Petaluma
Petaluma’s Housing Crunch – 6 pm Community Meeting Tonight at the Petaluma Library
by Christopher Fisher •
Monthly Archives: January 2018
Toons
We Can Do It! by Mr. Fish
by Christopher Fisher •
Mr. Fish’s We Can Do It! image received a great deal of exposure thanks to news coverage of last weekend’s marches, appearing on Morning Joe, in the L.A. Times and elsewhere. This image is from the Respect Rally in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival.
Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP/REX/S
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Chicken Scratch: Deciphering the Media, Media History
The Saudi War on Yemen Supported by U.S. – ‘Worst Humanitarian Crisis in 50 Years’ – was Not Newsworthy to MSNBC in 2017
by Christopher Fisher •
Russiagate Stories = Higher Ratings = Higher Profits Busily fueling the Grand Kremlin Conspiracy to Subvert Our Peace-Loving Democracy, MSNBC spent 2017 virtually ignoring the worst humanitarian crisis in 50 Years, in Yemen. As a major media institution with a large audience, MSNBC helps to define the scope of respectable political discourse in the United…
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Activism, History, Peace Movement
January 15, 1968: Sisterhood is Powerful – The Jeannette Rankin Brigade Marches on the Capitol
by Christopher Fisher •
Fifty years ago, on January 15, 1968, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a coalition of women’s peace groups, organized an anti-war march in Washington, D.C. that would become the largest march by women since the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Rankin led five thousand participants from Union Station to the steps of the Capitol Building, where they presented…
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History, Nuclear, Peace Movement
January 13, 1958: 9,000 Scientists Urge End to Nuclear Bomb Tests
by Christopher Fisher •
On this day sixty years ago, Linus Pauling presented a petition signed by over 9,000 scientists urging an end to nuclear bomb tests. The “Scientists’ Test Ban Petition” to the United Nations called for an end to testing due to its threat to the planet and its children in particular, noting that “If testing continues…
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History, Propaganda
Democracies Require the Most Sophisticated Propaganda
by Christopher Fisher •
From Taking the Risk Out of Democracy by Alex Carey (1995). Contrary to common assumptions, propaganda plays an important role – and certainly a more covert and sophisticated role – in technologically advanced democratic societies, where the maintenance of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion. In contrast, under authoritarian regimes power…
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History, U.S. Foreign Policy
Woodrow Wilson & Permanent Counterrevolution as U.S. Global Policy – Tariq Ali
by Christopher Fisher •
Text from The Dilemmas of Lenin (2017), by Tariq Ali. Chapter 8: October, p 184. Images added. Even as Lenin was presenting the April Theses to the Petrograd Soviet, the war party in Washington was almost ready to move into Europe. Woodrow Wilson was in discussions with close advisors regarding US entry into the First World…
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History, Journalism
Whose War? by John Reed
by Christopher Fisher •
Whose War? John Reed The Masses, April 1917 edition By the time this goes to press the United States may be at war. The day the German note arrived, Wall Street flung the American flag to the breeze, the brokers on the floor of the Stock Exchange sang “The Star Spangled Banner” with tears rolling…
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History, U.S. Foreign Policy
January 1918: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Empire as a Way of Life
by Christopher Fisher •
An excerpt from Empire as a Way of Life (1980), by historian William A. Williams on the subject of President Woodrow Wilson. His great admirers, beginning with himself, have sought to discount or even deny his understanding of the capitalist imperative to expand the marketplace, and his enjoyment in exercising police power in order to…
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Appalachia, Books, West Virginia
Spare Us Your Elegies: Who Will Advocate for West Virginia?
by Christopher Fisher •
We’ve just begun reading Ramp Hollow, The Ordeal of Appalachia, by Steven Stoll. Read on for an excerpt courtesy of the author and publisher. West Virginia has been beaten up, used and abused by rapacious mining corporations and their public servants, at the expense of its land and people, for the entirety of its existence.…
