Transatlantic Crossings

"Transatlantic Crossings: A Voyage of Discovery" is a collection of articles, essays, and documents written over a span of twenty years when Arthur Lipow was resident in Britain and was teaching at Birkbeck College, The University of London, and the Institute of U.S. Studies. He taught courses in American politics and foreign policy to advanced post-graduates students, including some Members of Parliament as well as Civil Servants. He was an active participant too in the independent, democratic peace movement, "European Nuclear Disarmament" (END) whose slogan was "Neither Washington Nor Moscow." One of the articles here tells of his arrest in still-Communist Czechoslovakia for the "crime" of meeting with Czech peace activists who opposed the stationing of Russian missiles in Czechoslovakia. The Foreword is written by Jan Kavan, a founder of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, co-founded with the dissident, Vaclav Havel, who when released from a Communist prison, became the first democratically elected President of the new Czech Republic. Kavan became the foreign minister of the Czech Republic and later was elected the President of the UN General Assembly. The text of the Foreword was delivered to the inaugural meeting of "The Center for Peace and Democracy," co-founded by Gretchen and Arthur Lipow in the U.S. in 2007. The Mission statement of the Center is reprinted in this volume along with other documents illustrating Arhur Lipow's long journey as a peace and democracy activist and writer. Included are the texts of Charter 77, Charter 88, of which he was co-founder - a call for a democratic written Constitution and written Bill of Rights, inspired by the first ten amendments to the American Constitution; and Charter 08, signed by over 100 Chinese democracy activists - all of which Lipow hopes will inspire a "Democracy 2016" movement in the U.S. where the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been ravaged by a Stasi-type surveillance state - all of which he hopes will lead to a global charter for democracy soon thereafter - one that defends the freedom of the press, bans torture, and acts as a barrier, legal as well as moral, to the spreading "inverted totalitarian" surveillance state (as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, terms it.) No less important, as reflected in the document for "Labour and Society International" is the call for trade union based social and economic justice to provide a global counterweight to the emerging global corporate economic order of "free trade," as embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA) and the pending "TransPacificTradeAgreement" and the parallel "TransAtlanticTradeAgeement" both of which give global power to the global corporations and are supported by the two parties of American imperialism which spread their global power on a network of over 1000 overseas military bases and whose unlimited financial resources have been fraudulently blessed by the American Supreme Court in the name of the First Amendment doctrine of "corporate personhood."