Articles by GlenAnderson

About GlenAnderson
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org
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“Voter-Owned Elections: Replace Special Interests’ Big-Money Financing.” This is necessary in order to really solve our nation’s health care crisis.

March 23, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

The Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s November 2009 TV program is still timely now! It focuses on how big money has corrupted our elections, so we need to empower voters to replace the “special interests” that fund our elections. As a case study about this, we pay special attention to our grossly inadequate health care system. Universal Single-Payer would be a much better alternative to our current system, but insurance and pharmaceutical companies pay big money to political candidates in order to prevent the government from replacing our current bad system with a great alternative. To watch the interview with two […]

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“Sell Off All Fossil Fuel Investments Now”

March 18, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

The April 2018 interview on “Glen’s Parallax Perspectives” explores an important aspect of the climate crisis that has been largely neglected. If people pay attention to this aspect, we can protect the climate and also save ourselves from serious financial losses. The climate crisis has forced the world to start significantly shifting away from coal and oil. We must shift away from all fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) much more rapidly in order to protect Planet Earth – and all of us – from catastrophic climate disruptions. Sharply reducing our consumption of fossil fuels will financially hurt the […]

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Watergate book & film “All the President’s Men” is highly relevant now!

March 13, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

Last night I watched the feature film “All the President’s Men,” which accurately lays out the Watergate scandal and the criminality of Nixon’s administration.  I had watched the film a number of years before and read the book many years before that. Now it is more relevant than ever, especially because: — The extremely corrupt Trump regime is violating the Constitution and the rule of law — News media nowadays do not dedicate themselves to investigative reporting and seeking the truth, nearly so much as they did before — Media consolidation — especially by right-wing owners — has created enormous […]

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Korea’s People — Both North and South — Want Peace

March 3, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

Unlike many nations that are comprised of several ethnic groups, Korea’s people — both North and South — are all the same:  They are Koreans.  One ethnic group.  The arbitrary line that divided their nation in the early 1950s has absolutely no basis in ethnicity or culture or geography or any other understandable justification.  It was imposed upon them to provide a temporary division related to the Korean War from the early 1950s. The Korean War never ended.  We’ve had a cease-fire but no formal peace treaty. The Korean people — both North and South — have family members on […]

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Prevent Trump’s war against Iran

March 3, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

Decent people must prevent Trump from starting a totally unnecessary war against Iran. Obama helped the U.S., France, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia, China and Iran use diplomacy to create a deal that stopped Iran’s nuclear weapons program. This Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been working very well. The only people who oppose the JCPOA are Trump and hawks who have always wanted war against Iran. George W. Bush lied and falsely claimed that Iraq was building certain weapons. Bush rejected diplomacy in order to start his war against Iraq in 2003 – a war we are still fighting. […]

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Weird aspects of the screwed-up “war on drugs” — July 2015 article in The Atlantic

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

The “war on drugs” has been dysfunctional and counter-productive for many years.  It was escalated when Nixon tried to attack the “hippie” and anti-war movements and also to create public animosity toward African Americans by causing the public to fear them as drug dealers.  Other politicians also provoked a “tough-on-crime” mania in order to attack their demographic and political opponents and in order to ingratiate themselves with voters who were easy to exploit through fear, racism, ignorance, and simplistic solutions to complex problems. This article in the July 2015 issue of The Atlantic magazine is informative: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/chapo-mexico-drug-war/398927/

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Nearly 400 fatal police shootings occurred in the U.S. from January 1 to late May in 2015.

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shootings-in-2015-approaching-400-nationwide/2015/05/30/d322256a-058e-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?wpisrc=al_alert-national We keep seeing statistics about the huge number of police shootings.  This article came from several years ago.  The slaughter will continue until the public insists on changing public policy in several ways.

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Norway and Sweden have more humane criminal justice systems

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

The U.S. has a very harsh (and ineffective) criminal justice system, compared to other modern nations.  Here is some information about Norway and Sweden that I saved from a few years ago: Norway’s prisons are much better than the U.S.’s.  Instead of dehumanizing their inmates, they help prisoners retain their human dignity, so they will become better able to reenter society.  http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michael-moore-norway-prison-tony-papa-sentence?akid=13995.2186.s12ezx&rd=1&src=newsletter1051042&t=10 In 2013 Sweden acted sensibly to reduce prison populations.  They accomplished this for several reasons including reducing sentence length and emphasizing rehabilitation.  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/12-0 I would like to see ordinary Americans (including taxpayers and conservatives) confront elected officials and […]

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Nuclear Weapons — Sources of Information

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

I compiled a list of information sources to go along with the March 2018 TV program, which you can watch through this blog’s “TV Programs” part or the “Nuclear Weapons” part. CLICK THE LINK BELOW: Nuclear Weapons Information Sources  

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Reject 4 stupid remedies conservatives have proposed for reducing gun violence in schools

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

Conservatives often misunderstand or distort the problems in our society, and they draw upon distorted values, so they tend to propose remedies that widely diverge from practical solutions to our society’s problems. Here are 4 stupid remedies conservatives have proposed for reducing gun violence in schools: https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/4-conservatives-ideas-preventing-gun-violence-instead-gun-control?akid=16759.2186.DjFJIn&rd=1&src=newsletter1089105&t=4 Thoughtful, humane people need to reject such remedies and organize at the grassroots for remedies that will draw upon society’s best values and valid evidence-based research about what works and what does not work.  We also need to organize against the Gun Lobby’s deliberate campaigns to mislead the public and dominate government.  

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The real problem of violence is NOT mental illness. The real problems are ANGER and ACCESS TO GUNS.

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

When mass shootings occur, many politicians try to shift attention away from the gun and blame the shooter for mental illness.  Yes, our society should provide more adequate funding and services for mental health.  But the problem is not “mental illness” per se.  The problem is ANGER.  Our society needs to explore and implement a wide variety of ways to reduce anger throughout our society. Consider this article about ANGER:  http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/04/anger_causes_violence_treat_it_rather_than_mental_illness_to_stop_mass_murder.html Do not let gun supporters avoid responsibility for the too-easy access to guns.  They want to blame mentally ill persons.  Instead, we must reduce access to guns, so consider […]

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Let’s correct the misunderstanding of the Second Amendment

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

The gun lobby and other conservatives have grossly misled the American people about what the Second Amendment really means. In order to reduce gun violence — and reduce the power of the gun lobby — decent people must change the public’s misconceptions about it. The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment says:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Some years ago Warren Burger, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (who happened to be conservative) understood the reality and wrote […]

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U.S.’s violent foreign policy leads to gun violence WITHIN the U.S.

February 25, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

We keep seeing how ALL ISSUES are INTER-CONNECTED. Among the reasons why the U.S. has so much gun violence is that the U.S. government sets a bad example with our violent militaristic foreign policy. On July 9 2016, I wrote about how President Obama was in Poland meeting with heads of NATO nations and expanding NATO provocatively to Russia’s borders and expanding NATO’s militarism into other part of the Eastern Hemisphere and pushing NATO’s member nations to spend more on militarism. During his press conference there during that visit, Obama praised those military escalations and at the same time he […]

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Read Glen’s thorough report on converting to a peace economy

February 24, 2018 GlenAnderson 0

Throughout our nation’s history, we had occasional wars and then de-mobilized afterward. But after World War II we launched the Cold War and maintained a permanent war status. We also created a “permanent war economy.” Massive military spending year after year – decade after decade – since the 1940s – has distorted and disrupted the U.S. economy and hurt our society in many ways. Typically when we think of military spending, we think of the budget and the trade-offs between military spending and spending for better purposes.  However, far beyond such budgetary trade-offs, military spending causes systemic harm to our […]