Global
My remarks are related to the problem of media as a factor in the war system but not focused primarily on that. I have experienced first hand as a journalist and as an author how the corporate news media hews to a set of well-delineated lines in the coverage of issues of war and peace that systematically block out all data that conflict with those lines. I’d be glad to talk about my experiences especially in covering ran and Syria in Q and A.
But I am here to talk about the larger problem of the war system and what is to be done about it.
I want to present a vision of something that has not been discussed seriously in many, many years: a national strategy to mobilize a very large segment of the population of this country to participate in a movement to force the retreat of the permanent war state.
I know that many of you must be thinking: that is a great idea for 1970 or even 1975 but its no longer relevant to the conditions we face in this society today.
he preposterous ironies of President Obama’s unapologetic visit to Laos on September 6 have not yet generated the attention they deserve, but they provide an excellent measure of the self-righteousness of the monstrous continuity of American violence inflicted on the world from Viet Nam in the 1950s to Yemen more than sixty years later.
Supporters of nuclear power like to argue that nukes are the key to combatting climate change. Here’s why they are dead wrong.
Every nuclear generating station spews about two-thirds of the energy it burns inside its reactor core into the environment. Only one-third is converted into electricity. Another tenth of that is lost in transmission. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists:
The United States government recently gave more than a million dollars to the family of one victim it had killed in one of its wars. The victim happened to be Italian. If you were to find all the Iraqi families with any surviving members who had loved ones killed by the United States it might be a million families. A million times a million dollars would be enough to treat those Iraqis in this respect as if they were Europeans. Who can tell me — raise your hand — how much is a million times a million?
That’s right, a trillion.
Now, can you count to a trillion starting from one. Go ahead. We’ll wait.
Actually we won’t wait, because if you counted one number per second you would get to a trillion in 31,709 years. And we have other speakers to get to here.
Maybe half a million dead, half a country — 10 million people — displaced from their homes, jettisoned onto the mercy of the world.
Welcome to war. Welcome to Syria.
This is a conflict apparently too complex to understand. The U.S. brokered a ceasefire with Russia, then proceeded to lead a bombing strike that killed 62 Syrian troops, injured another hundred — and gave tactical aid of ISIS. Later it apologized . . . uh, sort of.
“Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something we negotiated in good faith with them.”
