Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Life and Death of Words, People, and Even Nature

The Life and Death of Words, People, and Even Nature

By Eduardo Galeano

[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books).]

Memory on Legs

(January 3)

On the third day of the year 47 BC, the most renowned library of antiquity burned to the ground.

After Roman legions invaded Egypt, during one of the battles waged by Julius Caesar against the brother of Cleopatra, fire devoured most of the thousands upon thousands of papyrus scrolls in the Library of Alexandria.

A pair of millennia later, after American legions invaded Iraq, during George W. Bush’s crusade against an imaginary enemy, most of the thousands upon thousands of books in the Library of Baghdad were reduced to ashes.

Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century.

This prudent and tireless traveler kept his library with him. One hundred and seventeen thousand books aboard four hundred camels formed a caravan a mile long. The camels were also the catalogue: they were arranged according to the titles of the books they carried, a flock for each of the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet.



Civilizing Mother

(January 23)

In 1901, the day after Queen Victoria breathed her last, a solemn funeral ceremony began in London.

Organizing it was no easy task. A grand farewell was due the queen who gave her name to an epoch and set the standard for female abnegation by wearing black for forty years in memory of her dead husband.

Victoria, symbol of the British Empire, lady and mistress of the nineteenth century, imposed opium on China and virtue on her own country.

In the seat of her empire, works that taught good manners were required reading. Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves.

Books could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The World Shrinks

(February 21)

Today is International Mother Language Day.

Every two weeks, a language dies.

The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.



In 1974 Angela Loij died. She was one of the last Ona Indians from Tierra del Fuego, way out there at the edge of the world. She was the last one who spoke their language.

Angela sang to herself, for no one else, in that language no longer recalled by anyone but her:

I’m walking in the steps

of those who have gone.

Lost, am I.

In times gone by, the Onas worshipped several gods. Their supreme god was named Pemaulk.

Pemaulk meant “word.”

Fame Is Baloney

(April 23)

Today, World Book Day, it wouldn’t hurt to recall that the history of literature is an unceasing paradox.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It’s not there.

Plato never wrote his most famous line: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Don Quijote de la Mancha never said: “Let the dogs bark, Sancho. It’s a sign we are on track.”

Voltaire’s best-known line was not said or written by him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel never wrote: “All theory is gray, my friend, but green is the tree of life.”

Sherlock Holmes never said: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

In none of his books or pamphlets did Lenin write: “The ends justify the means.”

Bertolt Brecht was not the author of his most oft-cited poem: "First they came for the Communists / and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist..."

And neither was Jorge Luis Borges the author of his best known poem: "If I could live my life over / I would try to make more mistakes..."

The Perils of Publishing

(April 24)

In the year 2004, for once the government of Guatemala broke with the tradition of impunity and officially acknowledged that Myrna Mack was killed by order of the country’s president.

Myrna had undertaken forbidden research. Despite receiving threats, she had gone deep into the jungles and mountains to find exiles wandering in their own country, the indigenous survivors of the military’s massacres. She collected their voices.

In 1989, at a conference of social scientists, an anthropologist from the United States complained about the pressure universities exert to continually produce: “In my country if you don’t publish, you perish.”

And Myrna replied: “In my country if you publish, you perish.”

She published.

She was stabbed to death.

Nature Is Not Mute

(June 5)

Reality paints still-lifes.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.

Meanwhile the climate goes haywire and we do, too.

Today is World Environment Day. A good day to celebrate the new constitution of Ecuador, which in the year 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, recognized nature as a subject with rights.

It seems strange, this notion that nature has rights as if it were a person. But in the United States it seems perfectly normal that big companies have human rights. They do, ever since a Supreme Court decision in 1886.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Click here to read Tom’s Response.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/life-and-death-words-people-and-even-nature-1367334738. All rights are reserved.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

A Fighter by His Trade: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Sports and the American Dream

Published on Portside (http://portside.org)


A Fighter by His Trade: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Sports and the American Dream

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174080/fighter-his-trade-tamerlan-tsarnaev-sports-and-american-dream

:Dave Zirin

Monday, April 29, 2013

The Nation

“The most difficult part of getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.”

—Arch Ward (1896–1955),        Chicago Tribune sports editor and founder of the Golden Gloves of America Tournament of Champions

Alienation, poverty and despair drive people—overwhelmingly young men—to awful acts of violence. That’s as true for the strung-out soldier who commits war crimes in Kandahar as it is for the gang member who kills a child on the South Side of Chicago. It’s also true in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead—and deadly—elder bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon. The recognition of the roots of his rage rings clearly in a brilliant, harrowing profile [1] that appeared Sunday in The New York Times. It’s less a story than an autopsy that explores what killed Tsarnaev’s hope that he could make a life in the United States. Given the unconscionable arguments by Representative Peter King [2] and countless others that the Tsarnaev’s crimes should be a clarion call for intensified profiling and surveillance of Muslim families in the United States, understanding Tsarnaev’s motivations is critical. Just as we shouldn’t accept the racist argument that “culture” is the root cause of gun deaths in Chicago, we should reject the idea that Islam bears any sort of collective responsibility for Tsarnaev’s crimes.

The Times article, “A Battered Dream for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Then a Violent Path [1],” is heartbreaking, but also does a tremendous service by explaining—not excusing, but explaining—how he arrived at bombing the Boston Marathon on Patriot’s Day, killing three and injuring more than 200. People should read the article, and I’m not going to rehash it. But I do want to explore its examination of how much immigrant aspiration Tsarnaev put into boxing and how the sports establishment in the post 9/11 era responded by pushing him away.

In most descriptions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he’s described as a “one-time boxer.” That doesn’t quite tell the story. Tsarnaev was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion. This was a flamboyant showman of a fighter wearing white leather and furs and incorporating “showy gymnastics into his training and fighting, walking on his hands, falling into splits, tumbling into corners.” The religious ascetic would emerge later. At this point Tsarnaev was WWE flair with Donald Trump attitude. He was America as learned through a television screen. But also, like the America of his dreams, his ambitions were as large as his attitude.

A high school classmate in Cambridge, Luis Vasquez, said to the Times [1], “The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with him. He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the Olympics and then turn pro.”

The next step was to compete in the National Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. There was, however, one problem: the esteemed boxing organization had changed their rules for admittance. The Golden Gloves, at the height of Tsarnaev’s powers as a fighter, ceased its long-standing practice of allowing legally documented immigrants to take part in their Tournament of Champions. This broke with the history of a competition that was started in 1923 by sports editor Arch Ward in a hardscrabble town defined by immigration: the “stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders” otherwise known as Chicago. That meant Tsarnaev and three other New England champions—all immigrants—were not allowed to compete. It’s only at this point that he quit the sport. As the Times reported [1],

Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.

Adrift meant eking out an existence on food stamps, and his wife’s $1,200-a-month job. Adrift meant unemployment, as he needed to stay home and watch their infant daughter. Adrift meant feeling a new sense of belonging in political and religious doctrine that spoke of war against United States. Adrift meant fury at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but no means to channel that anger in a way that didn’t reflect his despair. The Times article covers all of this in depth. I would add, though, that his feeling of being “adrift” might also have meant he was suffering brain damage as a result of years in the ring. The esteemed neurologist Dr. Robert Cantu has stated [3] that any autopsy of Tsarnaev should include an examination for signs of the life-altering post-concussive syndromes Cantu has seen in numerous former boxers and NFL players.

The Golden Gloves’ rejection of an immigrant with fantasies of acculturation and acceptance through sports is profound for reasons unexplored in the Times, but that demand attention. For over a century, sports has been the entryway for many immigrants and people of color to feel a sense of belonging in the turbulent ethnic stew that is the United States. The first Public School Athletic Leagues and YMCAs in the nineteenth century were underwritten by industrialists as a means of “Americanizing” the masses arriving in record numbers from Eastern Europe. Their explicit hope was that sports would be the first step of children toward leaving behind radical socialist European ideologies and buying in to the idea of the American Dream. As the founding mission statement of the PSAL read, organized athletic competition could “provide opportunities for educating students in physical fitness, character development and socialization skills through an athletic program that fosters teamwork, discipline and sportsmanship.” In other words, it would teach the doctrine that anyone who works hard enough could climb the competitive ladder glorified by sports promoters like Arch Ward.

Similar hopes of finally having a seat at the American table have been projected onto athletes of color such as Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente and, most recently, Jeremy Lin. Their acceptance—or the myth of their acceptance—was treasured by immigrants and people of color as a sign that this country wasn’t just for Caucasians of pure European stock. How horribly ironic that this athletic avenue of acculturation closed in the face of someone who would have been at home in that late nineteenth century wave for whom the PSAL was created: an immigrant from Eastern Europe.

There has been so much idiotic ink spilled about whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers “should be considered Americans.” What is certain is that the means by which people have historically felt a sense of having a stake in this country have been inexorably altered in the post-9/11 world. This is now a nation defined and scarred by the cruel anti-immigrant policies of both Presidents Bush and Obama. It’s now a nation defined and scarred by pushing people away from that historic safe haven for immigrants otherwise known as competitive sports. It’s a nation that spawned the brothers Tsarnaev. It’s a nation that must change if future tragedies of violence are to be avoided. This won’t happen by accident. Movements and meetings against Islamophobia and for the rights of immigrants are great a place to start. Sports may have been bestowed onto immigrants from the top down, but a shift away from fear and toward a more inclusive future will only come from the bottom up.

Source URL: http://portside.org/2013-04-29/fighter-his-trade-tamerlan-tsarnaev-sports-and-american-dream

Links:

[1] http://nyti.ms/11MPZ8M

[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/peter-king-politically-correct-90369.html

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/dr-robert-cantu-professor_n_3159194.html

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

The Weapons Oligarchy

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/26/the-weapons-oligarcy/

WEEKEND EDITION APRIL 26-28, 2013

Federal Taxes Reward 8-Figure Pentagon Fraud Spree

The Weapons Oligarchy

by JOHN LaFORGE

With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time to consider the mountains of money being wasted on useless weapons or just plain stolen.

Without a public uproar, U.S. could spend more than $600 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, according to Alicia Godsberg of Peace Action and others.[1]

President Obama has famously mouthed support for “a world without nuclear weapons,” and “a world where these weapons will never again threaten our children,”[2] but his nuclear weapons budget says bombs, bombs and more bombs.

For 2014, the President plans a nuclear weapons spending increase over the current level of $7.227 billion. Where’s the money to come from? Taking a page from the Reagan/Thatcher play book, Obama plans to get it from the nuclear non-proliferation budget. According to a report by Jeffery Smith and Douglas Birch in Foreign Policy April 9, the president has proposed a $460 million cut from the nuclear non-proliferation program — so it can boost nuclear weapons building programs by exactly $500 million.[3]

Since 2011, Obama has been pushing a plan to spend $85 billion over 10 years to rebuild thousands of H-bombs — bombs that should be retired and abolished. The president has also proposed pouring $125 billion over 10 years into a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, new nuclear bombers and new land-based ICBMs.[4]

One plan is to return 200 B61 gravity H-bombs from five U.S. bases in Europe, where they are unwanted, and to replace their warheads and tail fins. Today, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Turkey and Belgium are debating whether they want the U.S. bombs ousted permanently, yet the Pentagon plans to return them to European fighter bases with new “life extension.” Europeans by the millions are demanding that the B61s be withdrawn forever.

The H-bomb program, known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), estimated last year that the B61 make-work plan would cost $7 billion and produce its first replacement bomb in 2019. The Pentagon countered that it would cost $10.4 billion and take until 2022. Daryl Kimball and Tom Collina reported April 11 in Arms Control Now that 400 new B61-12s are planned, at roughly $25 million-per bomb.[5] Boeing Corp. hopes to make hundreds of millions working on the 50-kiloton devices,[6] each one capable of a Hiroshima massacre times four.

Joe Cirincione, of the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Ploughshares Fund, charged April 21 that “lavishing” billions on the B61 “is criminal.”[7]

According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion.

Billions for unneeded, unusable weapons

As every combat or terror casualty since 1950 proves, our nuclear weapons cannot protect us. So what is this spending for?

One answer was revealed on March 14, 1992, when the Associated Press reported on a study — by Admiral Bruce DeMars — that made clear that the purpose of new submarines was “to protect the vast industrial facilities and skilled workers needed to build them, not because the submarines themselves were needed.”[8] Today’s plans are precisely the same. With its 5,000 ready and reserve nuclear weapons, the US can pulverize every major city on earth with over 200 each.

The NNSA calls Obama’s new warhead production “modernization” or “refurbishment” or “life extension.” This is just euphemism, deception, deceit and disinformation used to help rob the taxpayers, and it has no purpose but to pamper billionaire industrialists and string out some cancer-causing careers.

Because fear moves taxpayers to send half their federal taxes to the Pentagon and to a militarized space program and Energy Department, the deceptions extend to the manufacture of threats too. Thus, North Korea’s nuclear nothing somehow endangers the Pentagon colossus. On April 3, the New York Times said North Korea might have “6 to 8” nuclear weapons. Four days earlier it noted two salient facts on its page one: North Korea’s missiles cannot reach the U.S.; and there is no evidence that its bombs can be made small enough to fit on a missile. Even the Wall St. Journal admitted that Pyongyang “isn’t thought to be capable of following through.”[9]

With $1 billion being spent on new “missile interceptors” in Alaska “to foil North Korea,” cynical fear mongering has reached absurd heights. Experts have reported for decades that money spent on missile defense is wasted. Even the cold-blooded Margaret Thatcher said, “I am a chemist. I know it won’t work.”[10]

Mr. Cirincione said Pentagon contracts for useless weapons are “clearly aimed at buying senators’ votes.”[11] Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found a staggering $70 billion in Pentagon spending that was nothing but waste.[12] In the realm high crimes, it takes a lot of bribery, larceny, robbery, kickbacks and embezzlement to steal that much money and then to protect so much theft from the law.

The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.

Notes.

[1] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 11, 2011; & Alicia Godsberg, letter, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2011

[2] Joe Cirincione, interviewed on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, April 21, 2013,

[3] R. Jeffrey Smith & Douglas Birch, “Obama Proposes Shifting Funds from Nuclear Nonproliferation to Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy.com, April 9, 2013,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/09/obama_proposes_shifting_funds_from_nuclear_nonproliferation_to_new_nuclear_weapo

[4] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 30, 2011

[5] Daryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina, Arms Control Now, April 11, 2013, http://armscontrolnow.org/ 2013/04/11/nnsa-nuclear-weapons-budget-ignores-fiscal-realities-congress-should-re-examine-b61-project/

[6] Hans M. Kristensen, “B61-12: Contract Signed for Improving Precision of Nuclear Bomb,” Federation of American Scientists, Nov. 28, 2012; http://blogs.fas.org/security/2012/11/b61-12contract/

[7] Julian Borger, “Obama accused of U-turn as guided weapons plan emerges,” The Guardian, April 21, 2013http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/21/obama-accused-nuclear-guided-weapons-plan

[8] Associated Press, “Navy seeks to preserve submarine shipyards: In doing so it would buy some vessels it may not need,” Milwaukee Journal, March 14, 1992

[9] Wall St. Journal, March 29, 2013, p. A12

[10] “Margaret Thatcher, ‘Iron Lady’ Who Set Britain on New Course, Dies at 87,” New York Times, April 9, 2013, p. A11

[11] Ibid, n. 7

[12] Christopher Drew, “Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste,” New York Times, March 30, 2011

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs


by JOHN LaFORGE

With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time to consider the mountains of money being wasted on useless weapons or just plain stolen.

Without a public uproar, U.S. could spend more than $600 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, according to Alicia Godsberg of Peace Action and others.[1]

President Obama has famously mouthed support for “a world without nuclear weapons,” and “a world where these weapons will never again threaten our children,”[2] but his nuclear weapons budget says bombs, bombs and more bombs.

For 2014, the President plans a nuclear weapons spending increase over the current level of $7.227 billion. Where’s the money to come from? Taking a page from the Reagan/Thatcher play book, Obama plans to get it from the nuclear non-proliferation budget. According to a report by Jeffery Smith and Douglas Birch in Foreign Policy April 9, the president has proposed a $460 million cut from the nuclear non-proliferation program — so it can boost nuclear weapons building programs by exactly $500 million.[3]

Since 2011, Obama has been pushing a plan to spend $85 billion over 10 years to rebuild thousands of H-bombs — bombs that should be retired and abolished. The president has also proposed pouring $125 billion over 10 years into a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, new nuclear bombers and new land-based ICBMs.[4]

One plan is to return 200 B61 gravity H-bombs from five U.S. bases in Europe, where they are unwanted, and to replace their warheads and tail fins. Today, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Turkey and Belgium are debating whether they want the U.S. bombs ousted permanently, yet the Pentagon plans to return them to European fighter bases with new “life extension.” Europeans by the millions are demanding that the B61s be withdrawn forever.

The H-bomb program, known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), estimated last year that the B61 make-work plan would cost $7 billion and produce its first replacement bomb in 2019. The Pentagon countered that it would cost $10.4 billion and take until 2022. Daryl Kimball and Tom Collina reported April 11 in Arms Control Now that 400 new B61-12s are planned, at roughly $25 million-per bomb.[5] Boeing Corp. hopes to make hundreds of millions working on the 50-kiloton devices,[6] each one capable of a Hiroshima massacre times four.

Joe Cirincione, of the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Ploughshares Fund, charged April 21 that “lavishing” billions on the B61 “is criminal.”[7]

According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion.

Billions for unneeded, unusable weapons

As every combat or terror casualty since 1950 proves, our nuclear weapons cannot protect us. So what is this spending for?

One answer was revealed on March 14, 1992, when the Associated Press reported on a study — by Admiral Bruce DeMars — that made clear that the purpose of new submarines was “to protect the vast industrial facilities and skilled workers needed to build them, not because the submarines themselves were needed.”[8] Today’s plans are precisely the same. With its 5,000 ready and reserve nuclear weapons, the US can pulverize every major city on earth with over 200 each.

The NNSA calls Obama’s new warhead production “modernization” or “refurbishment” or “life extension.” This is just euphemism, deception, deceit and disinformation used to help rob the taxpayers, and it has no purpose but to pamper billionaire industrialists and string out some cancer-causing careers.

Because fear moves taxpayers to send half their federal taxes to the Pentagon and to a militarized space program and Energy Department, the deceptions extend to the manufacture of threats too. Thus, North Korea’s nuclear nothing somehow endangers the Pentagon colossus. On April 3, the New York Times said North Korea might have “6 to 8” nuclear weapons. Four days earlier it noted two salient facts on its page one: North Korea’s missiles cannot reach the U.S.; and there is no evidence that its bombs can be made small enough to fit on a missile. Even the Wall St. Journal admitted that Pyongyang “isn’t thought to be capable of following through.”[9]

With $1 billion being spent on new “missile interceptors” in Alaska “to foil North Korea,” cynical fear mongering has reached absurd heights. Experts have reported for decades that money spent on missile defense is wasted. Even the cold-blooded Margaret Thatcher said, “I am a chemist. I know it won’t work.”[10]

Mr. Cirincione said Pentagon contracts for useless weapons are “clearly aimed at buying senators’ votes.”[11] Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found a staggering $70 billion in Pentagon spending that was nothing but waste.[12] In the realm high crimes, it takes a lot of bribery, larceny, robbery, kickbacks and embezzlement to steal that much money and then to protect so much theft from the law.

The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.

Notes.

[1] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 11, 2011; & Alicia Godsberg, letter, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2011

[2] Joe Cirincione, interviewed on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, April 21, 2013,

[3] R. Jeffrey Smith & Douglas Birch, “Obama Proposes Shifting Funds from Nuclear Nonproliferation to Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy.com, April 9, 2013,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/09/obama_proposes_shifting_funds_from_nuclear_nonproliferation_to_new_nuclear_weapo

[4] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 30, 2011

[5] Daryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina, Arms Control Now, April 11, 2013, http://armscontrolnow.org/ 2013/04/11/nnsa-nuclear-weapons-budget-ignores-fiscal-realities-congress-should-re-examine-b61-project/

[6] Hans M. Kristensen, “B61-12: Contract Signed for Improving Precision of Nuclear Bomb,” Federation of American Scientists, Nov. 28, 2012; http://blogs.fas.org/security/2012/11/b61-12contract/

[7] Julian Borger, “Obama accused of U-turn as guided weapons plan emerges,” The Guardian, April 21, 2013http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/21/obama-accused-nuclear-guided-weapons-plan

[8] Associated Press, “Navy seeks to preserve submarine shipyards: In doing so it would buy some vessels it may not need,” Milwaukee Journal, March 14, 1992

[9] Wall St. Journal, March 29, 2013, p. A12

[10] “Margaret Thatcher, ‘Iron Lady’ Who Set Britain on New Course, Dies at 87,” New York Times, April 9, 2013, p. A11

[11] Ibid, n. 7

[12] Christopher Drew, “Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste,” New York Times, March 30, 2011

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

The Story of Our Time

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/opinion/krugman-the-story-of-our-time.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130429&_r=0

April 28, 2013

The Story of Our Time

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Those of us who have spent years arguing against premature fiscal austerity have just had a good two weeks. Academic studies that supposedly justified austerity have lost credibility; hard-liners in the European Commission and elsewhere have softened their rhetoric. The tone of the conversation has definitely changed.

My sense, however, is that many people still don’t understand what this is all about. So this seems like a good time to offer a sort of refresher on the nature of our economic woes, and why this remains a very bad time for spending cuts.

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family.

Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.

And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day.

Why did spending plunge? Mainly because of a burst housing bubble and an overhang of private-sector debt — but if you ask me, people talk too much about what went wrong during the boom years and not enough about what we should be doing now. For no matter how lurid the excesses of the past, there’s no good reason that we should pay for them with year after year of mass unemployment.

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Now, just to be clear, this is not a case for more government spending and larger budget deficits under all circumstances — and the claim that people like me always want bigger deficits is just false. For the economy isn’t always like this — in fact, situations like the one we’re in are fairly rare. By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.

O.K., I’ve just given you a story, but why should you believe it? There are, after all, people who insist that the real problem is on the economy’s supply side: that workers lack the skills they need, or that unemployment insurance has destroyed the incentive to work, or that the looming menace of universal health care is preventing hiring, or whatever. How do we know that they’re wrong?

Well, I could go on at length on this topic, but just look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

Is the story really that simple, and would it really be that easy to end the scourge of unemployment? Yes — but powerful people don’t want to believe it. Some of them have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.

What has happened now, however, is that the drive for austerity has lost its intellectual fig leaf, and stands exposed as the expression of prejudice, opportunism and class interest it always was. And maybe, just maybe, that sudden exposure will give us a chance to start doing something about the depression we’re in.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Calling Out 'Crimes' of Obama, 31 Arrested Blockading NY Drone Base

Published on Monday, April 29, 2013 by Common Dreams


Calling Out 'Crimes' of Obama, 31 Arrested Blockading NY Drone Base

Unusually high bail rates seem to indicate desire by courts to discourage continued protest at Hancock Drone Base

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

Thirty-one people were arrested at the Hancock Air Force Base in Syracuse, N.Y. on Sunday after protesting against the deadly U.S. drone program that has killed thousands of innocent civilians around the world.

About 250 activists took part in the anti-drone protest. Sunday's rally was part of a three-day weekend event titled: ‘Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire: A Convergence to Action.'

Those arrested had blockaded the front entrance to the military base by lying down in front of the main gate.

As Democracy Now! reports:

The [Hancock Air Force Base] is a departure point for U.S. drones. Roughly 300 people held a funeral procession to condemn the use of drones in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The protesters were members of the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars.

The protesters attempted to deliver a war crimes indictment to the base, charging President Obama, the military and service members at Hancock Air Base with crimes against humanity.

The letter states:

We, the people, charge the US President, Barak Obama, and the full military chain of command, to Commander Colonel Greg Semmel, every drone crew, and service members at Hancock Air Base, with crimes against humanity, with violations of part of the Supreme Law of the Land, extrajudicial killings, violation of due process, wars of aggression, violation national sovereignty, and killing of innocent civilians.

According to the Syracuse Peace Council (part of the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars), bail amounts for those arrested have been set at unusually high rates, ranging from from $500 to $3500, with a total of $34,000 for the 31 people. Though some of those arrested posted bail and have been released, others are refusing to do so and will be held in jail until the next available court dates. Those dates, reportedly, are not until either May 7th or 8th.

___________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

________________________________________

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/29-0





Update on the "Hancock 31"



As of 9 pm Monday, almost everyone is out of jail!



Twenty-one people had been arraigned on Sunday, most charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction of governmental administration second degree. All were given orders of protection and their bails ranged from $500-$3500. Everyone was bailed out today with the exception of three people. Two will be bailed out tomorrow and one is hoping for a bail reduction (and will be bailed out if that doesn't happen).



The total "bail bill" was $34,000. We are starting a revolving bail fund for future bail needs. To donate to the fund, send a check made out to the Syracuse Peace Council, 2013 E. Genesee St., Syracuse, NY 13210. Be sure to note that it is for the revolving bail fund.



The next court dates for those arraigned are split between among May 7 and May 8.



The remaining ten received appearance tickets and will be arraigned on May 1 (that's the only date we know about, but we didn't hear from everybody).

-Carol Baum



People arraigned

Elizabeth Adams

Cynthia Banas

Ellen Barfield

Dewing Beatrice

Russell Brown

Cait Demott Grady

Bruce Gagnon

Charles Heyn

Rae Kramer

Joanne Lingle

Bonny Mahoney

Valerie Niederhoffer

Jules Orkin

Elizabeth Pappalardo

Joan Pleune

Bev Rice

Grace Ritter

Andy Schoerke

Mary Snyder

Eve Tetaz

Paki Wieland



People with appearance tickets

John Amidon

Max Farhi

Sandra Fessler

Daniel Finley

Jack Gilroy

John Honeck

Mary Loeher

Harry Murray

Julienne Oldfield

Matt Ryan

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Baltimore Activist Alert - April 30 & May 1, 2013

46] Celebrate passage of the Offshore Wind Energy Act – Apr. 30


47] Philadelphia Peace Vigil - Apr. 30

48] War Is Not the Answer – Apr. 30

49] Genetically Engineered Food: A Fad or the Future? – Apr. 30

50] CONSTITUTION SERIES CONTINUES – Apr. 30

51] Activate Your Inner Citizen Briefing – May 1

52] Price we pay for militarism and war – May 1

---

46] – Join the Maryland Offshore Wind Coalition in a celebration of the passage of the Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2013.....a win for wind and a win for Baltimore. Join in for refreshments, wind memorabilia and drink at Liam Flynn's Ale House, 22 W. North Ave. from 5 to 7 pm on Tues., Apr. 30. Contact the Baltimore Offshore Wind Grassroots Organizer Meredith Moise at mmoise@mdlcv.org or RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/333003913488644/.



47] – Each Tuesday from 4:30 - 5:30 PM, the Catholic Peace Fellowship-Philadelphia for peace in Afghanistan and Iraq gathers at the Suburban Station, 16th Street & JFK Blvd., at the entrance to Tracks 3 and 4 on the mezzanine. The next vigil is Apr. 30. Call 215-426-0364. Call 410- 230-0450 or go to http://www.redemmas.org.



48] – There is a vigil to say "War Is Not the Answer" each Tuesday since September 11, 2001 at 4806 York Road. Join this ongoing vigil. The next vigil is Apr. 30 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. Call Max at 410-366-1637.



49] – On Tues., Apr. 30 at 6 PM at the University of Maryland, College Park, hear a talk about Genetically Engineered Food: A Fad or the Future? Go to http://iaa.umd.edu/news/events/genetically-engineered-food-fad-or-future. Contact Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director, Organic Consumers Association, at alexis@organicconsumers.org. He will be the featured speaker in the Sustainable Tuesdays: Topics in Sustainable Agriculture series in Room 1123, Jull Hall.



50] – The CONSTITUTION SERIES CONTINUES on Tues., Apr. 30 from 7:30 to 9 PM with an important discussion of the Death Penalty at the Baltimore Ethical Society, 306 W. Franklin St., Suite 102, Baltimore 21201. Discuss Maryland’s campaign to end capital punishment as well as the national and constitutional issues surrounding the death penalty. Among the questions to consider: What is the current national legal status of capital punishment, and what does the future hold? Should we consider the death penalty “cruel and unusual punishment? Go to http://www.bmorethical.org. Call 410-581-2322 or email ask@bmorethical.org.



51] – CPHA will be hosting an Activate Your Inner Citizen Briefing on improving community health. A panel discussion, moderated by WBAL's Jayne Miller, will take place at War Memorial Hall on Wed., May 1 from 6:30 to 8 PM. The doors will open at 5:30 pm and citizens will have the opportunity to explore informational displays on health initiatives going on in our communities. Carol Payne from HUD, Anne Palmer from the Center for a Livable Future, and Klaus Philipsen, former president of ArchPlan will be the panelists. The event is free, but pre-registration is encouraged. To register or send an advanced question for the discussion, call CPHA at (410) 539-1369 x109 or email melf@cphabaltimore.org.



52] – Nowhere is it written that the U.S. Empire will go on forever... The price we pay for militarism and war will be scrutinized on Wed., May 1 from 6:30 to 9:30 PM at the American Friends Service Committee, Friends Center, 1501 Cherry St., Phila., PA 19102. See a screening of Eugene Jarecki's powerful documentary WHY WE FIGHT [2005, 98 mins.] See trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcuStxJHv4c. Afterwards the discussion includes Bob Smith, Brandywine Peace Community, Peter Lems, American Friends Service Committee, Cassie MacDonald, Brigid House, Camden NJ, and John Grant, Veterans for Peace. Call 215-241-7170.

To be continued.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

CIA 'Biggest Source of Corruption in Afghanistan'

Published on Monday, April 29, 2013 by Common Dreams


CIA 'Biggest Source of Corruption in Afghanistan'

All evidence points to how US occupation fuels racketeering, graft, and deep mistrust

- Jon Queally, staff writer

Confirming what many policy experts have known for some time, a New York Times headline in Monday's print edition describes how the most corrupting influence within the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is not innate cronyism or tribal favoritism, but rather the suitcases full of US cash delivered to the Presidential Palace over the last decade by the CIA.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States,” one unnamed US official told the Times' Matthew Rosenberg, who described "wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags" being delivered to Karzai's door.

According to the reporting:

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

It has been a key talking point within mainstream discourse that the one of the "goals" of US policy has been to undo the "culture of corruption" that is described as somehow a natural phenomenon in Afghanistan. However, as many progressive analysts have noted throughout the years of the military occupation, US policy has been the single largest driving force of political corruption in the country.

As Robert Naiman, director of Just Foreign Policy, pointed out in 2009:

Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome?

There is something very Captain Renault about it. We're shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption. How ungrateful can they be?

But perhaps we should consider the possibility that our occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate - indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan today is the American occupation.

And just this month, writing for TomDispatch.com, historian and author Dilip Hiro desribes how cash infusions from the US went beyond what the CIA was delivering to Karzai, revealing that the culture of "cash assistance" was fueling an illegitimate economy as a war waged in the margins:

In its drive to win the hearts and minds of Afghan villagers, the Pentagon’s policymakers also gave cash directly to U.S. officers to fund the building of wells, schools, and health clinics in areas where they were posted. The stress was on quick, visible results -- and they were indeed quick and visible: the funds generally ended up in the pockets of rural power brokers with little oversight and no accountability, particularly when the American officer involved usually left the area after a relatively brief tour of duty.

Later, the State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a Congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the U.S. pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.

Staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bagsful of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan’s underdeveloped $12 billion economy -- a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 -- did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.

Back to the Times reporting:

... much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.

The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan.

As Hiro concludes in his piece, "In the next two years, as Washington draws down its forces in Afghanistan and the situation there disintegrates further, there will undoubtedly be more stories about “Afghan” corruption. Given that, it’s well worth recalling the following facts: it was the U.S. that flooded the country with military and aid funds, while expediently skipping any process of oversight, and so turned Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Corruption."

__________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/29

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Drone Wars: How White Privilege Obscures Real Dialogue

http://www.nationofchange.org/drone-wars-how-white-privilege-obscures-real-dialogue-1366982992


Drone Wars: How White Privilege Obscures Real Dialogue

by Noor Mir and Rooj Ahwazir

We are not here to proffer an analysis. We aren’t academics. We are here as a Pakistani and a Yemeni, as activists, as citizens of this country and as citizens of our homelands. We are dismayed. We are confused. But we are not hopeless.

We had been waiting for this hearing for a long time. With a handful of location and time changes, rumors floating around of Rand Paul as a witness and a push by human rights organizations around the globe to make calls to their senators and ask them to pose the important questions about civilian casualties of the secret war, the momentum had crescendoed by the time the moment finally approached on Tuesday. We were the first in line at noon for the 4 pm hearing, amused by the cameras trained on members of the Intelligence Committee as they were hurried by their staff into their closed meeting on the Boston bombings. One of our colleagues stood in the receiving line and asked senators the same question as they speed-walked past him, undoubtedly avoiding the activist in pink, “What about Abdulrahman Al-awlaki? He was just a boy? Will you ask about why they killed him with a drone strike?” James Risch eloquently responded with a simple “No.”

Hart 216, ironically the same room where Brennan’s first public confirmation hearing was held and that we disrupted, was filled with journalists and activists, many in Amnesty’s black shirts with white targets. Testimonies started with Retired Marine Corp General James Cartwright and moved down the line, each one with a more or less “pro-drone reform” spin. Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown spoke of the antiquity of the AUMF with regards to targets with more and more tenuous links to al-Qaeda such as Somalia’s al-Shabaab. We nodded. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason, smiled broadly as he explained that enemy combatants on U.S. soil could be lawful drone targets. Retired Col. Martha McSally was introduced as a special guest of Lindsey Graham’s, which became more and more evident as the hearing proceeded and she spoke about how we were better off calling drones “remotely piloted aircrafts or RPAs” (not dissimilar from CEO of pro-drone lobby AUVSI Michael Toscano’s remark at the Judiciary hearing last month that drones have a negative connotation and we are better off calling them unmanned aerial vehicles). We winced. Peter Bergen spoke about calculating the dead and noted that civilian casualties were significantly reduced in 2013. Then Farea al-Muslimi, a friend from Yemen, took the microphone.

We sobbed.

For the first time ever, there was a public hearing on the human, yes, “human” cost of drone warfare. For the very first time, the drone debate included on its panel of white male faces a young, brown Yemeni man who spoke clearly but emotionally about how hard it was to reconcile his love for America and Americans with the devastation upon his dear Yemen, and his struggle with informing his community about the goodness of America-- that these drone strikes which are killing innocent people were not representative of the American people. For the first time, Senators were hearing from someone whose job was not to sift through news sources to calibrate numbers of dead people, or somebody who wrote lengthy legal opinions “reasoning” with murder, or an obvious ex-military apologist for war, cowering behind podiums and office desks. For the first time, Senators saw that the human cost was far beyond dollars and triple digits. It was a man’s identity and morals in question, his home and his family’s life in jeopardy, his difficulty in both loving a country that has given him so much, but taken away equal amounts.

Help us speak truth to power. Donate what you can afford to support NationofChange.

We can relate to his dilemma.

Farea wasn’t there to try to win the hearts and minds of Senate by giving them policy or reform suggestions. He was there to tell his story. But white privilege and its associated subjectivities were clearly in action.



“I have been to Yemen,” Lindsey Graham said to Farea al-Muslimi. Our blood pressures rose. “Isn’t your country in turmoil?” Graham continued. “We have some problems.” replied Al-Muslimi. Graham ended his questioning, self-indulgent smirk on his face, as if to say, “I rest my case.” Although we doubt he is even aware of the terminology, Graham’s neo-colonial presumptions about Farea’s understanding of his own country were disgusting.

No, Senator, you do not rest your case. We, as citizens of the United States and witnesses to the turmoil in this nation, do not accept your reasoning. Schools are shutting down across the country and students are staging walkouts on this very day to protest this blow to their rights to a fair and equal education. Affirmative action is still a subject of debate, as though structural inequalities are a myth. We are still waging an endless, futile and racist war on drugs and extending a school to prison pipeline that is tearing apart families and disenfranchising youth. Racial profiling is rife, with a Palestinian woman in a hijab being assaulted in a Boston suburb last week following the bombings and a Bangladeshi man being savagely beaten in the Bronx on account of the color of his skin. This country is ripped down the middle when it comes to gun control despite the serious shootings that have devastated Aurora (and remember Columbine?). Monsanto damages our food diversity and destroys our health but props up our elected officials with one hand and stifles small farms with the other. There are uprisings, there is dissent, there is police brutality. This country is in no lesser turmoil than Yemen, or Pakistan, just because the standards to which you hold our homelands in comparison to yours is whitewashed by your condescension and insensitivity to difference. Your bigotry precedes you, Senators -- your causation is fundamentally flawed.

Lindsey Graham was not the only one whose self-righteous “understanding” of the political and cultural landscapes of places like Pakistan and Yemen barred him from actually exploring the human cost of war. The majority of the hearing focused on analyzing the flaws of the current administration’s reliance on an overbearing executive authority and reforming the AUMF. We waited with bated breath for it to go beyond what we had hoped was only a self-obsessed, stagnant battle of the egos, but it did not. Questions prized legal, constitutional and operational aspects over ones actually pertaining to stories that Farea could have told, their commentaries punctuated with “We thank you for coming such a long way,” or “We thank you for that chilling perspective.” Nobody apologized for bombing his village, Wessab. They ascribed so profoundly and unwaveringly to forceful measures of “counterterrorism” as a given strategy with no room for questioning that they, in turn, tried to reject the validity of his personal experiences.

There are both benefits, and costs to having witnessed a panel of white male privilege embodied, questioning a similarly colored panel, except with one brown face. The outlier, the subject of fascination, the other, upon whom were projected a series of embarrassingly condescending generalizations about the “untrustworthiness” of the Yemeni government and questions about whether “Yemenis supported AQAP before the drone strikes,” to which he answered no (because surprisingly, people of color do not welcome terrorism of any variety). Farea spoke beautifully and passionately when he was afforded the chance about the dangers of drones in creating more enemies than friends, but was not allowed to analyze or explain his statement any further, curtailed by a reliance on legal jargon and reining in executive authority. We are thankful for him being there, but we are distressed that the Subcommittee’s treatment of his presence was just that-- a cold, removed, and uninvolved treatment markedly different from their involved and lengthy conversations with the remaining witnesses. Why invite a Yemeni to speak about the human costs of drone wars and then cast a shadow of doubt and ignorance over his experiences by adopting a presumptuous tone?

The benefits are that Farea’s testimony was the only segment of the hearing that was any different from what we have heard before and what the public wants to hear more of. We appreciate that he prompted moral discussion and colored the panel of academics and military experts with his very human experiences of drone-related tragedies. We are grateful that he occupies a very special place as a person who looks at the United States as a second home and as a place of generosity and kindness; this sentiment occupied the center of his testimony and thus positively problematized the complexities of his relationship with drone wars in Yemen.

We must focus on these personal stories, destroyed and mangled bodies, identified by mothers as their son’s via a video on a cell phone. We must focus on his love and respect for this country and his simultaneous dismay at its terror. We must cherish his challenge of the usual power dynamics. We must invite a Farea to every hearing on drone strikes and allow for the voice of a person of color to be empowered and to resound with its own volition, devoid of the presumptions and blanket abstractions of our elected officials. We must disempower them of their given privilege and attend to the power of his words as they are importantly different from the rest. We must not presume that his country is lesser than ours, or more conflicted than ours, or in need of the sort of dialogue that is prefaced on “What I feel is good for you, must be good for you.”

As we left the hearing room, a young male journalist came up to us and said, “Are you with CODEPINK? Do you know that what you do is counterproductive? Your chortling and whispering during the hearing impairs my ability to listen.” This is for him: We are Yemeni, we are Pakistani, we are Americans. We are activists and we are dissenting-- be it with an article, or a louder than usual whisper, a die-in in front of a drone manufacturer’s, a sit-in, a voluntary arrest, or charging towards an elected representative.

We stand with justice. We are here to stay.

For more from Noor Mir and Rooj Alwazir please visit CODEPINK.org

Noor is the Pakistani-American anti-drone campaign coordinator at CODEPINK.

Rooj is a Yemeni-American activist and organizer with SupportYemen.

Fact vs. Fiction: How Renewables Outshine Fracking

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)


EcoWatch [1] / By Jay Warmke [2]

Fact vs. Fiction: How Renewables Outshine Fracking

April 15, 2013

Originally posted on EcoWatch.com [3]

The practice of hydraulic horizontal fracturing or fracking [4] to extract natural gas from the shale beds of the U.S. began, for all practical purposes, in 2007. Since that time, the production of natural gas within the nation has increased, gas extracted from shale beds more than making up for a decline in production from conventional sources.

And the industry has not been quiet about this growth. Hardly a day passes without some national media outlet expounding the benefits the nation will derive from this recent production “boom.” But just how real is this boom when compared with other developments within the energy industry—specifically the exponential growth of renewable energy [5]?

Just the facts, ma’am

To be sure, there has been an increase in the production of domestic natural gas. As President Obama noted in his recent State of the Union address [6], production of natural gas within the U.S. has never been higher. But since 1971, when annual domestic production hit about 22,000,000 million cubic feet, natural gas production has remained fairly stable, hovering at around the 20,000,000 million cubic feet level.



In 2011, annual domestic natural gas production rose to 24,000,000 million cubic feet (growing by about 20 percent since 1995). An import fact often overlooked in discussions concerning this recent spike in production is that, while output has indeed increased, the number of gas wells needed to produce this gas has increased at a much greater rate (up about 180 percent over the same time period).

Perhaps the real story in these numbers is that the amount of natural gas per well continues to decline. A sign of an industry past its peak, with declining reserves and lower productivity.



Where has the Real growth been?

While a 20 percent growth in production over a dozen years may be considered a “boom” by some, almost ignored in the national dialogue has been the recent growth of renewable energy [7].

In 2012, renewable energy accounted for 55 percent of all the new domestic energy created in the U.S. For the first time in history, renewable energy (primarily wind and solar) has become the dominant electrical energy of choice within this nation.

Over the past ten years, wind energy capacity within the U.S. [8] has grown by more than 960 percent. Last year wind alone accounted for 42 percent of the total new U.S. electrical capacity installed, and wind energy capacity grew an astounding 22 percent in 2012 alone.



One reason for this remarkable growth can be found in the declining price of renewable energy installations. Since 2008, the price of commercial wind turbines has declined by nearly 30 percent. In 2011, the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) published that wind power production costs had reached parity with the cost of producing electricity with coal (traditionally considered the cheapest source of electicity). And while the cost of wind power continues to decline, the cost of energy produced by coal continues to rise.

But what about Solar?

While the growth of wind energy capacity has been dramatic in recent years, it pales in comparison with its comparatively small renewable energy cousin—solar electric.

For all practical purposes, the solar industry in the U.S. is only about ten years old. Prior to 2006, just a very few early adopters had deemed it practical to install relatively small and relatively expensive solar arrays. But in recent years, the price of solar energy has fallen dramatically, and as a result, the installation of photovoltaic (PV) systems has increased in an equally dramatic fashion.



The U.S. currently has about 6,500 megawatts of installed solar capacity [9], enough to power more than 1 million homes. This represents a growth in generating capacity of more than 1,200 percent in just five years.

Once again, this exponential growth can be traced to declining prices. Over the past five years, the price of installed systems has been more than cut in half. And in recent years, declines in the cost of solar panels have resulted in even more dramatic price reductions. From the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2012, the average cost of an installed PV system dropped by 33 percent, and the average price of a solar panel declined by 58 percent.



Critics argue, however, that while renewable energy growth is indeed impressive, the numbers are quite small when compared with energy derived from fossil fuels. And they are, in fact, correct. In 2011, the U.S. consumed a staggering total of 79.02 quadrillion BTUs of energy. Of this amount, only about 11 percent was obtained from renewable sources (primarily hydro and biofuels, with only about 2 percent coming from wind and solar).

However, exponential growth is a powerful force. Should the growth of wind and solar slow and only double each year, within five years they would account for more than 50 percent of all the energy consumed within the U.S. While this dramatic growth rate seems highly unlikely, given production limitations and inherant barriers to market (hard to convert a natural gas power plant to solar just because it is a cheaper process)—should give one pause. The transition may take place much faster than most industry watchers imagine.

The Revolution is underway

Our society is poised to transform as renewable energy becomes the dominant source of power. How these transitions will manifest are anyone’s guess—but they will be massive and dramatic. To be sure, we as a nation have undergone such changes before. The automobile was, at first, a silly plaything for tinkerers and the wealthy. Mobile phones were status symbols, and nothing more. It was a certainty within the industry that they could never compete with the more efficient and ubiquitous land lines.

Yet our nation changed, despite the best efforts of the powerful railroads and Ma Bell. We are in the process of changing once again.

So why all the fuss about a small bump in domestic natural gas and oil production? We need only look to politics and marketing. The fossil fuel industry is long-established, wealthy and well connected. By comparison, the renewable energy industry is a child.

In a marketplace dominated by headline stories of visible failures such as Solendra, few Americans realize that (according to the Government Accountability Office) the electricity generated by fossil fuels receives $5 in federal subsidies [10] for every $1 received by the renewable energy industry.



In a very real sense, the only reason the fossil fuel industry can now compete with renewable energy is because of government subsidies.

My how the mighty have fallen. For more on this story, stay tuned to your local station …

Visit EcoWatch’s RENEWABLES [11] page for more related news on this topic.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/fracking/fact-vs-fiction-how-renewables-outshine-fracking

Links:

[1] http://ecowatch.org/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jay-warmke

[3] http://ecowatch.com/

[4] http://ecowatch.com/p/energy/fracking-2/

[5] http://ecowatch.com/p/energy/renewable-energy-energy/

[6] http://ecowatch.com/2013/obama-strong-stand-climate-sotu/

[7] http://ecowatch.com/2013/renewable-energy-82-percent-new-electrical-generation/

[8] http://ecowatch.com/2013/wind-power-in-2012/

[9] http://ecowatch.com/2013/solar-market-grows-76-percent/

[10] http://ecowatch.com/2012/fossil-fuel-subsidies-run-rampant/

[11] http://ecowatch.org/p/energy/renewable-energy-energy/

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Julian Assange on George Bush's Library and Bradley Manning's Trial

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16047-julian-assange-on-george-bushs-library-and-bradley-mannings-trial


Julian Assange on George Bush's Library and Bradley Manning's Trial

Sunday, 28 April 2013 11:35 By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink
Interview

I had an opportunity to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been granted political asylum since June 2012. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sex allegations, although he has never been charged. Assange believes that if sent to Sweden, he would be put into prison and then sent to the United States, where he is already being investigated for espionage for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic and military memos on the WikiLeaks website.

George W. Bush’s new presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Texas has opened with great fanfare, including the attendance of Presidents Obama and former Presidents Carter, Bush Sr. and Clinton. George Bush has said that the library is “a place to lay out facts.” What facts would you like to see displayed at his library?

A good place to start would be laying out the number of deaths caused by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. At Wikileaks, we documented that from 2004-2009, the US had records of over 100,000 individual deaths of Iraqis due to violence unleashed by that invasion, roughly 80% of them civilians. These are the recorded deaths, but many more died. And in Afghanistan, the US recorded about 20,000 deaths from 2004-2010. These would be good facts to include in the presidential library.

And perhaps the library could document how people around the world protested against the invasion of Iraq, including the historic February 15, 2003 mobilization of millions of people around the globe.

Many people worked hard during the Bush years to protest the wars, but the Bush administration refused to listen. It was very demoralizing for people to think that their efforts were for naught.

They should not be demoralized. I believe that the opposition to the Iraq war was very important, and that it actually altered the behavior of US forces during the initial invasion of Iraq. Compare it to the 1991 Gulf War, when massive numbers of Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, were killed. In the 2003 invasion there was a lot more concern about casualties. The protests rattled their cage.

We released a memo that showed that if the prospective military operation might kill over 30 people, it had to be approved all the way up the chain of command. So while the protests did not stop the war, they did have an impact on the way the war was initially conducted, and that’s important.

While George Bush is feted in Dallas, Bradley Manning languishes in jail. His trial will begin on June 2. Bradley already pleaded guilty in February to ten charges, including possessing classified information and transferring it to an unauthorized person. Those pleas alone could subject him to 20 years in prison. On top of that, the government has added espionage charges that could put him in prison for life.

What do you think the trial will be like?

It will be a show trial where the government tries to prove that by leaking the documents, Bradley “aided and abetted the enemy” or “communicated with the enemy.” The government will bring in a member of the Navy Seal team that killed bin Laden to say that he found some of the leaked information in bin Laden’s house.

But it’s ridiculous to use that as evidence that Bradley Manning “aided the enemy”. Bin Laden could have gotten the material from The New York Times! Bin Laden also had a Bob Woodword book, and no doubt had copies of articles from The New York Times.

The government doesn’t even claim that Bradley passed information directly to “the enemy” or that he had any intent to do so. But they are nonetheless making the absurd claim that merely informing the public about classified government activities makes someone a traitor because it “indirectly informs the enemy”.

With that reasoning, since bin Laden recommended that Americans read Bob Woodward book Obama’s War, should Woodward be charged with communicating with the enemy? Should The New York Times be accused of aiding the enemy if bin Laden possessed a copy of the newspaper that included the WikiLeaks material?

What are some things that Bradley Manning supporters can do to help?

They should pressure the media to speak out against the espionage charges. The Los Angeles Times put out a good editorial but other newspapers have been poor. A Wall Street Journal column by Gordon Crovitz said that Bradley should be tried for espionage, and that I should be charged with that as well because I’m a “self-proclaimed enemy of the state.”

If Manning is charged with espionage, this criminalizes national security reporting. Any leak of classified information to any media organization could be interpreted as an act of treason. People need to convince the media that it is clearly in their self-interest to take a principled stand.

What are other ways people can help Bradley Manning’s case?

People could put pressure on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These groups briefly protested the horrible conditions under which Bradley was detained when he was held in Quantico, but not the fact that he’s being charged with crimes that could put him in prison for life.

It’s embarrassing that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—Amnesty International headquartered in London and Human Rights Watch headquartered in New York—have refused to refer to Bradley Manning as a political prisoner or a prisoner of conscience.

To name someone a political prisoner means that the case is political in nature. It can be that the prisoner committed a political act or was politically motivated or there was a politization of the legal investigation or the trial.

Any one of these is sufficient, according to Amnesty’s own definition, to name someone a political prisoner. But Bradley Manning’s case fulfills all of these criteria. Despite this, Amnesty International has said that it’s not going to make a decision until after the sentence. But what good is that?

What is Amnesty’s rationale for waiting?

Their excuse is that they don’t know what might come out in the trial and they want to be sure that Bradley released the information in a “responsible manner.”

I find their position grotesque. Bradley Manning is the most famous political prisoner the United States has. He has been detained without trial for over 1,000 days. Not even the US government denies his alleged acts were political.

Human Rights Watch doesn’t refer to Bradley Manning as a political prisoner either. These groups should be pushed by the public to change their stand. And they should be boycotted if they continue to shirk acting in their own backyard.

Another way for people to support Bradley Manning is to attend his trial in Ft. Meade, Maryland, which begins on June 2, and the rally on June 1. They can learn more by contacting the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Thank you for your time, Julian.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

Medea Benjamin is a cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and is author of the book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Pentagon Claims $757 Million Overbilling by Contractor in Afghanistan

Pentagon Claims $757 Million Overbilling by Contractor in Afghanistan


Saturday, 27 April 2013 11:06 By Richard H.P. Sia, The Center for Public Integrity
Report

http://truth-out.org/news/item/16034-pentagon-claims-757-million-overbilling-by-contractor-in-afghanistan

(Photo: Asten / Flickr)

The principal food supplier to US troops in Afghanistan is embroiled in a costly dispute with the Pentagon that has attracted congressional interest.

The Pentagon allowed a private firm providing food and water to U.S. troops in Afghanistan to overbill taxpayers $757 million and awarded the company no-bid contract extensions worth more than $4 billion over three years, according to the Pentagon’s chief internal watchdog and congressional investigators.

The deal represented one of the largest U.S. military contracts in Afghanistan. But the Defense Logistics Agency, which was overseeing the contract, failed repeatedly to verify that the contractor’s invoices were accurate, an official in the Defense Department inspector general’s office said. "This has to be one of the prime poster childs for a government contract spun out of control," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said last week.

Mica and other members of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Subcommittee on National Security expressed outrage at a hearing last week about the Pentagon’s handling of the deal, especially two contract extensions awarded amid a dispute between the government and the company over as much as $1 billion.

The criticism was bipartisan, and it also targeted the Swiss-based private contractor, Supreme Foodservice GmbH, which had previously supplied British troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots.

The panel’s hearing, the first focused solely on the food contract, was convened to hear from agency and company officials about how a straightforward deal in 2005 to supply food and water to troops ballooned into a still-unresolved dispute with so much money at stake.

The company has denied wrongdoing. But several lawmakers at the hearing also accused it of trying to bill taxpayers improperly for a $58 million warehouse and charging $12 million to deliver food from that warehouse across the street to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province.

“Despite all these concerns [over overbilling and undocumented costs], the government continued to contract with Supreme, and it even exercised options to extend the contract,” said Subcommittee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. “We have well-established contracting procedures. If we're not going to use them, why have them?”

“It took DLA six years to demand that Supreme reimburse the government for more than $750 million in what it believed were overpayments — that's an astounding amount of money,” said Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat.

According to Tierney, DLA realized nearly a year after it expanded the scope of the contract to include many more delivery points — through verbal arrangements with Supreme — that its rates for transportation and storage costs were unreasonable. But the agency spent the next five and a half years trying unsuccessfully to negotiate fair and reasonable rates.

The House subcommittee, which launched a probe of the contract last spring, found that the defense agency already had paid Supreme $1.38 billion for distributing food to additional locations when it determined it had overpaid the firm by $756.9 million. “Despite all of these problems, the agency failed to rebid the contract after the contract expired [in 2010] and decided to grant Supreme a no-bid extension of the contract that ended up lasting two more years,” Tierney said.

Matthew Beebe, DLA’s deputy director for acquisition, told the panel that his agency has recouped $283 million — over a third of the $757 million in overpayments — by withholding nearly $22 million a month from Supreme, which is still supplying food and water to U.S. troops and NATO forces. The withholding, which began on March 2012, followed unsuccessful negotiations and audits in 2008 and 2011 to determine “whether Supreme’s rates were fair and reasonable,” Beebe said.

The company claims it is owed $1 billion more than the $5.5 billion it already has been paid over the life of the contract. It claims the initial contract allowed prices to be adjusted as the work expanded, and has appealed the refund demands to special government board.

Michael Schuster, Supreme Foodservice’s managing director for logistics, told the panel the audits were flawed. As its work progressed, Supreme had “to change fundamentally the way it executes its responsibilities and to develop and operate a network of airplanes, helicopters, and trucks able to reach isolated regions of Afghanistan,” Schuster said.

He added that DLA’s original solicitation said that only “remnants” of the Taliban were still active in areas of Afghanistan where his company would be operating. But as its mission expanded from four locations to 120 in remote areas, “312 of our subcontractors” lost their lives while delivering food to troops, he said. “Supreme had to build this network in an active war zone,” Schuster said.

At the hearing, Daniel R. Blair, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told lawmakers however that the contract was expanded improperly through orders that were not written down promptly. The DLA contracting officer “did not provide sufficient oversight,” by failing to set appropriate rates and promptly modify the written contract.

Beebe confirmed that DLA extended the contract for two more years in 2010, even though a 2008 review of the contract by the Defense Contract Audit Agency found possible double-billing by the company for the cost of delivering food to the forward operating bases. DLA officials did not seek competition because Supreme “was the only source able to provide the required support within the required timeframe,” he said.

Last summer, Beebe added, the agency issued a follow-on interim contract to Supreme that expires Dec. 12, 2013. That, too, was not competed, he said.

When questioned by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., about the warehouse the company built in southern Afghanistan, Schuster said it was necessary because of the surge in U.S. troop strength there in 2010 and 2011. Speier then raised the $12 million delivery cost for transporting food from the warehouse across the street. “So whether it costs you $12 million or not, it was a great way to soak the federal government, it sounds like?” she asked.

“No, it wasn't,” Schuster said.

Mica said he concluded that “we need to get out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later and put this whole wasteful episode behind us and, again, in a time of national deficits and the United States economic and national security being threatened by our fiscal situation.”

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

Richard H.P. Sia is the Senior Editor of CongressDaily.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs


Saturday, April 27, 2013

Sign the antibiotics petition

Friends,


If you are a health professional, please consider signing on to this Natural Resources Defense Council petition. Note that Tom Hucker would be pleased to speak with you about the matter. Thanks for considering this.

Kagiso,

Max

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 1:21 PM

Max,

Thanks so much for allowing PSR-Chesapeake to signing the antibiotics petition and offering to help get it in front of your members. I finally have an online version that your contacts can sign here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/antibiotics/.



Again, this letter will be sent to Maryland's Congressional delegation. I'm working for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to help strengthen the federal laws regulating the use of antibiotics. I hadn't realized 80% of antibiotics are used in agriculture, and while the medical community is reducing antibiotic use to prevent the creation of disease-resistant pathogens (superbugs), use in agriculture is increasing and the data on use is not disclosed by the FDA to the public.



We're asking health professionals like yourself to sign the letter. Thanks again for adding PSR and feel free to add your name. As you can see, the MD Hospital Association, the Maryland Nurses Assn, MedChi and many others are all on board.



Any of your members should feel free to contact me if they have any questions. This legislation may move soon in the Senate and House, and our Maryland Congressional delegation is positioned to play a key role, but it's important they hear from as many members of PSR as possible.



Thanks a lot!



Tom Hucker

(240) 481-4825



Dear Maryland Senator/Member of Congress,

As medical doctors and health professionals, we are writing to ask for your help in addressing the serious and growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (“superbugs”) that increasingly threatens public health. We specifically ask for your help to ensure that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acts to reduce the misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture, and we ask you to support legislation enabling FDA to better track and monitor this issue. We need your leadership on this vital issue.

It is hard to think of a problem that could more directly affect your constituents than a serious illness that does not respond to treatment. Antibiotic resistance is compromising the effectiveness of essential human medicines, leading to longer illnesses, more hospitalizations, and deaths when treatments fail. Incidence data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for 2005 suggest that just one kind of antibiotic resistant pathogens, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), killed nearly 19,000 Americans, more than HIV/AIDS in that year. A CDC-funded study estimates that antibiotic resistance in the United Sates results in up to $26 billion a year in excess healthcare costs and up to $35 billion a year in total societal costs.

The overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is a critical contributor to the problem of antibiotic resistance. Eighty percent of all antibiotics, and seventy percent of all medically important antibiotics, sold in the United States are for use in livestock. The vast majority are not used to treat any diseases, but are fed regularly to animals to speed growth and compensate for unsanitary and crowded conditions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the scientific literature “establish[es] a clear link between antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans” and “there is a compelling body of evidence to demonstrate this link.” Major medical and public health organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Public Health Association, have called for stronger action to protect life-saving antibiotics in the face of the clear scientific evidence linking the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in food animals and the spread of antibiotic resistance.

While FDA has warned for nearly 40 years that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in healthy animals is a serious human health concern, the agency has done little to change the status quo and currently either does not collect or publicly report the information necessary to evaluate drug use trends, patterns of use, or high risk practices. FDA issued a draft guidance in the Fall of 2012 that urges reduced use of antibiotics in animal agriculture but relies on voluntary adoption by industry to succeed. Yet it currently lacks the tools it needs to track industry’s progress in reducing use or identify high risk sectors and practices.

We ask you to support other legislative efforts that would address this shortcoming when the Animal Drug User Fee Amendments of 2008 (ADUFA) is reauthorized in 2013. As part of ADUFA reauthorization, Congress should require stronger reporting requirements for livestock

antibiotic sales and distribution that can help illustrate current use

patterns, explain resistance trends, and monitor progress in assuring

responsible livestock antibiotic use. Such reporting would provide critical information to help track progress in reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics and help target attention where it is needed.

We also ask for your leadership in ensuring that Congress does not undermine FDA’s authority to curb antibiotic use in animal agriculture. In March and again in early June of 2012, a federal court directed FDA to take action to end the use of antibiotics when their use in animals is not proven safe for human health. The court specifically required FDA to withdraw approvals for non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed unless drug manufacturers prove that such uses are safe. We ask for your help to ensure that no Congressional action is taken that would limit

or undermine FDA’s ability to comply with the court’s order or otherwise curb the misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

As doctors and healthcare professionals on the frontlines of this war against antibiotic resistant pathogens, we see every day how critical antibiotic stewardship is for our patients and communities. We hope you will give this issue the priority it deserves and ensure that FDA takes decisive action to track and curb antibiotic use in the livestock sector.

Sincerely,

MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society

Maryland Hospital Association

American Academy of Pediatricians – Maryland

Maryland Society of Anesthesiologists

Maryland Nurses Association

Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment

Maryland Physicians for a National Health Program

Physicians for Social Responsibility – Chesapeake

Hon. Dr. Dan K. Morhaim, Maryland General Assembly*

Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, PhD, Professor of Environmental Health, Johns Hopkins University*

Dr. Keeve Nachman, PhD, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable World*

Dr. Jay Graham, MD, MPH, MBA; GWU School of Public Health and Health Services*

Dr. Linda M. Bock, R.N.; Dimensions Healthcare*

Dr. Brian H. Avin, M.D.; The Neurology Center*

Dr. Amjad Chaudhry, DVM, MPH; Deputy Animal Program

Director, DHHS, NIH, NIMH*

Dr. Young Dae Cha, PD; Walter Reed Outpatient Pharmacy*

Dr. Tony Hausner, PhD; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid

Services (retired)

Can you sign an anti-killer drone letter to John Brennan?

Dear Friends,


Below is a letter that the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) is circulating for signatures. This letter will be sent to the head of the CIA, John Brennan, in mid-May and will set the stage for an action of nonviolent civil resistance that NCNR is organizing at the end of June at the CIA in Langley, VA. Consider adding your name, organization and city to this letter. Also consider joining us for the action at the CIA in June. I look forward to your response.

Kagiso,

Max

National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance

325 East 25th Street, Baltimore, MD 21218

Email mobuszewski at Verizon.net

Phone 410-366-1637

John Brennan, Director

The Central Intelligence Agency

Washington, D.C. 20500

xxxx xx, 2013

Dear Mr. Brennan:

We followed with great interest the progress of your nomination by President Obama to be head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now that the United States Senate has confirmed you as CIA director and you were sworn into office, we must write to you about our deep concerns regarding the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, by the CIA in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places.

CIA-operated drones have been used to kill people who have not been convicted of any crime, including US citizens. As you know, in 2011 in Yemen CIA drone attacks were used to kill, first, Anwar Al-Awlaki and weeks later his son. They were U.S. citizens, who were never charged, brought to trial, or convicted of any crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights brought a lawsuit in US federal court against the Obama Administration regarding the assassination of Al-Awlaki. The suit was lost on procedural grounds, however, the judge in the case stated "Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?"

We find this case to be alarming as it goes directly to important constitutional issues, due process, and international law. We concur with Michael Ratner, recent president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who stated “The dire implications of this killing should not be lost on any of us. There appears to be no limit to the president's power to kill anywhere in the world, even if it involves killing a citizen of his own country. Today, it's in Yemen; tomorrow, it could be in the UK or even in the United States.”

In addition, the CIA drone program has been used to kill political opponents of foreign governments the US supports. This happened in 2010 in Yemen, when a state governor who opposed President Ali Abdullah Saleh was labeled as a leader of Al Qaeda and killed by CIA drones. We do not see actions like this as promoting peace or stability in this troubled region. In fact, violent actions like this on the part of the US military and the CIA in sovereign countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen will only promote more terrorism directed at the US.

We are also disturbed by the lack of transparency and oversight by our congress. In spite of positive statements about you and the drone program by members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, there appears to be lack of oversight and understanding of the CIA drone program. For example, committee chair Senator Diane Fienstein recently said, on the first day of your nomination hearing, that she didn’t know that all combat age males were considered targets by the US drone program. This particular fact of targeting of combat age males had been reported over a year ago by The New York Times and other news organizations. If facts like this are public knowledge and members of congress are still unaware, then how much more ignorant can they be of the CIA drone program if they aren’t informed by your agency?

In spite of assurances from President Obama that the victims of drone strikes are surgical targets, it has been reported that hundreds of victims who are innocent of crimes against the US have been killed including civilian men, women, and children. These people have names and families who love them. Furthermore, people attending funerals in Pakistan have been killed by drone strikes. Reporters with the United Kingdom based Bureau of Investigative Journalism have reported that “…between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.”

We hope that you will take our concerns seriously as it is our position that the use of these drones to kill alleged criminals or terrorists without trial and conviction of any crime is illegal and immoral and increases the ill will directed toward the United States.

We have written to President Obama and the Secretary of Defense several times in the past with our concerns. We must state again in this letter to you what we said to President Obama: “As members of peace and justice organizations opposed to your continuation of the Bush administration’s failed wars, we are writing to condemn your use of unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) to kill citizens in at least seven countries. Besides opposing your war policies, we have great concern for people caught up in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Yemen. The use of drones is wrong on many levels: the illegality and immorality of assassinations, the violation of international law and the Constitutional protection of due process, the targeting of civilian populations, and the disregard of sovereignty. We are especially troubled by your refusal to release the flawed document which purportedly gives you legal cover to determine who is on the kill list…We believe U.S. wars and drone attacks have been demonstrable failures. Now is the time to take the risks of peace. Imagine leading a country which has denounced the madness of war, and instead wants to assist and make friendship with the people of the Middle East and Central Asia.”

We believe the US killer drone program by the CIA and the use of drones to kill by the U.S. military must be brought to an end immediately.

Because we take seriously our Nuremberg obligations, we ask that you respond and meet with us to discuss the termination of the use of drones by the CIA and the U.S. military. We would be prepared to meet with relevant policy-makers from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Obama Administration to discuss our proposal to immediately end killer drone strikes and to start a process of healing with the victims of U.S. wars. Please give serious consideration to our proposal of reconciliation and diplomacy rather than pernicious killer drone strikes.

We look forward to your response. Rejecting our proposal will mean more death and destruction abroad. We will then continue to protest, risk arrest, and denounce the CIA and U.S. military use of killer drones and a foreign policy of endless wars.

In peace,

Malachy Kilbride, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance

(Signatures will follow in alphabetical order by last name, along with affiliation and city.)