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.
“Speaking
Truth to Empire” on KFCF 88.1 FM independently owned and
locally operated since
1975 in Fresno Dan Yaseen
interviews Steve Lendman, an author, a
progressive blogger and an
internet radio host. He writes on vital international and
national topics,
including war and peace, American imperialism, corporate
dominance, political
persecutions, and a range of other social, economic and
political issues. His
website is:www.stephenlendman.org
"The empire's assault on the People of Syria and the DPRK. Dakotah talks with Canadian author and activist Stephen Gowans about Washington’s grudge against the DPRK and Syria, as well as busting some myths about planned economies and capitalism."
OnSpeaking Truth to
Empire
on FM 88.1 KFCF, an
independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno,
Dan Yaseen
interviews Ann Wright. She is a retired Army Reserve colonel
and a 29-year
veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was also a diplomat
in Nicaragua,
Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone,
Micronesia, Afghanistan
and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for
Heroism for her
actions during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned
from the Department
of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She
is the co-author
of Dissent: Voices of Conscience and and appeared in the
documentary
“Uncovered".
When I left Vietnam in September 1971 after being
in the Central Highlands for one year, I remember
an event that I could only see its importance many
years later.
Three days before I left Vietnam at the out processing
center in Cam Ranh Bay, I was with a couple of hundred
soldiers who were also heading home from a war that
was drenched in Lies.
I was sleeping in one of the large barracks with
a lot of other anxious people who just wanted
out of this place.
One of the things we had to wait for was the
results of a piss test to determine if we had
been using heroin while in Vietnam.
If you tested positive, you had to stay in Vietnam
for another 2-3 weeks to be detoxed.
It was obviously a temporary shake and bake
treatment that would only last until they got
home, where they would no doubt continue
the assault on destroying their lives with a drug
that was having a powerful impact on the morale
of American troops in Vietnam.
While I was in Vietnam, I saw the end results of
people killing themselves and killing others because
heroin was dictating every decision they made.
Heroin addiction was rampart in my unit, and it
was being supplied and transported by the CIA
and high ranking South Vietnamese officers,
because heroin was like cash, and the cash flow
never stopped.
It was another level of unfathomable corruption
that defined the entire American War in Vietnam.
We were all disposable chess pieces that were moved
around on a chessboard to suit the corporate elite's
orgasm of non-stop profit.
We were all chumps in a war that would eventually
kill millions of people.
So, when my piss test came back negative, I was
good to go-- back to the United States that pretended
to be my earthly home.
My last perceptions of being in Vietnam were written
on the walls of that barracks I stayed in for a few days.
On every square inch of the walls of that building was
highly toxic war graffiti telling the absolute truth about
the American War in Vietnam.
It was all graphic prose to say the least.
American soldiers spilled their guts about how much
they hated their government and Richard Nixon.
They were as articulate as any gifted writer who
had the personal experience of bull shit and betrayal.
Betrayal is like heroin, it would eventually kill anything
that moved.
And, when the Vietnam War ended, that graffiti was
destroyed with the walls it was written on.
The blackboard was erased forever.
The tragedy of all this is that future American
soldiers would see the same horror of Lies in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and would experience the
exact same pathology of betrayal.
Long after Vietnam veterans are gone, the new
American soldier will be pissing in the same
sewer of historical deceit.
It's all the same orgy of madness.
I am truly sorry the Vietnam War blackboard
was destroyed, because it would have saved
so many lives.
For the love of money is the root of all evil.
And, that is why the blackboard is erased.
Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam
Full Disclosure
November 9, 2017
