Remembering King in 2010

By Michael McPhearson
From King2Obama.org

As our nation celebrates the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., oneof the most influential figures of the 20th century, it is important to remember the breadth and depth of his the message and vision. In the era ofthe first Black President, it would be easy to say King’s dream has been fulfilled and now it is time to move on to new challenges. But this is a misreading of current events and his words.

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech, BeyondVietnam: Time to Break Silence, Dr. King talked about three major demons; racism, materialism and militarism.[i] Today these triplets continue to haunt us. In fact they have become more entrenched. In the speech, King spoke of youth challenging his disapproval of their use of violence when the U.S. was “…using massive doses of violence…”[ii] in Vietnam. He called our government, “the greatest purveyor of violence in theworld today.” This continues to be true as our nation is conducting global military operations and occupying two countries with eyes on one or two others. The U.S. is the largest weapons exporter in the world and has the largest military budget, nearly outpacing all other nations combined. More...

Paranoia or People

By Chrissy Heaslet
2/25/2010
Chrissy blogs regularly as CHaze at http://chaze77.wordpress.com

By now, the entire planet is aware of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010. Almost immediately their cries for help were heard. President Obama, on January 15, pledged to send $100 million in aid on behalf of the United States. In a most emotional statement, Obama spoke to the people of Haiti, saying, “You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you”.

While any effort to help those in need should be applauded, the disaster in Haiti has become another disappointing example of missed opportunity. The United States was given the chance to do something great for a nation in need, but instead chose mediocrity. While no one can argue that $100 million is a lot of money, when put into perspective, it becomes obvious that America’s priorities are out of balance. The U.S. Department of Defense, for example, has an annual budget of $7.5 billion to spend on its missile defense program. This program is designed to prepare America to defend itself, should a missile reach its shores during a military attack by a foreign entity. It is a massive, money draining department within the U.S. government that deals solely in hypothetical scenarios. More...

Slimming Down the Defense Budget

By Lawrence J. Korb, Laura Conley, Sean Duggan | February 2, 2010
From AmericanProgress.org

The Obama administration’s newly released fiscal year 2011 defense budget request continues to provide real increases to the historically high level of defense spending that the Bush administration initiated after September 11. The $708 billion budget, which includes the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, represents an increase of nearly 3.4 percent from the FY 2010 baseline budget, or a 1.8 percent real increase over inflation.

The budget does not rebalance the defense budget to meet the national security challenges of the 21st century as the Pentagon should have done as a result of the Quadrennial Defense Review—a planning and strategy document also released on Monday that defines our military’s force structure and thus shapes its upcoming budget plans. The FY 2011 defense budget instead tinkers at the margins of reallocating resources to urgent priorities and fails to scale back or eliminate poorly performing or unnecessary weapons programs that are based on threats from a bygone era. More...

Dr King’s Dream Deferred – Does it Explode?

Andy Heaslet
1/15/10

My roommate, Michael, and I were headed to meet some friends in North St Louis and found ourselves driving along about five miles of Martin Luther King Dr. The story in St Louis is the same as most cities in the country, the streets named for this visionary leader run through the parts of our communities that most vividly illustrate how far away we are from realizing his many dreams.

If buildings were standing, they were boarded up, paint chipping off of signs painted decades ago. Businesses that were operational were liquor stores, gas stations with bullet-proof glass, and fast food restaurants. The few people brave enough to travel on foot through this urban wasteland wore worn thrift clothes and were, exclusively, of course, black.

Michael and I started the drive innocently enough, we’ve been there before, we know Chris Rock’s comedy and the unfortunate humor in the joke, but it didn’t take long for our spirits to dim on this short journey. Virtually the entire North Side of our city is in dire straights, but Dr King’s Drive is particularly depressing. More...

Chopping Block: No New Nuclear Weapons Plant in Kansas City
and Remarks by Dr Martin Luther King Jr on Nuclear Weapons

The US Nuclear Weapons Complex currently produces 85% of the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons in neighboring Kansas City at Honeywell’s Kansas City Plant (KCP). The mere presence of this facility is disturbing, but I was blown away last month when it was revealed to me that the city of Kansas City is preparing to give Honeywell and other developers $40 million in tax breaks to pay for a NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS PRODUCTION PLANT!

In addition to these massive tax breaks, they are moving the facility to a productive soy bean field in the southern reaches of the city and plan to have labeled the site “blighted” in order to help secure the land and subsequent bonds needed to fund the project!

And as odd as any part of this proposal is that Kansas City is planning a lease-to-own policy for this property. Meaning this municipality will essentially be the owners of this weapons plant for the 20 years until the facility ultimately becomes fully owned by the developers. (The current facility is on federal property, giving at least indirect control and ownership to the federal government)

Finally, this whole process is being steamrolled through the city council and the developers want to break ground this spring, likely before the UN sponsored conference to review the NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), which the US has signed and ratified, and as President Obama attempts to push the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) through the Senate for ratification. The construction of this facility has the potential to derail vital, global nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

In short, this plant is a boondoggle of epic proportions and cannot proceed unchallenged. Friends in and around Kansas City have expended great efforts to mobilize against this, but they can use our support… please contact your friends and family in Kansas City and ask them to take part in future mobilizations. And please keep your eyes and ears open about larger mobilizations against this expansion of our nuclear arms complex!

Some Kansas City contacts/resources:
http://kcnukeswatch.wordpress.com/

http://www.peaceworkskc.org/

For a more thorough breakdown of the grievances against the new plant, visit the
Nuclear WatchBlog!

In reflection on this issue, at this time of year, I wondered what Dr Martin Luther King Jr said about nuclear weapons in his lifetime. I was not surprised to find that he forcefully spoke out against these weapons of mass destruction. Below is an excerpt from his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, focusing on the scourge of war and nuclear weapons. More...

Obama's Rejection Speech

By David Swanson
From OpEdNews.com

That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions.

Some highlights: More...

The Regional Alternative to Escalation in Afghanistan

Children Afraid of the Night
By VIJAY PRASHAD
from CounterPunch.org

More US troops are being prepared for Afghanistan. The President charged them with (1) defeating or degrading the Taliban; (2) building the Afghan National Army. We have thrown in our lot with Hamid Karzai's government. Its association with warlords is uncontestable (his own brother is an opium kingpin). Our enemy is the Taliban, which recruits a family each time we accidentally kill one civilian. And we have offered the coldest shoulder to the forces of progress, like the former parliamentarian Malalai Joya (one of the first acts of the Karzai government in 2002 was to ban the communists, and he has himself refused to create the kind of political parties that might undermine warlordism). Obama's enunciated goals seem impossible. Departure in 2011 is a chimera; it is thrown like magic to assuage those with anxiety about a long-term commitment. Withdrawal will be silenced by the monstrous anger of guns.

The United States-NATO Occupation has ill-defined signposts, and those that are defined will be difficult to reach. There is a better alternative to escalation, which is to make the stability of Afghanistan a regional responsibility, and to withdraw in a very timely fashion. The regional partners with the greatest stake in the stability of Afghanistan, such as Iran, India, Pakistan, China and the various Central Asian republics, will not begin a genuine process if the US-NATO Occupation persists. Why would the Chinese or the Iranians get their hands dirty if this means that their work will reward the US with military bases at Bagram and Kabul? A prerequisite for their entry into the process is the withdrawal of the US, and a pledge that no permanent military bases will remain in the region. This is not a marker that the US is willing to put on the table. It is committed to empire. Obama said at West Point, "We have no interest in occupying your country." That is true if the definition of occupation is a 19th century one. But a 21st century occupation is conducted via military bases and extra-territorial privileges, by free trade agreements and dispensations for certain corporations. The high walls of the bases and the hum of the drones is enough to distort the fine sentiments in Obama's phrase. More...

Education, Not Drones, in Pakistan

Brianna Jordan
12/18/2009

The CIA’s recently expanded drone program in Pakistan is highlighting the atrocities of war. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, can pinpoint and kill their targets from halfway around the world with the controller in the comfort of his own office. While this does keep American troops out of combat zones, it is also the very reason that drones should disturb us.

Being able to send an unmanned machine to anywhere in the world and choose to destroy whatever we want seems like the plot to a bad sci-fi movie. The ugly truth of war is that it allows us to dehumanize people and the act of killing. Drones capitalize on this and take the devaluing of human life to a new level. Fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters turn into insurgents, or targets. Innocent civilian casualties become just a small side note to a “successful strike,” and are often just swept into the broad category of the enemy.

It becomes infinitely easier to kill when you have no connection to the killed and can just press a button to have your target eliminated on the other side of the world. More...

$680 billion military budget an affront to God, the poor

Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)
By Art Laffin

President Obama signed into law Oct. 28 the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, the largest military spending bill of its kind. The bill includes $130 billion in funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and only modifies the military commissions system at Guantánamo Bay, rather than abolish it.

The bill included several military spending projects Obama had previously opposed, including $560 million for a new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter engine the Pentagon had rejected. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department's budget, money dedicated to maintaining the huge U.S. nuclear arsenal. Overall, the bill increases military spending $24 billion from the last fiscal year.

However the president or members of Congress may try to justify this military budget, it is an affront to God and constitutes a direct theft from the poor. This budget is more than a bailout for the weapons industries; it is a massive giveaway to the war profiteers. More...

IT IS THAT TIME AGAIN – THE QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW: THIS TIME LET’S GET IT RIGHT.

by PEP Board Member, Charles Kindleberger

Every 4 years the Defense Department prepares the Quadrennial Defense Review. As required by Congress, the QDR must review the threats around the world, consider strategies for addressing those threats, and recommend the allocation of resources necessary to implement the strategies.

Work began some time ago on the latest report, which is due in early 2010. Hopefully those working on this analysis have or will read carefully an article in the July/August 2009 issue of “Foreign Affairs,” by Andrew Krepinevich Jr., president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Entitled “The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets”, this provocative article is a highly effective critique of current U.S. defense policy and weapon systems. More...