OCCUPY THIS: WAR AND JOBS

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via TomHayden.com

Unemployment in 1933: 24.9%
Unemployment in 1937: 14.3%
Unemployment in 1938: 19%
Unemployment in 1942: 5%

These statistics from the Historical Statistics of the United States clearly show that the New Deal dramatically lessened joblessness from Roosevelt’s election in 1932 until his second term; then began to climb when FDR retreated to a more conservative path; then finally ended because of war spending in World War 2.

Sensing the return of a structure crisis, Roosevelt proposed an “economic bill of rights” in his 1944 State of the Union address. Roosevelt died and his proposed domestic agenda was subordinated to seventy years of Cold War military spending.[see the fine history by Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights, FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever, 2004.]

Needless to say, spending on spies and electronic battlefields in the Long War on Terrorism will not resolve our unemployment crisis, and sending hundreds of thousands of Americans into ground wars is not an option.

Civilian economic development – investment in green jobs, infrastructure, education, health care, tax credits for job creation – is the only path to a full employment economy. #

Iraq: 100 Days of Solidarity

By Medea Benjamin
Beaver County Peace Links via Code Pink

Sept 28, 2011 - This week marks the beginning of what is supposed to be the final 100 days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But if U.S. troops are to leave Iraq at the end of this year as promised — repeatedly — it will take grassroots pressure to counter the growing "occupy-Iraq-forever" chorus in Washington.

Despite the fact that there is a Bush-era agreement with the Iraqi government to leave, despite the fact that the majority of Iraqis and Americans don’t support a continued U.S. presence, and despite the fact that Congress is supposedly in an all-out austerity mode, strong forces — including generals, war profiteers and hawks in both parties — are pushing President Obama to violate the agreement negotiated by his predecessor and keep a significant number of troops in Iraq past the December 31, 2011 deadline.

It’s true there has already been a major withdrawal of U.S. troops, from a high of 170,000 in 2007 to about 45,000 troops today (with most of the troops being sent over to occupy Afghanistan instead). That number, however, doesn’t tell the whole picture. As the New York Times notes, "Even as the military reduces its troop strength in Iraq, the C.I.A. will continue to have a major presence in the country, as will security contractors working for the State Department," the latter to defend a U.S. embassy that’s bigger than the Vatican.

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On Oct 6 in DC, Let’s Make

a National Clamor for Peace

By Robert Naiman
Beaver County Peace Links via JustForeignPolicy.org

On October 7, 2011, the United States will have been at war for ten years.

Let’s mark the occasion by making a national clamor for peace so loud that Congress, the president, and big media will have to pay attention.

October 7 happens to fall on a Friday this year. If you get to choose, Friday is not necessarily the most strategic day to make a national clamor for peace, because 1) Congress will likely not be in session 2) Friday is, in general, a crummy day to try to get media attention and 3) even if these two things weren’t true or relevant, Friday is not a great day to try to hold public attention. People’s thoughts are turning to the weekend, and then the weekend erases the chalkboard.

Moreover, the press has to cover the anniversary of the war, but these stories are going to be largely written and produced before Friday. The default media narrative will be: America has lost interest in the wars, because of the economy and unemployment, because "the wars are already winding down," or some other story that journalists or editors will make up. We have to beat this default media narrative. To beat it, we need to get in front of it.

So let’s mark the occasion on Thursday, October 6. Let’s have a national, "ecumenical" day of action for peace: to end the wars and cut the military budget.

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Blinded by Fright

We’re 10 years past the Twin Towers attack and still fighting wars in its name. Can we open our eyes in time?

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising via Detroit Metro Times

September 7, 2011 - After witnessing the first jetliner crash into the Twin Towers on that Sept. 11 morning, a friend of mine’s wife and 7-year-old daughter fled to their nearby Manhattan loft and ran to the roof to look around. From there, they saw the second plane explode in a rolling ball of flaming fuel across the rooftops. It felt like the heat of a fiery furnace.

Not long after, the girl was struck with blindness. She rarely left her room. Her parents worked with therapists for months, trying various techniques including touch and visualization, before the young girl finally recovered her sight.

"The interesting new development," my friend reports, "is that she no longer remembers very much, which she told me when I asked her if she would be willing to speak with you."

That’s what happened to America itself 10 years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be charged that many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before.

But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a pre-existing blindness as to the way much of the world sees us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — in all, a dozen "shadow wars," according to The New York Times. In Bob Woodward’s crucial book, Obama’s Wars, there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009.

From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of the "Long War," a counterinsurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S. open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.

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Get Ready to Rumble for Jobs,

Not War and More Weapons

By Judith Le Blanc
Beaver County Peace Links via CommonDreams.org

Something is missing in the swirl of news reporting on the debt ceiling deal struck on August 2 by the Congress and the President for close to $1 trillion in cuts in discretionary programs over the next decade.

Will the 56% of discretionary spending that goes to the Pentagon take a hit in the name of deficit reduction?

The short answer is not necessarily, not unless we are ready to rumble.

Even the Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain have no idea what the deal does to the Pentagon budget.

The cruel irony is the debt ceiling deal exempts spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though war costs are one of the biggest factors driving up the national debt by over a trillion dollars.

Caps have been set for ’security and non security’ spending. The cuts will follow. The security category lumps together the Pentagon with the State Department, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and nuclear weapons systems.

Right now cuts to the Pentagon budget are not guaranteed. It is threat. Without a grassroots rumble the ax won’t fall on the Pentagon or weapons of mass destruction, it will land on veteran’s benefits or diplomatic efforts.

It’s a fight, not a discussion.

The military budget has doubled in the last 13 years. Up until now there has been a bottomless till for weapons and wars. Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, says, "in real or inflation adjusted dollars it is higher than at any time since World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam wars and the height of the Reagan buildup."

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Gates Speech Reveals Deep Splits in NATO

By Alan Woods
Progressive America Rising via In Defense of Marxism

London, June 17, 2011 - A decade ago George W Bush and the neo-cons took advantage of 9/11 and combined pseudo-democratic demagogy with a thirst for revenge to launch American foreign policy on the road of brute military force. But after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the wake of the deepest slump since the 1930s, the mood has changed.

A few months before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, an article published in The Financial Times carried the headline: “US loses its appetite for job as the world’s policeman”. This title sums up the changed position of the US in world politics. It is a reflection of the fact that ten years later the effects of the bombing of the Twin Towers have begun to wear off. The poisonous fog of chauvinism has dissipated, leaving America with a bad headache.

The changed situation is shown by Washington’s attitude to the Libya crisis. The confusion in Washington over how the US should respond to the epoch-making changes in the Middle East signals the arrival of a new era in US foreign policy. The Arab Revolution has thrown the whole of the Middle East and North Africa into the melting pot. It has dissolved all the old certainties, undermined the old safe allies of Washington and thrown its foreign policy into confusion and reduced to ashes the boastful notion of the New World Order. US imperialism was at a loss to understand these events, which it had not predicted and which it did not expect.

Analysts in Washington were shocked to realize that the US administration had no control over the Arab street, and that it is no easy job to re-establish America’s lost influence and authority in what is a key element in its international strategy. Washington is having serious difficulties in reconciling its traditional foreign policy interests with a revolutionary movement in favour of real democracy.

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With Afghanistan, Now it’s a Critical

Moment of Opportunity for Obama

The president has gained the moral and political capital to responsibly end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via Los Angles Times

May 5, 2011 - President Obama has now gained the moral and political capital to responsibly end the U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. With an average of 30 to 50 Americans being killed each month in Afghanistan, the total will be well over 1,000 on Obama’s watch if nothing is done. In addition to saving lives, removing 60,000 troops from Afghanistan in 2011-12 would also save about $70 billion a year in tax dollars.

The targeted killing of Osama bin Laden is powerful evidence that terrorist threats, both real and hypothetical, can be more effectively suppressed by special forces operations than by deploying hundreds of thousands of American soldiers on the ground.

The Bin Laden operation proves that a counterterrorism strategy focusing on intelligence, airstrikes and special forces units, as advocated by people such as Vice President Joe Biden and conservative columnist George Will, would be an effective deterrent against any new clandestine cells seeking to launch attacks against the United States.

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Stop the Presses, Literally in Iraq

The US military praises Iraqi security forces as they crack down on press freedom.

The US has remained largely silent following Iraq’s recent crackdown on press freedom [GALLO/GETTY]

By Nick Turse

Beaver County Peace Links via al-Jazeera

The first months of this year have been grim for free speech in Iraq.

As revolts swept across the Middle East and North Africa, they spread to Iraqi cities and towns, but took on a very different cast.

In February, in places like Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Tikrit, protesters took to the streets, intent on reform - focused on ending corruption and the chronic shortages of food, water, electricity and jobs - but not toppling the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The response by government security forces, who have arrested, beaten, and shot protesters, leaving hundreds dead or wounded, however, was similar to that of other autocratic rulers around the region.

Attacks by Iraqi forces on freedom of the press, in the form of harassment, detention, and assaults on individual journalists, raids of radio stations, the offices of newspapers and press freedom groups have also shown the dark side of Maliki’s regime.

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Here’s More Than You Probably

Wanted to Know About Afghanistan

More than 30 FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS

Beaver County Peace Links via UFPJ’s Afghan War Weekly

Anatomy of an Afghan war tragedy

By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times [April 10, 2011]

—- "We have 18 pax [passengers] dismounted and spreading out at this time," an Air Force pilot said from a cramped control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 7,000 miles away. He was flying a Predator drone remotely using a joystick, watching its live video transmissions from the Afghan sky and radioing his crew and the unit on the ground. None of those Afghans was an insurgent. They were men, women and children going about their business, unaware that a unit of U.S. soldiers was just a few miles away, and that teams of U.S. military pilots, camera operators and video screeners had taken them for a group of Taliban fighters. The Americans were using some of the most sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-drone-20110410,0,2818134,full.story

Brandon Barrett’s War

The Army didn’t tell anyone about a disturbed AWOL soldier until it was too late.

By Rick Anderson, Seattle Weekly [April 13 2011]

—- Brandon Barrett, who killed at least two enemy fighters during his yearlong tour, didn’t seem to fare badly, however. During a post-deployment health screening last summer, he told doctors only that he was a bit nervous, could be startled from time to time, and had seen lots of dead people. Otherwise, he was fine, he added, and certainly not suicidal. But doctors, according to a 200-page Army report on Barrett’s case obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, worried he was keeping his real feelings to himself. http://www.seattleweekly.com/2011-04-13/news/brandon-barrett-s-war/

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Rebel guarding oil field in Eastern Libya

Libya and the World of Oil

By Noam Chomsky
Beaver County Peace Links via Truthout.org

April 5, 2011 - Last month, at the international tribunal on crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone, the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor came to an end.

The chief prosecutor, U.S. law professor David Crane, informed The Times of London that the case was incomplete: The prosecutors intended to charge Moammar Gadhafi, who, Crane said, “was ultimately responsible for the mutilation, maiming and/or murder of 1.2 million people.”

But the charge was not to be. The U.S., U.K. and others intervened to block it. Asked why, Crane said, “Welcome to the world of oil.”

Another recent Gadhafi casualty was Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics, who resigned after revelations of the school’s links to the Libyan dictator.

In Cambridge, Mass., the Monitor Group, a consultancy firm founded by Harvard professors, was well paid for such services as a book to bring Gadhafi’s immortal words to the public “in conversation with renowned international experts,” along with other efforts “to enhance international appreciation of (Gadhafi’s) Libya.”

The world of oil is rarely far in the background in affairs concerning this region.

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