying, at the deepest level, the moral conscience of the country. Another disgrace was the corrupt manner in which the Ministers closest to him manipulated agricultural policy in order to favor the very rich with public money, meanwhile impeding and stigmatizing social projects. The corruption of his sons, who enriched themselves by using the advantages of power, scandalized the whole country at one time.
In addition, he used the security agency that was directly under his control (the Department of Administrative Security) to spy on the courts, on opposition politicians, and on social and human rights movements, by means of clandestine telephone tapping. The corrupt machinations he used to obtain his re-election as President in 2006 were sordid in the extreme, with the result that ministers and close collaborators have gone to jail.
He manipulated the coordination between the Army and the paramilitary groups that resulted in 14,000 extrajudicial executions during his term of office. His strategies of impunity for those who, through the government or the "para-government," committed crimes against humanity will go down in history for their brazenness.
The decision by the Jesuits at Georgetown to offer a professorship to Álvaro Uribe is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still maintain moral principles, but also places at high risk the ethical development of the young people who attend our university in Washington. Where are the ethics of the Society of Jesus?"
Javier's closing question leaves me trembling.
I urge people everywhere to call or write Georgetown University's president and protest Uribe's presence on campus -- and to push Georgetown to cut its ties with dictators, warmakers and the Pentagon. For further information, visit the School of the Americas Web site at www.soaw.org and the Colombia Support Network at www.colombiasupport.net.
I grieve that our struggle to end war and injustice is so often stymied by the church itself and, in this case, my own religious order. But I'm heartened by the reaction of so many people and the organizing that has sprung up around this scandal. I hope someday Georgetown University and every Jesuit and Catholic institution will become a school of justice, nonviolence, and human rights.
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A week from today, on Sept. 14, thirteen friends and I will stand trial at the Nevada State Courthouse along the Las Vegas strip. Our infraction? Daring to walk on to Creech Air Force Base, headquartered in the Nevada desert, last year on Holy Thursday. We entered the premises to call prayerfully for an end to the U.S. drone bombers.
Alas, our call was rejected and -- after a tense stand-off with soldiers at the gate -- the police arrived and arrested, handcuffed, chained, booked and held us in the Las Vegas jail for the night. In March the government pressed charges against us, hoping to set an example of us and to stop others from protesting our "drones." So the struggle goes on.
To follow the trial of the Creech 14, visit Voices for Creative Nonviolence, at www.vcnv.org
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John Dear's latest book, Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (Orbis), along with other recent books, A Persistent Peace and Put Down Your Sword, as well as Patricia Normile's John Dear On Peace, are available from www.amazon.com. To contribute to Catholic Relief Services' "Fr. John Dear Haiti Fund," go to: http://donate.crs.org/goto/fatherjohn. For further information, or to schedule a lecture or retreat on Gospel Nonviolence, go to www.johndear.org.
[From our good friend Skip Mendler] Hi folks - as some of you know, I was at the Peace Conference in Albany last weekend. The Action Plan agreed to at the conference has been released; in the attached I have reformatted the Action Plan document slightly to highlight actions and dates. I'd very much be interested in your thoughts/reactions to it. I don't think there's much earthshakingly new here, tacticswise, and of course there are many many other issues to address & things to do along with these items - but it's a good start.
/ / skip Skip Mendler
---Subject: Peace Movement Adopts New Comprehensive Strategy Date: Thursday, July 29, 2010, 12:46 PM
Last week 700 leading peace activists from around the United States met and strategized in Albany, N.Y. ( http://nationalpeaceconference.org ). They discussed, debated, and voted for a comprehensive new plan for the coming months. The plan includes a new focus and some promising proposals for building a coalition that includes the labor movement, civil rights groups, students, and other sectors of the activist world that have an interest in ending wars and/or shifting our financial resources from wars to where they're actually needed.
The plan includes endorsements and commitments to participate in events planned for Detroit on August 28th, and Washington, D.C., on August 28th and October 2nd, as well as a national day of actions led by students on October 7th, and a week of anti-war actions around the country marking the start of Year 10 in Afghanistan on October 7-16. Dates to put on your calendar now for 2011 include mid-March nationally coordinated teach-ins to mark the eighth year of the Iraq War and to prepare for bi-coastal spring demonstrations the following month, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles mobilizations on April 9, 2011, and blocking of ports on May Day.
Here is the full list of actions agreed upon:
1.The Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have invited peace organizations to endorse and participate in a campaign for Jobs, Justice, and Peace. We endorse this campaign and plan to be a part of it. On August 28, 2010, in Detroit, we will march on the anniversary of that day in 1963 when Walter Reuther, president of UAW, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders joined with hundreds of thousands of Americans for the March on Washington. In Detroit, prior to the March on Washington, 125,000 marchers participated in the Freedom Walk led by Dr. King. At the march, King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech for the first time before sharing it with the world in Washington. This year, a massive march has been called for October 2 in Washington. We will begin to build momentum again in Detroit on August 28th. We also endorse the August 28, 2010 Reclaim the Dream Rally and March called by Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network to begin at 11 a.m.. at Dunbar High School, 1301 New Jersey Avenue Northwest.
2.Endorse, promote and mobilize for the Saturday, October 2nd "One Nation" march on Washington, DC initiated by 1199SEIU and the NAACP, now being promoted by a growing coalition, which includes the AFL-CIO and U.S. Labor Against the War, and civil rights, peace and other social justice forces in support of the demand for jobs, redirection of national resources from militarism and war to meeting human needs, fully funding vital social programs, and addressing the fiscal crisis of state and local governments. Organize and build an antiwar contingent to participate in the march. Launch a full-scale campaign to get endorsements for the October 2 march on Washington commencing with the final plenary session of this conference.
3.Endorse the call issued by a range of student groups for Thursday, October 7, as a national day of action to defend education from the horrendous budget cuts that are laying off teachers, closing schools, raising tuition and limiting access to education, especially for working and low income people. Demand "Money for Education, not U.S. Occupations" and otherwise link the cuts in spending for education to the astronomical costs of U.S. wars and occupations.
4.Devote October 7-16 to organizing local and regional protests to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan through demonstrations, marches, rallies, vigils, teach-ins, cultural events and other actions to demand an immediate end to the wars and occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan and complete withdrawal of all military forces and private security contractors and other mercenaries. The nature and scheduling of these events will reflect the needs of local sponsors and should be designed to attract broad co-sponsorship and diverse participation of antiwar forces with other social justice organizations and progressive constituencies.
5.Support and build Remember Fallujah Week November 15-19.
6.Join the new and existing broad-based campaigns to fund human needs and cut the military budget. Join with organizations representing the fight against cutbacks (especially labor and community groups) to build coalitions at the city/town, state and national level. Draft resolutions for city councils, town and village meetings and voter referendum ballot questions linking astronomical war spending to denial of essential public services at home. (Model resolutions and ballot questions will be circulated for consideration of local groups.) Obtain endorsements of elected officials, town and city councils, state parties and legislatures, and labor bodies. Work the legislative process to make military spending an issue. Oppose specific military funding programs and bills, and couple them with human needs funding issues. Use lobbying and other forms of protest, including civil disobedience campaigns, to focus attention on the issue.
7.Mid-March, 2011 nationally coordinated teach-ins to mark the eighth year of the Iraq War and to prepare for bi-coastal spring demonstrations the following month.
8.Bi-Coastal mass spring mobilizations in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles on April 9, 2011. These will be accompanied by distinct and separate non-violent direct actions on the same day. A prime component of these mobilizations will be major efforts to include broad new forces from youth to veterans to trade unionists to civil and human rights groups to the Arab, Muslim and other oppressed communities, to environmental organizations, social justice and faith-based groups. Veterans and military families will be key to these mobilizations with special efforts to organize this community to be the lead contingent. Launch a full-scale campaign to get endorsements for these actions commencing with the final plenary session of this conference.
9.Select a week prior to or after the April actions for local lobbying of elected officials at a time when Congress is not in session. Lobbying to take multiple forms from meeting with local officials to protests at their offices and homes.
10.Recalling that the West Coast Longshore Workers Union shut down the ports for May Day 2008, and noting the recent successful actions in Oakland to block the unloading of an Israeli ship in solidarity with Palestine, the National Peace Conference will join with immigrant rights and union organizers to plan for May Day actions that include picket lines at the ports in San Francisco and Los Angeles. A large portion of war materiel is shipped from West Coast ports. These areas are home to large number of immigrants, many of whom work as truck drivers. A picket line, with veterans in the forefront, provides an opportunity to unite broader sections of the people in action. It also generates the possibility of impacting the war by blocking shipments of war materiel, and provides further consideration for continuing direct actions of this kind.
11.National tours. Organize over a series of months nationally-coordinated tours of prominent speakers and local activists that link the demands for immediate withdrawal to the demands for funding social programs, as outlined above.
12.Pressure on Iran from the US, Israel and other quarters continues to rise and the threat of a catastrophic military attack on Iran, as well as the ratcheting up of punitive sanctions that primarily impact the people of Iran, are of grave concern. All peace activists and organizations should be organizing for a peaceful and just solution to the concern over Iran's nuclear program, including, but not limited to, supporting a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East (which would of course deal with Israel's nuclear arsenal) and insisting that diplomacy, not war or threat of war, is the only acceptable option.
13.In the event of an imminent U.S. government attack on Iran or such an attack, or a U.S.-backed Israeli attack against Iran, or any other major international crisis triggered by U.S. military action, a continuations committee approved by the conference will mount rapid, broad and nationally coordinated protests by antiwar and social justice activists.
14.In the event of U.S.-backed military action by Israel against Palestinians, aid activists attempting to end the blockade of Gaza, or attacks on other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, or Iran, a continuations committee approved by the conference will condemn such attacks and support widespread protest actions.
15.Support actions to end the Israeli occupation and repression of Palestinians and the blockade of Gaza.
16.Support actions aimed at dismantling the Cold War nuclear, biological, radiological and chemical weapons and delivery systems. Support actions aimed at stopping the nuclear renaissance of this Administration, which has proposed to spend $80 billion over the next 10 years to build three new nuclear bomb making factories and "well over" $100 billion over the same period to modernize nuclear weapons delivery systems. We must support actions aimed at dismantling nuclear, biological, radiological and chemical weapons and delivery systems. We must oppose the re-opening of the Iranian mining industry, new nuclear power plants, and extraction of other fossil fuels that the military consumes.
17.Work in solidarity with GIs, veterans, and military families to support their campaigns and calls for action. Demand support for the troops when they return home and support efforts to counter military recruitment.
18.Take actions against war profiteers, including oil and energy companies, weapons manufacturers, and engineering firms, whose contractors are working to insure U.S. economic control of Iraq's and Afghanistan's resources.
19.Support actions, educational efforts and lobbying campaigns to promote a transition to a sustainable peace economy.
20.Develop and implement a multi-pronged national media campaign which includes the following: the honing of a message which will capture our message: "End the Wars and Occupations, Bring the Dollars Home"; a fundraising campaign which would enable the creation and national placement and broadcast of professionally developed print ads as public service radio and television spots which communicate this imperative to the public as a whole (which would involve coordinated outreach to some major funders); outreach to sympathetic media artists to enable the creation of these pieces; an intentional, aggressive, coordinated campaign to garner interviews on as many targeted national news venues as possible which would feature movement voices speaking to the honed our nationally coordinated message; a plan to place on message op-ed pieces in papers around the country on a nationally coordinated schedule.
21.We call for the equal participation of women in all aspects of the antiwar movement. We propose nonviolent direct actions either in Congressional offices or other appropriate and strategic locations, possibly defense contractors, Federal Buildings, or military bases in the U.S. These actions would be local and coordinated nationally, i.e., the same day for everyone (times may vary). The actions would probably result in arrests for sitting in after offices close. Entering certain facilities could also result in arrests. Participants would be prepared for that possible outcome before joining the action. Nonviolence training would be offered locally, with lists of trainers being made available. The message/demand would be a vote, a congressional action to end the wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Close U.S. bases. Costs of war and financial issues related to social needs neglected because of war spending would need to be studied and statements regarding same be prepared before the actions. Press release would encourage coverage because of the actions being local and nationally coordinated.
22.We will convene one or more committees or conferences for the purpose of identifying and arranging boycotts, sit-ins, and other actions that directly interfere with the immoral aspects of the violence and wars that we protest.
23.The United National Antiwar Conference calls for building and expanding the movement for peace by consciously and continually linking it with the urgent necessity to create jobs and fund social needs. We call for support from the antiwar movement to tie the wars and the funding for the wars to the urgent domestic issues through leaflets, signs, banners and active participation in the growing number of mass actions demanding jobs, health care, housing, education and immigrant rights such as: July 25 - March in Albany in Support of Muslims Targeted by Preemptive Prosecution called by the Muslim Solidarity Committee and Project Salam. July 29 & 30 Boycott Arizona Actions across the country as racist Arizona law SB 1070 goes into effect, including the mass march July 30 in NYC as the Arizona Diamondbacks play the Mets. All the other mass actions listed above leading up to the bi-coastal actions on April 9, 2011.
24.The continuations committee elected at this conference shall reach out to other peace and social justice groups holding protests in the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011, where such groups' demands and tactics are not inconsistent with those adopted at the UNAC conference, on behalf of exploring ways to maximize unity within the peace and social justice movements this fall and next spring. -- David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" http://davidswanson.org http://warisacrime.org http://facebook.com/pages/David-Swanson/297768373319 http://twitter.com/davidcnswanson http://youtube.com/afterdowningstreet
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Mike Ferner, National President Veterans For Peace Organized locally. Recognized nationally. Exposing the true costs of war and militarism since 1985.
I am saddened today at the prospect of a young Hispanic immigrant in Arizona going to the grocery store and forgetting to bring her passport and immigration documents with her. I cannot be dispassionate about the fact that the very act of her being in the grocery store will soon be a crime in the state she lives in. Or that, should a policeman hear her accent and form a "reasonable suspicion" that she is an illegal immigrant, she can -- and will -- be taken into custody until someone sorts it out, while her children are at home waiting for their dinner.
Equally disturbing is what will happen in the mind of the policeman. The police talk today about how they do not wish to, and will not, engage in racial profiling. Yet faced with the option of using common sense and compassion, or harassing a person who has done nothing wrong, a particularly sinister aspect of Arizona's new immigration law will be hanging over his head. He can be personally sued, by anyone, for failing to enforce this inhumane new act.
I recognize that Arizona has become a widening entry point for illegal immigration from the South. The wave has brought with it rising violence and drug smuggling.
But a solution that degrades innocent people, or that makes anyone with broken English a suspect, is not a solution. A solution that fails to distinguish between a young child coming over the border in search of his mother and a drug smuggler is not a solution.
I am not speaking from an ivory tower. I lived in the South Africa that has now thankfully faded into history, where a black man or woman could be grabbed off the street and thrown in jail for not having his or her documents on their person.
How far can this go? We lived it -- police waking a man up in the middle of the night and hauling him off to jail for not having his documents on his person while he slept. The fact that they were in his nightstand near the bed was not good enough.
Of course if you suggested such a possibility today to an Arizona policeman he would be adamant that he would never do such a thing. And I would believe him. Arizona is a long way from apartheid South Africa.
The problem is, under the new law, the one or two who would do it are legitimized. All they have to say is that they believed that illegal immigrants were being harbored in the house. They would be protected and sanctioned by this law.
Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population. They start with trying to solve a problem by asserting superior force over a population. They start with stripping people of rights and dignity - such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty - that you yourself enjoy. Not because it is right, but because you can. And because somehow, you think this is going to solve a problem.
However, when you strip a man or a woman of their basic human rights, you strip them of their dignity in the eyes of their family and their community, and even in their own eyes. An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being. He or she feels degraded and feels they are of less worth than others of a different color skin. These are the seeds of resentment, hostilities and in extreme cases, conflict.
Such "solutions" solve nothing. As already pointed out, even by people on the police force, Arizona's new laws will split the communities, make it less likely that people in the immigrant communities will work with the police. They will create conditions favorable to the very criminals these laws are trying to disarm.
The Latinos in Arizona have not come to Arizona because they want to live in communities wracked with violence and crime. I would guess that the most recent arrivals have fled their border towns and the growing violence there as drug lords tightened their control of the communities. They want to live and raise their children in peace, just as you or I do.
I am certain that, given the chance, the leaders of the Latino immigrant communities in Arizona would enthusiastically work with the state to find constructive solutions to these problems. I am very sure that they would like, as much as others, to rid Arizona of the drug smugglers, human traffickers and other criminal elements infiltrating their communities.
We can only hope that this law will be thrown out of the courts in short order. I do not disagree with the calls to boycott the businesses in the state until it is turned around.
In the meantime, it has opened the door to some smart state leaders sitting down with the leaders of the Latino communities in Arizona and hammering out some solutions that actually work. Hopefully these solutions would recognize the difference between a drug smuggler and a man willing to stand outside a gas station in the hot sun for hours in the hopes that someone will give him some work for the day.
The problem of migrating populations is not going to go away any time soon. If anyone should know this, it should be Americans, many of whom landed here themselves to escape persecution, famine or conflict. With the eyes of the world now on them, Arizona has the opportunity to create a new model for dealing with the pitfalls, and help the nation as a whole find its way through the problems of illegal immigration. But to work, it must be a model that is based on a deep respect for the essential human rights Americans themselves have grown up enjoying.
Hi, Fr. Pickard shares that his trial is Monday at 9 in the DC Superior Court (Indiana Ave) in Room 120 before Judge Sullivan. He understands that it is early and Mothers' Day and thus unlikely that many will get there. Nonetheless, if you or some one you know from the DC area (ring 'em up!) can make it, great. If not, please keep him in your prayers. Joe Rogan
Contrary to popular belief, slavery didn’t end with Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Experts estimate that today there are 27 million people enslaved around the world. It’s happening in countries on all six inhabited continents. And yes, that includes the United States. The CIA estimates 14,500 to 17,000 victims are trafficked into the “Land of the Free” every year.
PLEASE NOTE: Peace and Justice member ATHENA FORD is part of this peace walk and part of the original group that walked the entire 135 miles!
MEDIA ADVISORY Immediate Release Feb 23, 2010
CONTACT: Roxanne Pauline Roxiep9@aol.com 570-840-1650 Majority Leader Reid and Other Key Members of Congress to Welcome Health Cares Marchers and Hundreds of Supporters Capitol Senators Reid, Harkin, Dodd, Casey, and Sherrod Brown join with Health Care Leaders from HCAN, SEIU, and Families USA to Promise to Bring the People’s Voice to President’s Health Care Summit Washington, DC – On Wednesday February 24th at 2pm EST, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) along with Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) will join with SEIU President Andy Stern, Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack, Health Care for America Now National Campaign Manager Richard Kirsch, and several PA, VA, DC, and MD residents with stories of health insurance industry abuse to welcome walkers who will have traveled 135 miles on foot from Philadelphia to DC to highlight the urgent need for comprehensive health care reform. For more information on the march, see MelaniesMarch.com. Health care reform supporters will join those who have completed the “March to the Finish Line for Melanie” at Union Station in Washington, DC at 12:30pm EST. Together, they will proceed to the Dirksen Senate Office Building - Room 50 – where the indoor event will begin at 2pm. The March was named for Missouri resident Melanie Shouse who passed away January 30th after a long battle with breast cancer. Her insurance company had denied her critical treatment her doctor prescribed, and Melanie was a fierce advocate for comprehensive health care reform. Melanie’s best friend Romona Williams and partner Steve Hart will open the program and introduce Majority Leader Reid. WHO: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Bob Casey, Senator Sherrod Brown, SEIU President Andy Stern, Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack, Health Care for America Now National Campaign Manager Richard Kirsch, and several speakers with stories of insurance industry abuse. WHAT: Event to welcome Health Care Refom Marchers to DC and hear the people’s voice in the run-up to the President’s Health Care Summit. WHERE: Dirksen Senate Office Building Room G50. March from Union Station begins at the half-circle in front of the station at 12:30pm. Hundreds will proceed up Delaware Avenue N.E. to C Street N.E. to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Marchers will enter Dirksen at C and First Street N.E. WHEN: Wednesday February 24, 2010 at 2pm EST. March from Union Station begins at 12:30pm. ### Local Members of NEPA Citizens in Action, Local UFCW 1776 and Health Care For America Now will travel to Philadelphia and Washington D.C. on Wednesday, February 24th, to walk the final mile of the “March to the Finish Line" for Health Care Reform.
Dear Friends of the Peace and Justice Center:
The following article by Kathy Kelly comes to us from Joe Rogan. Joe requests that we keep Father Bill Pickard in our prayers. Father Bill is a longstanding supporter of the Peace and Justice Center. Fr Bill has been arrested for his acts of civil disobedience.
Washington D.C., – The Campaign for Peace, Women Against Military Madness, and other peace groups, aligned with the Peaceable Assembly Campaign, organized a civil disobedience action today, in Washington, D.C. Thirteen nonviolent activists, including Scranton priest Fr. William Pickard, were arrested in front of the White House protesting US militarism.
Beginning at 10:30 a.m., over thirty participants read names of 77 US citizens killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the names of Iraqis and Afghans killed in the U.S. wars. After each name was read, a bell was rung and the participants said “We Remember You.” A banner that read, “Occupation” was pelted with shoes inscribed with anti-war slogans. Finally, the thirteen walked onto the sidewalk and laid down in remembrance of the war dead. Father Pickard anointed the “dead” with olive oil.
The Washington D.C. Park Police arrested all thirteen. They include, Vickie Andrews, John Braun, Marie Braun, Lori Blanding, Ward Brennan, Stephen Clemens, Diane Haugesag, Maxine McNamara, Ceylon Mooney, Joe Palen, Mary Percich, Father William Pickard and Cornelia Sullivan. They were taken to the Anacostia Police station and then were transported to Washington D.C. District 1 police station before being jailed in the Washington D.C. lock up. They have been told they will remain there until they appear before a judge on January 27, 2010.
The Peaceable Assembly Campaign is founded on the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution that states “Congress shall make no law... prohibiting the right of the people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.” The group’s literature states:
The organizers hold President Obama, the Senate and the House to:
• End the wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
• Publicly commit to vote against any additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond funds required for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.
• Promote the redirection of funding away from military spending and towards the rebuilding of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine and to the rebuilding of and provision for the Common Good in the U.S.
• Further the development of truly green (non-nuclear), environmentally friendly alternative energy sources accompanied by a decrease in policies that drive consumption of fossil fuels.
Voices for Creative Nonviolence, www.vcnv.org, has initiated a nationwide Peaceable Assembly Campaign, which seeks an end to the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and an end to U.S. support of the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Begun in September, 2009, and continuing for the next ten months, the group engages in both legal and extralegal (nonviolent civil disobedience/civil resistance) lobbying efforts, urging Representatives and Senators to stop authorizing and funding wars and occupations.
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On Eve of Mega 5 Mile Human Rights March in Arizona: Donate for Water and follow via twitter
In the past week, we've received more than 100 endorsements for the Mega March Tomorrow and have received hundreds of donations ranging from $5 to $100 dollars. Thank You! and Please keep the support coming as people arrive in town from Chicago, NY, New Orleans, Los Angeles and all across the country.
Nearly a full year into the new presidential administration, people will demonstrate by the thousands to defend basic rights in Arizona. In recent years, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has become the face of a failed US immigration policy that encourages racial profiling by local law enforcement authorities. At the same time, Arizona has become home to experimental laws that use immigration as an excuse to criminalize communities of color.
This Saturday, people will gather in Phoenix for a five mile march ending with a rally and concert with Linda Ronstadt and Little Joe y la Familia at the Maricopa County Jail. If you can not attend in person, please donate $5 or $10 or more to provide water and supplies for the marchers.
After you donate, spread the word via facebook and twitter by posting ""I just stood against hate by donating $10 for water to march against terror in Arizona. will you? http://ndlon.org/water""
Join the Facebook Group "Outraged at Arpaio" Get News, Receive Updates, Learn about Upcoming Events
Follow Along with the Weekend's Activities via Twitter Search for hashtag #azhumanrights
Please, forward this email, and change your Facebook & Twitter status to say
"I just stood against hate by donating $10 to buy water for Saturday's historic march in Arizona. Will you? www.ndlon.org/water"
Links to Background Information
New York TImes editorials on "Arpaio's America" here, here, and here.
Pulitzer Prize-winning series on evolution of Arpaio's reign of terror.
Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times The Happiest People By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: January 6, 2010
SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica
Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.
There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.
That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6.
Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness, as above, with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last.
A third approach is the “happy planet index,” devised by the New Economics Foundation, a liberal think tank. This combines happiness and longevity but adjusts for environmental impact — such as the carbon that countries spew.
Here again, Costa Rica wins the day, for achieving contentment and longevity in an environmentally sustainable way. The Dominican Republic ranks second, the United States 114th (because of its huge ecological footprint) and Zimbabwe is last.
Maybe Costa Rican contentment has something to do with the chance to explore dazzling beaches on both sides of the country, when one isn’t admiring the sloths in the jungle (sloths truly are slothful, I discovered; they are the tortoises of the trees). Costa Rica has done an unusually good job preserving nature, and it’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering “nature deficit disorder.”
After dragging my 12-year-old daughter through Honduran slums and Nicaraguan villages on this trip, she was delighted to see a Costa Rican beach and stroll through a national park. Among her favorite animals now: iguanas and sloths.
(Note to boss: Maybe we should have a columnist based in Costa Rica?)
What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.
I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.
In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.
Rising education levels also led the country to preserve its lush environment as an economic asset. Costa Rica is an ecological pioneer, introducing a carbon tax in 1997. The Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of Yale and Columbia Universities, ranks Costa Rica at No. 5 in the world, the best outside Europe.
This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.
Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital — but then again, Mexicans sometimes slip into the United States, presumably in pursuit of both happiness and assets.
Cross-country comparisons of happiness are controversial and uncertain. But what does seem quite clear is that Costa Rica’s national decision to invest in education rather than arms has paid rich dividends. Maybe the lesson for the United States is that we should devote fewer resources to shoring up foreign armies and more to bolstering schools both at home and abroad.
In the meantime, I encourage you to conduct your own research in Costa Rica, exploring those magnificent beaches or admiring those slothful sloths. It’ll surely make you happy.
Joe DeRaymond, noted peace and justice activist has gone Home. May he rest in peace as we continue his mission.
During the weekend of November 20-22, 2009, Joe DeRaymond "crossed the line" one final time. Joe's ashes were scattered on the grounds of the Fort Benning military base.
The following is Joe DeRaymond's Sentencing Statement:
I have pleaded "not guilty" to the charge of trespassing on the Fort Benning military base, I plea I would like to reaffirm at this time.
I believe the ruling of this Court regarding our right to a jury trial is incorrect. [To this argument the Judge stated that jury trials would take months, and would be too cumbersome, to which I replied, "Justice is cumbersome, Your Honor."] I believe the ruling of this Court regarding the affirmative defenses based on national and international law, related to our duty to protest and oppose the commission of crimes against humanity, is incorrect. I believe I have been denied the right to a fair trial.
Nevertheless, I stand before this Court convicted of Trespass on the Fort Benning military base, in order to protest the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation. It is the people of Latin America who have accurately named this school the "School of Assassins". I am encouraged by my co-defendants, our supporters, but most of all by many friends in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia who support my protest of this school, and are encouraged in their struggle for justice by the presence of School of the Americas Watch here in Fort Benning every year.
Your Honor, I have visited Central America and Colombia many times in recent years. In February of 2005, I was working as a volunteer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the Peace Community of San Joseé de Apartadó, located in the northwest corner of Colombia. This community has declared itself neutral in the decades-long armed conflict that engulfs Colombia. They have declared that they will not carry arms, participate in the violence of the war, and will not aid any armed actor in the conflict. On February 20, eight community members were massacred, on their land, while harvesting their crops. They were unarmed, and four of the victims were children, ranging in age from 2 to 15.
Eyewitness testimony and independent investigations indicate that the Colombian military acting in concert with paramilitary forces were the murderers who literally chopped these human beings to pieces. The official Colombian government investigation has yielded no answers. This is not unexpected, since over 150 community members have been assassinated or "disappeared" in the last eight years, and not one perpetrator has been brought to justice. It is worthy of note that two community leaders, Alfonso Bolivar and Luis Eduardo Guerra, were killed in this massacre. Luis Eduardo was a visitor to the demonstrations here in Columbus in November of 2002, and was a courageous worker for peace and human rights. We honor his work, his life and memory.
The United States each year sends many hundreds of millions of dollars to the Colombian military, and the Colombian military sends more soldiers to the School of Assassins than any other nation. Each year, Colombia leads our hemisphere in human rights violations, and each year our Congress and President send more of our tax dollars to support policies of assassination and torture. The School of Americas Watch has identified members of the Colombian military who were in command positions of the Colombian military brigade in control of the region where the massacre of February 2005 occurred. I believe a jury would be very interested in this chain of circumstance.
I want to put these policies and this School of the Americas, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, School of Assassins on trial. I call on my Congress, my President, my Courts, the free press of the world, the governments of the world, to do their jobs, to let the truth out, to let justice be done.
Is there something happening on your campus or in your community with regard to the fight against Nike's sweatshop abuses that we should know about? If so, send an email to jim@educatingforjustice.org with the details.
The link above is regarding a crime in July 2008, a group of white teenagers fatally beat Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala while yelling racial epithets. In May, a jury acquitted two of the perpetrators of the most serious charges, instead convicting them of simple assault.
Please save this date for an important event.
Date: Friday, July 17, at the new River Front Park in Wilkes-Barre, Wilkes side, 5:45 PM.
Event: Peace Vigil
We are calling for a peace vigil to note the anniversary of the tragic murder of Luis Ramirez. Ramirez, a father of three, was beaten to death in the streets of Pennsylvania by several young men.
Please forward this to as many people as possible.
Location: River Commons for the Candlelight Vigil on July 17th @ 6:00 PM. We will close with a Jewish tradition of tossing bread into the river, led by Rabbi Lerner, who will explain the symbolism.
The Interfaith Council Planning Team is the host organization for this event.
peace, rod
EDUCATING FOR JUSTICE TEAM SWEAT CAMPAIGN UPDATE
Friends of EFJ:
I recently received a letter from Nike in response to our TEAM SWEAT postcard campaign demanding that they disclose wage rates for all their partner factories worldwide. At the moment, they are refusing to comply. I am in the midst of crafting a response and I will post both the original letter, the response, and the call to action in the coming days.
Be sure to join Team Sweat on Facebook and Twitter so that you can get involved in the discussion on this issue. You can find links for both of these on the Team Sweat homepage, www.teamsweat.org.
On another note, I am currently working on restructuring the programming focus and activities of EFJ in preparation for the 2009-2010 school year. I will be sending an update on this soon.
I hope this finds you well.
Peace, Jim Keady
******* EDUCATING FOR JUSTICE Shopping with a Conscience
Friends of EFJ:
I am writing to share with you the "2009 Shop with a Conscience Guide" that was put out by Sweatfree Communities and the International Labor Rights Forum. As you prepare for the holidays, you may want to consider getting your friends and family members gifts from these companies that believe in fair trade and workers' rights.
I hope this finds you well!
Peace, JWK
ANNOUNCING THE RELEASE OF THE 2009 SHOP WITH A CONSCIENCE CONSUMER GUIDE SweatFree Communities and International Labor Rights Forum have teamed up once again to release the 2009 Shop with a Conscience Consumer Guide filled with excellent products made in good working conditions. We believe that one of the most important criteria for meaningful and dignified work is that workers have an effective, collective voice in determining their wages and working conditions. Therefore all the products in this shopping guide are made by workers organized into democratic unions or worker-owned cooperatives. All retailers and wholesalers listed in the guide have undergone a rigorous application process to give us and you the confidence that their products truly meet our sweatfree criteria. Please support organized workers by shopping with a conscience this holiday season and by helping publicize this guide. View the 2009 Shopping Guide
If you know of a business that you should be included in the guide, encourage them to check out our criteria and application for more information. And for those that would rather directly support workers around the world, consider donating to SweatFree Communities and International Labor Rights Forum.
Click below from a notice from our good friends at PennFuture:
Immigration officers may NOT enter your home unless they have a “warrant.”
A warrant is a document issued by a court or government agency.
There are two types of warrant — one for when they are coming to arrest you, and another for when they have permission from a judge to search your home.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can issue arrest warrants, but only a court can issue a search warrant.
click here for full pdf notice>> Know your rights! Please distribute this very important notice.
From the Los Angeles Times Skilled immigrants a 'brain waste' in California's workforce About 300,000 college-educated legal immigrants in the state, and 1.3 million nationwide, are unemployed or working in low-level jobs because their credentials aren't recognized here, a study finds.
By Teresa Watanabe
November 11, 2008
As a physician in Peru, Luis Garcia amassed nine years of medical education and five years of practice, including successful appendectomies, Cesarean deliveries and other surgeries. Since he immigrated to Southern California four years ago, he has earned a community college degree specializing in geriatrics.
The only work he's been able to find, however, has been cat-sitting, dog-walking and elder care.
That's because Garcia hasn't yet been able to pass the battery of requirements for a U.S. medical license, including several exams and a residency. He represents what a recent report calls a massive "brain waste" of highly educated and skilled immigrant professionals who potentially could, with a little aid, help ease looming labor shortages in California and nationwide in healthcare, computer sciences and other skilled jobs.
"I feel lost," Garcia said. "Sometimes I'm embarrassed to talk to my family back home and tell them I'm taking care of dogs. But I know someday I will be able to do my geriatrics practice, and I know there are people here who need my help."
Nationwide, more than 1.3 million college-educated legal immigrants are unemployed or working in unskilled jobs such as dishwashers or taxi drivers, according to the report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. Nearly one-fourth of them, or 317,000, live in California.
Professionals from Latin America and Africa fare worse than those from Asia and Europe, the study found. Two of the biggest barriers are lack of English fluency and non-recognition of foreign academic and professional criteria.
In some cases, for instance, U.S. medical systems require course work typically not required abroad, such as maternity and psychiatric nursing, according to Julie Hughes-Lederer, interim director of the Los Angeles County Regional Health Occupations Resource Center.
Medical licensing exams are also different, such as the use of multiple-choice exams in the United States -- a format regarded as more difficult than the essay exams used in other countries.
"A lot of this is just technical obstacles they have to get through," Hughes-Lederer said. "We don't have to question their capability to learn and progress. You know they have the gray matter."
Immigrants say shortages of time and money prevent them from pursuing the needed U.S. credentials. Arsal Awan, 50, immigrated to the United States in 1985 shortly after earning his law degree in Pakistan. But he was forced to abandon his professional career ambitions when his father suddenly died and he needed to begin sending money to his family back home. He worked in a duty-free shop, started a radio show and 15 years ago began driving taxis in L.A. -- a job he still does 12 hours a day despite the back, knee and stomach problems he says it causes him.
"I always wanted to be in the legal field, but you really have to study a lot, and I never had a chance to go to school" here, Awan said.
Michael Fix, senior vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, said the need to help immigrant professionals gain the requisite credentials and experience is particularly acute now that the nation faces the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers, considered the most skilled workforce in history. In California, for instance, the fastest growing occupations are computer software engineer and registered nurse.
California also faces shortages of health professionals who can speak the language and understand the cultures of the state's increasingly diverse population. Latinos, for instance, make up 35.5% of California's population but only 5.2% of its physicians and 5.7% of its registered nurses, according to data compiled by the Welcome Back Initiative, a program primarily funded by the California Endowment and the California Wellness Foundation to help immigrant health professionals overcome barriers to practicing in the state.
Since its inception in 2001, the program has helped nearly 8,000 foreign healthcare professionals from more than 160 countries by offering courses, training, counseling and other services. The endowment's funding, however, is set to expire this year.
The migration institute report noted that competition for such professionals is heating up, with other countries such as Canada and Australia moving aggressively to attract them with better transition programs.
"The U.S. historically enjoyed the advantage in picking the best immigrants in the world," said Jeanne Batalova, a policy analyst with the institute. "But with other countries entering the race for global talent, the U.S. is losing its competitive advantage."
The report urged several new measures to help ease the way for immigrant professionals, including more language and workforce training, national coordination of credentialing criteria and three-year transitional visas to allow employers to "test the waters" with foreign workers.
The report also suggested an expansion of successful programs such as Welcome Back.
At Welcome Back's Southern California center at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, several immigrants huddled over a plastic arm sheathed in a tattooed covering to learn how to draw blood. Although all of them had drawn blood countless times in their careers, instructor Xochitl Manriquez was teaching them how to use the latest U.S. technologies. The class was part of their training to become medical assistants -- work far below their qualifications that would nonetheless get them back into the healthcare field.
The group included physicians from Peru, Mexico and Iran, radiologists from Honduras and nurses from El Salvador. They related, sometimes tearfully, their experiences of leaving their homes to come here and the difficult times they've had trying to reclaim their professional careers and identities. Some were pushed out by violence and poverty, others were pulled by the chance to learn advanced U.S. medical techniques.
Marta Martinez, a nurse from Mexico, said she had to lay carpet and sell flowers on the street when she first came to California more than a decade ago. She said she shelled out $850 to a private firm that guaranteed it could help her pass her U.S. licensing exam for nurses, but she failed. Like several of the professionals, Martinez said her big mistake was taking the exams before she had mastered sufficient English.
Manriquez, licensed as a physician in Mexico, assembled lamps in her uncle's factory in her first job in the United States. She passed the first exams required for a U.S. medical license but abandoned the process after being diagnosed with cancer. She now teaches in the Welcome Back program and does volunteer surgeries and other medical work in Mexico with two international medical organizations to "shake my frustration" of not being able to work as a doctor here.
"Human beings in the whole world are the same," said Fariba Fadaee, an Iranian doctor who passed all of her U.S. medical exams and is now applying for a residency. "If we can manage patients in our own country, we can do it here too."
