the guy by the door …

There’s something happening here!

Park Street station on Boston Common. The Statehouse dome is in the background.

The big action was, of course, in Washington D.C. Mainstream media are slowly starting to pay attention, but ‘alternative media’ [ ] are still well in the lead. Today’s edition of Democracy Now! dedicated the most of the hour to coverage of Saturday’s protest. Video coverage is available through their website [at low resolution] and through cable systems around the country. Audio is available over some broadcast radio stations. The website has a finder to help you hookup.

I was turned on to DN! by a fellow HUCTW member who is also a member of the Dollars and Sense Collective. DN! was started by Amy Goodman ‘84*. Produced from the Downtown Comunity Television Center in a decommisioned firehouse in Chinatown NYC, Amy and her team provide an hour of in depth reportage every weekday. It is subtitled, “The War and Peace Report.”

Dollars and Sense is bimonthly magazine of economic analysis from a left perspective.

* For those of you not inundated by the Harvard Culture, a year after somebody’s name is their year of graduation from Harvard. As my first thesis advisor said, “Harvard is sweet on itself.” Jack Trumpbour has a slightly different view of the same phenomenon. As do I.

… we’re finally on our own…

… or are we?

Couldn’t make it to D.C?

Saturday, Jan 27:

Boston Common at Park Street, from 1-2 PM. A March on Washington solidarity event. Organized by the Committee for Peace and Human Rights and Newton Dialogues on Peace and War. For more information contact Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller marieljm1961@yahoo.com or Linda Nathanson univ@comcast.net. Bring your voices, Bring your signs!

United for Justice with Peace. 

Four dead in Ohio. -30-

A Multimedia Showcase of the People and Places of Inman Square.

[[The pictures are in my other pants.]]
ABZ Gallery; 186 Hampshire St.
Jan 13-15, 2007 10 AM - 7 PM [MLK day today! Last chance :)]

Well worth the short walk from Harvard. Multimedia in this case means video with sound and slideshows on three screens with attention to temporal relations between the screens. I don’t know the word the professional art crowd would use. I call it an ensemble piece, because it clearly depends on synergy between the components. Ordinarily, I would find a picture of laundry in a dryer unexciting, but in context it clearly served a definite purpose. The Harvard students who did the work [their names are in my other pants] clearly had a good relationship with the community in order to get the shots they did. For me, the piece de resistance was the faces of ‘local color’ including but not limited to Issy. [He’s holding a flower pot in the show.] You may have seen Issy around the Pit. His principle axes are more nearly equal than most of us. And he is a lively wit. Stay for a full cycle. I think it’s about 30 min.

Chuck Richardson of Military Families Speak Out.

Would cutting off war funds be deserting the troops? Military Families say no! The administration has already deserted the troops by spending the money on corrupt contractors that don’t deliver what the American people have authorized for the troops.

A simple message.

See/add reports of this and other events around the country at AmericaSaysNo.org.

As of 1:00 PM 1/13/07 there were reports from 369 of the 597 protests registered through the ASN [hung off True Majority] site. An additional 488 protests were registered with the MoveOn site. Unfortunately, MoveOn does not have a report back page. They have produced a small amount of reportage with pictures and Flickr photostream. This is much better than nothing. Still, two half collections of reports is less powerful than one full collection. As I said before, the good thing to do would be for MoveOn to hand it’s list of protests to ASN and put a link to the ASN report page on their site. As for the ideologues at StopTheWars.org, they relied on the bourgeois press for their coverage!!!

Despite popular sentiment against it, U.S. military “projection of power” in the Persian Gulf region has reached new heights. Hours after Bush announced his plan to surge troops into Iraq, U.S. forces raided the Iranian embassy in the Kurdish [Northern] region of iraq [Agence France-Presse]. The Washington Post speculates that this could be a test of of Iraqi Prime Minimster Nouri al-Maliki’s determination to enforce security laws independent of the ethnic and religious affiliation of the suspects. Al-Malikii is a Shiite Muslim. The nightmare scenario of Pentagon Neocons is a unified Iranian-Iraqi Shiite population sitting on top of most of the world’s easily exploitable oil.

Three days before the Bush address a British publication, the Independent reported that the Iraqi parliament was considering a new law concerning production-sharing agreements with foreign oil companies. The report cited terms far more favorable to such firms than is usual in the business. The Bush address confirmed that there is such a law under consideration, but the spin was noticably different - that the law is about equity between competing Iraqi ethnic groups. Chris Floyd argues that this law is the real victory for Bush.
Two days before the Bush address, U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a village in Somalia, the first in over a decade. The target was presumed al-Qaeda. The U.S.S. Eisenhauer strike force [Codename “Ike Strike”] set sail for the Somali coast. A second carrier strike group, the U.S.S. Stennis, is scheduled to deploy to the gulf sometime this month. The specific capability of an aircraft carrier is the “projection of power” as is appointing a navy man as commander of Centcom.

America Says No is staging protests across the country tonight Jan 11, 2007. Their website has a lookup to find one near you. As of 1:30 PM EST, those near Harvard are:

4:00-6:00 PM Boston Park & Tremont Sts.

5:00 PM Natick, Malden, Newton, Sudbury

6:00 PM Revere, Stow, Rockland, Andover, Westborough, Jamaica Plain, Salem, Belmont(2), Concord, Bedford(2),

6:30 PM Rockland

7:00 PM Lexington

11:30 PM Harvard, MA {the town not the university]

Take a camera and post pictures to the web [or look at other people’s event reports]. Send a link to your congresspeople. You’re allowed to drive your car to get there, but carpooling is encouraged.
*Cool Hand Luke.