The harvest of imperial crimes, injustices, and pure b.s. was ripe this year, sometimes riper than usual, and the Soapbox never missed an opportunity to oppose those crimes.
It was SUPER hard to choose, because I am justifiably proud of
In this episode, we interview peace activist Cindy Sheehan. We discuss
many subjects including the peace movement, her book The Obama Files:
Chronicles of an Award Winning War Criminal, and much more.
As the year draws to a close, war continues to rage around the world,
from Yemen to Myanmar to Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, usually with
the United States in the middle of it. We look at the prospects for
peace in 2018 with activist
On “Speaking Truth to Empire” on
KFCF 88.1
independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno.Dan
Yaseen
interviews “Peace
Mom” Cindy Sheehan, an
author, blogger, and radio talk show host. She is America’s
leading antiwar
activist. Her website is http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/
Mr. Catalinotto has been
active in the anti-war movement since the October 1962 missile crisis
and has worked on some of the peoples' war crimes tribunals
that the IAC organized regarding the U.S. wars against Iraq and
Yugoslavia. Since 1982 John has been a managing editor of Workers World
newspaper. And specifically from 1967 to 1970 he was a civilian organizer
with the American Servicemen's Union, a circulation manager of the
newspaper, The Bond, and must have read and answered some thousands of
letters from GIs around the world, and once in a while got into the
direct struggle.
Draftees and enlistees — eighteen-year-olds from the South Bronx, factory workers from Buffalo, miners’ sons from Kentucky, unemployed youth from Watts — hate the military and the Vietnam War. They throw a wrench into the Pentagon’s war machine, becoming leaders of the anti-war movement and organizing a union in the conscript military to battle war, racism and their officers. In three other wars — the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 that sparked the Paris Commune; World War I, which sowed revolutions in Germany and Russia; African liberation wars of the 1960s that incited a captains' revolt in Portugal — ordinary soldiers turn their guns around to make revolution.
Weaving together letters from servicemen and servicewomen, interviews with GI war resisters and first-hand narratives, memoir and historical research, author John Catalinotto — as participant and historian — highlights the relation between rank-and-file soldier resistance and the struggle for state power.
From the first napalm bomb dropped, Catalinotto hated the U.S. war against Vietnam. By 1967 he was organizing rank-and-file servicemen to resist the war. For the last 50 years he pondered that experience and its lessons for humanity. Now he wants to share this history with all who want to fight injustice.
Should millionaires have the power to reduce taxes on the wealthy?
The average wealth of the US Senate hovers around eight-million dollars per senator. Of course, in this age where three people own more wealth than the bottom-half of the nation, eight-million could be considered chump change.
So, the elitist Club of Millionaires aka The US Senate just passed a tax cut bill for those wealthiest USAians and puts the onus for paying for the crimes of the US Empire on the backs of those who make 10-20k per year. To me, and, to be sure, to any socialist/humanist this is abominable, to say the least.
This Club of Millionaires remains in service to the billionaire class of War and Wall Street. Case in point: Jeff Bezos of Amazon infamy recently surpassed ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars in hoarded wealth. Naturally, his wealth has been accumulated on the backs of his workers, where in India, Amazon pays $222 a year and here in the states, $12.40 an hour.
Not only does Bezos pay his workers a paltry amount in contrast to his vast wealth-hoard, reports of dangerous and stressful work conditions are rampant. Communities are bending over backwards to give this billionaire even more cash benefits to build another plant to pay local workers peanuts. Chicago has offered around 2.25 billion in benefits and one town has offered to change its name to "Amazon" and make Bezos mayor for life. If US workers had any revolutionary consciousness, they'd be offering Bezos the chance to escape the guillotine in exchange for expropriating his wealth which has been stolen from the community!
I am often accused of being "jealous" of the wealthy and my response is, "I don't want to be like them, I want them to be like us."
While owning the mouthpiece of Empire, the Washington Post, Bezos also does business with the deep state and the murderers and drug dealers in the CIA. One person should not be allowed to harm the masses by his/her avarice and hunger for power; Bezos and his ilk are not to be worshiped, or emulated, but despised and we should be organizing to oppose such immoral accumulation of wealth.
At the very least the Club of Millionaires should be disbanded and abolished.
Molesters
Recently, women have been outing the rich and powerful and their predilection for sexual harassment and sexual assault. Of course, the pain of the women has often been used for political gotcha gaming: "We'll take your Judge Roy Moore (R-AL), and raise you an Al Franken (D-MN) and John Conyers (D-MI)."
I have a history with both of these Demoquacks. Before Al Franken even ran for the Senate, I debated him on his radio show on Air America. His viewpoint was that now that the US was in Iraq, "we" needed to stay there to "finish the mission." Of course, like every other war supporter, he could never adequately define that "mission." It was in going over to Iraq and Afghanistan to "entertain" the troops his position was killing, maiming, and otherwise screwing up where he has gotten into trouble for serial sexual harassment.
Then there's my old "friend" John Conyers who has had me arrested and also removed from a hearing that he was chairing. John Conyers the one who wrote a book about impeaching George W. Bush while he was the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, then refused to institute impeachment proceeding when the Demoquacks regained a majority in the House in 2007.
In one of the many meetings I had with Conyers about impeachment (before the final meeting where he had me and 50 others arrested while we were sitting in at his office), he told us that "Pelosi" was a major obstacle to impeachment. It's ironic now that she's calling for his resignation, but has already made it very clear that if the Demoquacks once again regain majority, impeachment of Trump will be "off the table."
In WashedUp, DeCeit, the corruption and repellent behavior of John Conyers is well-known, but as creepy as he is, he is, by far not the creepiest member of Congress. However, again, House seats should not be inhabited by the same person for decades, upon decades. This kind of political entitlement invites corruption and graft and it is time for Conyers (and several hundred more) to go.
Hopefully, the rotten House of Cards is imploding.
Monsters
As much as the recent partisan passage of the tax bill has been reviled, there was a recent defense budget that passed where, in a bi-partisan effort, the Senate gave Trump 60 billion more than he even asked for to expand and maintain the violent US Empire. Passing 88-8, the Senate was apparently worried that War Profiteers wouldn't have a Merry Christmas unless their corporate welfare was expanded.
By my count, the US Empire is currently and actively destroying: Yemen, Niger, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya; and passively destroying every other country by its Imperial agenda.
Obama's Shame
I will never ask you to call your (s)elected thugs in WashedUp, DeCeit, but we need a united front against capitalism and its evil spawn, imperialism.
I always hope that "this year" will be the year we awake and arise and stay risen until the Empire is no more. I will never give up that hope, and I will never give up the struggle.
