October 9, 2009
Today, 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.
September 29, 2009
Alternet, Huffington Post, Common Dreams, ZNet
On the eve of the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama gave a long interview to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which he said that even during his days as a community organizer in Chicago he was never a big fan of mass protests.
With the clear intention of discouraging those who might join the looming demonstrations against the G-20, Obama explained that he was always a believer that “focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference; and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally is not really going to make much of a difference.”
While I personally never jumped on the Obama bandwagon, such a flippant dismissal of protest by the president is disappointing nevertheless, and slightly reminiscent of how his predecessor wrote off the millions who took to the streets before the invasion of Iraq.
Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman noted in response: “Of course, Mr. Obama’s answer would be news to those who marched in countless civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war demonstrations over the decades. It would also be news to those who filled stadiums to hear candidate Obama’s stump speeches in 2008.”
Not surprisingly, his remarks were also not well received by the protesters who had arrived in Pittsburgh.
“You have revealed the real Obama!” Clarence Thomas, a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said during a rally demanding new jobs programs, according to the Wall Street Journal. He said the president’s statement was “very, very disrespectful” to the civil rights and other social movements.
For all of his flaws, Obama is clearly an intelligent person who must have known better.
It would not have taken an incredible investigative feat to discover that the protesters descending upon Pittsburgh were doing so for very “concrete” reasons that touch their daily lives in very real ways.
They came to advocate for greater assistance for everyday people during these tough economic times, for more serious government action on global warming ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already taken such a staggering human and financial toll.
In fact, as a general rule of thumb, most people — whether they are diehard activists or not — don’t normally travel great distances to face ominous riot police firing rubber bullets, pepper spray and deafening sound cannons, unless they have been deeply, personally affected the issues being protested.
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.
With 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.
October 27, 2008 issue
Indypendent, and a longer version on the Huffington Post
“If you don’t vote, then you can’t complain.” So goes a refrain that is reflexively regurgitated to anyone who questions the efficacy of voting. Generally it’s accompanied by a smug look, indicating that in their eyes you’re hopelessly out of touch with reality. But after cutting through the hype, are elections really worth the enormous amount of attention, energy and money they consume?
In explaining why he stayed home on election day, comedian George Carlin flipped this dictum on its head. “I believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain,” he argued. “If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem. You voted them in. You have no right to complain.”
And Carlin wasn’t merely directing his ire towards Republicans. “This country was bought and sold and paid for a long time ago,” he acknowledged with disgust. “The shit they shuffle around every four years doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”
That may be a bit overstated, but the idea that pulling a lever every few years is actually going to bring about real change is delusional. How exactly is this supposed to happen, when the corporate media and wealthy campaign contributors filter out any candidate who may rock the boat long before the public is ever asked for its opinion? Just look at what has become of Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards for challenging the status quo. Despite espousing views on numerous issues that polls show are far more in line with public sentiment than either major party candidate, they are branded as out of touch. The media ridicules — or more often, simply excludes and ignores — them until they are forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
In contrast, Barack Obama has made it clear that he would not ruffle any feathers. To take just one example of his orthodoxy, when asked September 7, on ABC’s “This Week” which issues he would break with his own party on, he replied, “I’ve said that we need to increase the size of our military.” Apart from the fact that cutting military spending isn’t even a position held by his party, Obama’s response implicitly approves of the Pentagon’s already enormous baseline budget, which has increased by more than 60 percent since 2001, not including the more than $800 billion that has been wasted on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, he could slash $200 billion a year from the Department of Defense and it would merely bring military spending back to where it was under the Clinton Administration. Moreover, such a belligerent position is not even in line with public opinion, as a recent poll showed that 43 percent of Americans thought we spent “too much” on the military, while only 20 percent said “too little.”
Thus, while the predictable drama around the nefarious schemes used to exclude voters unfolds, few note that the system was effectively rigged from the start. No matter who wins, a friend of the corporate interests that actually run this country will be installed in the White House. And everyday folks will once again be fleeced by an election — and a political system — that remains little more than theater.
September 19, 2007
In 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.
by Eric Stoner and Bryan Farrell
April 17, 2007
When 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.
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.
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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