September 2009

Code Pink Buffalo and the WNY Peace Center are pleased to announce a FREE screening of Rethink Afghanistan, a Brave New Foundation Film about the need to end the war in Afghanistan. Watch experts from the U.S., Afghanistan, and Russia explain the issues surrounding this war, including the fact that there is no military solution to the conflict, and why we need congressional oversight. Read more »

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Building Bridges to Communities-- Gallery Opening

Start: 10/02/2009 7:00 pm

Timezone: America/New York

Description: Gallery Opening

By Santiago Masferrer

The Latin American Cultural Association (LACA) is pleased to announce the re-opening of our Community Art Gallery in El Buen Amigo, our fair trade storefront and cultural center in Allentown.

The opening reception will feature a show by the Rich Art Experience, a group of individuals with special needs who create beautiful artwork in a variety of mediums. The work on display will feature abstracts, landscapes, paint on photography and portraits by five different artists – Nancy Richert, Brian Federick, Ann Milliken, Betsy Roshner and Dan Mika.

Some members of the Rich Art Experience have been working together for over 10 years, when the program was hosted by Spectrum Human Services in Orchard Park. Their name is in honor of the art therapist, Molly Rich, who formerly ran that program. When the program was cut upon her retirement, Rich found an ally in her friend Barbara Murak. Murak now runs the program, which meets weekly at the Impact Gallery in the Tri-Main Center.

“Our focus is on art-making, exhibiting and socialization,” Murak said. “The group members talk openly about the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate non-judgmental acceptance and support of each other.” Read more »

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BOYCOTT TONY BLAIR!

Start: 10/07/2009 7:00 pm

Timezone: America/New York

Description: Peace, Justice, and Antiwar Coalition of WNY

By Jim Holstun

Have we lost our sense of smell?

The UB Distinguished Speakers Series has invited former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to speak on October 7. According to his exclusive booking agency, he will receive $150,000 plus travel and expenses for four persons. The Peace, Justice, and Antiwar Coalition of Western New York (PJAW) has organized a demo for peace and against Blair and his procurers. Please join us at 7:00 p.m. in the Coventry Loop of Alumni Arena, and bring signs and friends. And please don’t buy tickets to this obscene event. Please don’t even take a comp. ticket.

Why protest Tony Blair? Compared to the shamelessly despicable Karl Rove—a Distinguished Speaker of the 2008-9 season at UB—Blair seems almost innocuous. With his goofy grin and his public parade of his faith (including the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and his Faith and Globalisation Initiative), he can come across as a charmingly eccentric combination of Howdy Doody and an earnest choirboy.

The Blair War Crimes Foundation provides a quick answer when it indicts Blair for “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.” Some more detail:

During his years as Prime Minister (1997-2007), Blair helped maintain the murderous sanctions on the people of Iraq (1990-2003). From 1990 to 1999 alone, these killed 500,000 to 800,000 people, mostly infants and children. Like former US Secretary of State (and UB Distinguished Speaker) Madeline Albright, Blair thinks “the price was worth it.”
Blair’s government provided the “Dodgy Dossier,” a lying and plagiarized compendium that fueled our flight to war. US Secretary of State Colin Powell—also a war criminal and twice a UB “Distinguished Speaker”—used it in the notorious UN presentation that took our country to war.
In 2002, Mr. Blair conspired with former US President George Bush to launch a war of aggression. At the Nuremberg Military Tribunal after World War II, Robert H. Jackson, said “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” In his 2005 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the late British playwright Harold Pinter called for Blair to be arraigned before the International Court of Justice, adding that “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.”
Estimates of Iraqi casualties during Blair and Bush’s War on Iraq vary from 100,000 to over 1,200,000.
Blair and Bush’s War has created millions of orphans and almost five million refugees, either internally displaced in Iraq, or living in the festering refugee camps of Syria and Jordan.
As of September 20, 2009, Blair and Bush’s War has killed 4,345 American servicemen and women, and wounded 31,102. Many of those dead lie buried in Western New York. Many of those wounded lie in our hospitals and walk or roll down our streets and the sidewalks of our campus.

Read more »

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Nationalize the Banks

By Cliff Cawthon

Benjamin Franklin’s famous definition of insanity as “doing something over and over again, and expecting different results” reflects our complacency and failure to substantively act in the wake ‘great credit crash’. In a Saturday, Sept. 12th article in the New York Times titled “A Year Later, Little Change on Wall St.” banks still sell and trade unregulated derivatives, despite their role in last fall’s chaos. ” The contradictory and suicidal nature of our banking establishment have revealed the shallow “state of exception” that we have lost and, it beckons us to remember in order to prevent another collapse.

According to Webster’s dictionary , Profit is defined as: 1) A valuable return; or, 2) the excess of returns over an expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; however, in Das Kapital, Marx’s corresponding definition of profit offers a more salient definition and critical definition of profit as accumulation of surplus-value of capital. As later Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel describes it in his introduction to Marx’s “Capital: volume one”:

” Capital is thus, by definition, value looking for accretion, for surplus-value.’ ‘But if capital produces surplus-value, surplus-value also produces additional capital….The basic drive of the capitalist mode of production is the drive to accumulate capital” (pg. 60).

Therefore, the accumulation of capital (i.e. profit and expansion) through this byproduct of the market is familiar to capitalism, however, it has manifested itself upon us as built on the backs of a slave society of debt an hazardous trading.

In capital, Marx postulates that the only difference between the capitalist mode of production and the older slave societies is the extraction of surplus value. It is all involuntary; in the current market there is no choice, to buy our houses, go to school, and in many cases pay medical bills we have to go to one of the three big banks: JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. Read more »

September 16, 2009

CROSSROADS SPRINGS YARD SALE!

Start: 09/25/2009 9:00 am

End: 09/26/2009 4:00 pm

Timezone: America/New York

Description: Benefit for Crossroads Springs Care Center/School for orphans of AIDS, Hamisi, Kenya

Friday and Saturday, September 25 and 26. 9AM-4PM

at
Orchard Park Quaker Meeting House
6924 East Quaker Road
Orchard Park, NY 14127

Come and bring your friends!

Treasures for sale from many kind donors.
Donations of your treasures gratefully received
Thursday evening 7:30-8:30 PM, Friday morning7:30-8:30 AM
at the Meeting House

Let's Build It! Classrooms for the children! Education and Health for their Lifetime!

For more info go to www.crossroadssprings.org

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Buffalo's Peace Jammers share their experiences, meet Rigoberta Menchu Tum

PeaceJam Buffalo started in October 2008, made possible by the support from the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, as a partnership of the WNY Peace Center, Stop the Violence Coalition Inc. and Concerned Ecumenical Ministries. PeaceJam is an international group formed by a coalition of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates who developed a curriculum to teach peace, cultural diversity and leadership. We meet Tuesdays from 4-5:30pm at St. Mary’s School for the Deaf, hosted by Erie County Counsel for the Prevention of Alcohol & Substance Abuse, now also a partner in the program. Last year, the youth-led, adult-supported group worked with younger students facilitating peaceful conflict resolution groups as their Global Call to Action Project. Below are a few Peace Jammers’ inspiring words after returning from meeting Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum at the Northern Region Peace Jam conference in Chicopee, Mass. Youth age 14 and up are welcome to join in next year's program, as are adult volunteers – call 884-0582 or 444-1991.

“Peace Jam opened my eyes to alternative ways to solve problems. By organizing our project to break the cycle of violence, it taught me to work together for a common cause. The conference was amazing and many of the people I met I will continue to keep in contact with.”

Bubbling Brittany Williams

“Hi, I’m Excellent Yves. I've been in the Peace Jam group for 4 months and I now understand more what Peace really is... Peace Jam means a lot to me because it helps me understand more and more every day what Peace means and what it’s like to work for Nonviolence. It has affected me and my hopes for the future. Now I know, for example, we can stop the violence in the future by starting to teach youth right now about being nonviolent… What really inspires [me] is that even though Rigoberta Menchu Tum had a violent childhood, she didn’t give up or go in revenge, she instead worked for peace.”

Excellent Yves Dushime Read more »

September 4, 2009