please enjoy the free, full-show audio podcast:

The Spring 2010 Edition of ¡Presente! is out!: Dan Archer and Nikil Saval created the two-page, full-color comic about the history of the School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC).
Dan Archer is a comics journalist based in the Bay Area whose work focuses on US foreign policy, militarism and corporatism. He’s been published by Alternet, HuffPo, The Guardian UK and Common Dreams. You can read some of his comics online at ArchComix, or FaceBook befriend as a fan.
His 32p full-colour comic on the Honduran Coup of 2009 (including a 2p spread on the SOA) is now available for pre-order

• Click here to view Part 1
• Click here to view Part 2
• Watch the short clips about the School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) & the campaign to shut it down.
• Share the videos with your family & friends, then post them on your blogs & webpages to spread the word about the reality of U.S. foreign policy & the SOA/WHINSEC.
• You can also order documentaries about the SOA through the SOA Watch webpage.

At 5 PM MST David Swanson returns !
We will discuss his recent article Top 10 Problems with America Killing Its Own Citizens
Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder. Whatever happened to Law, courts & trials?

David Swanson, author, blogger, and activist. He is the author of “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union“ and of the introduction to “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush,” by Dennis Kucinich. Swanson served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. From 2000 to 2003, Swanson was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Following the 2004 elections, Swanson worked for the labor movement for a year, serving as media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, the AFL-CIO’s organization of labor media outlets: newsletters, radio shows, websites, etc.

In May 2005, Swanson was instrumental in making the Downing Street Memos known in the United States and discussed in Congress. He co-founded a coalition at AfterDowningStreet, and led an unsuccessful campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. Swanson worked closely with the peace movement and could be found at the intersection of campaigns to end the war in Iraq and campaigns to punish those who launched that war.

Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats, despite living in Charlottesville, Va. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a convenor of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, chair of the UFPJ working group on Accountability and Prosecution, and a member of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee.
Swanson does paid work for various peace and justice groups, including creating websites and organizing campaigns. The AfterDowningStreet website is funded by VelvetRevolution.

We spoke earlier with Jonathan Mazower from Survival International about the campaign for the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode tribe of Paraguay.
There are several different sub-groups of Ayoreo. The most isolated are the Totobiegosode (‘people from the place of the wild pigs’). Since 1969 many have been forced out of the forest, but some still avoid all contact with outsiders.
Their first sustained contact with white people came in the 1940s and 1950s, when Mennonite farmers established colonies on their land. The Ayoreo resisted this invasion, and there were killings on both sides.
In 1979 and 1986 the American fundamentalist New Tribes Mission helped organise ‘manhunts’ in which large groups of Totobiegosode were forcibly brought out of the forest. Several Ayoreo died in these encounters, and others succumbed later to disease.

• Write a letter to the Paraguayan parliament using Survival’s online letter-writing tool.
• Donate to the Ayoreo campaign (and other Survival campaigns).
• Write to the President, your senators, congressmen or other elected officials (US).
• Befriend Survival International on FaceBook to show your support for their incredible work.

Tribal people appeal to James Cameron

Survival’s appeal to James Cameron appears today in Variety magazine. ©Survival Tribal peoples’ rights organization Survival International has appealed to Avatar director James Cameron on behalf of an Indian tribe through an ad in the film industry magazine Variety (published today 8 February 2010).
In the ad Survival asks Mr Cameron to help the Dongria Kondh tribe of Orissa, India, whose story is uncannily similar to that of the Na’vi in Avatar. The ad says:

Appeal to James Cameron
Avatar is fantasy … and real.
The Dongria Kondh tribe in India are struggling to defend their land against a mining company hell-bent on destroying their sacred mountain.
Please help the Dongria.
We’ve watched your film – now watch ours:
Survival’s ten-minute film ‘Mine: story of a sacred mountain’, narrated by Joanna Lumley, exposes the Dongria’s plight.
The Dongria live in the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa state, India. British FTSE-100 company Vedanta Resources is determined to mine their sacred mountain’s rich seam of bauxite (aluminium ore). Vedanta is majority-owned by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal.
The Dongria and other local Kondh people are resisting Vedanta, and are determined to save Niyamgiri from becoming an industrial wasteland. Other Kondh groups are already suffering from a bauxite refinery, built and operated by Vedanta, at the base of the Niyamgiri Hills.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry says, ‘Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything’, for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected. The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa, India.
Like the Na’vi of ‘Avatar’, the Dongria Kondh are also at risk, as their lands are set to be mined by Vedanta Resources who will stop at nothing to achieve their aims. The mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area.
I do hope that James Cameron will join the Dongria’s struggle to save their sacred mountain and secure their future.’