Thirty Questions about Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power

A photo of French Nuclear tests in the 1970s.

1. What is nuclear fission?

ANSWER: A nuclear reaction in which a heavy nucleus, uranium for example, splits into two lighter nuclei.

2. What is nuclear fusion?

ANSWER: A nuclear reaction resulting in two nuclear being fused, resulting in a new molecule and the massive release of energy.

3. Which female physicist informed Otto Hahn that nuclear fission could be instigated by humans?

ANSWER:  Lisa Meitner, 1939

4. Where was the first human-initiated sustained chain reaction?

ANSWER:  University of Chicago, December 2, 1941.

5. Which scientist informed President Roosevelt that it would be possible to create a bomb which could destroy an entire city?

ANSWER:  Albert Einstein

6. When was the first atomic bomb detonated?

ANSWER:  July 16, 1945, the Trinity Test

7. The president of which leading U.S. university initially proposed that Japanese cities with military functions and “densely packed workers homes” should be the criteria for identifying the cities to be targeted by the first atomic bombs?

ANSWER: James Conant of Harvard University

8. In how many second was the city of Hiroshima destroyed?

ANSWER: Nine

9. Which famous scientist joined with Lord Bertrand Russell in 1955 to urge the complete abolition of nuclear weapons?

ANSWER:  Signing the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was among the last acts of Albert Einstein before his death.

10. What are the three pillars, one of them unfortunate, of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty?

ANSWER:  The nuclear powers agreed to good faith negotiations to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals in exchange for the non-nuclear nations’ commitment never to develop or possess nuclear weapons and recognition of their inalienable right to develop and use nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

11. The witness survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs are called Hibakush Answer:   Are there U.S. Hibakusha?

ANSWER:  Yes, victims of uranium mining and the production of nuclear weapons, victims of the fallout of U.S. nuclear tests, and "Atomic Vets", many of whom were deliberately exposed to radioactive fall out.

12. What happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima?

ANSWER:  A disastrous melt down of nuclear power plant cores, resulting in the release of radioactive fallout.

13. How many nuclear power plants are there in the U.S., and what percentage of U.S. energy do they produce?

ANSWER:  104 plants. 19.6% of U.S. energy consumption

14. Which country has surpassed the U.S. in the production of solar technologies?

ANSWER: China

15. Which two nations recently reiterated their commitment to completely eliminate their nuclear power production?

ANSWER: Germany and Italy

16. Name the nuclear powers, declared and undeclared.

ANSWER: The U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea

17. The average strategic nuclear warhead, roughly 5,000 of which are currently deployed by the nuclear powers, is how many times more powerful that the Hiroshima A-bomb?

ANSWER: Fourteen

18. Who was Sam Lovejoy?

ANSWER: . On 22 February 1974, Washington's Birthday, organic farmer Sam Lovejoy took a crowbar to the weather-monitoring tower which had been erected at the site of the propose Montague nuclear reactor. Lovejoy felled the tower and then took himself to the police, taking full responsibility for the action. He was tried on charges of malicious destruction and acquitted on a technicality.

19. The occupation by anti-nuclear activists of the Wyle power plant production site in which country inspired the occupation of the Seabrook site at which 1414 activists were arrested for their nonviolent resistance?

ANSWER: Germany

20. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the U.S. has how many nuclear weapons deployed on alert and available in its stockpiles?

ANSWER:  8,500

21. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that there are how many nuclear weapons in the world

ANSWER:  20,500

22. During crises and conflicts, how many times has the United States prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear war in order to enforce its Middle East hegemony and its resulting privileged access to Middle East oil?

ANSWER:  Eleven. (1946 re: Iran, 1956 Suez Crisis, 1958 Lebanese Civil War & Iraq Revolution, 1967 October War, 1970 during Black September War, 1980 announcement of Carter Doctrine, 1990-91 First Gulf War, 1996 threat against Libya, 1998 Iraq, 2002 run up to invasion of Iraq, 2006-2011 “all options are on the table” threats by Bush & Obama against Iran.)

23. Which of the nuclear powers have prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises and wars?

ANSWER:  All of them.

24. What did the people of Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands and the crew of the Japanese tuna fishing boat, Lucky Dragon No. 5, have in common?

ANSWER:  They were exposed to the fall out of the Bravo H-bomb test in 1954, whose explosive power was roughly 1,000 times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb. Many of islanders and fishermen soon succumbed to radiation disease and cancer. (The bikini swimsuit derives its name from the shocking power of this explosion.)

25. How many petition signatures urging nuclear weapons abolition were delivered to the United Nations on May 2, on the eve of the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference?

ANSWER:  More than 17 million

26. In 1980, in what state were the first referendum held urging a freeze in the nuclear arms race?

ANSWER: Massachusetts

27. The legislatures of which two states have adopted resolutions calling for the U.S. to engage in negotiations leading to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons?

ANSWER: Vermont and Massachusetts

28. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday clock tells us that it is how many minutes before midnight (i.e. how close we are to a nuclear doomsday)?

ANSWER:  6 minutes

29. What will you do next week to press for the elimination of nuclear power production?

ANSWER: _______________________

30. What will you do next week to press for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons?

ANSWER: _______________________

Prepared by Joseph Gerson at the American Friends Service Committee,  JGerson@afsc.org

Gerson is also the author of Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World

Gaza flotillas have made a difference

by Adam Shapiro

Pressure exerted by the campaign has forced real changes, something the international community could not deliver through 'established channels'

As ships continue preparing to depart for Gaza from Greece and as the Greek government continues to serve as the Israeli ‘call centre’ for outsourcing the blockade of 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza, the myth continues to perpetuate that ‘established channels’ should be used to reach Gaza. 

Governments remain comfortable and unchallenged in maintaining a position that the situation in Gaza is untenable, that the blockade must end and that the blockade is illegal on the one hand and that by pursuing these established channels these same governments serve only to reinforce and legitimise the blockade.

It seems only the Palestinian people in Gaza must seek their freedom through established humanitarian channels that rely on the whim of their oppressor and the occasional glance of attention from the international community.  Being born in Gaza is being born into a life sentence of living in a virtual cage, without fundamental human rights.

The flotilla effort, initiated by the Free Gaza Movement in 2008 when it sailed small fishing ships to Gaza and successfully reached the port of Gaza, is not about humanitarian aid. It is about Palestinian freedom and their rights to access the world as any other people.  

And despite the chorus of “the flotilla is not necessary”, reality on the ground shows that it non-violent direct action that has been the only effective power to make change in the lives of Palestinians. 

The pressure applied by the flotilla effort has led to three main changes — in terms of the policy of the siege applied by Israel to Gaza; in terms of the media coverage and public attention to the crime scene that is Gaza; and in terms of compelling governments and institutions to take a position on the blockade.

Israeli policy

After Freedom Flotilla I, Israel came under enormous pressure worldwide, both popular and official.  As a result, within a number of days, Israel went from defending its policy of limiting items and goods allowed into Gaza to a list of between 70 and 80 items, chosen randomly and without any justification, to completely reversing track and creating a list of only banned items and having to justify why each item was listed. 

While this is far from the success the flotilla was aiming for and certainly did not mean an end to the blockade, it was the first time in three years that any change was made.  Even after US Congressmen visited Gaza and complained about the lack of basic food items being permitted into Gaza, Israel barely paid attention.

In the media arena, and shaping public opinion, the flotilla put Gaza back in the spotlight, not just for a short 24-hour news cycle, but for over a month.  Journalists based in Israel/Palestine who had accepted the Israeli government’s decision to bar and limit their access to Gaza, were clamouring to get into Gaza and reported the reality on the ground. 

Mainstream journalists from the US, Canada and Europe quickly adopted the language of the flotilla, referring to Gaza as an ‘open-air prison’ and showing the reality of the impact of the blockade on all aspects of Palestinian society in Gaza.  Furthermore, the flotilla put activists on an even level with Israeli diplomats and spokespersons in news programmes, talk shows and on op-ed pages of newspapers.

Untenable situation

The pressure of the flotilla also caused government leaders, UN officials and international organisations to take firm positions for the first time regarding the illegality of and need to end the blockade.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and presidents and prime ministers from around the world made statements against the blockade and even US President Barack Obama called the situation in Gaza ‘untenable’. 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (not yet campaigning for a second term) condemned the Israeli violence. The UN Security Council also condemned the violence by Israel, and even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced to support the Council’s position. 

And, in a significant legal development, the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (ICRC), issued a determination two weeks after the flotilla that Israel’s blockade of Gaza constituted collective punishment and therefore was illegal according to international law.

With this year’s flotilla, Israel has out-sourced the blockade to Greece, in an effort to stop it without having to incur the wrath of the international community. But even this year, the concrete results of the flotilla are evident. In an effort to address the growing attention, once again, to the situation in Gaza, in early June Israel permitted reconstruction material into Gaza for 1,200 homes and 18 schools for the first time since the blockade was enacted. 

A few days prior to that Israel increased the number of trucks of humanitarian aid permitted into Gaza, though that number remained below the number permitted prior to the enactment of the blockade and well below the daily needs of the population of Gaza. Again, due to flotilla pressure, real changes on the ground, something the international community could not deliver through ‘established channels’.

Freedom, however, cannot be delivered through ‘established channels’ and that is the core mission of the flotilla effort. The other major development over the last year that has directly impacted the lives of Palestinians in Gaza (though also insufficient) has been the opening of the Rafah crossing in a limited capacity. 

The opening of the crossing occurred only after the Egyptian people rose up and removed Hosni Mubarak and his regime. Their movement for freedom included solidarity with Palestinians and thus the pressure to open Rafah.  Egyptians did not seek freedom and reform through ‘established channels’, which were corrupted and useless. 

And the international community did not have the hubris to suggest that Egyptians (or Tunisians or Yemenis or Libyans or Syrians) accept some limited quantities of approved items of aid instead of fundamental freedom and human rights. 

Only Palestinian demands are discarded.  And it is only the flotilla efforts and other forms of non-violent direct action — from protests in the West Bank against the Wall to Boycott, Divestment and sanctions efforts in the West against Israeli Apartheid — that is making these demands heard, understood and able to generate real change.

Our message to the international community: join us in our quest for freedom, and join the tide of history. 

Photo: Next Left Notes

Adam Shapiro is an organiser with the Free Gaza Movement. He is also a documentary filmmaker and human rights defender. He is currently in Greece working on overturning the travel restrictions on the Flotilla.  

Source:

http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/gaza-flotillas-have-made-a-difference-1.833577#.ThOy6DC11KY.twitter

Independence Day by Frederick Douglass

Independence Day Speech

by Frederick Douglass

 

Illustration by Tracy Prescott MacGregor

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?  And, am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an art."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.  I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.  If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!...

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

A brilliant scholar, former slave and a leader in the 19^th-century Abolitionist Movement, Frederick Douglass gave this speech July 4, 1841 in Rochester, New York.

Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President

by Chris Hedges

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

There is no shortage of courageous dissidents in America. They seek to thwart the imperial disasters, looming financial insolvency and suicidal addiction to fossil fuel. They have stood in small knots on street corners week after week, month after month, year after year, to denounce the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have occupied banks, shut down coal-fired power plants, attempted to halt mountaintop removal, interfered with whaling ships and walked in blustery weather to the White House, where they were arrested. They are struggling to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza on a ship called the Audacity of Hope. But because the corporate state and the two major political parties are indifferent to principled calls for reform, and because the mass of the public still buys into the myths of globalization and the American dream, the plundering and destruction continue unimpeded.

When most Americans face the nightmare before us, when they realize the irreversible devastation unleashed on the ecosystem and the economic misery from which they cannot escape, violence will have a broad and terrifying appeal. Those of us who demand a return to the rule of law and remain steadfast to nonviolence will find ourselves cast aside—the useful idiots Lenin so despised. I watched this happen in the social and political implosions in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Palestinian territories, Algeria, Bosnia and Kosovo. I watched the same cocktail of despair, economic collapse and callousness from a corrupt power elite mix itself into potent brews of civil strife. I watched the same untiring efforts by those who detested the violence and cruelty of the state, and the nascent violence and intolerance of the radical opposition. I covered as a reporter the disintegration that tore these societies apart. Those who held fast to moral imperatives, including Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo, were thrust aside and replaced with killers on both sides of the divide who embraced violence.

“Wait until October,” Ralph Nader said when we spoke this weekend. “That’s when the budget cuts will hit home. It is one thing to have the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida and the legislators saying we will cut this and that. We don’t know what will actually happen when the guillotines are put in place. You may have a different kind of surge of public resistance and protest.

“There will be more and more people in the streets, homeless and hungry,” he said of the looming cuts. “Babies will be sick. Everything will be overloaded from the free food to the clinics. You never know where the spark will come from. Look at the guy who robbed the bank for a dollar. That was not quite the spark, but that is what I am talking about. This is what you have to do to get health care. Let’s say 50 people did that. There are a lot of dry tinder piles like that.”

The death of liberal institutions that once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, which once could respond to the suffering of the poor, the unemployed and working men and women, which once sought to protect the Earth on which we depend for life, means the last thin hope for reform is embodied in acts of civil disobedience. There are no established institutions that will help us. The press ignores the cries of the underclass and the poor. The labor movement is atrophied and dying. Public education is degraded and being rapidly dismantled. Our religious institutions no longer engage in the core issues of justice. And the Democratic Party is on its knees before Wall Street. The most basic government services designed to ameliorate the pain, including Head Start and Social Security, are targeted by our corporate overlords for destruction. The Kyoto Protocol, which was not nearly ambitious enough to prevent environmental collapse, has been gutted so companies like Exxon Mobil can continue to amass the largest profits in history.

Radical reform, including a breaking of our dependence on fossil fuel, must happen soon to thwart the effects of dramatic climate change and economic disintegration. And this radical reform will come only through us. I will join, for this reason, those planning the prolonged occupation of Washington on Oct. 6. Acts of civil disobedience are our last, thin line of defense against chaos. Make a resolution this Independence Day to join us. You owe it to your children and to the generations who come after us. I am not naive enough to promise you we can reverse these trends. I know the monolith we challenge. But I do know that if we do not begin to take part in these nonviolent protests then we have, in effect, given up all realistic hope of change and succumbed meekly to corporate enslavement, environmental catastrophe and severe social unrest.

“The first sign that there is a real breakdown is that the bridge between the people you mentioned and the people who should be speaking out as a result of their professional status is not there,” Nader said. “I am talking about the deans of law schools and law professors, as well as leading members of the bar. The obverse of that is that in 2005 and 2006 there was a bridge built. It was the president of the [American Bar Association] Michael Greco. He thought the destruction of the rule of law by George Bush was historically very dangerous. He commissioned three reports, using members of the ABA who were formally in national security agencies such as the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and the Justice Department. They came up with three white papers on three subjects, one of them being signing statements. They concluded that the recurrent violations by President Bush had risen to the state of serious violations of our Constitution. These papers were made public. They sent them to President Bush. He never replied. Apart from The Associated Press, the press, including the [New York] Times and the [Washington] Post, ignored it. That to me was a much bigger litmus test. It showed how deep the institutionalized official illegality has become, more important than the ignoring of people like Chomsky and us.

“Usually people who are candid in calling things as they are, are viewed as people on the outside who want to change the system,” Nader said. “In the historic past they were socialists. They were radical labor leaders such as the [Industrial Workers of the World]. This time those people who are speaking out want a restoration of the rule of law. This is a pretty conservative goal. The extreme radicals are now in charge of our country, the military-industrial complex and the White House. It is not so much the military as the civilian leadership, the neocons in the White House. The military does not like to get into wars, but once they are in it is very hard to control them because they want to win.

“It’s not like Japan in 1939, which really was a militaristic society,” Nader went on. “It is exactly the opposite of what the constitutional founders thought would be the case. They put the civilians in charge to restrain the military. In effect, these people are activating and pushing the military into places the military does not want to go. They use a volunteer Army, flatter it, give it a lot of weaponry and send it abroad. Only about 5 million people, soldiers and their families, feel what is going on. Once it is entrenched, once you accept this neocon ideology, which is a vitriolic, aggressive, empire-spreading ideology, run largely by draft dodgers who in their youth gung-hoed the Vietnam War but wanted their friends to go and die for it, then democracy is too weak to overcome that. Two dozen people plunged this country into war. The first arena designed to stop this is the Congress, but it does not observe its constitutional duties or require a declaration of war.”

While protests are useful, Nader does not see any possibility for reform until there is a widespread effort to organize a sustained and radical opposition movement. This will come by building a movement that offers an alternative ideology and vision to that of unfettered capitalism, consumerism, empire and globalization. It is something Nader tried and failed to do during his own presidential campaigns.

“There is a tremendous asymmetry,” Nader said. “Seven hundred thousand people demonstrated in London. But where are they the next day? And where are their adversaries? The next day their adversaries are on the job. Where are the 700,000 people? They are out of there. How many organizers are on the ground in the 435 districts? Could labor unions have been organized without organizers? Could the suffragist movement have been organized without organizers? Could the anti-slavery movement or the civil rights movement been organized without organizers? If you don’t have organizers on the ground you know ipso facto that your demonstration is going nowhere.”
When I asked Nader, who mounted campaigns for the presidency in 2000, 2004 and 2008, if he would consider running again, he answered that it was “very unlikely.”

“You have millions of people who say run, run, run,” he said. “Then you put yourself out there and find they are voting for Obama. Until they become mature, until they realize that if they generate 5 to 8 million votes behind a progressive third-party candidate for leverage, what is the point? Why should people try four or five times? Let someone else do it.

“The people who go out there with some credibility and record, go into 50 states, sweat it out month after month, beating back ballot access obstacles, fighting the Democrats who are trying to suppress free speech and candidate choices for the voters, and then you still can’t get on the air to discuss civil liberties,” he said. “Never mind that they do not want to upset dear Obama or dear [John] Kerry. They don’t give you airtime to discuss the simple issue of the denial of civil liberties and the crushing of third parties.”

If elections were that effective, as the anti-war activist Phil Berrigan used to say, they would be illegal. We must follow the path Nader forged, attempting to sway enough people with conscience to sever themselves permanently and unequivocally from the mainstream and especially the Democratic Party. This defiance will again be dismissed as counterproductive and ineffectual. The sacrifices we are called to make will be real, uncomfortable and immediate, while the goals will be distant and uncertain. It will remain hard, for this reason, to jolt people awake. The expediency of the moment has a habit of subsuming the moral imperatives of the future. But time is not on our side. The impending disasters that await us, ecological and economic, are already visible on the horizon. If we do not sever ourselves from established systems of power, if we do not become in every action we undertake agents of rebellion, then the ecological, economic and, finally, human distortions that arise in times of confusion, suffering and collapse will overwhelm us.

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

Source:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ralph_nader_is_tired_of_running_for_president_20110704/

'The Audacity Of Hope' waits to sail for Gaza

by Mark Weisbrot

US Flag seen through portal of boat "Audacity of Hope.:   Reuters Photo" "Palestinians' transition to non-violent protests" deeply concerns the Israeli government and its US backers. One of the most important foreign policy statements of the year came from Ehud Barak, Israel's Defense Minister, on May 16. Responding to non-violent protests at Israeli borders and military posts, he said: "The Palestinians' transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges." Indeed it does, and not just to the Israeli government, but to every government that seeks to impose its will by force and violence on subject populations. The Arab Spring has inspired people who hunger for freedom and justice throughout the world, and non-violent protests have toppled the dictatorships of Egypt and Tunisia - historic events that would have been thought impossible less than a year ago. The comparative advantage of the rich and powerful against non-violent resistance has significantly diminished in recent years. Although they still hold the upper hand with the vast majority of the world's communications resources, their monopoly over messaging has been shattered by the internet, social media, and other new forms of competition. Just as the Arab dictatorships have seen their power eroded to varying degrees by new media competition, so too have the more powerful governments and their corporate allies. It has become much more difficult to hide and cover-up massacres, or to keep people from empathising with the victims of state violence. Now comes the Freedom Flotilla, a group of 10 boats bound for the Gaza Strip, which is suffering under a blockade by the Israeli government. Its residents made the mistake of voting "the wrong way" in 2006 for a government that Israel and the United States didn't want. So they are being subjected to collective punishment, which is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention - that is the expressed opinion of a broad range of civil society, including the International Red Cross, Oxfam, and Amnesty International, who are not known for taking political positions on international disputes. A recent UN report found that in the fifth year of the Israeli blockade, unemployment in Gaza is at 45.2 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world. "It is hard to understand … policy which deliberately impoverishes so many and condemns hundreds of thousands of potentially productive people to a life of destitution," said a UN official. The most significant loosening of the blockade came after last year's Freedom Flotilla made its journey. This shows the promise of non-violent resistance but also its dangers: the Israeli military killed nine people on that trip. Unfortunately, the US State Department has increased the risk to the men and women aboard the American ship in this year’s flotilla - aptly named "The Audacity of Hope" - by issuing a travel warning to them rather than announcing any concern for their safety. This is a very disturbing abdication of the US government's responsibility to protect its citizens abroad. Of course, it is not without precedent: Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State Alexander Haig responded to the December 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen by US-backed Salvadoran soldiers by speculating that "the nuns may have run through a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire." Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich and five other Members of Congress have written to Secretary of State Clinton urging her to work to protect the Americans' safety, but so far there has been no response. Now the Greek government is holding up The Audacity of Hope, docked in Athens, since Thursday - under allegations that it is "not seaworthy" and must be inspected. Is this a result of US pressure? Washington has enormous leverage over the Greek government right now, since it has the predominant say in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Together with the European Union, the IMF will be deciding for quite some time whether Greece will get the loans necessary to maintain its debt payments, or will lapse into default. Greece should let the flotilla go and deliver its letters of support to the people of Gaza, which is perfectly legal and threatens no citizen anywhere. And the US government should declare its concern for the safety of these brave peacemakers, who like Martin Luther King Jr and his fellow civil rights activists are putting their bodies on the line for justice and humanity. Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net ). He is also President of Just Foreign Policy ( www.justforeignpolicy.org ). This column first appeared at: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/201163017129356947.html The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.