The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at www.fpif.org, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.

Tom Barry, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) www.irc-online.org and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be contacted at <tom@irc-online.org>.

We Count on Your Support!

Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Dear PR Subscribers:

"We count on you." That's a line that appears near the top of all the issues of the Progressive Response. And it means more than moral support. Like other nonprofits, the IRC is facing bleak prospects for foundation funding because of the stock market.

Over the past six years, we have produced the Progressive Response with ever-increasing, but minimal support from our subscribers--now numbering more than 10,000. Now, we really need to starting counting your contributions, as well as counting on your notes of appreciation and encouragement.

I believe you can help us meet the financial challenge we face--which is to raise $23,500 to pay for the staff time and other expenses needed to produce the Progressive Response for the next year. It is too difficult for us and for you to start charging subscriptions for an online publication, so we are asking for donations.

For those of you who enjoy and have come to rely on the Progressive Response, I ask that you consider contributing at least $20 to the IRC to keep the Progressive Response alive and growing. For those who can afford more, please consider a larger contribution.

Please remember the Progressive Response is not free. It's a progressive production, but like any other product it takes dollars to pay for our computers, our production staff, our editors, and our contributors.

You can use our secure server to make contributions, or simply call our office with your credit card number or mail us a check.

Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
P.O. Box 2178
Silver City, NM 88062-2178
Phone: (505) 388-0208

To use our secure server for online giving:

https://secure.iexposure.com/fpif.org/donate.cfm

I am attaching below a letter of support written by Noam Chomsky, a long-time board member and supporter of the IRC.

I look forward to your progressive, generous response.

Sincerely,

Tom Barry

Dear friends,

One cannot accuse the Bush administration of any lack of clarity about its "vision" for global affairs.

This administration understands very well that in terms of military force the United States stands alone, beyond any conceivable challenge. And this administration has made it crystal clear that it intends to use this power to organize the world to satisfy the demands of the narrow sector of domestic power and privilege that it represents. In service of the same interests, Bush and company are quite openly conducting an assault against the domestic population. They are seeking to impose obedience by undermining civil liberties and fostering a distorted brand of patriotism that aims at suppressing democratic debate.

The Bush administration is also breaking new ground in the brazenness of its contempt for international law and treaty obligations. The language and processes of multilateralism, international rule of law, treaties, and international cooperation have been thrown into the trash heap of history: the Kyoto protocol, International Criminal Court, arms control treaties, human rights conditionality on U.S. military aid--indeed any impediment to unconstrained U.S. force and coercion. Emboldened by their historically unprecedented and rapidly escalating military hegemony, leading Bush planners make no secret of their intention to validate the four-word definition that George Bush Sr. gave to his new world order--"What we say goes."

There is only one deterrent to this mad and destructive course--the people of the United States.

There can be no more urgent task than to speak truth about power--the destructive power unleashed in the name of all the people of the United States. Speaking truth about power entails good research and analysis by U.S. progressives, and it means listening to those impacted by U.S. power abroad. Truth about power facilitates the essential organizing and advocacy needed to ensure that the immense resources of the U.S. can help create a more decent, livable world.

Since 1979 the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, on the internet at www.irc-online.org) has been doing just this. Now more than ever, the IRC needs your support to continue this important work, because never before has U.S. power been so widely projected and unconstrained.

With long experience in U.S.-Latin American relations, the IRC has in the past year launched its new Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org). This program is not only critiquing how the U.S. is wielding its weight in the region--meddling in domestic politics in Bolivia and Venezuela, supporting state-sponsored terror in Colombia, funding migrant detention centers in Guatemala, and pushing its now discredited neoliberal trade agenda--but is also looking at how citizens are fighting back and establishing alternatives.

Six years ago the IRC had a vision of creating "a citizen-based think tank without walls." Today that vision has been realized in the internationally renowned Foreign Policy In Focus project (www.fpif.org). Over the years, FPIF has demonstrated an admirable capacity to respond to global affairs crises with expert analysis based on sound progressive principles. Also, in the past year I applauded the IRC's launch of an "Outside the U.S." component of FPIF, which insures that perspectives from countries impacted by U.S. policies become part of the public debate.

A new IRC initiative, the Project on the Present Danger (www.presentdanger.org), is a campaign to build support for international cooperation and law as the proper framework for managing global affairs. We define the "present danger" as U.S. unilateralism and U.S. attacks on multilateral frameworks for peace and security. Over the past six months, the IRC has also covered new investigative and analytical ground in its focus on the right-wing front groups and ideologues that are shaping Bush's supremacist foreign policy.

As a member of the IRC's board of directors--and a long-time fan of its work--I urge you to make a donation in support of the IRC.

More than ever before, we need groups like the IRC speaking out, asking hard questions, tabling alternatives, and telling it like it is.

Sincerely,

Noam Chomsky

Please consider supporting Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). FPIF is a new kind of think tank—one serving citizen movements and advancing a fresh, internationalist understanding of global affairs. Although we make our FPIF products freely available on the Internet, we need financial support to cover our staff time and expenses. Increasingly, FPIF depends on you and other individual donors to sustain our bare-bones budget. Click on https://secure.iexposure.com/fpif.org/donate.cfm to support FPIF online, or for information about making contributions over the phone or through the mail.

We Count on Your Support. Thank you.

Subscribe to The Progressive Response!

To subscribe to The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:

To unsubscribe from The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:
lists-unsubscribe@irc-online.org

Simply click the appropriate hyperlink above, or send a blank email to the appropriate email address above.

We're working to make the Progressive Response informative and useful, so let us know how we're doing, via email to irc@irc-online.org. Please put "Progressive Response" in the subject line. Please feel free to cross-post the Progressive Response elsewhere. We apologize for any duplicate copies you may receive.

IRC
Tom Barry
Editor, Progressive Response
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: tom@irc-online.org

IPS
Martha Honey
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: ipsps@igc.org

This page was last modified on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 7:21 PM
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality of this website.
Copyright © 2001 IRC and IPS. All rights reserved.