I remember my arrest. It was May of 1972 and Nixon had just mined Haiphong Harbor.
2011
Tikkun Olam Requires the Imagination of Children
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Hope for healing the world must start with children. This is modeled through Peace Pizzazz, a children’s festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan, sponsored by secular groups (such as the 6th Congressional District Campaign for a U.S. Department of Peace) and religious groups (such as the Skyridge Church of The Brethren) in a collaborative effort to build a whole culture of peace locally and globally.
2011
The Decalogue as an ABC of Human Behavior
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For there is hardly any other people which has something as substantial and striking to offer as Judaism with its Ten Commandments. As the German writer Thomas Mann explained after the terrors of National Socialism, these are the “basic instruction and rock of respectable humanity,” indeed the “ABC of human behavior.”
2011
Dare to Struggle
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Today, conditions are as dire as those we faced in the 1960s, but we are not coming together with sufficient urgency to confront them. Climate change threatens the very existence of a habitable planet, but here in the United States, the business of burning fossil fuels continues as usual.
2011
Treat the System, Not the Symptom
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“They stop at treating the symptoms of poverty, such as hunger and poor health, with food programs and clinics, without ever asking the obvious question: Why do a few people enjoy effortless abundance, while billions of others who work far harder experience extreme deprivation?”
2011
The Struggle for Universal Health Care
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This is why I devote my time to working for a health system in the United States that meets the human rights principles of universality, equity, and accountability: a single-payer national health insurance. Anything less will prolong suffering and unnecessary death. Every person in this country must have access to the same high-quality standard of health care.
2011
A New Future for Food
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Many happily munch on their hamburgers without a thought to the land destroyed for cattle grazing, or the immense cruelty in the raising and slaughter of the billions of animals we use for food each year. Mothers continue to prod their youngsters to eat their vegetables, unaware of the poisons involved in their production, not to mention the water and air.
2011
An Era of Danger to All Humanity
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Despite the absence of any strategic conflict in the world, there is a refusal to explore the possibility of ridding the world of nuclear weaponry, and even Obama’s visionary endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons signaled his political detachment with the damning admission that such an outcome might not happen in his lifetime. If not now, when? Are we waiting for a new Cold War or World War III?
2011
The “How To” of Caring Community
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These are lean times for utopian thinking. We know too much about its dangers and failures. What within previous utopian experiments, from communism to kibbutzim to ’70s communes, undermined them? Human nature? Our particular cultures?
Editorials & Actions
Why Progressives Should Run Against Obama and “Blue Dogs” in the 2012 Democratic Party Primaries
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If we are going to develop a challenge to Obama in 2010, we must start with a platform and worldview, not with the choice of another “dream candidate.” Yet that platform and worldview has to avoid the clichés of the past and speak in a language that touches people’s hearts and yearnings even as it is progressive and populist.
Editorials & Actions
10 Commandments to Revive Progressives After the November Defeat
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First off, don’t let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives.
2010
Coercive Environments
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Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.
2010
Iranophobia: The Panic of the Hegemons
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In the United States as in Israel, much of the hawkish fearmongering against Iran comes from the Right. How can the moral panic theory explain that? Moreover, the same kinds of fears now directed toward theocratic Iran were aimed, just a few years ago, at the secular government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
2010
Oscar Grant or Lebron James? The Systemic Devaluation of Black Life in America
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On the same day that millions of people watched Lebron James announce he was going to Miami, twelve jurors in Oscar Grant’s case decided that, unless he can put a ball through a hoop, a black man’s life is worth little in America. Two decisions — both resulting from five hundred years of white supremacy.
2010
Obama: The Fear of Assassination and What You Can Do About It
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Why has President Obama let us down? How come he lied to us? Why has he not kept his campaign promises? These are questions I frequently hear from people who attend my speeches and book signings.