FRESNO CENTER for NONVIOLENCE
January 2021
Currently CLOSED until further notice regarding the Corona virus Pandemic.
We miss you already.
Dedicated to PEACE and SOCIAL JUSTICE through
SIMPLICITY ~ JUSTICE ~ INCLUSIVENESS ~ NON-INJURY
1584 N. Van Ness Ave., 93728
www.centerfornonviolence.org – email: info@centerfornonviolence.org
Before President Trump leaves office, he is rushing through federal executions at a gruesome pace. There has not been a federal execution for 17 years. And in the last six months of 2020, 8 federal executions have taken place which is more than we have had in 57 years.
For a lame duck president to approve these executions is almost unprecedented. As I am writing this on December 10th, there will be another execution today in Terre Haute, Indiana. Protests and vigils are taking place. Several more executions will take place in January, including one woman the day before President Trump leaves office.
It is well known that President Elect Biden will abolish the federal death penalty when he is inaugurated, and it is hoped that he will do that in the first 100 days in office. Overall, public support for the death penalty has been dropping each year. Some believe that killing someone for killing someone makes no sense, some believe it is barbaric, some believe that the expense is not worth it – so many appeals and years happen before a person is put to death. States that have overturned the death penalty continue to grow with 21 states and 4 others have instituted governor-imposed moratoriums. The organization Death Penalty Focus has played a huge part in educating people.
The US is one of very few other countries who has the death penalty. We are in the company of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and China and put more people to death than they do! All of Europe and the British Isles have abolished it many years ago. My own country England did in 1969 after a woman was executed which proved too much for the public. Let us hope that with Lisa Montgomery scheduled to be executed the day before President Trump leaves office this will have much the same effect. – Angela Price.
KFCF 88.1 FM
Wednesday January 13th at 3 pm.
We begin the new radio year out with our host Josh Shurley and his guest, Fresno City College Professor Paul Gilmore speaking about MLK Day and Civil Rights struggle. If you have any questions, please call the Center at 559-237-3223. Although we are closed, we do pick up messages and respond to them.
Last year final show was hosted by Angela Price and as her guest John LaForge, co-director of Nuke watch, a Wisconsin-based peace group dedicated to abolishing militarism and weapons of mass destruction. They discussed the United Nations Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons which on January 22nd, 2021 will go into effect. Plus, what is happening in Fukushima, as well as resistance to U.S. Weapons based in Germany.
To hear it click on the play button below or visit this link:
https://soundcloud.com/user-32180140/stiu120920
Martin Luther King Jr. birthday on Monday, January 18, 2021.
“Guarantee Minimum Income.”
An idea supported by Martin L. King Jr. from the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
The first Sunni Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr, who came to power in 632 C.E., introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually. This was later increased to twenty dirhams. In 1795, American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a citizen’s dividend to all United States citizens as compensation for “loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property” (Agrarian Justice, 1795). French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte echoed Paine’s sentiments and commented that ‘man is entitled by birthright to a share of the Earth’s produce sufficient to fill the needs of his existence’ (Herold, 1955). The American economist Henry George advocated for a dividend paid to all citizens from the revenue generated by a land value tax.
In 1963, Robert Theobald published the book Free Men and Free Markets, in which he advocated a guaranteed Cloward–Piven strategy, minimum income (the origin of the modern version of the phrase). In 1966, the advocated “overloading” the US welfare system to force its collapse in the hopes that it would be replaced by “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”. In his final book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (1967), Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” —
(1967) from the chapter titled “Where We Are Going.”
