Workshops at the VFP convention will include such topics as: Veterans farming, Creating a culture of peace, Educating the community, Agent Orange, Nonviolent bioregional revolutionary strategies, Debt and death: making clear the costs of war, Labor's role, Environmental disaster, the United Nations, Helping homeless veterans, Palestine, Veteran suicide, Military sexual trauma and suicides, Voices of Iraq: resolution, reconciliation, reparation, The written word for peace and reconciliation, Bradley Manning and G.I. resisters, The perversion of just war reasoning, U.S. policy in the Middle East, The long war for central Asia, Building peace in Vietnam, and Abolishing war as an instrument of national policy. The full program is available at http://VFPNationalConvention.org
by Democracy Convention
Gar
Alperovitz who authored an important book on the decision to drop the
nuclear bombs on Japan will be in town, but he'll be speaking at the
Democracy Convention on the topic of worker ownership and how people can
create enough power to fix our broken democracy. He recently discussed
his new book on Talk Nation Radio. Take a listen. Peter Kuznick, another great writer on the nuclear decision, currently in Japan with Oliver Stone, was also a recent guest. Listen here.
The Democracy Convention is a real movement and coalition building project pulling together activists from a wide variety of sectors to find strength and inspiration in numbers. Several conferences will overlap and interact, including:
The Race and Democracy Conference.
The Earth Democracy Conference.
The Democratizing Defense Conference.
The Constitutional Reform Conference.
The Education for Democracy Conference.
The Economic Democracy Conference.
The Media Democracy Conference.
The Representative Democracy Conference.
The Local Democracy Conference.
Think for a minute about who you'd most like to see leading conferences on those topics. Then click the links, and in most cases I think you'll find that they are doing so! We hope you can join us!
The Democracy Convention website describes Madison thus:
"You've seen the images and reports of the mass protests in Madison. The Wisconsin uprising was the first wave of the global anti-austerity protests to arrive in the United States. But it should be no surprise that Madison, Wisconsin, is at the center of the national movement against corporate power and economic austerity.
"Since Wisconsin statehood, in the revolutionary year of 1848, Madisonians have led the way, co-founding and leading the National Organization for Women (NOW), United States Student Association (USSA), United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Sierra Club, American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and four national political parties: the early, radical Republican Party, and then later, the Progressive Party of the 1920-30s, and the New Party and Green Party. Madison, Wisconsin, has long served as the capital city of the heartland of the progressive movement.
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