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Check out the recent demos in DC against the School of the Americas, whose involvement in human rights abuses across latin america continues to go unpunished. For more info on the School, renamed the catchier WHINSEC (much like Blackwater’s seismic change to Xe), check out these comics.
And speaking of creative action, kudos to the protestors who heckled Obama at a recent fundraiser in here in San Fran, urging him to reconsider the Pentagon’s harsh treatment of wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, who has done 9 months of solitary in the brig (subject to regular sleep deprivation techniques and often forced to sleep naked) while Julian Assange continues on his PR blitz as the white Martin Luther King. Lyrics below. Admittedly, an expensive strategy (a table at the event reportedly cost $105,000 according to the Guardian UK), although how often is the President forced to stand mute and listen to dissenting (albeit not so tuneful) voices?
Dear Mr President we honour you today,
Each of us brought you $5,000
It takes a lot of Benjamins* to run a campaign
I paid my dues, where’s our change?
We’ll vote for you in 2012, yes that’s true,
Look at the Republicans – what else can we do?
Even though we don’t know if we’ll retain our liberties,
In what you seem content to call a free society.
Yes it’s true that Terry Jones is legally free,
To burn a people’s holy book in shameful effigy.
But at another location in this country,
Alone in a six by 12 cell sits Bradley.
Twenty-three hours a day and night,
The fifth and eighth amendments say,
This kind of thing ain’t right.
We paid our dues, where’s our change?
Panel 1: Obama quote from NPR
Panel 8: Kessler appears in this video of the recent AIPAC 2010 Student summit at 3:56:
Join the ongoing debate about the future of journalism in these technology-obsessed times, courtesy of authors Robert McChesney and John Nichols and their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. The authors argue for increased government subsidies (like in the Old World) to support the US media and encourage a free press to combat the growing spectre of coporate dominance of content providers, best exemplified by Comcast’s takeover bid for NBC. It’s currently being reviewed to see if it complies with anti-trust laws, though seeing as Comcast currently provides 24m homes with cable, 16m with internet and will suddenly be granted cable networks such as Telemundo, MSNBC and Bravo, TV shows such as Jay Leno’s, regional stations such as Washington’s WRC (Channel 4), and Universal movie studios, it’s clearly a step towards massive media consolidation. Not to mention posing a big threat to net neutrality. How do you feel about it? Leave a comment below.
In other news, the first ever Tea Party convention is currently taking place in Nashville, proving that the right can actually mobilise and protest with just as much (perhaps even more) vitriol than the left. For those outside the US bubble unfamiliar with the trend, it’s essentially a grass roots organization against what they perceive as Obama’s socialist agenda (forcing healthcare, tax hikes and increased state control on an unsuspecting populace). Personally, I think it’s great to see more people engaged in the political process, standing up for what they believe in. Unless, of course, they aren’t so sure why they have those beliefs in the first place – see this video of their march to the White House last year.
One reason, Dr David Runciman argues, that people can feel so passionately against measures that are designed to help them is that they have fallen for the narrative of a specific agenda, despite its lack of substantiating evidence. For more, read this article from the BBC on how interesting stories can speak to voters more than facts and figures, courtesy of Steve Bissette.
Yet further proof that we need to rethink the way news content and information is presented – comics journalism, anyone? Speaking of which, if you haven’t already, you need to check out legendary comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s latest graphic opus, Footnotes in Gaza – a devastating piece of comics journalism form on Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as an investigation of historical truth.
And last but not least comes the news of a corruption scandal at the heart of the world’s second largest arm manufacturer (the UK’s own BAE), and the £300m it has been forced to pay out in compensation. Check out the Guardian and the Serious Fraud Office’s combined efforts to bring the company to justice over the past 30 years here. Remember my Jan 28th post about Attorney General Goldsmith from the Chilcot Inquiry? Turns out he was once again silenced by Tony Blair, this time when it came to investigating BAE’s £43bn al-Yamamah fighter plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Which was on a par with the sale of a hi-tech military radar system to poverty-stricken Tanzania. Naturally, both cases were of the utmost concern to the respective parties’ national security.
I don’t think I was alone in finding Barack Obama’s nuclear change of heart a little odd, and more than a little hypocritical. Let’s skip back to December, and his Nobel Peace Prize address. Which, incidentally, made him one of the few prize winners to argue for war in his acceptance speech: “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. When it comes to waging war, reason will apparently only take you so far. Presumably after that it’s intuition, or maybe divine inspiration – we need only look back to the former President for that, courtesy of the Independent UK.
But I digress. The important thing here is Obama’s policy towards nuclear weapons, which incidentally was the reason he was awarded the Nobel in the first place. Here he is again: “One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. I am committed to upholding this treaty. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.” That was December 2009. Hence the double-take when he announced in the latest budget that the agency responsible for the US’ nuclear weapons stockpile would receive a 13.4% increase from the previous fiscal year, totalling $11.2 billion. Granted, some of that would go towards controlling and securing existing nuclear warheads, but then there’s also “plans to go to full production of the refurbished Navy W-76 Trident submarine warhead, to refurbish the B-61 bomb, and to study options for maintaining the W-78, the warhead in the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Coincidentally, in the same month that this nuclear leap was taken, one of the lone survivors of both of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tsutomo Yamaguchi, died aged 93. Amazingly, he was within the designated ground zero area (3km from the blast) for both. The students of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project have chosen his incredible testimony as the basis for their graphic novel, and the first few pages were excitedly written on Monday. To get a sense of the unbelievably apocalyptic level of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs dropped, check out this recent NPR podcast with the author of Last Train from Hiroshima, a collection of survivor testimonies.
In other news, the Independent World Report is running my Diego Garcia comic in their latest issue, but you can check it out here. And there’s only a week to get your pre-orders for the Honduran coup comic in! See the widget to the right and spread the word.
Here’s the first page of a graphic history of the Honduran Coup that’s been published online at Alternet – click here to read the whole story or on the thumbnails below.
[GALLERY=10]
It’s been too long since my last post I know, but there’s been a lot happening, so bear with me:
I submitted a poster for Moveon.org‘s Obama Poster Campaign:
It didn’t make it to the DNC (old hat of a news story now), mainly cos it looks like they were after more art with a capital A : click here for the paintily finalists. I’ve also been working on a new strip for BASH around the Sept 11 Chilean Coup that brought Salvador Allende’s Socialist regime toppling down, though you’ll have to wait a bit before I post it online. PLUS I’ve finally become a star of the silver screen!! I’m in a trailer for a new documentary out about the Center for Cartoon Studies, made by the award-winning Tara Wray. Click here to watch it.
One of sketches features around 30 secs in too. I don’t remember why, but I also provide sagelike advice on why you should never trust clean shaven men. Which I stand by.
AND most importantly of all, I got ENGAGED!! All my love to my blushing, supportive and amazing fiancee Jodie.
