Category: Peace and War

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Peace and War, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

Woke up this morning to the startling news that US President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Price–and a perceptive entry on Huffington Post wondering why.

After all, he has initiated a slow and limited timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, pretty much continuing the “progress” of his predecessor–and has made very clear his intent to expand the war in Afghanistan.

Now it’s true that these were wars he inherited, and that he’s had a very full plate even by presidential standards. It’s also true that he has moved us forward on climate change and the environment, on labor, and on the idea that foreign affairs should be primarily addressed through diplomacy And that last bit has certainly help the slow process of rebuilding the U.S.’s stature in the world, after eight years of a rogue coup d’etat regime that left the world negatively astounded and quite terrified. His speech in Cairo was a terrific example.

But the Nobel award does seem a bit, ummm, premature. I’d have rather they waited until he successfully extricated us from the Bush wars, or until he made a speech like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, both my fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world–in the 21st century, war simply has no place in the arsenal of foreign policy. The last significant example of a war achieving policy ends was World War II, when the world responded to a series of power-mad totalitarian regimes with equal force, stopped the aggressors at a great cost in human lives, and installed democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. That was 64 years ago, and took six bloody, difficult years to achieve. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a failure, and both Iraq and Afghanistan are succeeding only in giving strength and comfort and eager recruits to the enemies of freedom. Therefore, I have ordered the immediate drawdown of troops. Over the next three months, all US military personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be coming home, along with the private US military contractors that participate. In their place, we will devote significant resources toward hunger relief, education, rebuilding of bombed infrastructure, and eliminating corruption in those countries. There will be a small security presence whose mission is to protect the workers for social and economic justice that we will send over, but there will be no military mission beyond that. We can learn from the powerful example of countries like South Africa, Poland, and Northern Ireland, where peace and democracy were not imposed through the barrels of guns, but by the powerful leadership of indigenous residents who organized together to say, ‘enough of this.’ It’s long past time, in the words of John Lennon, to Give Peace a Chance.

The Nobel committee has made strange choices before (can you say Henry Kissinger?). I can only hope that they’re following the philosophy of rewarding the behavior they want to see in the hopes that the behavior will rise to meet the treatment. This is a great strategy in parenting, in conflict resolution between individuals, in customer service desks (I even write about it in my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First). It would be great if it turns out to work in international politics too.

Oh, and President Obama, I give you free and full permission to use the above speech in full or in part, at any time—including your Nobel acceptance speech in Sweden!

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

It is so amazing for me to watch a major foreign policy and development speech by a sitting US president and actually agree with more than 80 percent of it–yet that was the case for Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt. Even under Clinton, I was lucky if I agreed with him 25 or 30 percent of the time, and the number was far lower for speeches of the other presidents in my conscious lifetime.

As a progressive, I issue this challenge to other progressives: hold him to the grand rhetoric of peace, international cooperation, multicultural tolerance, and yes, feminism in the Arab world and at home…and to keep him maintaining his acknowledgment of the important roles of Israel and Iran as well as the Arab and Muslim countries.

But what was that he said about being in Iraq until 2012? Waaay too long.!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Peace and War Tagged with

We’ve known for quite a while that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is rife with incredible corruption. Under the Bush administration, there were basically no safeguards, and stories of money diverted into the pockets of US looters were legion.

Still, I had no idea it was this bad. According to Patrick Cockburn of the respected UK newspaper The Independent, when you add up all the thefts of a few billion here, a few million there, it totals around $125 billion. That is two-and-a-quarter times as much as Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Perhaps the saddest part is that of course, this money is NOT being used to rebuild Iraq. And therefore, not creating some good will to mitigate the horrific effects of our totally unjustified invasion and occupation. A proper rebuilding effort would have gone a long way toward demonstrating that the US had at least some altruistic motives. Instead, the rubble grows, the infrastructure fails, and Americans are hated more than ever.

I hope the Obama administration cracks down on these crooks, gets the troops out (I notice the timeline just got longer, from 16 to 18 months), and shows the Iraqi people that we are made of stronger stuff, and take seriously the mission to help undo the calamity we created.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War

Blackwater, a company heavily tarnished with a reputation for corruption and violence, a company that has done a lot of the heavy lifting for the Bush administration in Iraq, a company that was defeated in its plan to turn a US-Mexico border region into an armed camp…one of the most powerful private armies in the world–is feeling so much heat that it’s changed its name from Blackwater Worldwide to the innocuous-sounding (and totally vague) Xe.

It can run but it can’t hide. It’s still responsible for the atrocity/massacre at Nissur Square. It still has blood on its hands in incident after incident. And it’s still banned from future operations in Iraq.

It is an outrage that the US outsources its dirty work to companies like this (which pay their people a lot more than the government pays its soldiers), and then claims they can’t be held responsible for their actions because they’re outside the military system. That was the policy under Bush. I hope it changes under Obama.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War Tagged with , ,

Speaking of peace…this may be the first time anyone has cited both Howard Zinn and Mark Joyner on the same day. Mark is one of my favorite people. He’s extremely smart, a marketing legend, and that relatively rare bread, a marketer with a social conscience–even more rare for coming out of the military with his ideals intact. He’s an American but he lives in New Zealand. Here’s his well-thought-out plan for peace in Gaza. Methinks it could apply just as easily to Iraq or many other trouble spots.

I’ve been involved with Middle East peace stuff for years and I could find nothing to disagree with. Bravo, Mark! Now we just have to get the leaders of the world to read your blog.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

By Howard Zinn, with opening commentary by Shel Horowitz
Democracy Now ran a long speech by the legendary Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (a book that is absolute must reading for any serious student of history, of the power of social change, of people’s movements, and yes, of how to get to the kind of future we all want).

I strongly advise: go to the DN website and listen, watch, or read this speech. And then go read his book. If you’ve read it already, it’s probably time to read it again. If you’ve never read it, prepare to have your eyes opened wide.

Here are a couple of fragments of the speech. Two of which I bolded. the first is maybe the best advice Obama could receive–and the second is advice for we, the people. For us.
-SH

So, the other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war. The war, the thing that has, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you do all that? How can you offer free education, free higher education, which is what we should have really? We should have free higher education. Or how can you—you know. No, you know, how can you double teachers’ salaries? How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money.

And so, where’s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure…the top one percent of—the richest one percent of the country has gained several trillions of dollars in the last twenty, thirty years as a result of the tax system, which has favored them. And, you know, you have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes. You know that? You can’t do that. You don’t have their accountants. You don’t have their legal teams, and so on and so forth. You don’t have their loopholes.

The war, $600 billion, we need that. We need that money…that money is needed to take care of little kids in pre-school, and there’s no money for pre-school. No, we need a radical change in the tax structure, which will immediately free huge amounts of money to do the things that need to be done, and then we have to get the money from the military budget. Well, how do you get money from the military budget? Don’t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don’t we have to fight two wars? No. We don’t have to fight any wars. You know.

And this is where Obama and the Democratic Party have been hesitant, you know, to talk about. But we’re not hesitant to talk about it. The citizens should not be hesitant to talk about it. If the citizens are hesitant to talk about it, they would just reinforce the Democratic leadership and Obama in their hesitations. No, we have to speak what we believe is the truth. I think the truth is we should not be at war. We should not be at war at all. I mean, these wars are absurd. They’re horrible also. They’re horrible, and they’re absurd. You know, from a human, human point of view, they’re horrible. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people—imagine?—having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty, our war for whatever it is we’re supposed to be fighting for…

Obama could possibly listen, if we, all of us—and the thing to say is, we have to change our whole attitude as a nation towards war, militarism, violence. We have to declare that we are not going to engage in aggressive wars. We are going to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. “Oh, we have to go to”—you know, “We have to go to war on this little pitiful country, because this little pitiful country might someday”—do what? Attack us? I mean, Iraq might attack us? “Well, they’re developing a nuclear weapon”—one, which they may have in five or ten years. That’s what all the experts said, even the experts on the government side. You know, they may develop one nuclear weapon in five—wow! The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons. Nobody says, “How about us?” you see. But, you know, well, you know all about that. Weapons of mass destruct, etc., etc. No reason for us to wage aggressive wars. We have to renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy….

A hundred different countries, we have military bases. That doesn’t look like a peace-loving country. And besides—I mean, first of all, of course, it’s very expensive. We save a lot of money. Do we really need those—what do we need those bases for? I can’t figure out what we need those bases for. And, you know, so we have to—yeah, we have to give that up, and we have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We will no longer be a military superpower. “Oh, that’s terrible!” There are people who think we must be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We can—yeah. We’ll still be powerful. We’ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world. I mean, instead of sending helicopters to bomb people, send helicopters when they face a hurricane or an earthquake and they desperately need helicopters. You know, you know. So, yeah, there’s a lot of money available once you seriously fundamentally change the foreign policy of the United States…

when you put together that don’t belong together, you see a “national security”—no—and “national interest.” No, there’s no one national interest. There’s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there’s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They’re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there’s the interest of the worker, the nurse’s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests. Once you recognize that you and the government have different interests, that’s a very important step forward in your thinking, because if you think you have a common interest with the government, well, then it means that if the government says you must do this and you must do that, and it’s a good idea to go to war here, well, the government is looking out for my interest. No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they’re not the interests of the people…

We have checks and balances that balance one another out. If somebody does something bad, it will be checked by”—wow! What a neat system! Nothing can go wrong. Well, now, those structures are not democracy. Democracy is the people. Democracy is social movements. That’s what democracy is. And what history tells us is that when injustices have been remedied, they have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They’ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something. Really, that’s democracy.

And no, we mustn’t be pessimistic. We mustn’t be cynical. We mustn’t think we’re powerless. We’re not powerless. That’s where history comes in. If you look at history, you see people felt powerless and felt powerless and felt powerless, until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn’t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women’s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful enough to have an effect on the nation and on national policy. We’re not powerless. We just have to be persistent and patient…

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with ,

The news is terrible again: Dreadful violence in Gaza and Iraq, charities bankrupted by the Madoff scam, military forces massing on the India-Pakistan border, an open homophobe giving the invocation at the Obama inauguration, tough times for industries from publishing to retail to manufacturing, rampant poverty around the world (of material goods, housing, medical care, educational opportunity, and more) and a finance and foreign policy team that sure doesn’t seem a lot like the “change” mantra we were promised before the election.

And yet, this lyric from “Tommy” keeps playing in my head: “I have no reason to be overoptimistic…but somehow when you smile, I can brave bad weather!”

Yes, I know–the next part of the Tomm7 story is no cause for optimism. Neither is the world around us today.

But as 2008 draws to a close, I am still optimistic. I think the generation that is living now will fix the climate change problem. I’m hoping the generation of my future grandchildren might be able to do something about war and poverty.

I think the potential exists to transform the world we live in into something beautiful and powerful, to stake the claim on the rightful heritage of all people. But it will take all of us working together.

Decades ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that all of us deserve four freedoms:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

It’s still a pretty good list. Freedom from want and fear includes freedom from environmental catastrophe, hunger/poverty, or war. What can each of us do to help the world achieve this?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

By Shel Horowitz
This post is in three parts:

  • My Personal Poverty Story
  • What’s Wrong Right Now
  • Prescription to End Poverty

    • 7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.

    My Personal Poverty Story
    Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.

    When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.

    I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.

    Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.

    Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.

    What’s Wrong Right Now
    But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.

    And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?

    Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.

    Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.

    Prescription to End Poverty
    But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.

  • Switch to sustainable, renewable, nonpolluting energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale (non-invasive) hydro. Surely, if we can find $700 billion to pump into the financial system, we can find a few billion for a Marshall Plan-style initiative that would eliminate dependence on foreign oil, slash carbon emissions, create thousands of jobs, and put money in the pockets of rich and poor alike.
  • Retrofit all buildings with proper insulation, water-saving plumbing, and other sustainabiity measures. Again, this lowers costs, creates jobs, and reduces carbon as well as dependence on oil imports (and thus global warming).
  • Decriminalize the petty offenses that fill up our prisons, taking away income-earners, making it harder for them to get jobs again when they get out, and leaving their families with a huge financial burden. We have no business throwing people in prison for using drugs or feeling forced into prostitution. Dealing is one thing; it harms society. But using harms only the users and their families, as long as they don’t get behind the wheel or operate dangerous machinery.
  • Revitalize mass transit. Poor people get to work on buses and trains, and the more places transit systems reach, the more job opportunities for poor folks. Added benefits once again: reduced carbon, reduced foreign oil imports, reduced traffic congestion.
  • Urban community food self-sufficiency: an organic garden on every flat roof and in every vacant lot! Lowers food costs, boosts nutrition, freshness, and flavor, builds community, reduces carbon and more.
  • Adopt, finally, the sensible system of government-salaried doctors not beholden to insurance companies that has allowed almost every other industrialized country in the world to make health care a right, not a privilege. This is something we advocated for when I had the community organizing job with the Gray Panthers almost 30 years ago, and it’s still a good idea–and long-overdue.
  • Oh yes, and save poor and middle-class lives as well as vast boatloads of dollars by getting out of the illegal and unconscionable war the Bush administration lied its way into in Iraq. the $700 billion per year saved could provide seed capital to fund all the rest of it.

    • So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!

    While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

    It’s all over the blogosphere–but not in the mainstream news: Cheney’s office considered sending in heavily armed Navy Seals on boats disguised as Iranian craft to create an artificial incident so the US could go to war against Iran, according to Seymour Hersh. The project was rejected, as Americans killing Americans didn’t sound appealing. But that they even considered it makes you wonder–this goes beyond even the deceptions used to get us into Iraq.

    And why is the msm so silent on this?

    Hersh is one of the most distinguished investigative journalists of our time–the person who broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, more than 30 years ago, and who has broken several stories about various nefarious deeds in the Bush administration.

    If this allegation is true (as I suspect it is), it is without question grounds for impeachment and probably criminal prosecution. But where’s the investigation?

    In the first five pages of Google results for hersh hormuz seals, there is exactly one bit of coverage of Hersh’s very serious allegation in the mainstream media, from WQXT, St. Augustine, Florida. There was a story on today’s Democracy Now, which is where I heard about it–but that’s not the mainstream media.

    Today, my local paper had an article about Britney Spears’ father continuing legal oversight over her finances. Why is this news, while a plot to take an illegal action and disguise it as the work of a hostile government in order to enter a war goes unmentioned?

    I don’t give a flying f about Brittney–but I sure do care about actions on the part of our government that lead to lives lost, decrease the effectiveness of our diplomacy, channel the resources of the US government into all the wrong places, etc.

    Video clip and transcript of Hersh’s interview at the Campus Progress journalism conference. Here’s a quick bit:

    HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

    Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    I’ve been calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for five or six years now. OK, so I’m not a Democratic Party bigwig, and they don’t have to listen to me. But Ramsey Clark was Attorney General under LBJ, and he’s been sounding the call at least as long as I have.

    Why should these men be impeached?
    A very abbreviated list:

  • A long litany of unconstitutional acts that have made us a “rogue state”: illegal wars, torture of prisoners, attacks on civil liberties, etc.
  • Massive corruption and favoritism, not to mention attacks on perceived “enemies” (shades of Richard Nixon)
  • Attacking the patriotism of those who disagree with them
  • Holding themselves, their private contractors,a nd their offshore prisons above the law
  • Interfering with elections
  • Firing US Attorneys who chose not to divert resources into their pet (and baseless) fight on non-existent voter fraud among Democrats and minorities
  • Either gross incompetence, gross malfeasance, or both in the response to Katrina

    • Again, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The current gang of ruffians gets my vote for the worst administration in U.S. history. Even Warren Harding did a better job.

    So therefore I take great pleasure in reading in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer that Congressman Dennis Kucinich, perhaps Congress’ most honorable member, has finally introduced an impeachment resolution–35 counts of it! A reader comment notes it took 3 hours to read the whole thing.

    Of course, the Judiciary Committee has done nothing with his resolution last year to impeach Cheney, and will likely do nothing with this one unless Bush is foolish enough to actually try to start a war with Iran. I still don’t understand why the Dems have had no guts on this, even after they won a majority in Congress in 2006. What have they been waiting for?

    I am not going to defend in any way Bill Clinton’s lying under oath about his inability to keep his pants zipped
    –but if that was grounds for impeachment, the far larger crimes of Bush and Cheney should have been on the table a long time ago.

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