FROM THE EDITORS

Thank you for two years of support

Two years ago we thought: The news media is run by fools and stooges. If we put out a paper that tells what the US media won’t, and we cover the world wide political struggles against the US corporate and military machine, we’ll have a paper that honest people will love, AND we’ll do our part to resist the US use of deception in its efforts to fit the human race under its boot. Well, we are still getting used to the idea that we were right. Asheville Global Report is two years old, stronger than ever, and growing. And the US, stripped of its pretensions of humanity by a record of corporate plunder and barbarous military excursions, is more dependent every day on lies to conceal what is really happening – lies that we expose, while giving our readers the real consequences of US military and economic coercion.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear from someone who wants to publish a story or get a subscription or distribute the paper. AGR has become a means by which thousands of people who fear and loathe what the US is becoming work together to mount an informed and organized resistance, and to search for a more humane society.

Asheville Global Report has become required reading in high school, college and post graduate level courses, providing news free of state and corporate spin, and an example of what journalism could be and should be. And, as more people become aware of AGR and the paper’s record of honesty and resistance, opportunities for eyewitness reports increase. Amber Munger recently covered the election in Haiti for AGR, and we are looking forward to similar reports from Iraq and Colombia.

Our fund raising efforts have been successful. The recent drive for donations to cover a years’ printing costs has brought in over four thousand dollars, almost half the goal. In the next month or so, we’ll hold a joint raffle with Free Radio Asheville, and we plan to hold six benefit shows in 2001. Our advertising and subscription revenue is steadily increasing.

To our readers and writers, and everyone else who makes the paper what it is, we say THANK YOU SO MUCH! We are looking forward to the next two years, the next twenty years, and the years after. And, of course, we look forward to the day when we will not report on the preparation for war, or riots, or the mutilation of the global ecosystem, but a world at peace, heirs to the ancient vision of love triumphant.