Month: April 2012

“We Have to Think About the Alternative”: Grace Lee Boggs and Life After Capitalism

John Tarleton April 18, 2012 John Tarleton

Source: The Indypendent

Author, activist and feminist, Grace Lee Boggs has been a witness to and a participant in almost every major social movement in this country going back to the early 1940s. A resident of Detroit since 1953, she has seen the Motor City’s long decline and has been involved in various campaigns to reinvent the city as a space that serves the needs of its residents. In 2011, she published The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. She will appear at Cooper Union this Friday at 7pm with Amy Goodman to kick off a weekend of panels and discussions on how to create living alternatives to failing status quo institutions in a variety of fields. read more

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Wallerstein: Limping Out of Afghanistan

Immanuel Wallerstein April 16, 2012 Immanuel Wallerstein

The two candidates for the U.S. presidency seem to be trying to outshout each other concerning Iran, Syria, and Israel/Palestine. Each is claiming he is doing more to support the same objectives. Isn’t it therefore strange that no similar verbal contest is going on at the moment concerning Afghanistan?

Not so long ago, we were witness to the same Democratic-Republican game about Afghanistan. Which party was the more macho? Remember the concept that a “surge” in troops would win the war, a concept embraced by President Obama in his speech to the U.S. Military Academy in December 2009. Now all of a sudden, since March 2012, it seems to have become a subject no one wants to espouse too loudly. read more

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Vermont Yankee: A Nuclear Battle Over States’ Rights

John Raymond April 13, 2012 John Raymond

Source: In These Times

It was a 40th birthday bash attended by more than 1,000 people in three states–but the attendees came to demonstrate, not celebrate. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, a poster child for anti-nuclear protests throughout its four-decade history, was the target. Only the day before, on March 21, its state permit to operate expired and the legislature voted to shut it down. But the power plant was still operating.

The protest brought demonstrators (“Hell no, we won’t glow”) to Vermont Yankee’s owner, the Entergy Corporation, and its offices in Brattleboro, Vt., White Plains, N.Y., and corporate headquarters in New Orleans. There, they put up a yellow crime tape outside the building and went inside to demand an interview with CEO J. Wayne Leonard. read more