16 Celebrated American Spokespersons For Humanity & 2 For an Honest America

CINDY SHEEHAN - amazingly persistent, articulate, imaginatively aggressive and energetic anti-war activist, rightfully broadening her denunciations to include war's root causes, imperialistic capitalism; journey of political awareness after the double anguish of son's death in Iraq and her feeling of having failed him in not have prevented his joining the military, galvanized her into actions so provocative that they achieved media attention for her camp-out next to President Bush's Texas ranch; at the time of 2005 presidential inaugural, spoke at the opening of Eyes Wide Open: the Human Cost of War, a traveling exhibition created by the American Friends Service Committee; one of the founders of Gold Star Families for Peace; [Wikipedia informs:] Sheehan attracted international attention in early August 2005, when, just outside Bush's Texas ranch demanded a second meeting with the President. She told members of Veterans for Peace, "And the other thing I want him to tell me is 'just what was the noble cause Casey died for?' Was it freedom and democracy? Bullshit! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East." She also vowed not to pay her federal income tax for 2004 because that was the year her son was killed; gained the label of "Peace Mom" from the mainstream media; arrested for demonstrating on the White House sidewalk; met with Senator John McCain, and later called him a "warmonger"; in London end of 2005 interviewed by BBC Radio and by The Guardian; addressed the International Peace Conference, organized by the Stop the War Coalition, attended the London Premiere of Peace Mom, a play written by Dario Fo (Literature Nobel laureate) about her; traveled to Ireland, met Irish Foreign Affairs minister Dermot Ahern, voiced her objection to U.S. aircraft refueling at Shannon Airport, stating, "Your Government, even though they didn't send troops to Iraq, is complicit in the crimes by allowing the planes to land and refuel"; attending 2006 Bush State of the Union address arrested by Capital Police, for wearing a T-shirt reading "2,245 Dead How many more?"; 2006, in Melbourne spoke in support of David Hicks; in New York arrested after blocking the door to the U.S. Mission to the U.N. offices" during a protest with Iraqi women against the war; accused the United States of planning to attack Iran; appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, called Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world" and "worse than Osama Bin Laden," and conceded that she would rather live under Venezuela's Hugo Chavez than under Bush; published memoir: Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism; 2007, traveled to Cuba, called for the closure of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited the Latin American School of Medicine; years of speaking tours; contested the seat of Speaker of the House in 2008 election; has a weekly radio show at CindySheehanSoapbox.Org.; 2009, arrested at the White House protesting President Obama's continuation of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; 1960-70s, honors graduate Cerritos College; studied history at UCLA, youth minister at St. Mary's Catholic Church, Vacaville, California; for eight years, coordinated program for at-risk middle school children.


JEREMIAH WRIGHT - theologian, teacher, pastor; world wide prominence during days of repeating TV sound bites of an angry Rev. Wright, arm raised, fiercely declaiming in a horse voice, "God damn America for its war crimes!" "God damn America for killing innocent people," the war promoting entertainment/news media cartel inadvertently promoting a war condemning preacher to national notoriety; Sept. 2009, main speaker celebrating the 60th anniversary of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review at Ethical Culture Society, New York ("Jeremiah Wright: He's Baaack!" warned Washington Examiner, 11/ 2/09), gave eloquently compassionate, inspiring, empowering description of our predicament under imperial capitalism; identified his own personal community as inclusive of areas on other continents where people suffer injustice for the sake of world domination for profit by the few; spoke of his divinity school teachers and his education by events in the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm and the many other noble luminaries of black and minority leadership during the long history of the fight for liberation of Francis Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth"; himself also formed in years of ministry while listening "in the pew"; denounced the U.S. government for repeatedly launching wars "based on one lie after another"- for the of agony and manslaughter of Palestinians - for enslaving, oppressing, and criminalizing Black Americans, emphasized that Amendments to the Constitution did not make up for its fundamental laws of injustice in a nation where social change is suppressed; hailed the Monthly Review as a scholarly publication that has placed priority on people particularly the world's most oppressed; asked, Why the poor are not seen as people, but rather as a liability for health care," "if you help the homeless, they call you a saint; but if you ask why people are homeless, they call you a socialist. I am proud to be called a socialist, I want to know why! If I help the hungry in the world, they call me a saint. If I ask why are there hungry folks, they will call me a communist"; spoke of "a country where 2,000 juveniles are serving life without parole"; Listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once he reached the fiery peak of declaiming horrors and human degradation, the comparison with Martin Luther King Jr. thundering during his 1967 Beyond Vietnam address in New York was beautifully obvious. Both men base condemnation of violence on love. Both had the same divinity school teacher; The King who Wright sounded a bit like is not the one we remember every January, of "I Have a Dream", but the King of the righteous anger, "I cannot be silent. My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." That King was vilified the day after as treasonous reminds of Wright pilloried in media as anti-American. For the first time in these 42 years, the peace movement has a charismatic celebrity religiously following in King Jr.' footsteps; 1995, delivered a prayer as part of Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan organized Million Man March in Washington, D.C.; 1984, courageously disregarding public opinion went to Tripoli with Farrakhan to visit Gadaffi; professor, Chicago Theological Seminary, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary; Board Directors of Evangelical Health Systems, and Malcolm X School of Nursing; joined Marine Corp., trained as a cardiopulmonary technician; part of the medical team charged with care of President Lyndon Johnson after 1966 surgery at National Naval Medical Center; pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago; featured on Wynton Marsalis's album The Majesty of the Blues.

DAVID KORTEN - author, political activist and prominent critic of corporate globalization; extensive time living and working and warming his heart in the 3rd world forming his recipe for outliving imperialism; 1995, published When Corporations Rule the World, sometimes referred to as the bible of the 1999 Seattle WTO protest; next, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, which was launched at U.N. headquarters in New York in 1999, focused on framing a positive alternative to corporate rule based on living system principles; 2007, Global Civil Society; 2006, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community; 2009, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth -Why Wall Street Can't Be Fixed and How to Replace It; , "While based in the Philippines, 1980s, I concluded that the leadership needed to redirect the human course would not come from within establishment institutions, but rather would depend on citizen groups working from a shared understanding of the deeper problems afflicting the species and a common vision of unrealized possibilities. At that point, I became a defector from the establishment and have since worked through public interest citizen organizations devoted to a transformational social change agenda"; Ph.D. at Stanford U. in Business Administration; devoted to setting up business schools in low-income countries - starting with Ethiopia"; a captain in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam, taught civic action and psychological operations at the Special Air Warfare School, served as military aide to the civilian head of all defense department behavior and social sciences research; 5 years as Visiting Associate Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business; advisor to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute; staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development; faculty appointments at the Harvard School of Public Health; taught international family planning management; 1970s, left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia; 15 years Ford Foundation project specialist working with management institutes around the world, later Asia regional advisor on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help AID apply what they had learned in the Ford Foundation about organizational change strategies for transforming large-scale public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources; traveled regularly between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines. "Disillusioned by the evident inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to apply the approaches that the Ford Foundation had developed and proven, gradually I became aware that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration I was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world including the United States and other 'developed' countries, I eventually made my break with the official aid system. My last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian non governmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change. In 1990, I joined with colleagues from around the world to found the People-Centered Development Forum as a support network for those who were seeking to challenge the dominant development paradigm. I have since served as the Forum's president and principal spokesperson"; 1994, in New York joined "a gathering of global activists working on trade issues that led to the formation of the International Forum on Globalization, that assumed a major role in building global awareness of the dysfunctions of corporate-led economic globalization"


MICHAEL PARENTI - political scientist, historian, media critic, full-time political activist, on the advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network, and Education Without Borders; New Political Science and Nature, Society and Thought: scholarly journal of Marxist studies; of his books, most influential: Democracy for the Few, 2007,1974, translated into 18 languages; Contrary Notions, 2007; Superpatriotism, 2004; The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, 2003; The Terrorism Trap, 2002; Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, 1997; Against Empire 1995; Inventing Reality: the Politics of News Media, 1986,1993; Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment, 1992; The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, 1991; Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy, 1971; The Anti-Communist Impulse, 1970; appeared in the 1992 documentary Panama Deception and the 2004 documentary Liberty Bound; [Parenti's views from Wikipedi article:] that racism serves several functions for ruling interests: divides the working class against each other, creates a "super-exploited" group of people who are forced to work at below scale wages thereby depressing wage levels for the entire workforce, distracts the (U.S.) white population from its own legitimate grievances by providing an irrelevant scapegoat in the form of minority populations; has criticized the tendency among many who profess to be progressive to downplay the importance of class; that national debt in fact works well for certain interests, the greater the debt, the greater the upward transfer, as the government continues to borrow money from those they should be taxing. "The national debt is in effect a way of privatizing public spending and defunding the federal budget, The bigger the debt, the less money available for domestic programs, and the more money that goes from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers to rich creditors"; that Iraq was targeted for "having committed economic nationalism," with a state-run economy that pretty much shut out Western investors, that The same holds true for Yugoslavia, both countries were bombed and invaded, and their public economies were shattered; wrote The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic, was head of the U.S. chapter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic; that many on the left continue to deliver impassioned and blanket condemnations of deceased communist countries, Parenti states, "Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anti-communists as 'Soviet apologists'; that "despite the well-publicized deficiencies, crimes, and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, such as the free medical care and human services; affordable food, fuel, transportation, and housing; universal literacy; gains in women's rights; free education to the highest level of one's ability; a guaranteed right to a job; free cultural and sporting events, and the like." He supported Gorbachev's campaign of perestroika and glasnost until 1990 when it became evident to him that the Gorbachev reforms were leading to the implantation of free-market capitalism and were, as he saw it, bringing hardships to the common people; that entertainment media indoctrinate by propagating values in keeping with their corporate ownership and corporate advertisers; that Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La" ignoring its negative aspects.


JOEL KOVEL - politician, academic, writer, and eco-socialist, an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance; in THE ENEMY OF NATURE - The End of Capitalism or the End of the World gives a clear and easy to comprehend analysis of the basics of capital function and its dire need to be all-engulfing and all-overwhelming; sees capital as not just an economic system but as the present manifestation of an ancient rupture between humanity and nature -uses the Bhopal Union-Carbide industrial disaster as an example; believes that capitalists are driven to continuously generate profit through a combination of intensifying exploitation and selling to new markets. This means that capitalism must grow indefinitely to exist, which seems impossible on a planet of finite resources; suggests that the capitalist system itself is self-perpetuating, fueled by extra-human or impersonal forces; sees capitalist expansion "reducing the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital, while submerging "the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power" as it penetrates communities through "consumerism and depoliticization"; follows Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values, stresses that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities - such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence - are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes; "capitalist expansion" is seen by Kovel as "being 'hand in glove' with "corrupt and subservient client states"; believes that state or self-regulation of markets does not solve the crisis "because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation, which is 'unacceptable' for a growth-orientated system; foresees an "evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism" that echoes Rosa Luxemburg's "stark choice" between "socialism or barbarism"; criticizes many within the Green movement for not being overtly anti-capitalist; notes that "events in nature are reciprocal and multi-determined" and can therefore not be predictably "fixed" socially -technologies cannot solve social problems because "social problems are not mechanical"; advocates the non-violent dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the Commons. For Kovel, the main prefigurative steps are "that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system, and that they include a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it," which will then "deligitimate the system and release people into struggle"; uses the term "Eco-socialist revolution" to describe the transition to an eco-socialist world society, reforming money to retain its use in "enabling exchanges" while "reducing its functions as a commodity in its own right" and "repository of value -thus breaking the back of the value function of money and the redirecting the vast reservoir of mainly phony value"; advocates activities that have the promise of "breaking down the commodity form". This includes organizing labor, which is a "reconfiguring of the use-value of labor power" -forming cooperatives, allowing "a relatively free association of labor"; pursuing "ecological production" that goes beyond the socialist vision of the emancipation of labor to "the realization of use-values and the appropriation of intrinsic value "forming localized currencies", which he sees as "undercutting the value-basis of money"; and supporting "radical media" that, in his eyes, involve an "undoing of the fetishism of commodities"; Internationally, believes in the immediate cessation of speculation in currencies; In 1998 ran as the Green Party candidate for US Senator from New York; believes that the mainstream Green movement is too easily co-opted by the current powerful socio-political forces.


JOHN PERKINS - renegade economist and author, Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador 1968-70 -this experience launched him in the world of economics and later to writing; best known book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), an insider's account of the exploitation or neo-colonization of Third World countries by what Perkins describes as a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. His 2007 book, The Secret History of the American Empire, provides more evidence of the negative impact of global corporations on the economies and ecologies of poor countries, as well as offering suggestions for making corporations behave more like good citizens; studied at Boston University School of Management during the 1960s; spent the 1970s working for a consulting firm where he was employed after first being screened by the National Security Agency and subsequently hired an alleged NSA liaison and after much extensive pre-employment screening, trained as one of many "economic hit men" advancing the cause of corporate hegemony. As a chief economist at a Boston strategic-consulting firm served as an 'economic hit man' for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinational corporations cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business; tells that over the years news agencies have reported accusations of the NSA using its top echelon network to obtain confidential commercial information from foreign companies and pass it along to their US competitors in 'economic warfare'; after several years struggling internally over the role he was playing in crippling foreign economies, quit his consulting job; founded and directed a independent energy company; since late 1980s involved with non-profit organizations in Ecuador and around the world. One is Dream Change, dedicated to shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community; in Secret History of the American Empire (2007) points out that Indonesia is significantly worse off economically and socially than it was in the 1970s; gives a central role in his story of training and high living as a government level con man to the National Security Agency engaging in international economic sabotage; appears in the documentary movie Let's make money (in German) 2008, by Austrian director Erwin Wagenhofer; in Hoodwinked (2009), pulls back the curtain on the real cause of the current global financial meltdown, how we've been hoodwinked by the CEOs who run the corporatocracy: those few corporations that control the vast amounts of capital, land, and resources around the globe and the politicians they manipulate. These corporate fat cats, Perkins explains, have sold us all on capitalism, a predatory misguided form of geopolitics that encourages a widespread exploitation of the many to benefit a small number of the already very wealthy. Perkins has also written on indigenous cultures and shamanism.


Dennis Kucinich - courageous U.S. Congressman; consistent defender of the defenseless; an entirely honest speaking candidate for the U.S. presidency. There are many other congressmen doing good while balancing within the plutocratic controlled House.

Bernie Sanders - the only U.S. Senator identifying himself as a socialist; represents people not capital.

Even Che Guevara didn't rule out revolution coming through elections - Sanders and Kucinich manage to stay honest. It's not out of the realm of possibilities that Cynthia McKinney could get back in office and with other bring the wisdom of revolution into the halls of Congress.

This list is meant to encourage all who suffer the awareness of the infamy of U.S. foreign policies breeding back-blow terror and economic oppression at home.

Yours truly believes that all eighteen of them are supremely aware that those attempting merely to make the inhumane, murderous criminal insanity, of totally materialist, mindless control and priority for private capital growth and accumulation a bit less monstrous, must guard against being more acquiescent to its continuance than to working for its being replaced with something more intelligently human. They are all positive about the noble character of humankind and are dedicated to protecting life.

This list of a few worth telling friends about is no way meant to understate appreciation for all the less profiled thousands or hundreds of thousands of kind and loving men and women whose concern for the predicament of their fellows has inspired millions around them to fight for peace and justice and a happier world.