Op-Ed
Imagine yourself sitting down transfixed and watching video footage of U.S. bombs hitting Iran. You see children ripped limb from limb, mothers screaming and wailing, people panicked, tortured, traumatized, and killed. Imagine asking yourself at that point: What was I doing these past many months that I thought was more important than preventing this?
Now ask yourself today: What am I doing that is more important than ending the ongoing hell of the U.S. occupation of Iraq?
Are you struggling to support your family? So are many, many other people who still find hours and days to commit. While congress members and senators have the gall to tell constituents that opposing Pelosi or Reid and cutting off the funding lies outside their "comfort zone," citizens are going without sleep, ruining marriages and friendships, losing money, fasting, and risking serious jail time for nonviolent protests. Are those children hit by the bombs living within a "comfort zone"?
Now ask yourself today: What am I doing that is more important than ending the ongoing hell of the U.S. occupation of Iraq?
Are you struggling to support your family? So are many, many other people who still find hours and days to commit. While congress members and senators have the gall to tell constituents that opposing Pelosi or Reid and cutting off the funding lies outside their "comfort zone," citizens are going without sleep, ruining marriages and friendships, losing money, fasting, and risking serious jail time for nonviolent protests. Are those children hit by the bombs living within a "comfort zone"?
It’s 3 a.m. and your child is sleeping. A detainee groans at Guantanamo. On the campaign trail, the Clinton PR team is guzzling coffee, dreaming up new ways to milk votes out of fear.
Why, I wondered, is she going after these votes in the primary? Surely she doesn’t imagine that the fear fundamentalists are part of her constituency: the ones who think a wall across our Southern border, and a macho preener in the White House, will make them safe. Then I thought, oh, maybe it’s that Republican crossover thing. Rush Limbaugh loans the dittohead vote to Hillary so the GOP doesn’t have to run against Obama in the fall, and she eases their journey across the party divide with a little shameless fear-mongering so they feel temporarily at home.
Why, I wondered, is she going after these votes in the primary? Surely she doesn’t imagine that the fear fundamentalists are part of her constituency: the ones who think a wall across our Southern border, and a macho preener in the White House, will make them safe. Then I thought, oh, maybe it’s that Republican crossover thing. Rush Limbaugh loans the dittohead vote to Hillary so the GOP doesn’t have to run against Obama in the fall, and she eases their journey across the party divide with a little shameless fear-mongering so they feel temporarily at home.
It's kind of logical. In a pathological way.
A country that devotes a vast array of resources to killing capabilities will steadily undermine its potential for healing. For social justice. For healthcare as a human right.
Martin Luther King Jr. described the horrific trendline four decades ago: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
If a society keeps approaching spiritual death, it’s apt to arrive. Here’s an indicator: Nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance, and tens of millions of others are badly under-insured. Here’s another: The United States, the world’s preeminent warfare state, now spends about $2 billion per day on military pursuits.
Gaining healthcare for all will require overcoming the priorities of the warfare state. That’s the genuine logic behind the new "Healthcare NOT Warfare" campaign. http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2008-03-05-12-05-43-news.php
A country that devotes a vast array of resources to killing capabilities will steadily undermine its potential for healing. For social justice. For healthcare as a human right.
Martin Luther King Jr. described the horrific trendline four decades ago: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
If a society keeps approaching spiritual death, it’s apt to arrive. Here’s an indicator: Nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance, and tens of millions of others are badly under-insured. Here’s another: The United States, the world’s preeminent warfare state, now spends about $2 billion per day on military pursuits.
Gaining healthcare for all will require overcoming the priorities of the warfare state. That’s the genuine logic behind the new "Healthcare NOT Warfare" campaign. http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2008-03-05-12-05-43-news.php
Senator Russ Feingold (D., Wisc.) is preparing to give the Republicans in the Senate two more opportunities this week to grandstand and filibuster in favor of the occupation of Iraq. They will, of course, do so; and they will, of course, win.
Feingold cannot possibly have any doubt of that as he introduces his bills. As far as I know, he's not even trying to get the House to pass the same things, since they're guaranteed not to pass the Senate.
One of Feingold's bills proposes a delayed partial beginning of a withdrawal from an occupation that the vast majority of Americans (not to mention Iraqis) want completely ended. The other asks Bush to produce a report on his strategy for accomplishing the mythic mission that he uses to justify that same occupation. Both bills are written in Bush-Cheney vocabulary, promoting the very ideas they are intended to oh-so-weakly oppose.
Feingold cannot possibly have any doubt of that as he introduces his bills. As far as I know, he's not even trying to get the House to pass the same things, since they're guaranteed not to pass the Senate.
One of Feingold's bills proposes a delayed partial beginning of a withdrawal from an occupation that the vast majority of Americans (not to mention Iraqis) want completely ended. The other asks Bush to produce a report on his strategy for accomplishing the mythic mission that he uses to justify that same occupation. Both bills are written in Bush-Cheney vocabulary, promoting the very ideas they are intended to oh-so-weakly oppose.
A certain reverence is required just to approach the book’s title: “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” by noted economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. I can see why they understated it.
The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton. We’re not just “losing” this tragic, arrogantly unplanned war in the conventional sense of failing to subdue our enemies — we’re committing slow socioeconomic suicide with its open-ended pursuit, losing, as we plunge recklessly into debt over it, our options, our ability to choose. We’re losing the future.
“Because of the war, the national deficit is $2 trillion higher,” Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, told me. “At 5 percent interest, that’s $100 billion a year, year after year after year — forever!”
Such numbers are beyond the scope of the human imagination. To begin putting the war into financial perspective, Stiglitz suggested that we need a new unit of account: “Think of what things would cost in terms of hours, days, weeks of fighting.”
The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton. We’re not just “losing” this tragic, arrogantly unplanned war in the conventional sense of failing to subdue our enemies — we’re committing slow socioeconomic suicide with its open-ended pursuit, losing, as we plunge recklessly into debt over it, our options, our ability to choose. We’re losing the future.
“Because of the war, the national deficit is $2 trillion higher,” Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, told me. “At 5 percent interest, that’s $100 billion a year, year after year after year — forever!”
Such numbers are beyond the scope of the human imagination. To begin putting the war into financial perspective, Stiglitz suggested that we need a new unit of account: “Think of what things would cost in terms of hours, days, weeks of fighting.”
Maybe it sounded good when politicians, pundits and online fundraisers talked about American deaths as though they were the deaths that mattered most.
Maybe it sounded good to taunt the Bush administration as a bunch of screw-ups who didn’t know how to run a proper occupation.
And maybe it sounded good to condemn Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush for ignoring predictions that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to effectively occupy Iraq after an invasion.
But when a war based on lies is opposed because too many Americans are dying, the implication is that it can be made right by reducing the American death toll.
When a war that flagrantly violated international law is opposed because it was badly managed, the implication is that better management could make for an acceptable war.
Maybe it sounded good to taunt the Bush administration as a bunch of screw-ups who didn’t know how to run a proper occupation.
And maybe it sounded good to condemn Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush for ignoring predictions that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to effectively occupy Iraq after an invasion.
But when a war based on lies is opposed because too many Americans are dying, the implication is that it can be made right by reducing the American death toll.
When a war that flagrantly violated international law is opposed because it was badly managed, the implication is that better management could make for an acceptable war.
I don't know when Hillary Clinton and her advisors started channeling Karl Rove, but it's happened and it's ugly. If you want to stop them from tearing the Democratic Party apart, then get on the phones today and volunteer to turn out the Obama vote in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Her campaign's been sleazy since Obama first emerged as a serious challenger. I've written about it here and here. But in the past week, it's escalated. She's just run a radio ad on NAFTA that pretends to be a news report. Meanwhile, Canadian television reported that Clinton's campaign offered the same disavowals she just accused an Obama advisor of making. Her 3:00 AM ad echoed the worst of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. When asked if she'd "take Senator Obama on his word that he's not a Muslim," she left the door open to the right wing lies by saying "there's nothing to base that on. As far as I know."
She just handed McCain his campaign script by saying, "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
Her campaign's been sleazy since Obama first emerged as a serious challenger. I've written about it here and here. But in the past week, it's escalated. She's just run a radio ad on NAFTA that pretends to be a news report. Meanwhile, Canadian television reported that Clinton's campaign offered the same disavowals she just accused an Obama advisor of making. Her 3:00 AM ad echoed the worst of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. When asked if she'd "take Senator Obama on his word that he's not a Muslim," she left the door open to the right wing lies by saying "there's nothing to base that on. As far as I know."
She just handed McCain his campaign script by saying, "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
If we ignore global warming much longer, we'll face a world of perpetual disaster, so there's no larger question for presidential candidates than who is more likely to tackle it successfully. Although Obama's and Clinton's positions are similar, he seems far more likely to. The key difference is their ability to mobilize a grassroots base to demand that the necessary changes get passed.
In the wake of ten straight losses, Clinton's going to need some miracles to win, and Mike Huckabee's already ahead of her in line for divine intervention. But the question is how much damage she'll do to Obama and the Democratic chances before she quits.
If the fight goes to the convention, we know the answer: Unless she totally routs Obama in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, her sole remaining path to the nomination depends on convincing the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, and convincing the credentials committee to honor the problematic Michigan and Florida elections. So she'll have to practically destroy the party to save it, or more accurately to save herself. Assuming a possible breaking sex scandal doesn't bring down McCain, he already beats Clinton by 12 points in the latest poll, while Obama defeats him by 7. If the young voters, independents, and African Americans who Obama's enlisted in droves stay home in November because they feel they've been betrayed, Clinton's chances would be slim to none.
If the fight goes to the convention, we know the answer: Unless she totally routs Obama in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, her sole remaining path to the nomination depends on convincing the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, and convincing the credentials committee to honor the problematic Michigan and Florida elections. So she'll have to practically destroy the party to save it, or more accurately to save herself. Assuming a possible breaking sex scandal doesn't bring down McCain, he already beats Clinton by 12 points in the latest poll, while Obama defeats him by 7. If the young voters, independents, and African Americans who Obama's enlisted in droves stay home in November because they feel they've been betrayed, Clinton's chances would be slim to none.
I know it seems a geological eon ago, but do you remember the resignation of Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle? In the wake of Clinton's major Wisconsin defeat, I remembered how Doyle never told Clinton about the campaign's massive hemorrhaging of cash. And how Clinton similarly kept Solis in the dark when she took out her $5 million personal loan. Given that Hillary Clinton's campaign has now been reduced to a nonstop mantra of "ready to lead on day one," it made me wonder what that incident reveals about her competence, transparency and trust—the essence of her ability to lead.