New Clear Vision

Restoring National Unity Through Collective Compassion

by Brian J. Trautman

My reaction to news of the targeted assassination of al-Qaeda founder and most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden was unlike many Americans’. Celebrating killing and death felt wrong, and to witness my fellow citizens cheering jubilantly and chanting nationalist slogans with joy and pride was disheartening. Instead of reveling in more militarism and murder, our energies should be devoted to bringing home the roughly 150,000 American soldiers still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and in harm’s way every minute of every day.

National unity shouldn’t be born of and driven by acts of aggression; it should be shaped and inspired by individual and collective compassion and an altruistic desire to advocate for and alleviate the suffering of the tens of millions of civilians around the world, especially the children, who live in conflict zones and engage in a daily struggle to avoid the inhumanity and indiscriminate brutality of oppression and war. (more…)

Human Rights and Moral Principles Reject Extra-Judicial Killings

by Jerry Elmer

In early 1998, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan), Mary Jo White, convened a grand jury; and, on June 10, 1998, the grand jury handed up a criminal indictment against a certain man who was, then, a fugitive from justice.  The eight-page indictment alleged several serious federal felonies.  Some years later a successor grand jury expanded the original indictment; it grew to 29 pages, and alleged many criminal violations, including capital crimes.  The alleged criminal remained a fugitive.

In August 2010, President Obama came to believe that he knew the whereabouts of the indicted, but untried, man.  The President did not have the fugitive arrested so that he could be tried on the criminal charges pending against him (as the law requires).  Instead, the President resorted to a hit squad — a group of heavily armed men that went after the indicted, but untried, individual. (more…)

Stopping The Oil Company Gusher

by Robert Reich

Exxon-Mobil’s first quarter earnings of $10.7 billion are up 69 percent from last year. That’s the most profit the company has earned since the third quarter of 2008 — perhaps not coincidentally, around the time when gas prices last reached the lofty $4 a gallon.

This gusher is an embarrassment for an industry seeking to keep its $4 billion annual tax subsidy from the U.S. government, at a time when we’re cutting social programs to reduce the budget deficit.

It’s especially embarrassing when Americans are paying through their noses at the pump.

Exxon-Mobil’s Vice President asks that we look past the “inevitable headlines” and remember the company’s investments in renewable energy. What investments, exactly? Last time I looked Exxon-Mobil was devoting a smaller percentage of its earnings to renewables than most other oil companies, including the errant BP. (more…)

Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Ban Ignites a Human Rights Movement

by Roberto Rodriguez

Learning to Resist, Yearning to Breathe Free

by Matt Meyer

What a coincidence! The day that Cathie Black steps down as Chancellor of the NYC school system, an 11×17 glossy booklet arrives in my mailbox — “Mike Bloomberg: Fighting for our kids.” Really? The message is loud and clear:

Kind, benevolent Mike Bloomberg is fighting the good fight with those up-state Albany bureaucrats to get money into “our schools,” to help “our kids” — a real hero for the working person. Never mind that the whole, fancy flyer contained — along with the misleading information — a total of four sentences (and about five additional sentence fragments). That is all, I guess, they think a working person educated in today’s school system can handle. (more…)

Labor, Solidarity, and the Future of Public Education

by Diane Lefer

Two weeks ago, I walked into an alternate universe. While the rights of American workers are under attack all over the country, I found myself at the 3rd Annual Labor, Social & Environmental Justice Fair — a whole-day event at California State University Dominguez Hills where students have been able to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Labor Studies since 1977.

Hundreds of community members and students heard speakers and live music, attended film screenings and standing-room-only workshops, and visited more than two dozen booths set up along the East Walkway in front of the Loker Student Union.

They could register to vote, learn about community gardens, protest the sale of sweatshop clothing in the university store, learn how the UFCW can fight to protect workers in the food industries, support health care for all, sign postcards to Senators Feinstein and Boxer urging a vote against the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia (where 51 union leaders were assassinated in 2010), petition the university for a Women’s Resource Center (for a campus where 70% of the students are women), and meet a beaming Madelyn Broadus who is now a proud member of Sheet Metal Workers, Local 105, thanks to the apprenticeship she was able to access through the efforts of the Black Worker Center in South LA. (more…)

Reality Isn’t a Movie, and Killing Doesn’t Bring Peace

by David Swanson

I’m going to give this speech tonight to a crowd of drunk young people. If I’m not back by morning, ask around if there have been any “Islamic burials.”

About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes into buildings. A tall skinny guy who took credit said he was protesting the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and US support for Israel’s war on Palestinians. That wasn’t exactly going to hold up in a court of law as a justification for mass-murder. But the U.S. government had already, before 9-11, turned down offers from the Taliban to put bin Laden on trial in a third country, and it turned those offers down again. (more…)