Opinion
While many march and celebrate a fictitious King today, his family, largely ignored, call on no one to celebrate the holiday till voting rights are protected, with the current reversal of laws by the Supreme Court, some things are worse than what they were in the late 60s when King and the movement were struggling to pass those very rights. I myself will not march to hypocrisy, while we lack democracy at home, a democracy that King gave his life for. What is often overlooked or whitewashed when it comes to the American (US) mythology of King, which has turned King into a fictional character, was King’s radical revolution of values.
Am I the only Ohioan who has mixed reactions to the blasting news of the highly secretive and delayed announcement of Intel’s aspirational plans to build the “world’s largest” computer chip manufacturing “fab” in New Albany/Licking County? Am I the only reader disturbed by the no-longer-daily, little-news Columbus Dispatch’s Saturday, Jan. 22, front page and much of the first section’s unchecked press release for Mike DeWine’s and Jon Husted’s re-election campaign? This continued in the Sunday, Jan. 23, edition. I hope I’m not.
I support all responsible job creation and economic development. Let there be no doubt about that.
“The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
Even if Mitch McConnell’s viral gaffe last week is as innocent as he claims it to be, the stench of something deep — the unexamined racist fear and shame at the core of GOP policy — is unavoidably noticeable: There’s “them” and there’s “us” and never the twain shall meet. And we’ll make sure of that. (Shhhh … don’t tell anyone.)
The meeting—which drew more than 300 citizen participants—featured more than two dozen top-of-the-line intellectuals, organizers and activists offering their brilliance and their guidance on election protection.
We open with actress/activist MIMI KENNEDY and PDA Executive Director ALAN MINSKY with their deep insights into the forces attacking the remnants of our republic.
We’re then joined by ANDREA MILLER and RAY MCCLENDON, creators of the crucial “Georgia Way,” which against all conceivable odds turned two US Senate seats in Georgia to progressive campaigners who unseated Mitch McConnell.
They are followed by an astounding line-up of key players in saving American democracy, including: REV. RODNEY SADLER, CHRISTIAN NUNES, MIKE FOX, TATONKA BRICCA, SARA NELSON, DANNY SHEEHAN, LORI PESANTE, ROBERT WILSON, JAMES FUKUDA, DANNY GOLDBERG, KENNY BRUNO, JOHN BRAKEY and JAN GOODMAN.
The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the two men with signs warning, “Your neighbour is pushing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en Territory at gunpoint.”
Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, said, “Today supporters took action to bring the message home to Siim Vanaselja and Doug Guzman, two men leading companies that are orchestrating, funding, and profiting off of the violent colonial invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The decisions they make are directly linked to the militarized violence that the RCMP has carried out on Wet’suwet’en people over the past several months to shove through the Coastal Gaslink pipeline at gunpoint.”
It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was introduced by Netanyahu’s Likud party rival, Gideon Sa’ar.
Writer/director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s heartfelt Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom will charm the pants off of you – or, rather, the robes off of you. Because this captivating feature was shot mostly in the hard-to-get-to Kingdom of Bhutan, a Buddhist nation of less than 1 million inhabitants straddling the Eastern Himalayas between India and the Tibet region of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, Lunana was largely lensed on location in the actual village of that same name, a remote, tiny hamlet, which translated into English Lunana means: “The Dark Valley.” Minus electricity, let alone Internet connectivity and cell receptivity, Dorji’s crew had to shoot on location there using solar power batteries.
A public relations and marketing campaign called FL4ALL announced itself in a full-page ad in the New York Times on August 3, 2021. It represents a dangerous fiction and threat to students and unsuspecting “hard working citizens,” to repeat its promotional language. The campaign’s actions follow what I declared in my 1979 book, The Literacy Myth, the exaggerated importance of literacy by itself, taken out of context. To borrow terms from the field of literacy studies, “reading” the advertisement as “written” is revealing.
Let’s look at the text. It misrepresents both literacy and economics, and is a danger to the population this corporate coalition claims to serve.
First, no reputable person says or writes “FL” for “financial literacy.” Perhaps for a football league. Second, only marketers and business corporations seeking to derive financial profits would consider promoting a flawed slogan like “FL4ALL.” In corrupting well-established public civil rights movements, such sloganeering is a shameful misappropriation. The ad proclaims that “financial literacy is a civil rights issue of this generation.”
There are no statistics that can measure the pain and sorrow of their family members and friends of these victims of violence on both sides of this conflict. What follows is just a snapshot of the human rights violations in 2021, and suggestions for actions that we can take to help bring an end to the violence for the benefit of all people in the region.
Statistics from the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs for 2021 (OCHA oPt)
Palestinian deaths - West Bank 82 (including 15 children); Gaza 264 (including 67 children)
Palestinian injuries - 17,895
Israeli deaths - 16 (including 2 children)
Israeli injuries - 158
Source: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties.
There were 902 demolished building in the West Bank that displaced 1,203 people. Additionally, OCHA oPt documented that demolition of buildings resulted in the loss of livelihood for another 13,258.