by Aggie Perilli
Before the days of social and mobile media, I playfully emailed news commentary and editorial cartoons to interested family members and friends. Predictably, I found myself on the e-lists of networkers similarly inspired to share their ideas and concerns.
It felt healthy and fun to engage in nonpartisan dialogue then. The false projections of divisive ideologues had been relegated to later-than-late-night talk shows, while I slept to awaken fresh for another day at the creative helm of my business, Aggie Perilli Communications International.
An overnight email from a late-night networker alerted readers to incitements to war by oil-invested ideologues against the sovereign oil-rich nation of Iraq.
No way, I began, when the veracity of his message rang ominously true. Too enraged to be fearful, I responded, “Then we have to kick butt with our love!”
Suddenly, my home office filled with the fragrance of roses and other flowers. I glanced around, but no one had joined me and nothing visible had changed. I left my office to pour myself a glass of water, and observed the rosy aroma permeate every room. On an intuitive level, I recognized the Divine presence of unconditional oneness and love.
Earlier I had identified the opposite of love as fearful reactivity rather than responsiveness. Protective of soldiers as well as civilians, I researched honest and trustworthy sources to independently verify the whole unifying truth.
As a former journalist, I followed the lies and the money, especially queries and objections ridiculed and censored by perpetrators and ostrich enablers who defensively protested too much.
Beyond clear conflicts of oil interests, I explored unverified terror alerts and discovered the true countries of origin of all non-Iraqi 9-11 hijackers. I read unequivocal reassurances from independent inspectors who had repeatedly searched and found no weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq.
Afterwards I shared my research to my own list of e-networkers.
To partner with peacemakers, I marched with tens of thousands of war protesters in Washington, D.C. At home, I joined weekend war protests with the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey — and, on Sundays, attended Princeton Quaker Meeting where I purchased a lawn sign that read, “Peace is Patriotic, No War in Iraq.”
That winter, as I attempted to hammer the sign into my partially frozen Main Street lawn and the retired general who lived across from me ran over to help. I glanced at him in surprise and he reassured me, “I agree with you.”
Ensure the Only True and Lasting Power and Infinite Potential of Love
As a Catholic School teenager during the Vietnam War in the early 70s, I wrote poetry and prose to try to make sense of contradictory inequities rife in dishonest patriarchal and hierarchic exploitations of politics and religion. I found it impossible to reconcile benevolence with a heavenly mother or father who would deign to consent to condemnation or conceive of hell.
For what positive purpose would one want to obscure or deny the only true and healing power and potential of unconditional oneness and love?
Later I’d learn from theologians in Princeton and elsewhere that some Bible authors intentionally distorted passages they wrote in an attempt to perpetuate inequality and the exploitation of women and the vulnerable.
I found myself reflecting back on the Vietnam war and the unimaginable devastation of soldiers and the South Vietnamese after relentless bombings and sprayings of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange across inhabitants’ lush forests and fertile river-valley farms.
I remembered how escalation of the deadly Vietnam War drew hundreds of thousands of protesters from professors to students and clergy to atheists onto college campuses and the streets of metropolises, such as Washington, D.C. Police had clashed with protesters projected to play into the hands of communists likely to share expansionist intentions.
I watched my dad watch the news and wondered whether it would revive painful memories from his days as a marine on the front lines of World War II. My dad rarely mentioned the war in which he and his older two brothers and two sisters served, the former as a marine and a coastguardsman, and the latter as a nurse and a singer and entertainer in the USO.
War Wreaks Devastation, Poverty, Hunger and Heartache
Only once did my dad mention two war-related incidents. The first incident in Okinawa still left him shaking his head in bewilderment. It involved a surprise air attack in an open area where he had little choice but to dive behind a stockpile of bombs for cover.
Memories of the second incident reduced the characteristic ebullience in my dad’s voice to a grief barely audible. “We received a government telegram saying that my brother, Bill, drowned in a boating accident off the Pacific Islands,” he lamented. “None of us ever saw him again.”
After my dad passed in 2019, I read a letter he had saved from Uncle Bill dated October 15, 1944. In the letter, Uncle Bill had graciously recounted his combat experiences:
“As you already know, I have been in the invasion of the Marshall Islands, and then returned to our base camp for a brief rest of little more than month. …We then left for the Mariana Islands, in which I was in the invasion of the island of Saipan and, also, Tinian. I needn’t tell you that our adventures and experiences were a little rough. In spite of that fact, we are all proud, for we’ve done our best in accomplishing the one thing we are all fighting for. Our faith is strong, and with our trust in the Good Lord, I’m sure that we will not be let down and, soon, we will all be together again to live our lives in peace everlasting.”
My dad had also saved a newspaper interview with his sister, Louise, after she returned from her military service as a Lieutenant Army Nurse at station hospitals in Italy.
In the interview, Aunt Louise acclaimed the admirable courage and faithfulness of soldiers. Then this daughter of an Italian immigrant grieved over devastated war-torn areas of Italy where violence “had brought destruction and poverty, hunger and heartache.”
From top left to right, my dad, Gus Perilli, as a Marine; Aunt Mamie with a pianist at their USO Broadcast in Iceland; and Uncle Bill as a Marine, Aunt Louise, a Lieutenant Army Nurse, and Uncle Maurice, a Coastguardsman.
Like my dad, all of my aunts and uncles embodied the humble sense of responsibility described by journalist Tom Brokow in his book, The Greatest Generation. Their first-hand experiences led my dad to caution that “war and violence are the dangers we must proactively prevent.”
In the days leading up to the Iraq war, my dad vehemently objected. “They told us we had to go into Vietnam,” he protested. “That turned out to be untrue! That war was political. Now they’re trying to say that we have to go into Iraq. This war is political too!”
Can I quote you on that? I asked my dad, whose strict conservative Catholic upbringing I had liberally protested as a teenager.
My dad nodded his tacit approval.
“Some may dislike what I write,” I warned.
“Well you know you can’t let that stop you,” he replied with equal caution.
Remain Proactively Aware and Responsive
Too few of us questioned and insisted the United States end dishonest provocations that led to the Iraq war launched against international law and the opposition of hundreds of millions of us. Those in vehement opposition reportedly included the heads of 54 countries and both the National and the World Councils of Churches, the latter with 350 member churches.
In the wake of the Iraq war around 2004, I drove to Washington, D.C., along with more than 200 peace activists to lobby for a Bill reintroduced by Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich to establish a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace. We learned about the Bill from a professional lobbyist and best-selling author Marianne Williamson, Peace Alliance co-founder and, later, Democratic presidential candidate.
As the sole citizen lobbyist from New Jersey, I visited my then Representative Rush Holt on Capital Hill. I explained how our Bill would proactively prevent violence and wars with funds immediately applicable to diplomacy and conflict resolution from global affairs to relations within our own cities and schools.
Thankfully, Holt took time to read and sign our Bill. Its passage, however, required more than the total signatures our citizen lobbyist group could gather.
Today, my gratitude extends to California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee (the only Congressional representative in 2002 to vote against the use of force in Iraq) who, since 2013, has reintroduced a similar Bill to establish a United States Department of Peacebuilding.
Recognition of our vital need for a United States Peace Department dates back to 1793. Founding father Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an elected official, a psychiatrist and doctor, and founder of Dickenson College, published an essay that recommended the United States give “perpetual peace” equal footing with the War Department, our forerunner of today’s Department of Defense, according to the collaborative Peace Economy Project (PEP).
“Like most of our founding fathers, Rush feared the emergence of militarism and its consequences,” posted PEP in April 2017. Rush envisioned a Peace Office to “celebrate life” and proactively “discourage the horror of bloodshed.”
Insist on Passage of the Bill that Prioritizes Peacemaking
No doubt our dangerously bloated military budget led to the unwarranted influence of today’s military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower had warned against in his 1961 farewell address. The United States reportedly spends more on our military than the following nine countries combined: China, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.
Voters must insist the United States redirect the trillions of dollars squandered on tactics devised to annihilate, rather than save and support ourselves and all interdependent beings now. Voters must ensure we resume global denuclearization and eliminate criminally heinous biological weapons programs.
As Eisenhower implored, “Together, we must learn to resolve our differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Disarmament with mutual honor and confidence is our continuing imperative.”
Speech Is Never Free When Someone Is Lied To and Exploited
Today, a world of nations is united behind measures to save Ukrainian lives and sovereignty from Russia’s deadly illegal invasion of Ukraine. Early in the war, Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky empathized with Russian soldiers who, without a free and independent press, could more easily be bullied into believing their war would free Ukrainians from nonexistent Nazis.
Ukrainian President Zelensky likened his country’s invading forces to confused children being used. Then, a Russian soldier burst into tears after Ukrainian civilians gave him tea and food and helped him phone his mother. When that soldier realized he had been lied to, he threw down his weapon.
More Russians must insist on an immediate end to their unprovoked and indefensible war. As of this writing, tens of thousands of Russians as well as Ukrainians have passed, tens of millions of Ukrainians are displaced, and vital cities and essential infrastructures lie in ruins.
Be the Infinitely Powerful Peace We Wish To See
In a revelatory gaffe during his condemnation of Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine, former United States President George W. Bush inadvertently referred to his own administration’s invasion of Iraq as wholly unjustified and brutal. While the Iraq war ended on December 15, 2011, the United States had yet to officially end its illegal and counterproductive U.S.-led global war on terror.
The July 2022 drone blast that killed al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shook the ground of an affluent Kabul neighborhood and left terrified residents and shopkeepers confused, then outraged by the source. War-weary Afghans condemned our violation of their new-found peace and possible incitement of retaliatory attacks.
“We’ve had so many years of war, and things were just beginning to settle down,” a jobless schoolteacher selling vegetables from a cart reportedly said to Washington Post journalists. “The conflict is past and no one has the right to violate our sovereignty” and still fragile peace.
Assassinations of anyone’s untried sons and daughters represent an unlawful departure from our historic role in the United States as a champion of human rights. One haunting example reported in The New York Times involved an uncle who sat in a public cafe urging his nephew to abandon all ties to violence when a drone bomb sent to track his nephew killed both of them and everyone there.
I thought of South Africa in 1962. What if that country’s white-imposed government had ruled to execute global peacemaker Nelson Mandela for his participation in what had escalated into an armed struggle against apartheid?
After Mandela spent more than 27 years in prison, he went on to become president of South Africa in its first multiracial elections since apartheid began in 1948. Even before Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, President Frederik Willem de Klerk had privately negotiated with Mandela to replace their country’s institutionalized racist segregation and discrimination with the majority rule of a democratic government. Both men jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their co-leadership in South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid to a new democracy.
Frederik Willem de Klerk
Nelson Mandela
Some of our world’s most powerful and successful peacemakers learned from their experiences as former warriors. Their unifying patience and tolerance and empathetic partnerships have been transformative.
For his part, Israeli President Shimon Peres said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times, ”The man with a hammer thinks every problem is a nail. Problems are not nails. When there is good will, they can all be overcome.”
Is world peace impossible? Then 89 years old, Peres said he had most often seen faith triumph over cynicism or skepticism.
A Sustainable Peace Requires Honesty and Accountability
Thankfully, in January 2022 dozens of Congressional Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren urged President Biden to systematically reform our country’s secretive and unaccountable military operations.
In response to increased awareness, in August 2022 Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced an overhaul of United States combat operations to protect civilians from military and drone attacks. His partial response follows the April 2022 Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative series by The New York Times on missed (illegal) targets, disproportionate destruction, and civilian killings from military strikes.
The 2022 Symposium: Still at War – Where and Why the United States is Fighting the “War on Terror” presents all policymakers and our voting public with essential questions. Among the questions posted in March by Tess Bridgeman and Brianna Rosen of Just Security at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law are: What do decision makers “seek to achieve through the use of force that it could not (actually) achieve through other means?” Other questions include: How do our wars end? What are humanely “viable policy alternatives to the use of lethal force in an armed conflict context that could achieve U.S. security goals? What are the consequences of remaining on a perpetual war footing?”
Our Pentagon asserted the United States has shifted its priority from so-called counterterrorism towards “greater competition with Russia and China.” However, the February 2021 map and research posted by Stephanie Savell and research assistants with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University revealed increased widespread air and drone strikes, ground combat and other military operations in 85 countries from 2018 to 2020.
In January 2018, Karen McVeigh of The Guardian reported on a global survey that found more than 15,000 civilians killed by deadly weapons in U.S.-led attacks against Isis militants in 2017, which represented a 42-percent spike.
As early as 2010, Australian publisher and whistleblower Julian Assange exposed our alleged war crimes on WikiLeaks. He included our lawless detention of men held at Guantánamo Bay with neither criminal charges nor trials.
Assange had filled our country’s void of fearless or courageously independent investigative journalism. Included in the information Assange released — with redactions and withheld documents he had reportedly discussed with U.S. government officials beforehand — is a video of the crew of an Apache helicopter in Baghdad who reportedly killed a dozen civilians. Those who passed included 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
“Namir and Saeed would have been forgotten statistics of that illegal war, if not for Assange,” Dean Yates, a former Baghdad Bureau Chief of Reuters reported in the January 2022 New Age Opinion.
As of mid-November 2022, however, President Biden’s Justice Department has yet to revoke our exploitative ex-president’s request to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom ostensibly on allegations of espionage for publishing classified information said to have endangered lives.
Even though, as Yates reported, “Brigadier general Robert Carr testified that his team of 120 counter-intelligence officers couldn’t find a single person killed in Afghanistan or Iraq because of WikiLeaks disclosures.”
Free Assange and Protect Freedom of the Press
The Justice Department under President Barrack Obama had decided against prosecution of Assange to protect both our democracy’s pivotal right to freedom of the press and our constitutional balance of power, especially after other media had reportedly made the same disclosures without the same redactions.
“Publishing information that is in the public interest is a cornerstone of media freedom,” agreed Secretary General Agnes Callamard of Amnesty International in the organization’s April 2022 post.
Vital media freedom is also protected by international human rights laws. “It’s not too late for United States authorities to set things right and drop their charges,” Callamard said. “In the meantime, given the politically motivated nature of this case and its grave implications for our democratic freedom of expression,” Callamard urged the United Kingdom to “refrain from representing the United States in further appeals.”
Charges of espionage against Assange have been described by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as an attempt to criminalize the objective journalism necessary for a democracy to be healthy and thrive.
During the Vietnam war, Ellsberg enlightened the United States public of civilian casualties and suffering, which helped end the Vietnam War.
More than every voter’s right to know what our government is doing is our responsibility to proactively end and prevent deadly lies and conflicts of interest.
In 2012, former President Jimmy Carter had also raised alarms about our alleged war crimes in his New York Times op-ed article, A Cruel and Unusual Record. “After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded such attacks end, but the practice (continued) in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that (were) not in any war zone,” Carter wrote. “We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.”
Carter cautioned that our own unjust bombings could turn “aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations,” “arouse civilian populations against us,” and drive “repressive governments to cite such actions to (attempt to) justify their own despotic behavior.”
Carter urged the United States to reclaim its leadership role as a nonviolent “global champion of human rights.”
A fearless or courageously aware and responsive public insists on honest and trustworthy leaders. The honest rally diverse talents and interests around equitably inclusive partnerships. Trustworthy leaders prioritize the safety and welfare of all interdependent beings and the native organic environment that sustains us. They are unifiers who consistently learn and earn one another’s trust. They value the tough love of whistleblowers and journalists and insist on the criminal incarcerations essential to save lives.
I write these words in my Pennsylvania home-based office, in front of the more than 100-year-old porcelain-and-steel sign, 20th Century Publishing Co. Printing, that hung outside my grandfather’s business.
My dad knew firsthand of the fearlessness and courage it takes to share speech that is truly free for everyone. He and his four siblings and mother helped my Italian-immigrant grandfather, Armondo Perilli, edit and publish their own Italian newspaper, Il Secolo XX or 20th Century, on the first floor of their New Jersey home.
Recently, I asked my aunts how my grandfather had gotten the scar I had seen across his left cheek in photographs. Aunt Louise said she’d never forget the day her father answered a knock on their front door and a man with a knife slashed her father’s face over an article published in their newspaper. Her father had grabbed a kitchen towel and pressed it to his face as he rushed to the hospital.
Too young to grasp the issues involved, Aunt Mamie said, “I have to give my dad credit. He was fearless in reporting abuses committed by organized crime then.”
“Ink runs through your blood,” my dad used to tell me. Early in my communications career and, again, during my one of family’s last birthday celebrations with my dad before he passed, he gifted me with the same birthday card of Superwoman “who always finds a way to save the day.”
From one of the top shelves in my office, Superwoman stares down at me with hands on her hips as I write this pre-election post. I still recall the rosy promise of fearless or courageous responsiveness amid today’s criminally dishonest and exploitative exclusions and abuses.
Subscribe to Fearless or Courageously Trustworthy Newspapers
In the 1980s, my History of Journalism professor at Temple University in Philadelphia urged more fearless and courageous journalism.
Instead of more journalism, David Bauder reported in the July 1, 2022, issue of AP News on the demise of thousands of United States newspapers. A reported 70 million United States residents now live in a county with no local newspaper, or just one.
Competition from digital media for publishing profits and clicks is partly responsible.
McKay Coppins reported earlier in the October 14, 2021 issue of The Atlantic on a secretive hedge fund gutting newsrooms. He described how Alden Global Capital hollowed out the prestigious Chicago Tribune newsroom— “that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, and that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and earned dozens of Pulitzer Prizes”— to a quarter of its former size.
“When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement,” Coppins wrote. Misinformation can proliferate.
Without a newspaper to hold the dishonest and predatory to account — as independent newspapers have done for hundreds of years, Coppins described how city budgets can balloon and corruption and dysfunction take root. Consequently, Coppins cited a Politico analysis that found our pathologically dishonest ex-president performed best during the 2016 election in communities without independent media to proactively counter his lies.
Voters must hold to account anyone who abuses the trust of soldiers and voters, and who tries to compromise the human rights and freedoms my father and so many others have since risked their lives to restore and protect.
Appropriately in 2015, when Pope Francis visited with grade-school students in Harlem, New York, he described the devil, not as an energy outside ourselves, but as “one who sows sadness, distrust, envy and evil desires.”
“Happiness comes not from conformity, but unity,” he later elaborated.
Use your consumer dollars to restore and protect objective journalism free of conflicts of interest and owner bias.
For example, as of mid-November 2022, even The New York Times had yet to report the whole story about ChevronTexaco‘s long-overdue debt to Indigenous inhabitants and farmers in a remote region of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. In 2011, the Ecuadorian court reportedly ordered ChevronTexaco to pay $18 billion in compensation, later reduced to $9.5 billion, for the oil-pooled wasteland and poisoned soil and water reportedly left behind when the company’s drilling contract expired in 1992, according to an April 2022 post of Amazon Watch, the Indigenous rights and environmental preservation nonprofit.
Unlike a public relations agent, it is the responsibility of journalists to research and interview a variety of sources both involved and affected, regardless of whether Chevron pays for a media ad or post. Overdue is investigative coverage of ChevronTexaco’s much-needed remediation and reparations for the 16 million gallons of crude oil ChevronTexaco reportedly spilled over more than two decades, and the billions of gallons of toxic waste reportedly deposited “with reckless disregard for industry standards” in unlined pits to save an estimated $3 per barrel.
Also egregiously overlooked by The New York Times and other mainstream media are abuses of power that Amazon Watch described in an April 2022 post as “so far-fetched as to be almost unbelievable,” and that led to human rights lawyer, Steven Donzinger, to serve jail time and lose his yet-to-be restored law license and passport, the latter which blocks his helpful return to Ecuador.
Voters must join House Rules Committee Chairman, James P. McGovern, and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), and other politicians who, on April 25, 2022, urged President Biden to pardon Donzinger and dismiss the criminal contempt case against him. They are among a coalition of 56 Nobel Prize Laureates, Amnesty International USA and other human rights organizations and members of the European Parliament who issued statements of protest against the questionable and “disparate treatment of Donziger by U.S. Courts,” and urged an investigation into alleged judicial abuses.
Further use your consumer dollars to boycott ChevronTexaco. Hold company officials accountable for the cost and cleanup of toxic spills and deposits left to Ecuadorians with far fewer means and, since, serious health and safety issues.
“When Steve and I went to Ecuador and visited these communities together, there were places where the stench of toxic chemicals was so strong it burned my nose,” elaborated Chairman McGovern in his April 27 press release. “There were villages where nearly every family had been affected by cancer. These actions were appalling and immoral.
…Steve exposed their acts of corporate violence. And in response, Chevron executives used their unchecked power to rig the justice system against him—resulting in highly suspect and deeply troubling treatment by U.S. courts that made a mockery of justice, serving to bully and intimidate Steve and others who fight for environmental equity. President Biden should pardon Steve Donziger.
This is about more than a court case—it’s about sending a message that corporate polluters need to be held accountable for breaking the law, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and intimidate those who seek justice.”
Honesty and Accountability Are Essential to Earn Trust
Our country’s shortage of independent and unbiased newspapers and media can enable oligarchic abuses by judges, prosecutors, government regulators and legislators with financial ties to industry.
As temporary guardians of one another, we have no time for criminally deadly denials and delays in mitigations and yet possible reversals of today’s multiple catastrophic threats against all life on earth. Atomic scientists shortened the time on the Doomsday Clock they had set to reflect the risk of global-manmade catastrophe from 2 minutes to 90 seconds to midnight. “Our international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have caused the international political infrastructures for managing them to erode.”
Beyond the threat of nuclear Armageddon and a heinous biological weapons race are the dangers of climate change and domestic and international terrorists.
Our country’s 2020 change of leadership restored hope that renewed United States partnership in interdependent world affairs would reverse our “global race toward catastrophe.”
Seditious lies about a stolen election and other deceptive provocations left unreported by absent and corruptly prosecuted whistleblowers and journalists threaten to undermine our elections and democracy. Today’s multiplicity of threats can also undermine trust and our country’s ability to reliably lead or partner in urgent mitigations and yet-possible reversals of our world’s worst threats since the creation of the Doomsday Clock in 1947.
Positive steps toward a safer world include our 2021 decisions in the United States to both extend the New START arms control agreement with Russia and rejoin our Paris Climate Accords. Also pivotal are resumed negotiations for an Iran nuclear deal.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their Board of Sponsors call for greater urgency and unity to prevent the worst cataclysmic outcomes. Sponsors of the atomic scientists include 13 Nobel Laureates and, most recently, The Elders, a global group of independent leaders founded in 2007 by Nelson Mandela to establish world peace and human rights.
“Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed cooperation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risks,” atomic scientists warn. “Citizens of the world can and should organize and insist their leaders do so.”
Vote to Reverse Multiplicity of Catastrophic Threats
Our need for universal partnerships comes at a time when, in April, corporate overseer Warner Brothers Discovery bought mainstream CNN and, just a couple of months before our 2022 election, ordered network anchors to obfuscate and avoid the phrase the Big Lie in reference to the criminally deadly lie that President Biden stole our many-times certified 2020 election. CNN’s new owners cut programs, such as Reliable Sources that reported on the fairness and objectivity of our media, and laid off a pernicious percentage of staff members. One of the biggest shareholders of Warner Brothers Discovery is multibillionaire John Malone, who donated $250,000 to the 2016 presidential inauguration and served on the board of directors of the Cato Institute, a decades-long climate-science denier. Today’s life-saving coverage of yet another mainstream media has been obstructed by the bias of its corporate owner.
Rather than support and encourage voters, Republicans in dozens of states that include Arizona and Georgia passed illegal voter suppression bills that restrict access and make it harder mostly for people of color to vote. Responsiveness is needed to end and proactively prevent voter suppression and equally illegal voter subversion bills that can enable extremists to seize partisan control over election administration and sabotage or reject votes and actually steal future elections.
Before our 2022 election, Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and Elias Law Group, urged U.S. voters to “elect pro-voting rights candidates into election offices — not just secretaries of state, but local elected officials as well.” He urged voters to deprive obstructionists of the tools they’d need to suppress pivotal votes.
Recent projections of voter fraud followed the criminally deadly January 6 domestic terrorist insurrection that resulted in the passing of seven people. Those who passed included five police officers. Incited by our criminally accountable ex-president, insurrectionists planted two pipe bombs and posted their murderous intention to hang Mike Pence. They erected a gallows and shouted into a megaphone, “Execute the traitors,” then brutally battered law enforcement officers in the bloody rampage they had intended to be deadlier.
All complicit warrant an immediate criminal trial and incarceration followed by either removal from office or, as the impeachment article for our accountable ex-president rules, “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”
In every election, do your part to end and prevent today’s multiplicity of threats by dishonest perpetrators and ostrich enablers. Solidify plans for you and your family and friends to vote. If possible, register for your state’s mail-in or absentee ballot. Some states provide online tracking of ballot status and email confirmations when your ballot is both received and processed. When you vote in person, verify your active voter registration and current polling place beforehand.
(Continued in Part 2 of Be Audaciously Aware and Responsive here. Part 2 demonstrates how honesty, oneness and generosity towards all interdependent beings create the world’s happiest countries.)
How are you ensuring speech that is truly free and safe for everyone?
Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
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