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Quote of the Day - Michelle Alexander: Dr. King was speaking out against the Vietnam War, condemning America's militarism and imperialism; Reader's Comments: March on Washington; Black Unionists; Full Employment; Bradley Manning; Syria; Wal-Mart Workers Winning; U.S.'s 1 Percent So Much Richer; Visualization of Every Protest Since 1979; Announcement - Memorial for Margrit Pittman - New York - Oct. 6

David McReynolds, co-worker with March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin, in the War Resisters League, remembers the march, the country and Washington, D.C. in 1963. The slogan was "Jobs and Freedom." The link was very deliberate - for what was freedom without a job? He is also critical of Rustin's rightward turn after the march and his support of the war in Vietnam.

Not only does an image like that of construction workers attacking protesters (as famously occurred on Wall Street in May 1970) justify foreign interventions and military spending, it stigmatizes dissenters as illegitimate and alien to the body politic. That grossly distorts real working class sentiment or the class composition of protesters, all to divide critics themselves.

As part of their national convention in Chicago, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) presented a public forum titled "21st Century American Militarism: Occupation Abroad and Resistance at Home." Featuring talks by Christian Parenti, Michael Rakowitz, Suraia Suhar, and Nick Turse, and followed by an interesting Q&A session - a stimulating discussion of war and militarism in the current day US Empire.

The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg exposed were not military secrets. They were historical secrets - a history of U.S. intervention and deceit that Ellsberg believed, if widely known, would undermine the U.S. pretexts in defense of the war's prosecution. Like today's whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg knew the consequences for his act of defiance. He was indicted on 11 counts of theft and violation of the Espionage Act.

The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military invasion against a popular, rural-based insurgency for independence...During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. planes sprayed more than twenty million gallons of herbicide defoliants, Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and toxic herbicide constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military.

In Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm,...