I am very excited to be included as a speaker in a large conference Ralph Nader is putting together in Washington, DC at the end of May.

Breaking Through Power

In Ralph’s own words:

…the civil society is fighting back with four full days (May 23, 24, 25, 26, 2016) at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. with a civic mobilization designed to break through the power of the corporate/political complex.

Breaking through power means securing long-overdue democratic solutions made possible by a new muscular civic nexus connecting local communities and Washington, D.C.

On these four days, speakers will present innovative ideas and strategies designed to take existing civic groups to higher levels of effectiveness.

Day One — May 23, 2016 will feature an unprecedented series of presentations by seventeen successful citizen advocacy groups of long standing.

Day Two – May 24, 2016 brings together a large gathering of authors, documentary filmmakers, reporters, columnists, musicians, poets and editorial cartoonists who will demonstrate the need for wider audiences over the mass media.

Day Three – May 25, 2016 will be dedicated to enhancing the waging of peace over the waging of war. We will assemble leading scholars having military and national security backgrounds such as ret. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Colin Powell, veterans groups such as Veterans For Peace, and long-time peace advocacy associations to explain how peace is more powerful than war.

Day Four — May 26, 2016 will unveil a new Civic Agenda (much of which has Left/Right support) that could be advanced by engaged and enraged citizens in each Congressional district. The agenda includes recognized necessities ignored by Congress for decades and will be presented by a veritable brain trust of recognized advocates for the well-being of present and future generations.

I’ll be speaking on the third day, May 25, along with an Iraqi friend who endured the first few years of the American occupation with his family in Baghdad.

More information, registration and tickets are here: Breaking Through Power. Please let me know if you can attend. As a further incentive the Mets are in town the first part of that week and I’ll buy the beer and hot dogs* 😉

An essay Ralph recently published on the motivations and purposes behind the conference can be found at Counterpunch.

*So long as the beer is non-alcoholic and the hot dogs are vegan. Ah sobriety and veganism you are the wretched twin children of boredom and lameness…