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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:
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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.
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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.
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$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.
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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.
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NOT SPENDING MONEY ALONE: Sweat of Laborers, Genius of Scientists, Hopes of Children Are Squandered by Half-Trillion Dollar War Budgets
FACT SHEET ON THE U.S. MILITARY BUDGET
Frida Berrigan, Arms and Security Initiative
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies-- in the final sense-- a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." President Dwight David Eisenhower, Republican, 1961.
These words—that military spending is a material, intellectual and spiritual theft—are more true today than when uttered 48 years ago: there is more spending, and thus more theft. Today, the nations of the world devote an estimated $1.464 trillion dollars to their military budgets.[1]
The United States of America alone accounts for almost half of global military spending. This years’ military budget is $534 billion dollars, a 4% increase over President George W. Bush’s last military budget. On top of the mega-military budget, we must add the ongoing costs of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere—costs that so far total more than $900 billion and will cross the trillion dollars threshold with next year’s appropriation.[2]
The United States is the largest spender on the military, but all over the world we can see a wide gulf between the resources controlled by the military and those allocated to the people.
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My Vision of a Peace Economy: Why PBS is Cool
by Nick Stevens
Growing up my father used to watch the Newshour on PBS nearly every night as he fixed our dinner. I couldn’t stand Jim Lehrer’s dry voice and thought all of the segments were boring. I’d complain until he changed the channel to the Simpsons. Bart Simpson was cool.
Then, in 2006 during my freshman year of college, I lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a valley where the only TV station I could get reception for was PBS. I cursed the rabbit ear antennas on top of my TV, but they seemed to have the same affinity for Jim Lehrer as my father.
So I watched the show.
I had never had a definite opinion about the War on Terror, but as I watched the Newshour regularly I began to ask questions. What was most alarming to me was that the number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed far outnumbered those killed on September 11.
Were we really creating a safer world? What could America do to make the world safer?
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THE WOODSTOCK FORUM:
Building a Peaceful, Just and Sustainable Economy
Introduction and Background
It is 40 years since the historic Woodstock Festival crowned an era now associated with peace, love and rock and roll. Although the 1969 festival itself did not take place in Woodstock, but in Bethel many miles across the Catskills, the town of Woodstock, New York, nevertheless, has become a pilgrimage point for people seeking to either rekindle those years of love and music, or at the very least to buy a tie-dye T-shirt. Despite the great deal of hoopla surrounding the 40th anniversary of the famous festival, very little attention has been paid to the philosophical culture which permeated the event and its aftermath.
In 1969 the Vietnam War was a central focus for the passion of the crowd and the many songs of protest. At the Woodstock Forum, which took place August 15 and 16, well over 300 people heard and discussed the many pressing issues of OUR time. We are overwhelmed with on-going wars, continuing exploitation of people and resources around the world, worsening ecological devastation and usurpation of our communities for weaponry and repression. In 2009, although the name Woodstock is synonymous with "peace and love", the biggest employer in our own town is a military contractor. Given the perilous state of New York, the nation and the world, we need more than ever to discuss how to convert the engines of war for a peaceful future.
In the sessions held at the Woodstock Town Hall on Saturday we heard from historians, poets, workers, social critics and journalists such as:
Peter Woodruff, worker in a Maine weapons factory; grass roots organizer, Mary Beth Sullivan; Peace Economy Project Coordinator Andy Heaslet; legendary activist Diane Wilson, author, An Unreasonable Woman and co-founder Code Pink; poet and teacher, Janine Vega; curator and gallery director, Ariel Shanberg; award winning journalists Jeremy Scahill and Jeff Cohen; economist Robert Pollin; historians Silvia Federici, Simon Harak, SJ, and Richard Grossman; social critics Joel Kovel and George Caffentzis; filmmakers DeeDee Halleck and Tobe Carey.
The speakers painted an ominous view of how militarism has gripped our communities, our culture and our lives.
On Sunday the Forum switched from presentations on what was wrong to reflections on how citizens could right those wrongs. A day of deliberation, contentious at times but essentially forward moving, led to the drafting of an initial statement and the framing of ways to build movements, local as well as regional and national, to carry the struggle forward.
(continued)
Statement from the Woodstock Forum:
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Drones: The awful prospect of turning war over to machines
by Ron Smith
Sept. 18, 2009
Baltimoresun.com
"Once in a while, everything about the world changes at once. This is one of those times."
This is a quote from social commentator Chuck Klosterman that I saw atop Chapter 11 in the important and disturbing book "Wired for War" by P.W. Singer. If you doubt the accuracy of the observation, all you have to do is read the book and you'll see there is no denying it. Modern warfare is moving at warp speed to a future where robots and robotic systems do most of the fighting on battlefields. We get a hint of it every time a news story mentions that X number of "insurgents" were killed somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan by missiles fired from an American drone aircraft. We are in the midst of the most astounding revolution in the waging of war since the creation of the atom bomb.
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Chopping Block: The F-35’s Backup Engine
By JW Stern, social research intern
True to our form (See 3 steps to a Peace Economy), we at the Peace Economy Project are always keeping an eye out for specific defense programs and products that represent the worst of wasteful military spending in order to keep our broad vision of a peace economy grounded in tangible goals. We did not have to look far within the new defense-spending bill to find just such a product: the F-35’s backup engine. The pure redundancy of producing an extra engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a single-engine aircraft intended to replace older generation fighter planes, makes the program a perfect candidate for elimination. Seeking practical progress, we have no problem picking the low hanging fruit every once in a while.
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