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Interview: A Journalist Not Scared to Speak the Truth

5 Jun

June 5, 2010

Celebrity Dialogue

CelebityDialogue: Which news publications do you write for?
Eric: I’ve written for The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, Huffington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among others.

CelebityDialogue: What is your beat?
Eric: I don’t have one beat in any traditional sense. My interests are quite varied. I generally critique US foreign policy, our outrageous military budget, the privatization of war, including the use of mercenaries, and the growing use of robotics, both on the ground and in the air, in modern warfare. I also regularly write about nonviolent movements around the world for Waging Nonviolence, a blog that I helped start last year.

CelebityDialogue: What would you say to the critics who may view your writing as mostly anti-government?
Eric: I would say that would be an inaccurate way of characterizing my work. I’m not against all government. I’m against government that is destructive, dysfunctional and unresponsive to the will of the people, and that’s unfortunately where we’re at in the United States. On issue after issue the policies of the US government are in direct opposition to the demands of social and economic justice. To take just one example, we spend upwards of a trillion dollars every year on the Pentagon and war while tens of millions of Americans live in poverty and have no access to health care. That is immoral and unacceptable.

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Friday Media Roundtable

10 Oct

October 9, 2009

KALW 91.7FM

kalw-cityToday, I was on “Your Call,” an hour-long call-in program on KALW 91.7 FM, the local Public Radio station in San Francisco, for its Friday Media Roundtable. Along with two other guests, I discussed how the mainstream media has covered the war in Afghanistan, the passage of the defense spending bill in Congress, and the debate on health care reform over the last week. To listen to the show, click here.

The Pentagon’s Monster in the Mirror

15 Apr

U.S. Military Spending Dwarfs China’s

April 15, 2009

ZNet, Huffington Post. Also published as an op-ed in the Asheville Citizen-Times, NC; White River Valley News, AK; Liberal Opinion Week, IA. Distributed by Minuteman Media and Featurewell.com.

CHINA-CONGRESS-NPC-MILITARYWith the release of its annual report on China’s military capabilities at the end of March, the Pentagon is doing its part to keep alive the threat of the red menace.

China’s official military budget jumped to $60 billion, an 18 percent increase over last year, but US officials warned that the actual figure is somewhere between $105 and $150 billion annually.

Without a hint of irony, the report expresses concern about, “the purposes to which China’s current and future military power will be applied,” and suggests that Beijing could even use its armed forces “to ensure access to resources or enforce claims to disputed territories.”

Sound familiar? Well, Washington apparently needs to relearn the basic moral principle of universality: What is wrong for others to do, must also be wrong for us.

In February, the Obama administration requested a mind-boggling $664 billion for the US military over the next fiscal year – more than 10 times China’s official budget. In fact, the US spends roughly the same amount on “defense” each year as every other country in the world combined, according to the authoritative data of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

And much like China, Washington’s accounting for such things is notoriously lacking in transparency. Many expenses that the average person would consider defense-related – such as funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Energy’s maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, military aid to allies, and the share of interest payments on the national debt that can be attributed to the past military spending – are hidden in other parts of the federal budget. When all of these costly extras are added up, the United States’ unofficial military budget tops out at more than $1 trillion.

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Living by the Sword

28 Feb

September 19, 2007

Huffington Post

swords_into_plowsharesIn the United States, where the vast majority of the population (82 percent according to a recent Newsweek poll) identify themselves as Christians, one of the most important steps we can all take to ending not only the war in Iraq, but all war, is to remind people of faith at every turn how radical and nonviolent their God truly is.

One of the many stories that could be mentioned in this regard comes at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Just before Jesus was capitally punished by the Roman Empire, he gave his followers an unequivocal lesson about violence that we can ill afford to ignore today.

When the authorities came to arrest Jesus, the apostle Peter did what most of us would do under similar circumstances. He drew his sword in defense of the life of his friend and teacher — who he also believed was the Son of God — and struck the high priest’s servant, cutting off his ear.

For Christians still wedded to the just war theory, a more “just cause” for the use of violence in all of history is hard to imagine.

Jesus responded, however, not with approval, but by emphasizing once again the centrality of love, even for the enemy, to his teachings. He rebuked Peter, saying: “Put your sword back in its sheath, for all who take the sword shall perish by the sword.”

The key word there is “all.” Jesus was not only condemning Peter’s violence in that moment some two thousand years ago, but explicitly issuing a warning to anyone, anywhere who chooses violence.

This story should make Christians in this country uncomfortable, because no other nation is currently taking up the sword with more zeal or recklessly wielding it around the world than our own.

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Why Pay for War?

28 Feb

by Eric Stoner and Bryan Farrell

April 17, 2007

ZNet

visualize-taxWhen millions took to the streets across the U.S. and around the world on February 15, 2003, in the largest global demonstration for peace in history, President Bush brushed it off with ease. To let this influence his decision to attack Iraq, he quipped, would be “like saying I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”

Such has been the administration’s disdainful response to every antiwar protest since, and the bloody occupation of Iraq rages on.

With tax day upon us, those fighting for peace should ponder another hardliner’s words. “Let them march all they want to,” Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig reportedly said in 1982, after a massive rally for nuclear disarmament in New York, adding: “as long as they continue to pay their taxes.”

Bush’s proposed federal budget for 2008 requested $645 billion for national defense, including the $142 billion supplemental to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even this enormous figure could be considered incomplete, as Winslow Wheeler, a defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information, has pointed out, because it does not factor in among other things the cost of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, military aid to allies, or “the share of annual payments on the interest of the national debt that can be attributed to the Defense Department.”

To the taxpayer, these numbers mean that at a bare minimum over half of every tax dollar that Congress has control over through the appropriations process – also known as the discretionary budget – will go to the current wars or for maintaining the military establishment. 

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King’s Prophetic Call for Peace

28 Feb

April 5, 2007

TomPaine.com, and a shorter op-ed version was published in: Topeka Capital Journal, KS; Hereford Brand, TX; Northwest Arkansas Times, AK; Asheville Citizen-Times, NC; Portland Observer, OR; Newberg Graphic, OR; Morris Sun Tribune, MN; Daily Globe, MN. Distributed by Minuteman Media.

mlkjr-vietnam-riverside

Forty years ago this week, on April 4, 1967, and a year to the day before his tragic assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church to deliver one of the most controversial speeches of his life.
 
Entitled ” Beyond Vietnam,”  the address was King’s first public antiwar speech, and he gave it only after much trepidation and prayer. Believing that silence in the face of injustice is in fact complicity with evil, King wrote in his autobiography that, “The time had come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim and kill.”
 
As anticipated, King was roundly criticized at the time for straying from civil rights, not only by the mainstream media, but also by allies such as the NAACP. “It was a low period in my life,” he wrote. “I could hardly open a newspaper.”
 
Now, however, history has vindicated the truths that King so bravely spoke that day, and his testimony is rightfully seen as a prophetic masterpiece.
 
While still mesmerizing, listening to the speech today can also be somewhat disconcerting. It painfully reveals how little has changed and how politicians, both then and now, use the same rhetorical devices to scare the public into supporting misguided policies. By simply swapping the word ” Iraq” for “Vietnam,” and “terrorism” for “communism” King’s speech could be given today, with little need for editing.
 
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