A few nice American Public University images I found:
Ralph Nader challenges us to get active
Image by guano
I took quite a few shots without a flash, trying to be unobtrusive. They had some very bright lights on Ralph. He is used to it. All my shots turned out fuzzy except for one where I used my flash. It’s too bad, because I was in the front row and very close.
Ralph spoke with indignation about how corporations are treated as if they had human rights. God Bless you, Mr. Nader, you telol the truth about how corporations have taken over in evil ways. No other candidate has the guts to take on that kind of serious reform. He asked each us of who were are and what we have done to help leave our communities a better place. Here is an article from the local paper, Daily Pantagraph…
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Nader visits ISU, impresses necessity of civic action
By Michele Steinbacher
Daily Pantagraph
Watch VIDEO of the press conference.
NORMAL — Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are locked in a back-and-forth exchange of barbs that illustrates a new low in presidential politics, third-party candidate Ralph Nader said Monday. Citing the latest dispute over Obama’s comment about rural voters being bitter and whether Clinton was sincere in her visit to a working-class tavern, Nader said their only hope of escape from the cycle of charge and countercharge is the voters.
“They can only be rescued by the people. … Voters need to raise the expectation levels,” said Nader, the famed consumer advocate whom Time magazine called one of the 100 most influential voices of the 20th century.
Nader was in Normal to speak at the Civic Engagement Celebration at Illinois State University. The event is tied to ISU’s participation in the American Democracy Project, which aims to help students at ISU and other campuses become more civic-minded and politically aware.
Nader called the Democratic senators’ latest exchanges “highly exaggerated responses to casual sound bytes.” He said they embarrass the two candidates, the voters and everyone around the globe watching the presidential race.
“It’s as if these candidates are running for ‘Saturday Night Live’ and not the office of the president of the United States,” he said.
Nader called his own decision to join the presidential race a way to raise awareness about the lack of competition in the U.S. political process. The 2008 election marks his fifth campaign for the nation’s top post.
“We’ve allowed our country to turn into a two-party dictatorship, he said, criticizing both the Democratic and Republican parties for pandering to the same corporate contributions. “They are selling the U.S. government to the highest corporate bidder.”
He told the group of about 800 people that he hoped his visit to the campus would shake up the students from a period of passivity enveloping the nation.
“Every social justice movement in our history has started with shaking up,” he said, alluding to the American Revolution, the end of slavery, the civil rights movement and women fighting for the right to vote. “Civic action means you have to break your routine.”
He called on the students to first recognize the important role of each voter.
“You have to have a sense that you matter or count,” he said.
Colleges should build civic skills courses into their curriculum, he said. Students should be taught how to be active public citizens, not just a series of facts to memorize about the branches of government.
Nader criticized today’s young adults for lacking enough public indignation to get up and become civically active. He said too many see fighting city hall or affecting change at the national level as impossible.
It’s easier to ignore civic duty and instead watch episodes of “American Idol” or update profiles on social networks like Facebook, he said.
Looking back to people involved in earlier social justice movements, Nader said those citizens didn’t have the communication technology available today, but they still connected and moved forward.
“We can’t make excuses for ourselves,†he said.
Destiny Pediment by Adolph A. Weinman (19ȃ) (SOS! Control # IAS 77006179)
Image by WikiProject Public Art
Central seated figure flanked by two men on horses and multiple seated figures on either side of the horsemen. A seated griffin at the far ends of the pediment finishes off the group scene. The central figure represents Destiny, one of the men on horses represent "The Arts of Peace," and the other represents "The Arts of War." The seated figures represent "The Romance of History," and "The Song of Achievement." The griffins represent the "Guardians of the Archives."
Index of American Sculpture, University of Delaware, 1985
Source: Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum, P.O. Box 37012, MRC 970, Washington, D.C. 20013-훤
siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=…
National Archives and Records Administration, 7th & Pennsylvania Avenue, West facade, Washington, District of Columbia
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A cool green Nadre pic from the web
Nader is not running green, as he did in 1996 and 2000.
He is strictly independent, as he was in 2004.
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Petra Kelly helped found the Green movement in Germany
”…for forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights.”
Petra Karin Kelly, born in 1947, was one of the founders in 1979 of Die Grünen, the West German Green Party, which she described as ‘a non-violent ecological and basic-democratic anti-war coalition of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary grassroots oriented forces’.
As one of the party’s national chairpersons from 1980 to 1982, she achieved international renown as the German Greens put environmental politics on the European political agenda in the early 1980s. In 1983 she was elected to the Bundestag, the German parliament, as one of 28 Green MPs and was speaker of the party’s parliamentary group until 1984. She was re-elected to the Bundestag in 1987 but her party was badly defeated three years later at the first elections of a reunited Germany, less than two years before her tragic death in 1992.
In her international political work and public speaking, Kelly concentrated on the four themes closest to her heart: peace and non-violence, ecology, feminism and human rights, and the links between them. She believed in the right of civil disobedience and participated in many such actions around the world. She used her status as the world’s most famous ‘Green’ to bring her passionate concern for the rights of the victims of oppression and violence to the attention of everyone she met, from heads of government to groups of activists. In her last years much of her indefatigable energy was taken up by the cause of Tibet – and, as always, the dangers of nuclear radiation.
Kelly also founded and chaired an association for the support of cancer research in children, a Europe-wide citizen group founded after the death from cancer at the age of 10 of her sister, Grace.
Kelly’s first book, Fighting for Hope, was published in 1984 (in English by Chatto and Windus). She later wrote books on Hiroshima, childhood cancer and Tibet.
Quotation
"The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth… In a world struggling in violence and dishonesty, the further development of non-violence – not only as a philosophy but as a way of life, as a force on the streets, in the market squares, outside the missile bases, inside the chemical plants and inside the war industry – becomes one of the most urgent priorities."
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