PeaceVoice

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“But we do collectively sentence other ‘legal persons’ to death. According to Amnesty International, there are as many as 3,300 inmates on death row in the United States alone, as of today; mostly male; many with mental illnesses; many abused as children; many guilty of the accused crimes; many innocent among them.
In Maryland itself, each death penalty case costs the state taxpayers three million dollars. Even with these numbers and considerations, only 15 states have abolished capital punishment, showing that contrary to rhetoric against conservatives, Americans do care about something other than money and profits: we care about protecting our moral standards first. Still, why is this topic so controversial to so many?…”

Author: Stephanie Van Hook, Conflict Resolution graduate, former Peace Corps volunteer, and Board member of the Oregon Peace Institute
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/; this piece here)
Date: February 7, 2010

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“Reporters, columnists and nuclear industry boosters often state without qualification that nuclear facilities “have operated safely since the 1970s.” It is easy to prove this statement false.
Every U.S. government agency that regulates radiation exposure agrees that there is no safe level of exposure.
The Environmental Protection Agency says, ‘There is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk….’”

Author: John LaForge, Nukewatch staff
Published in: Cap Times in Madison, Wisconsin (article here)
Date: February 5, 2010

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“When desperate Haitian earthquake victims have tried to save themselves or rescue others by looking for resources needed to survive in the collapsed buildings of Port-au-Prince, they are often branded “looters.” New Orleans residents in dire need after Hurricane Katrina were similarly condemned.
The mass media has been blamed for how the actions of these survivors are described, but the common use of the term “looter” points to another need….”

Author: Beckey Sukovaty, certified mediator and adjunct faculty member at Portland State University’s Conflict Resolution Program
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: February 4, 2010

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“Decades ago, rightwingers began championing cuts in income taxes for the rich and — when that lowered government revenue — turned around and claimed that government could no longer “afford” to maintain vital public services like education and health care.

Unfortunately, in an effort to curry favor with the wealthy and their corporations, many state and national office-holders began to adopt the right wing’s tax-cutting model. In New York State, the tax rate for top income earners was reduced from over 15 percent….”

Author: Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/; this piece here), at BuzzFlash.com (at http://blog.buzzflash.com/), at Truthout (at http://www.truthout.org/), and in the West Yellowstone News in West Yellowstone, Montana
Date: February 1, 2 and 3, 2010

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“Howard Zinn has crossed over. He was a mensch, a historian and a peace and justice activist. He was not convinced that nonviolence was always the answer, but he often provided expert testimony for nonviolent resisters seeking help in conducting a robust defense of their actions in opposition to militarism and injustice. He was a public intellectual of staggering stature, producing his germinal Peoples History of the United States that shattered myths and provided comfort to people who had been written out of history or misrepresented in our standard histories.

At the same time that the news of Zinn’s death flashed throughout the peace and justice world, we listened to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address….”

Author: Tom H. Hastings, Professor in Conflict Resolution at Portland State University and on the Governing Council of the International Peace Research Association
Published in: Joplin Independent from Joplin, Missouri at http://www.joplinindependent.com/, and at Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: February 1, 2010

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“There is big money in polarization, as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other media kingpins understand all too well. But one of the many tragic by-products of our polarized political culture is the demonization of conservatives by progressives. Left-leaners are often convinced that those on the right are all greedy, fearful militarists without consciousness or conscience—a grotesque and insulting distortion.

My late father was a lifelong Republican who delighted in undermining the conservative stereotype. He once returned from a trip to Nicaragua and scandalized his Rotary group by asserting that he hadn’t met a single communist down there….”

Author: Winslow Myers, author of “Living Beyond War, A Citizen’s Guide,” and on the Board of nonprofit educational organization Beyond War
Published in: BuzzFlash.com at http://blog.buzzflash.com/
Date: January 31, 2010

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“In less than a year the battle for truth has lost three of its most innovative and stalwart voices, historians John Hope Franklin, Ivan Van Sertima and Howard Zinn.
Each challenged aspects of the cheerfully bigoted narrative that has passed for history in schools, colleges, texts and the media. Each created works that made history by awakening millions of fellow citizens to a new host of heroic men and women whose daring contributions had been shamefully ignored.
As they gathered their documentation, Franklin, Van Sertima and Zinn confronted a lily-white, elite establishment comfortable with racism, economic injustice, and imperialism - or willing to cast them as forms of progress. Indeed, the books of these innovative scholars amounted to a vast underground railroad of treacherous knowledge….”

Author: William Loren Katz, author of 40 history books, and editor of more than 200 others
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/, this story here)
Date: January 31, 2010

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“The outpouring of humanitarian aid from numerous nations for the suffering people of Haiti is truly extraordinary — particularly when set against the shabby record of the past.

After all, in previous centuries the French government invaded Haiti, enslaved its people and, when the Haitians arose and drove out the French, subsequently crippled its economy by foisting a huge reparations burden upon the nation. The American government was not much more generous….”

Author: Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/; this article: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/100126-wittner-columnspeacevoice.html)
Date: January 26, 2010

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“On Tuesday, 19 January 2010, a rural Virginia man slaughtered eight people because, his neighbor speculates, he was worried that his sister and brother-in-law were planning to make him move out of the inherited rural home he and his sister inherited from their mother, who died in 2006.

How many of these mass murders must we endure—this one even included a four-year-old—before we address the painfully obvious logic that such events are almost always committed with legal firearms, and almost always would not have been nearly so deadly to so many if guns were not involved?…”

Author: Tom H. Hastings, lifelong peace activist and director of PeaceVoice, a program of the Oregon Peace Institute
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, in The Daily Press from Ashland, Wisconsin, and at BuzzFlash.com
Date: January 22, 2010

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“The recent furor over an unsuccessful terrorist attempt to blow up an airliner is distracting us from considering the possibility of a vastly more destructive terrorist act: exploding a nuclear weapon in a heavily-populated area.

Such a disaster — which would kill hundreds of thousands of people — is not a remote possibility at all. Although terrorist groups do not have the fissile material (that is, material capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction) necessary to build nuclear weapons on their own, they have been trying to obtain such weapons, either by purchase or theft, for decades….”

Author: Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, and in the Joplin Independent at http://www.joplinindependent.com/ from Joplin, Missouri
Date: January 13, 2010

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