Links
Below is a set of resources around the web divided into the these sections:
Peace, Non-Violence & Organization
Social Justice & Human Rights
Gay & Lesbian Rights
Globalization
Miscellaneous
If you'd like your organization included here, or have a link to suggest, see below.
Peace, Nonviolence & Organizing Links
Through PeaceNet, take action for positive social change in the areas of
peace, social and economic justice, human rights and the struggle against racism.
An idea whose time has come. Inspired by the one-day Moratorium on November 15, 1969 during the Vietnam War, which encouraged local activists all over the country to do events of all kinds as part of a nationwide Vietnam War Moratorium Day, on November 15, 1969. On high school and college campuses, town squares, places of worship, neighborhoods, work places and public gathering places teach-ins, talks, debates, film screenings, pickets,
protests, vigils, and protests took place. Public opposition to the
war was growing deeper and wider.
On the 3rd Friday of September 2007, the Iraq Moratorium was born, with locally volunteer-organized grassroots events in over 100 places around the country. Each and every month on the 3rd Friday, actions take place in villages, towns and cities across the country. This project has no funding from major donors, patrons, underwriters or foundations. It relies entirely on the generosity of small donors like yourself. Each local event is created and put in to action by local activists. The strength and purpose of the project is in its website that serves to promote, publicize and post reports on each local event through the national website. This in turn helps activists and people everywhere be sble to easily connect with others acting locally in their own communities across the country to share ideas, information and strategies on how best to publicize the pro-peace/anti-war messege. This can only grow with your participation. Tell others about the Iraq Moratorium Project. Include the website in every Press Release you put out. Mark your calendars: the 3rd Friday of each month as Iraq Moratorium Day Read about the 3rd Friday events state-by-state throughout the country, or post your own upcoming event on the project's website: www.IraqMoratorium.com.
The War Resisters League affirms that all war is a crime against humanity.
We therefore are determined not to support any kind of war, international or
civil, and to strive nonviolently for the removal of all causes of war. W.R.L.
is the oldest secular pacifist organization in the U.S., founded in 1923. Publishes
a quarterly magazine, WIN.
The Nonviolence Web is the home to many of the U.S.'s most dynamic peace and
justice groups.
AVP is a nationwide and worldwide association of volunteer groups offering
experiential workshops in conflict resolution, responses to violence, and
personal growth.
The Ruckus Society provides training in the skills of non-violent civil disobedience
to help environmental and human rights organizations achieve their goals.
The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors supports and promotes
individual and collective resistance to war and preparations for war.
1515 Cherry St
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-563-8787
Fax 215-567-2096
info@objector.org
630 20th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
510-465-1617
Fax 510 465-2459
Veterans for Peace is an organization made up of men and women veterans who
realize that wars are easy to start and hard to stop; they advocate alternate
methodes of resolving conflits.
216 South Meramec Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63105
(314) 725-6005
Fax: (314) 725-7103
E-mail: info@veteransforpeace.net
On Martin Luther King's birthday, January 15, 2006, a new progressive student
action national organization was born, taking its name from the 1962-1969 S.D.S..
Already there are over 100 local chapters of S.D.S. on college and high school
campuses across the country. They have held regional meetings around the country
and had their first national conference in August 2006 in Chicago. One of the
original S.D.S., slogans, "Dare to struggle, dare to win" still holds true
today.
Students for a Democratic Society
P.O. Box 40921
New York, N.Y. 10304
Dedicated to peace, anti-war, anti-intervention, pro-Constitution.
Human Rights & Social Justice
Publishes the "Shop With A Conscience Consumer Guide" to companies that make and sell sweatshop-free and union-made clothing. Founded in 2003, they assist sweatshop workers globally in their struggles to improve working conditions and form strong, independent labor unions. They are also building a national sweatfree movement with the unity and political strength to generate significant market demand for products that are made in humane conditions by workers who earn living wages.
SweatFree Communities
Liane Foxvog, National Organizer
140 Pine Street #10
Florence, MA 01062
phone: (413) 586-0974
fax: (413) 584-8987
email: liane@sweatfree.org
www.sweatfree.org
WILPF works for women's rights, world disarmament, racial and economic justice,
an end to violence, and towards assuring peace freedom, and justice.
1213 Race Street
Phila., PA 19107
215-563-7110
Fax: 215-563-5527
FOR is an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a means
of radical change and as a tranforming way of life. The see to replace violence,
war, and racism with nonviolence, peace, and justice. They educate, train,
build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and copassionate actions locally,
nationally, and globally.
P.O. Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960
(845) 358-4601
Fax:(845) 358-4924
E-mail: for@forusa.org
Amnesty International works to free prisoners of conscience detained around
the world because of their beliefs, ethic origin, sex, color, or language.
Amnesty fights for fair trials for political prisoners as well as campaigning
against the dealth penalty, torture, and cruel treatment of prisoners.
322 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10001
212-807-8400
212-463-9193
admin-us@aiusa.org
Global exchange promotes human rights, social justice, and environmental causes
around the world, as well as providing resources on the global economy and
fair trade.
Global Exchange
2017 Mission St., Room 303
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel. (415) 255-7296
Fax: (415) 255-7498
www.globalexchange.org
UNITE! is running a "Stop Sweatshops" campaign. Their website provides
a basic set of resources that can help you as a consumer figure out what you
can do to fight sweatshops.
Human Rights Watch has been protecting human rights around the world for
over 20 years. Their web site is regularly updated and provides news and investigations
about ongoing human rights violations.
United Students Against Sweatshops is an international student movement of
campuses and individual students fighting for sweatshop free labor conditions
and workers’ rights
1413 K St. NW, 9th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
phone: 202-NO-SWEAT
fax: 202-393-5886
Gay & Lesbian Rights Links
GLAAD is dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate, and inclusive
representation of individuals and events in all media as a means of eliminating
homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
GLSEN is the leading national organization fighting to end anti-gay bias in
K-12 schools. Formerly Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network (GLSTN)
The Human Rights Campaign provides a national voice on gay and lesbian issues,
effectively lobbying Congress; mobilizing grassroots action in diverse communities;
investing strategically to elect a fair-minded Congress; and increasing public
understanding through innovative education and communication strategies. HRC
is a bipartisan organization that works to advance equality based on sexual
orientation and gender expression and identity, to ensure that gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender Americans can be open, honest and safe at home, at
work and in the community.
NGLTF is the national progressive organization working for the civil rights
of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. NGLTF's vision and commitment
to social change is building a powerful political movement in the fifty states
and the District of Columbia.
PFLAG promotes the health and well-being of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered
persons, their families and friends through: support, to cope with an adverse
society; education, to enlighten an ill-informed public; and advocacy, to end
discrimination and to secure equal civil rights. Parents, Families and Friends
of Lesbians and Gays provides opportunity for dialogue about sexual orientation
and gender identity, and acts to create a society that is healthy and respectful
of human diversity.
Globalization Links
Wal-mart Watch is a nationwide publc education campaign to challenge the world's
largest retailer to become a better employer, neighbor and corporate citizen.
It is a project of the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics. Visit their
website and their MySpace page: myspace.com/walmartwatch.
page
The Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG) is an independent research
and media group of writers, scholars journalists and activists. The CRG is
based in Montreal. It is a registered non profit organization in the province
of Quebec, Canada.
The Global Research webpage at www.globalresearch.ca publishes news articles,
commentary, background research and analysis on a broad range of issues, focussing
on social, economic, strategic, geopolitical and environmental processes.
The Continental Direct Action Network consists of many autonomous locals working
to overcome corporate globalization and all forms of oppression.
PO BOX 1485
Asheville NC, 28802
Miscellaneous Links
Adbusters is a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters,
students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist
movement
of the information age. Their aim is "to topple existing power structures
and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century."
The official Michael Moore home page.
Mark Frankenburg has written a timely warning in novel form, "Just Say No To Fascism - a Fable" about
how a corporate aristocracy is soft selling us a dictatorship. America is living
in denial due to The Big Lie. Our nation, under the Bush neocon regime, fits
all 14 early warning signs of fascism defined by Professor Lawrence Britt.
Our country can be paralleled to an alcoholic, or addict, since we as a nation
are so sick with denial of the problem, so in fear of what we don't want to
admit the truth about the direction our nation is headed. We, as a people,
are like a hooked fiend - dependent on militarism and corporatism. Do we have
to wait for the addict to "hit bottom"? His book (280 pages, trade paperback) is available to purchase on his wesbite. The site has many other very good features and links.
A mail-order business in Washington, D.C., Teaching for Change "provides teachers and parents wit tols to transform schools into centers of justice where students learn to read, write and change the world." They also run a bookstore inside a restaurant/bar/film/theatre/performance space on "V" Street, called "Busboys & Poets" and in a second "Busboys & Poets" that opened in 2007 in Shirlington, Virginia. They offer an outstanding selection of books by mail and in their two bookshops.
Add a Link
Want your organization added to our list? If you've got a web site dedicated
to progressive causes, just contact us,
and we'll add you to the list. We'd appreciate if you'd link to us on your web
site as well; if you don't want to link to our catalog, you're welcome to link
to this page instead!
ARE AMERICANS A BROKEN PEOPLE?
Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?
Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?
No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?
In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.
Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "It seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."
Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."
The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. 12/9/09. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/
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