New Clear Vision

What’s the Big Deal About Snowmaking?

by Mary Sojourner

This is not the first time I’ve traveled up this mountain.  My once-lover Dark Cloud and I hiked, camped and made love in these old Ponderosa and Fir forests.  My road buddy Everett and I crawled into a little cave in this mountain to drink water from an icy spring that tastes of volcanic rock.  I’ve danced on the thick mat of pine needles under a New Moon and followed my son up Bear Jaw trail until I had no more breath.

I would tell you that this mountain that the settlers named the San Francisco Peaks is tethered to my heart if I didn’t worry that you would then dismiss my words as those of a wannabe flake. (more…)

Direct Action to Protect Holy Peaks Continues

by Klee Benally

On Saturday, August 13th 2011, after a prayerful gathering on the Holy San Francisco Peaks, my friends Mary Sojourner, Rudy Preston and I were arrested by “law enforcement” agents for standing against desecration and eco-cide caused by the Arizona Snowbowl ski area. Since June 16th, 26 arrests have been made during protests when Snowbowl started its current desecration of the Holy Peaks.

As a Snowbowl-hired excavator operator tore into sacred earth, plants, and boulders to extend the wastewater pipeline trench further up the Holy Mountain, 40 people gathered in prayer in a meadow directly across from the excavation. At times, bulldozers and the excavator were no more than 200 feet from the gathering, so the machinery made it nearly impossible for elders to speak. The noise completely disrupted statements and prayers made by those in attendance. (more…)

War, Consumption, Aggression — Can We Make a Cultural Change?

by Jan Lundberg

When we think of the millions of U.S. Americans who have needlessly attacked or harmed millions of others in dozens of countries, and have harmed themselves — without fully knowing why — and when we acknowledge that many in the U.S. seem resigned to allow more of the same, one can extend this phenomenon to the nation’s population in general. We can call it a common trait, and find it to be a U.S. tendency upon historical analysis or reading between the lines of corporate news. Let us name the national condition confusion.Under this we can lump poor education, being propagandized, exploitation of the poor, rampant ill health, environmental devastation, and the rape of Mother Nature (and therefore of ourselves and our spirit). (more…)

What I Did (and Learned) in Barrancabermeja, Colombia

by Diane Lefer

Friends and family expressed concern when I said I was going to Colombia. Isn’t it dangerous? So I got a kick out of the tourism video Avianca showed en route: Colombia! The risk is that you won’t want to leave!

Apparently something of the sort happened to Yolanda Consejo Vargas, dancer and theatre artist born in Mexico, and her husband Italian-born director Guido Ripamonti when they found themselves in 2007 in Barrancabermeja, specifically in Comuna 7, which began as a neighborhood of squatters–people who’d been driven out of the countryside by violence, had landed in the city and were struggling to get by. The area was controlled by the guerrilla forces of the ELN. Then rightwing paramilitary death squads swept in, disrupting a Mothers Day celebration in 1998, killing and disappearing civilians, including children, while the Colombian military failed to intervene. The people of Comuna 7 organized, intent on reweaving the social fabric and creating a culture of peace. (more…)

A Mother’s Art Brings Attention to Wrongly Convicted Young Men

by Jordan Flaherty

As the date approaches for the 10th anniversary of her son’s conviction, Sheila Phipps is hard at work completing a powerful and moving series of paintings that tell the stories of wrongly-convicted young men in the U.S. prison system.

Phipps, a self-taught artist in New Orleans, has been selling and displaying her work for more than 20 years. Her son is Mckinley “Mac” Phipps, the legendary New Orleans rapper who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In collaboration with the Innocence Project, Phipps contacted prisoners across the nation and researched their cases. Once she read enough evidence to convince her of their innocence, she communicated with the prisoner and then painted an image of them.

Now, Phipps is unveiling a series of ten works, for a show called the Injustice Exhibition. Her use of color and framing varies with the inspiration, ranging from muted portraits to bright explosions of color, often capturing small details like focusing on a subject’s feet or hands. In the portrait of her son she highlights the gentle features of his face. (more…)

Sometimes We Have to Sing and Cry and Hit the Streets…

by Harry Targ

Fred was dating a young woman who gave him the two Weavers Carnegie Hall albums for Chanukah in the winter of 1958. He brought the albums over to my house so I could listen. He never got them back.

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard those albums. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

From time to time I reminisce about all this as I still listen to the music that makes me mad, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to (and even give) on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization — and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home. (more…)

(Editor’s Note: August 6th was the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima; and today commemorates the attack on Nagasaki. In remembrance of these events, which helped usher in the atomic age and the permanent war economy, we present three critical reflections by leading voices for peace.)

Truman Lied, Hundreds of Thousands Died

by David Swanson

On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.  It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”

When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (more…)