The Fire Burns, The Cauldron Bubbles
By Robert C. Koehler
America serves up its news in a cauldron from hell, or so it sometimes seems. The fragments are all simmering in the same juice: bombs and drones and travel bans, slashed health care, police shootings, the Confederate flag.
Double, double, toil and trouble . . .
Suddenly I’m thinking about the statues of Confederate generals taken down in New Orleans, the Confederate flag yanked from the state capital in Charleston, S.C. . . . and the secret flag the authorities can’t touch. Ray Tensing was wearing such a flag — a Confederate flag T-shirt — on July 19, 2015, while he was on duty as a University of Cincinnati police officer. That afternoon, he pulled over Samuel DuBose because of a missing front license plate. Less than two minutes into the stop, DuBose — a dad, a musician, an unarmed black man — had been shot and killed.
This is so commonplace that, while it may be news, it’s hardly surprising. Tensing was fired from his job. He went to trial for murder, twice. Both ended in hung juries. OK, that’s not surprising either. Cops are almost never convicted in such shootings. But what I can’t get out of my mind is the T-shirt. It’s what places this story fragment within the American news cauldron: the quiet hatred of it, the implicit sense of dominance, the armed racism. Tensing wasn’t a “loner” with an agenda. He was an officer of the law; he served the public. Yet he was secretly honoring the same agenda (the same god?) as Dylann Roof, the young man who killed nine African-Americans two years ago at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
This is the crossing of a line. Official public action — armed action, no less — is still permeated with poison.
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
“As Senate Republicans rolled out the Better Care Reconciliation Act,” Rolling Stone reported, “. . . the halls outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were starting to get a little crowded. Sixty disability rights activists from grassroots group ADAPT, many of whom were using wheelchairs, staged a ‘die-in’ to protest steep Medicaid cuts in the bill. They were arrested and removed by Capitol Police, with witnesses saying that some protesters were dropped by police officers dragging them from their chairs.”
A vote on the bill, as we all know by now, has been postponed because of the controversy it has generated across the country, the die-ins that have been held at senators’ offices, and the Congressional Budget Office determination that the legislation would wind up causing, ultimately, 22 million people to lose their health insurance, which translates into thousands of people dying prematurely. What T-shirts were the 13 (Republican, male, white) senators who wrote this bill wearing?
Maybe their T-shirts bore dollar signs rather than Confederate flags, but the connection resonates. Public policy emerges from what we believe to be right, perhaps without the least reflection or awareness. And there is a consensus of fear, scapegoating and dehumanization that has always dominated a portion of American policy as well as individual behavior. Some people’s lives just don’t matter. Or they’re in the way.
With the current president, reckless individualism and public policy merge, sometimes shockingly, as with, for instance, Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, which the Supreme Court partially removed from the oblivion two lower courts had assigned it.
According to The Guardian: “The nation’s highest court said the 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, along with a 120-day suspension of the US refugee resettlement program, could be enforced against those who lack a ‘credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.’”
So the chaos at airports will continue, and families from these “bad” countries can be split apart. Somehow I don’t see this as a separate, isolated piece of news but part of the big picture of what President Trump might call American greatness, which is to say, American dominance. And of course many of the people who would attempt to enter the United States from these countries are refugees of the wars we are waging or facilitating there, which are making their homes unlivable.
“The enemies may rotate, but the wars only continue and spread like so many metastasizing cancer cells,” Rebecca Gordon wrote recently.
“Even as the number of our wars expands, however, they seem to grow less real to us here in the United States. So it becomes ever more important that we, in whose name those wars are being pursued, make the effort to grasp their grim reality. It’s important to remind ourselves that war is the worst possible way of settling human disagreements, focused as it is upon injuring human flesh (and ravaging the basics of human life) until one side can no longer withstand the pain. Worse yet, as those almost 16 years since 9/11 show, our wars have caused endless pain and settled no disagreements at all.”
We condemn, we bring to trial, the armed hatred and racism of individuals, but far too rarely do we ever bring the whole system, or a serious segment of it, to trial. That’s because it takes a movement to do so. The civil rights movement and the movements that followed — antiwar, women’s rights, environmentalism — did that, and we changed as a nation. But not enough.
It will take another movement of ordinary people to continue this evolution. I know it’s underway: I feel the courage, for instance, of the disabled die-in participants. We’re at a new beginning.
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.
Dorothy Day Refuses To Duck-And-Cover
On June 15th, 1955, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in the civilian defense drills scheduled on that day. These drills were to prepare the citizenry in the event of a nuclear attack, and involved evacuations of city centers, taking shelter in subway tunnels, and, for schoolchildren, “duck-and-cover” to hide under their school desks. Such actions would be futile if a nuclear attack were underway, but the drills were part of a government propaganda program to convince Americans that nuclear weapons were a necessary part of the US arsenal, and that it would be possible to survive a nuclear war.
In this particular case, Operation Alert was a nationwide, mandated, legally enforced drill. Dorothy Day, fellow Catholic Workers and other pacifists informed the media that they would disobey the law, and refused to evacuate public spaces and work places for the proscribed fifteen-minute period. Instead, they sat on park benches in City Hall Park, quietly praying and meditating. All 27 – and a shoeshine man who was taken into custody by mistake – were arrested. They were branded murderers by their judge, who accused them of being responsible for the simulated deaths of three million New Yorkers.
Day said she was doing “public penance” for the United States’ first use of atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She and other protesters plead guilty to the charges, but the judge ultimately refused to send them to jail, saying, “I’m not making any martyrs.” For the next five years, Dorothy Day and many others engaged in similar acts of civil disobedience, refusing to cooperate with the civilian defense drills.
In 1960, more than 600 New Yorkers joined them at City Hall Park, with simultaneous demonstrations at CCNY, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Columbia University and several New York City high schools in noncooperation with the drills. When young mothers with children joined the protests in 1960, opposition to the drills increased, and the drills were stopped after the 1961 protest. Historians point to these campaigns and many others of the time as drivers toward the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty negotiated, signed by President Kennedy, and ratified by the US Senate.
This campaign is an excellent example of the power of nonviolent action, combining noncooperation with drills, civil disobedience of unjust laws, public acts of protest and persuasion, among others. The pacifists also used letters, speeches, trials, public statements, and interviews to convey the immorality of nuclear weapons and to expose the hidden agenda of the US government. The careful strategizing of noncooperation and protests brought a halt to the civilian defense drills, demonstrating to the US government that the populace would not passively comply with the unspeakable horrors of nuclear weapons.
As we know, the work is far from complete. With one trillion dollars slated for expanding the nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, it may be time to dust off this chapter of nonviolent history, and tackle modern nuclear challenges with organizing nonviolent action.
Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the Programs Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence.
Many Fingers On The Button
If we had a nickel for everyone who has muttered some variation on “I worry about Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button,” we could finance an anti-Trump Super-PAC.
Obviously the temperament of the leader of any nuclear nation matters deeply. But there will be moments when it matters not whether the leader is sober and restrained, because the action will be elsewhere, further down the chain of military command and control. Thousands of military personnel around the world have access to nuclear weapons. We are told that battlefield commanders of the Pakistani army deployed in Kashmir are free to unleash their tactical nukes without the command and control of their political leaders.
One of the lesser-known pivotal moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred on a Soviet submarine deep beneath the Atlantic. From an article in the Guardian, October 2012: “In late October, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the decision to sidestep WWIII was taken, not in the Kremlin or the White House, but in the control room of a Soviet submarine under attack by the US fleet. The submarine’s batteries were failing, air conditioning was crippled, communication with Moscow was impossible, and Savitsky, the captain of the ship, was convinced that WWIII had already broken out. He ordered the B-59’s ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing against the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force. The launch of the B-59’s torpedo (2/3 the power of Hiroshima) required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Vasili Arkhipov, one of the three, was alone in refusing permission. It is certain that Arkhipov’s reputation was a key factor in the control room debate. The previous year the young officer, son of peasant farmers near Moscow, had exposed himself to severe radiation in order to save K-19, a submarine with an overheating reactor. That radiation dose eventually contributed to his death in 1998. What saved us was not only Arkhipov’s clear-headedness under great stress, but the established procedures of the Soviet navy, which were respected by the officers aboard the B-59.”
How bizarre, this barely, rarely acknowledged truth: we all owe our lives to one ethical Russian man, a man already sick unto death with nuclear radiation.
In 1940, speaking of the Nazis and Mussolini, the poet Wallace Stevens wrote of the “absence of any authority except force.” Held up against Trump’s simplistic and bullying bombast, how refreshing are the outspoken convictions of the late Muhammed Ali, who refused to go to Vietnam and kill people with whom he had no quarrel. Too many of us prefer the comforting lie that soldiers in Vietnam died for our freedom. Has not the absence of any authority except force, with a few quiet intervals, been a constant ever since?
The most frightening element in our present world situation is not only that nuclear weapons could slip out of the control of national leaders, but also that there is no non-military endgame in sight for many contemporary conflicts. Terrorists multiply faster than we can kill them with our drones—indeed, because we kill them and their friends and families. The United States especially seems to know only the endless use of overwhelming force, actual or potential. The two major candidates for president, sadly, share this empty lack of vision, one dangerously habituated to military options, the other dangerously inexperienced in their use. There is no vision of other, better ways to stabilize an unstable planet, such as increased humanitarian aid, adherence to international law, and non-violent processes of mediation and reconciliation.
We are a young, great, and dynamic nation, made so by the genius of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Our original sin, still not fully confronted and repented, is our treatment of Native Americans and African slaves. Our contemporary temptations have been materialism and militarism. But our future includes the inevitable end of exceptionalism. While we may persist with our nativist pride in our freedom and prosperity, the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin got it right: “The age of nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth.” The three greatest challenges we face are global in scope and require global cooperation: climate, food, and nuclear weapons. We’re all in this together.
That “common sense” is lacking among the nuclear powers. Instead, they are playing a game of chicken that accelerates toward the purest folly. However effectively Mr. Obama represented us in his visit to Hiroshima, there was a haunting distance between his rhetoric and the obscenely expensive renewal of our nuclear arsenal that our government is planning. No matter whom we choose to allow access to the nuclear button, before America can “become great again,” we need national repentance and reflection. Perhaps this will yield a new vision of our commonality and interdependence with all peoples. If we can grow into that understanding, we will no longer need anyone’s finger on the nuclear button.
Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Preventive Initiative.
Bridge To Wellbeing?
Last year, Charles Koch, the billionaire and conservative activist, initiated a project called “Bridge to Wellbeing.” Sponsored by his Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the project has been offering workshops in various states to help individuals find ways of enhancing their wellbeing. If you go to the “Bridge” website, you’ll find a listing of workshops on such subjects as healthy eating and cooking, growing your own food, couponing and personal budgeting, saving energy in the home, and effectively managing personal time.
According to journalist Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Koch supported this new initiative as a way to counter an increasingly negative public image while attempting to reframe public discussions of the “free market” ideology he has so long espoused. Although the program may seem like a minor curiosity with so much attention focused on presidential politics, it is significant because its central concern – wellbeing – represents a nexus of issues affecting almost every aspect of American life today. From the declining lifespans of white, middle-aged Americans (particularly those without a high school education) to record levels of suicide (up by 24% from 1999 to 2014), from the lead-tainted waters of Flint, Michigan, to the opioid epidemic now afflicting over two million Americans, you’ll find it hard to read a newspaper today without seeing some reference to a serious issue affecting the physical and emotional health of our citizens. And the troubling fact is that each of these issues is inextricably linked to a web of related problems.
For example, the increased death rates for middle-aged white Americans (ages 45-54 years) was first discovered last year by the Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who found that the increase in mortality from 1999 to 2013 (22% for people with a high school education or less) had much to do with increasing levels of distress, chronic pain, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide. The contamination of Flint’s water system, meanwhile, has also been a painful reminder to many observers that over half a million American children ages one to five have excessive levels of lead in their blood. This poisoning is traceable to lead paint in older homes, to soil tracked into the homes, and to water sources – and it disproportionately affects children in poor communities and communities of color.
Free-Market Individualism
For many years, Charles Koch and his brother David have vilified the idea of collective responsibility for the kinds of health-related problems described above, and the Bridge to Wellbeing program is no different in its approach. If you visit the Bridge website, you’ll find a section entitled “Policies Affecting You,” and the brief policy statements appearing there address a wide range of issues, from “Health Care and Entitlements” to “Energy and Environment” and “Technology.” In all the statements, an ideology of free-market individualism predominates. You can see it in assertions that government spending on food stamps has “grown out of control in recent years;” or that minimum wage legislation has been “hurting the unemployed and the very same young and low-skilled workers it is intended to help;” or that the use of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 to protect wetlands is an abuse by federal regulators who have employed the act to “relentlessly expand their reach over both land and water use.”
This ideology supports the economic self-interest of a family with immense holdings in oil, gas, coal, chemicals, and lumber, but it has little to do with meaningful efforts to advance human wellbeing. Though the “Bridge” workshops may have merit in their own right, the program as a whole evades the fact that people’s physical and emotional health requires strong social supports. No number of workshops on budgeting or healthy eating will clean up the waters of Flint or address the systemic racism and environmental injustice that led to their contamination in the first place. No helpful classes on couponing will address the rent and mental health crises in my home county of Los Angeles, where 47,000 people are now living on the streets, with the number rising each year.
For many years, Charles Koch and his brother have been major players in orchestrating the growing influence of free market, or neoliberal, ideology over American government at all levels, and it is no surprise to see the ideology dominating Republican presidential politics over the past year. Yet the challenges to our wellbeing will not go away no matter who is elected this November, and the illusory nature of Mr. Koch’s bridge reminds us of what is at stake.
We need only connect the dots to see that Mr. Koch’s structure is a bridge to nowhere. The only true bridge to human wellbeing is a just society.
Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught a course, “War and Peace in Literature,” for 10 years.
The Return of Democratic Socialism
Democratic socialism used to be a vibrant force in American life. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America, headed by the charismatic union leader, Eugene V. Debs, grew rapidly, much like its sister parties in Europe and elsewhere: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Australian Labor Party, and dozens of similar parties that voters chose to govern their countries. Publicizing its ideas through articles, lectures, rallies, and hundreds of party newspapers, America’s Socialist Party elected an estimated 1,200 public officials, including 79 mayors, in 340 cities, as well as numerous members of state legislatures and two members of Congress. Once in office, the party implemented a broad range of social reforms designed to curb corporate abuses, democratize the economy, and improve the lives of working class Americans. Even on the national level, the Socialist Party became a major player in American politics. In 1912, when Woodrow Wilson’s six million votes gave him the presidency, Debs–his Socialist Party opponent–drew vast, adoring crowds and garnered nearly a million.
This promising beginning, however, abruptly came to an end. Socialist Party criticism of World War I led to a ferocious government crackdown on the party, including raids on its offices, censorship of its newspapers, and imprisonment of its leaders, including Debs. In addition, when Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Russia and established the Soviet Union, they denounced democratic socialist parties and established rival Communist parties under Soviet control to spark revolutions. In the United States, the Socialists fiercely rejected this Communist model. But the advent of Communism sharply divided the American Left and, worse yet, confused many Americans about the differences between Socialists and Communists. Although the Socialist Party lingered on during the 1920s and 1930s, many individual Socialists simply moved into the Democratic Party, particularly after its New Deal programs began to steal the Socialist thunder.
The Socialist Party’s situation grew even more desperate during the Cold War. With the Communists serving as cheerleaders for the Soviet Union, Americans often viewed them as, at best, apologists for a dictatorship or, at worst, subversives and traitors. And the Socialists were often mistakenly viewed the same way. By the 1970s, the once-thriving Socialist Party was almost non-existent. Some of its remaining activists, led by Michael Harrington, broke away and organized the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later morphed into Democratic Socialists of American–a group that dropped third party campaigns, called attention to the value of democratic socialist programs, and worked with progressive forces in the Democratic party to secure them. But, for several decades, it made little headway.
And, then, remarkably, democratic socialism began to revive. Of course, it had never entirely disappeared, and occasional polls found small-scale support for it. But, in December 2011, a startling 31 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they had a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” with young people, Blacks, and Hispanics showing the greatest enthusiasm. In November 2012, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to “socialism,” including 53 percent of Democrats.
Why the rising tide of support for socialism in recent years? One key factor was certainly a popular backlash against the growing economic instability and inequality in America fostered by brazen corporate greed, exploitation, and control of public policy. In addition, college-educated young people–saddled with enormous tuition debt, often under-employed, and with little recollection of the Soviet nightmare–began to discover the great untold political story of the postwar years, the remarkable success of European social democracy.
Of course, Bernie Sanders played an important role in this public reappraisal of democratic socialism. Once a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth group of the old Socialist Party, Sanders forged a successful political career as an independent, serving as a popular mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a U.S. Congressman, and, eventually, a U.S. Senator. During these years he consistently attacked the greed of the wealthy and their corporations, assailed economic and social inequality, and stood up for workers and other ordinary Americans. For many on the American Left, he provided a shining example of the continued relevance of democratic socialism in America.
Sanders’s plunge into the Democratic Presidential primaries, though, drew the attention of a much larger audience–and, as it turned out, a surprisingly sympathetic one. Although the communications media were quick to point out that he was a socialist, a fact that many assumed would marginalize him, he didn’t run away from the label. Perhaps most important, he presented a democratic socialist program in tune with the views of many Americans: universal healthcare (Medicare for All); tuition-free public college; a $15/hour minimum wage; increased Social Security benefits; higher taxes on the wealthy; big money out of politics; and a less militaristic foreign policy.
This sounded good to large numbers of voters. In June 2015, shortly after Sanders launched his campaign, a Gallup poll found that 59 percent of Democrats, 49 percent of independents, and 26 percent of Republicans were willing to support a socialist if he were the candidate of their party. This included 69 percent of Americans 18 to 29 years of age and 50 percent of those between 30 and 49 years of age. To the shock (and frequent dismay) of the political pundits, Sanders’s poll numbers rose steadily until they rivaled those of Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, and he won 20 of the Democratic state primaries and caucuses conducted so far. Indeed, polls showed that, if he became the Democratic nominee, he would win a landslide victory in the race for President.
But whether or not Sanders reaches the White House, it’s clear that democratic socialism has made a comeback in American life.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark?
Poverty, Militarism, and Public Schools
What’s the difference between education and obedience? If you see very little, you probably have no problem with the militarization of the American school system — or rather, the militarization of the impoverished schools . . . the ones that can’t afford new textbooks or functional plumbing, much less art supplies or band equipment. My town, Chicago, is a case study in this national trend.
The Pentagon has been eyeing these schools — broken and gang-ridden — for a decade now, and seeing its future there. It comes in like a cammy-clad Santa, bringing money and discipline. In return it gets young minds to shape, to (I fear) possess: to turn into the next generation of soldiers, available for the coming wars.
The United States no longer has a draft because the nation no longer believes in war, except abstractly, as background noise. But it has an economic draft: It claims recruits largely from the neighborhoods of hopelessness. Joining the U.S. military is the only opportunity available to millions of young Americans to escape poverty. We have no government programs to build the infrastructure of peace and environmental sustainability — we can’t afford that, so it has to happen on its own (or not at all) — but our military marches on, funded at more than half a trillion dollars a year, into ever more pointless wars of aggression.
Glory, glory hallelujah. I’d never been to a Memorial Day parade in my life, but I went to this year’s parade in downtown Chicago because members of the Chicago chapter of Veterans for Peace were going to be there, protesting the militarization of the city’s schools.
I arrived as the parade was still assembling itself along Wacker Drive. What I saw, along with the Humvees and the floats (Gold Star Families of the Fallen, Paralyzed Veterans of America: Making a difference for 70 years) were thousands of young people — mostly kids of color, of course — bedecked in various uniforms, standing in formation as martial music erupted sporadically, driven by the drumbeat of certainty. Some of the boys and girls seemed as young as 10 or 11. One boy walked past me twirling a rifle like it was a baton. Was it real? Was it loaded?
The concept of America is a totally military phenomenon, I thought as I walked along the parade route. This is what holds it together, not culturally, but as a legally organized entity. The flags, the rifles, the Humvees, the names of the dead . . . the uniformed children. For a moment I wondered if I could continue calling myself an American.
Then I met up with the Vets for Peace people at State and Lake — a small group of men and women handing out stickers that read: “No military in Chicago Public Schools. Education, not militarization.”
“The idea is, just by being here, we’re having people stop for a moment and think about the militarization of Chicago schools,” Kevin Merwin told me. “There’s opposition to the wholesale militarization of youth in Chicago. It’s the most militarized school system in the country, if not the world.”
Indeed, according to various sources, there are between 9,000 and 10,000 young people in the Pentagon’s JROTC program, with “military academies” — often in spite of furious community opposition — taking over portions of 45 of the city’s 104 high schools.
“Kids in seventh grade are being rolled up into this Memorial Day parade,” Merwin said. “We’re inculcating kids into the military system at a young age — the kind of thing we criticized the Soviet Union for back in the day. And it’s mostly kids of color.”
Ann Jones, addressing this hypocrisy, pointed out in an excellent essay that Congress actually passed an act in 2008 — the Child Soldiers Prevention Act — that was “designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From then on, any country that coerced children into becoming soldiers was supposed to lose all U.S. military aid.”
However, not surprisingly, the economic interests of the military-industrial complex eventually gutted the intention of this rare bit of compassionate legislation. Five of the 10 countries on the child-solider list, Chad, South Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, have been granted “waivers” so they can continue to purchase American weapons.
“Too bad for the young — and the future — of those countries,” Jones wrote. “But look at it this way: Why should Washington help the children of Sudan or Yemen escape war when it spares no expense right here at home to press our own impressionable, idealistic, ambitious American kids into military ‘service’?
“It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world.”
Those who want to perpetuate the military mindset — that is to say, the servants of the most powerful economic interests in the country — have to grab the minds of the young, because only in one’s youth does militarism resonate with uncontaminated glory. This is why the Army maintains a gamer website. And it’s why every branch of military service sets up shop in our most desperate schools and parades the Junior ROTC boys and girls before the public on Memorial Day, our national holiday in celebration of arrested development.
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an award-winning Chicago journalist and editor.
Building Trust In Afghanistan
Here in Kabul, I read a recent BBC op-ed by Ahmed Rashid, urging a “diplomatic offensive” to build or repair relationships with the varied groups representing armed extremism in Afghanistan. Rashid has insisted, for years, that severe mistrust makes it almost impossible for such groups to negotiate an end to Afghanistan’s nightmare of war.
Glancing upward at one of the six U.S. manufactured aerostat blimps performing constant surveillance over Kabul, I wonder if the expensively high-tech giant’s-eye view encourages a primitive notion that the best way to solve a problem here is to target a “bad guy” and then kill him. If the bad guys appear to be scurrying dots on the ground below, stomp them out.
Crushing only the right dots has proven very difficult for a U.S. drone warfare program documented to have killed many civilians. News sources speculate that the recent drone assassination of Taliban leader Akthar Mansour makes an end to this war far less likely. A commentator for the highly respected Afghan Analyst Network has written that “with the U.S. killing Akhtar Mansur, it is unlikely the Taleban will be set on anything but revenge for now, as can be understood from the movement’s political psychology… There is no reason to believe the fighting will de-escalate with the new leadership.”
Was that simple prediction available to the U.S.A.’s giant’s-eye view?
My young friends among the Afghan Peace Volunteers have shown me a vastly different approach toward problem solving. In a sense, they’ve been launching a diplomatic outreach, refining their approach through trial and error over the course of several years, taking careful steps toward building trust between different ethnic groups, and also relying on their own personal stories to help them understand the cares and concerns of others. Throughout their efforts they’ve tried to be guided by Gandhi’s advice about considering the poorest person’s needs before making a decision.
What has brought a non-violent future closer to Afghanistan – giant sized military and surveillance systems or the accomplishments of young volunteers working to develop inter-ethnic projects?
Twenty teams are working at the Borderfree Center organizing practical activities within communities coping with multiple economic woes, including food insecurity, unemployment, and inadequate income for meeting basic needs
Young people travel to and from the Center along unpaved roads lined on both sides with sewage filled drainage ditches. Traffic is chaotic, and the air is so polluted that many wear protective face masks. Day laborers congregate at intersections waiting in desperation for the opportunity to perform hard labor for $2 a day or less.
Even those fortunate enough to receive an education will likely face extreme difficulty in finding a job. Unemployment is at an all-time high of 40 percent and many jobs are attained only through ‘connections.’
Throughout Kabul, refugees crowd into squalid, sprawling camps where people live without adequate protection from harsh weather. According to The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between Jan. 1 and April 30 this year, “117,976 people fled their homes due to conflict.” And, the U.N. says it has only received 16 percent of funds needed for humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan this year.
Nisar, one of the students at the Borderfree Center’s Street Kids School, understands destitution all too well. He has been earning an income for his family since he was a small child, working as a shoeshine boy on Kabul streets and also in a butcher shop. Now, at age 17, he will soon graduate from three years of classes with the Street Kids School. In the past year, he has been a steady volunteer, taking on responsibilities with the duvet project and the organic gardening team. Nisar says that when he first came to the Center, three years ago, he felt astonished to see people from different ethnic backgrounds sitting together. Nisar’s family comes from the Wardak province, and relatives of his are among those who recently fled the Taliban. He clearly understands the terrible risks that armed struggle could bring, even here in “Ka-bubble” as Kabul is sometimes called because of the relative calm that still prevails here. In spite of tensions, Nisar feels sure that when people learn to overcome their fears and start talking with one another, they can set aside hatreds taught to them at young ages.
U.S. planners, heads lost in the sky, seemingly pay little heed to developing ways of building trust. Resources are gobbled up by gigantic multinational “defense” companies dedicated to the task of further, trampling warfare, while withholding anything like the quantity of resources needed for the task of repairing the wreckage they themselves have caused.
U.S. think tanks cleverly promote cartoonized versions of foreign policy wherein the mighty giant strikes a fist and eliminates the “bad guy” whom we are told has caused our problems. But I believe U.S. people would be better off if we could see the often-suffering communities that show admirable qualities as they try to survive. We could learn from their efforts to build mutual trust and solidarity, and their courage to reject war. We could insist that the massively well endowed US and NATO powers finally acknowledge that the best hopes for a lasting peace come when communities experience a measure of stability and prosperity. The giant powers could help alleviate the desperate need faced by people enduring hunger, disease and homelessness.
U.S. people should earnestly ask how the U.S. could help build trust here in Afghanistan, and, as a first step, begin transferring funds from the coffers of weapon companies to the UN accounts trying to meet humanitarian needs. The “giant” could be seen stooping, humbly, to help plant seeds, hoping for a humane harvest.
Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) is distributed by PeaceVoice and co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She is writing from Kabul where she is a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.
On President Obama’s Hiroshima Visit
President Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the bombing 71 years ago in 1945.
Japan seeks not an apology or reparation but an awareness and intimate connection to the common humanity we all share and that is at once threatened by the continued existence of nuclear weapons.
Any nation that continues to keep these weapons is not more secure or powerful but rather a bully ready to threaten others and indeed themselves.
Current scientific and medical research has drawn an even closer connection between nuclear war and catastrophic climate change. We now recognize that a small regional nuclear war for example between Pakistan and India using 100 Hiroshima-size bombs and representing less than ½ percent of the global nuclear arsenals would put at risk the lives of two billion people on the planet from the global famine that would follow.
The ballistic thermonuclear weapons on a single U.S. Trident submarine can produce this same disaster. The U.S. has 14 of them, plus a fleet of land-based missiles and strategic bombers.
The old adage of MAD for Mutually Assured Destruction is now better termed SAD for Self Assured Destruction as whomever would unleash such an attack would put their own people at risk from this climate change becoming de facto suicide bombers.
We must ignore the voices who continue to promote the myth of nuclear deterrence which in reality is the greatest driver of the arms race. They do so either out of ignorance of the effects of these weapons, suicidal ideation, raging irrational hatred, or financial gain for war profiteers who make and sell these weapons of extinction.
Indeed, the continued existence of these weapons comes at a staggering financial burden as well. We are spending $4 million an hour on nuclear weapons and the Obama administration proposes the U.S. spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to pursue a second nuclear arms race that, in turn, will encourage the other nuclear powers to follow our lead and do likewise. These current and proposed massive expenditures rob future generations of critical funds needed to address their basic needs including the threat of climate change.
It is important for President Obama to meet with Hibakusha, survivors of the attack, and listen to what they are saying. For more than seven decades the Hibakusha have tried to make the world understand the full horror of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to make sure that nuclear weapons are never used again. Like survivors of the Nazi Holocaust they have, over and over again, made themselves relive the most painful experiences imaginable in the hope that others will not have to suffer their fate. For decades nuclear-armed states have talked about these weapons as though they were playing some abstract game of chess. The Hibakusha make flesh and blood the real nature of nuclear war.
President Obama came to office offering the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, but since the successful negotiation of the New START treaty, which was a major step in that direction, even considering his groundbreaking Iran nuclear deal, his administration has seemingly abandoned that goal.
The United States has refused to join the growing Open Ended Working Group of more than 140 nations supporting a nuclear weapons ban treaty, just as other weapons from chemical, to biologic, and land mines have been banned.
If the President is serious about seeking a world free of nuclear weapons, we must change course. We need to abandon the trillion dollar nuclear spending spree and embrace instead the international movement to eliminate nuclear weapons and the existential threat to human survival that they pose.
In Hiroshima, we don’t need another speech. We need a new nuclear weapons policy.
We have a choice – to continue down the path of a second nuclear arms race or to abide by our legal treaty obligations as required under Article VI of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and to move toward nuclear disarmament.
So, we the people implore you, Mr. President, as you process your experience, the choice is clear. You have the opportunity to make history. Choose life Mr. President. The world longs for your leadership on this issue. This is our prescription for survival.
Robert F. Dodge, M.D., is a practicing family physician, writes for PeaceVoice, and serves on the boards of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Beyond War, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions.
A-Bomb On Nagasaki Termed War Crime
“The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.
In his 2011 book Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell says, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.” Mitchell notes that the US writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized there was “no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.”
Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five — said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”
On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. …we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. …we…did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to Dr. Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eye, some 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 were poisoned.
If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?
The saving of thousands of US lives is held up as the official justification for the two atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if Hiroshima’s incineration was not necessary?
The most amazingly under-reported statement in this context is that of Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the August 29, 1945 New York Times with the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Byrnes cited what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
On Sept. 20, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
According to Robert Lifton’s and Greg Mitchel’s Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (1995), only weeks after August 6 and 9, President Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”
The US Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atom bombings, concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and ever if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Likewise, the Intelligence Group of the US War Department’s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from January to April 1946 and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war, according to reports Gar Alperovitz in his massive The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. The IG said it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”
Russia did so, Aug. 8, 1945, and as Ward Wilson reports in his Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, six hours after news of Russia’s invasion of Sakhalin Island reached Tokyo — and before Nagasaki was bombed — the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender.
Experiments with hell fire?
Nagasaki was attacked with a bomb made of plutonium, named after Pluto, god of the underworld earlier known as Hades, in what some believe to have been a ghastly trial. The most toxic substance known to science, developed for mass destruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever, every isotope a little bit of hell fire.
According to Atomic Cover-Up, Hitoshi Motoshima, mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.” Mitchell notes that “hard evidence to support this ‘experiment’ as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy.” But according to a wire service report in Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945, by a journalist traveling with the president aboard the USS Augusta, Truman reportedly announced to his shipmates, “The experiment has been an overwhelming success.”
US investigators visiting Hiroshima Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan’s leading radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given a 1926 paper on Tsuzuki’s famous radiation experiments on rabbits. “Ah, but the Americans, they are wonderful,” Tsuzuki told the group. “It has remained for them to conduct the human experiment!”
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.
Fracking: First, Do No Harm
Our country is addicted to oil and gas. In recent years the technique of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, or fracking, has gotten greater attention, both positive and negative. It is a Trojan horse, sold to us as a way to become energy independent, provide local jobs, and stimulate the economy. As an MD, I need to note that the disease, death and destruction of fracking outweighs its appeal.
Fracking is a process where a large amount of water is mixed with sand and/or chemicals that are then injected deep underground into rock formations, fracturing the geologic formations to release petroleum, natural gas, or other substances for extraction. With today’s technologies horizontal bores can be drilled for miles away from the well.
While the precursor to modern fracking has gone on for decades, the potential health and environmental risks associated with today’s fracking methodologies are significant. Since federal laws have failed to prevent fracking pollution and groundwater contamination so severe that some rural wells are now producing flammable water that literally burns, states like Illinois have been faced with attempting to regulate it.
Modern fracking across the country is so water-intensive it uses some seven billion gallons of water annually in just four western states—North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado—mixed with massive amounts of a “chemical cocktail,” many of which are known cancer-causing agents, in addition to other kidney, liver, neurologic and respiratory toxins. The industry has refused to provide the identity of many of these agents under a “trade secret” law, though studies have identified more than 600 chemicals used. This lack of transparency and inherent “trust us” attitude is suspect at best in an industry that has brought us oil spills, pipeline breaks, and environmental degradation with their associated health impacts the world over.
This process is also premised on the assumption that there will be no cross-contamination of groundwater aquifers, demonstrably false. This assumes a leak-proof “plumbing” pipeline without mention of the potential for surface ground and air quality toxin contamination. It also fails to deal with the handling and detoxification of the millions of gallons of contaminated fracking water that result.
This new fracking is happening around the country and currently is being planned for California’s rich underground petroleum deposits. The California legislature is currently developing the oversight laws to regulate this industry. Senate Bill 4 authored by Sen. Fran Pavely passed the California Senate on Wednesday. Unfortunately this law does not protect the health and wellbeing of our citizens from the chemicals being used in fracking and even has the potential to gag physicians from revealing the impacts of fracking chemicals to their effected patients and consulting medical colleagues under threat of being sued by the oil and gas industry as their “trade secret” gets out. This gift to the oil and gas industry is unethical and forces physicians to break their Hippocratic oath. Yet this already is the law in states like Pennsylvania.
When it comes to safeguarding the public health, anyone who has the potential to impact it would be well served to abide by the medical dictum of “first, do no harm.” As a family physician my responsibility is to protect the health of my patients and community. What is to be an acceptable risk for cancer and health risks of these toxins? Is it 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000? Who will decide? The oil and gas industry? In addressing incurable illnesses it is better to prevent what we cannot cure.
At the same time that we pursue fracking, our efforts are diverted from the bigger picture and the more pressing need to move away from our dependency on fossil fuel and toward the development of renewable forms of energy. Scientists tell us that of the existing carbon-based fuel in oil, gas and coal global reserves we can only consume ~20% before we reach the tipping point for catastrophic climate change and its resultant health implications. Without shifting the paradigm in energy sourcing, it is not a question of energy independence or whose fracking project is more favorable but more realistically a question of whose match will light the final fuse.
We have a limited time to get ahead of this process and work for real solutions to our energy needs while simultaneously protecting our health and environment. This is a time for the people to lead and the leaders to follow.
Robert F. Dodge, M.D., serves on the boards of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Beyond War, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions, and writes for PeaceVoice.
Unconstitutional Drug Testing Costly
Lawmakers And School Officials: Stay Out Of Our Bodily Wastes
Why is it that the same conservatives who so desperately want “big government” out of our lives are at the same time so darn eager to have officials involved in our urination? Despite major studies showing that suspicion-less drug testing is not an effective means of identifying or deterring drug use, state and federal officials continue to promote it. That is true of both school-based drug testing and random workplace testing.
In 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott (a Republican) attempted to require anyone seeking benefits from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to submit a urine sample. No suspicion was required, nor was any previous arrest or conviction for a drug-related offense required. Being poor was the only suspicion needed. Federal courts declared the program unconstitutional, although Scott spent nearly $400,000 fighting the court’s decision. And Florida spent $118,140 reimbursing the 3,938 TANF applicants who tested negative for drugs. Only 2.6 percent of people who were tested during the four months that the Florida program was in operation had results positive for drugs—a rate far lower than drug use among the general public. In fact, more than three times lower than the 8.13 percent of Floridians over the age of 12 who are estimated by the federal government to use illegal drugs. Tennessee’s program saw only one person out of the 800 who applied for assistance test positive.
In 2012, Georgia passed the Social Responsibility and Accountability Act, a virtual carbon copy of the recently-debunked Florida law, which requires all benefits recipients to pass a drug test. Note the name of the law, which highlights the disgusting assumption that persons receiving benefits cannot be trusted to be socially responsible or accountable unless they take a piss test. In all, at least 28 states introduced some type of drug testing for benefits recipients in 2012. The infatuation with drug testing poor people has not ended. In early August, Republican Governor Paul LePage of Maine announced his plan to drug test people applying for TANF, although at least this proposal is limited to those who have previous felony drug convictions.
It’s not just the poor who are targeted, however. Officials seem to believe that all teenagers are up to no good, hence a continued increase in school-based drug-testing. This fall, three Catholic schools in Ohio are drug testing their entire student bodies, requiring students to submit hair samples. Closer to my home, the Miami Dade Public Schools announced it will begin randomly testing students this fall as well. In 2011, Linn State Technical College in Linn, Missouri, enacted a controversial policy requiring drug testing for all incoming students and some returning students. It was declared unconstitutional in 2013. It seems the only people immune from being tested are lawmakers themselves, as John Stewart so keenly pointed out when he requested that Florida Governor Rick Scott submit to a urinalysis.
Of course, while testing programs are not cheap, with the cost passed on to taxpayers, the drug-testing business has fast become a multi-billion dollar industry, with huge amounts spent on lobbyists who demonize the poor and vulnerable in order to line their own pockets. They argue, as do the lawmakers who they buy, that people shouldn’t worry if they have nothing to hide. That’s bunk. Our excretory processes should be among the most private activities, hence why we have laws against public urination and, even in our own homes, most of us shut the door to the bathroom.
To be clear, I have no problem with drug testing based on actual suspicion. Clearly, if someone appears to be impaired by drugs in the workplace or at school, this suspicion could justify use of a urinalysis. But for increasing numbers of high school youth and people in need of public services, no suspicion is needed. Rather, it is simply presumed that they must prove their innocence by whizzing in a cup.
Laura Finley, Ph.D., teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.
Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators—unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless and benefitless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt)―are thriving.
In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.
Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.
In addition to their formal compensation, college and university presidents receive some very lavish perks. These include not only free luxury cars and country club memberships, but free elite university housing. James Milliken, the chancellor of the City University of New York, attended by some of the nation’s most impoverished students, lives rent-free in an $18,000 a month luxury apartment on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side. From 2000 to 2007, when Gordon Gee was chancellor at Vanderbilt University, he benefited from a $6 million renovation of the university mansion in which he and his wife resided. According to a New York Times article, after Gee moved on to his multi-million dollar job at Ohio State, he was known for “the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”
The soaring incomes of campus administrators are paralleled by their soaring numbers. Between 1993 and 2009, their numbers reportedly increased by 60 percent, to 230,000―ten times the rate of growth of the faculty. According to a February 2014 report by the American Institutes for Research, between 1987 and 2012 the number of administrators at private universities doubled, while their numbers in central university system offices rose by a factor of 34.
A look at one university system is instructive. Between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators at California State University rose 221 percent (from 3,800 to 12,183), compared to an increase in full-time faculty of less than four percent (from 11,614 to 12,019). CSU thereby achieved the distinction (since then, rapidly fading) of having more administrators than full-time faculty members.
In Canada, where the situation is much the same, faculty members recently teamed up in groups of four to apply for an advertised position as president of the University of Alberta. They explained that, “by job-sharing this position, we would be able to do a better job than any one person could do―and the salary is certainly ample enough to meet the needs of all four of us.” A leader of their collective action told a reporter that it was designed to highlight “the disparity between the recent growth of university administration―both in terms of numbers of administrators and in terms of their salaries―and their rhetoric of austerity, which has resulted in program cuts, loss of tenure-track jobs, increasing numbers of poorly-paid, insecure sessionals [adjuncts], and skyrocketing tuition.”
Not surprisingly, the soaring income and numbers of administrators have led to their consuming an increasing share of the campus budget, thereby reducing the percentage spent on teaching and research.
Their rapidly-rising income reflects, in part, the fact that the boards of trustees of most higher educational institutions are dominated by businessmen, who, naturally, are accustomed to the outlandish incomes and perks of the corporate world. Thus, for example, the board of trustees of New York University had no hesitation in giving university president John Sexton a $1 million loan to help build his lavish vacation home on Fire Island, despite the fact that he was already receiving $1.5 million per year from that university. When the loan became a source of public controversy, the board chair responded indignantly: “This is a guy who could readily make $25 million a year” in the private sector!
In addition, as boards of trustees are often less concerned about education than about money, they are dazzled by administrators who rake in large financial contributions. Against the backdrop of drastically-reduced public funding for universities, attracting donations from the wealthy and their corporations―plus, of course, raising tuition and reducing faculty salaries―is considered particularly desirable behavior in a modern university administrator. Thus, as a Wall Street Journal article noted, the nation’s top-paid administrator in 2013, Gordon Gee, was “a prolific fundraiser,” who oversaw an Ohio State fundraising campaign that, by the middle of that year, had “raised more than $1.5 billion.” The priorities were also clear when it came to NYU’s John Sexton. Although the faculty voted no confidence in him for his autocratic actions, the chair of the board of trustees retorted: “Since he became president we’ve raised, I think, $4.7 billion in contributions.” He added: “We’re convinced there is no one who could be more effective than John, and I speak on behalf of a totally unanimous board.”
The extraordinary growth in the number of administrators can be explained partially by the fact that bureaucrats tend to multiply. Thus, a top administrator, such as the campus president, likes to have subordinate administrators doing his or her work. In turn, the subordinates like to have additional administrators working for them.
Another reason for administrative bloat is that, although the number of faculty is strictly regulated by the administration, there is no one regulating the number of administrators except the college or university president. And the president is unlikely to get rid of administrators―except when he or she wants to appoint new ones.
Thus, whatever the plight of faculty and students, these are boom times for campus administrators.
Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is “What’s Going On at UAardvark?” (Solidarity Press), a satirical novel about campus life.
Going to College? Ask This!
Students heading off to college for the first time or even to a new campus as a transfer are always full of questions. As an academic adviser at my university, I am happy to answer whatever a student or parent who accompanies their son or daughter might ask. Most of the questions I have been asked, however, are related to the pathway to graduation and career opportunities thereafter.
While surely these are important areas for consideration, I believe that both students and their parents might benefit from asking a different set of questions that better gets at the real goal of higher education: to transform young people into people who can create a better world. To that end, I offer the following five potential questions that students and/or their parents should ask when they meet with academic advisers, university admissions staff, orientation leaders, or others with whom new students interact in their first few days. I briefly unpack each here, although surely many other extension questions can be appropriate as well.
1. What is the classroom experience actually like? Will professors work hard to reach learners of all sorts? This is essential, since we all know that people learn in many different ways. Since most of the education in the U.S (from K-12 through college) privileges verbal learners who can listen and take notes from which they study, this question is particularly important for those who require different teaching modes.
2. Does advising focus only on coursework and timely graduation? Some might ask, but what else would it emphasize? The answer is: A lot! If faculty members are the advisers, these sessions can be an important one-on-one mentoring session in which career and life tips are shared. Good advisers can help students understand not only how to prepare for their careers but also how to use the skills and knowledge they are obtaining to better their communities.
3. Are there opportunities for students to interact with faculty and staff outside of the classroom? Students can and should be offered opportunities to engage in campus and community service in which their professors are involved, as well as in research projects. These experiences not only add to students’ knowledge base but they also enhance their confidence and leadership skills.
4. Is the campus safe? Colleges and universities are responsible for creating safe educational spaces for students. This includes minimizing the risk that students will be harmed by some of the most common crimes occurring on campuses, like sexual assault and dating violence, but also that classrooms and other environments will be safe for students to express their beliefs and ideas without suffering emotional or physical danger. Is there any written campus civil discourse set of standards? Do professors protect that safe educational environment even when uncomfortable conversations are encouraged (for example, would a student be allowed to use a racial, gender, sexual, religious, or other identity slur)?
5. Does the college or university celebrate the achievements of ALL students? As a former collegiate athlete, I surely benefitted from the privilege many colleges and universities afford to student-athletes in terms of accolades. But much research has shown that the best educational climates are those in which different skills and knowledges are not only acknowledged but applauded. That means that colleges and universities must be equally excited, and share that excitement, when the Ethics Bowl Team, the Model UN, or other clubs, organizations, or students achieve at high levels.
I believe that advisers should be able to respond to each of the above. If not, it says a lot about the institution. In sum, students, and the parents or others who support them, deserve an education that will not only teach but transform. It is my hope that perhaps this line of inquiry can help people determine whether a specific college or university is the best place for that to occur.
Laura Finley, Ph.D., teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.
U.S. DU Toxic Legacy Continues
A new report from the Netherlands based on U.S. Air Force firing coordinates shows that our military fired its armor-piercing munitions ¾ made of waste uranium-238 which is called “depleted uranium” or DU ¾ into civilian areas of Iraq and at Iraqi troops during the 2003 invasion and occupation, defying the U.S. Air Force’s own legal advice that the toxic and radioactive ammunition be used only against hardened targets in compliance with the Laws of War.
The study, “Laid to Waste,” by the Dutch organization PAX (http://www.paxvoorvrede.nl/media/files/pax-rapport-iraq-final-lowres-spread.pdf) found that the lack of legal obligations on U.S.-led militaries in Iraq to help clean-up after using DU weapons has resulted in Iraqi civilians and workers continuing to be exposed to the highly toxic heavy metal years after the war.
The health risks posed by the inadequate management of Iraq’s DU contamination are unclear because neither U.S.-led forces nor the Iraqi government have supported health research into civilian DU exposures.
High-risk groups include people living near or working on dozens of Iraqi scrap metal sites where thousands of military vehicles ¾ destroyed in the 1991 and 2003 bombardments ¾ are stored or processed. Waste sites often lack official oversight and in places it has taken more than 10 years to decontaminate military wreckage from residential neighborhoods. Hundreds of locations that were hit by the weapons, many of which are in populated areas, remain undocumented, and concern among Iraqi civilians over potential health effects from exposure, ingestion and inhalation is widespread.
Report urges release of targeting details to aid clean-up
“To help clean-up we urgently need to know the location and quantities of DU fired,” says the report’s author Wim Zwijnenburg. “The Iraqi government is also in dire need of technical support to help manage the many scrap metal sites where contaminated vehicles are stored,” Zwijnenburg said. The ongoing refusal by the United States to release targeting information continues to hinder the assessment and management of DU in Iraq. The Dutch military contributed a few thousand troops to the Coalition Forces in Iraq, and peacekeepers in Kosovo, and raised alarms over contamination in 2001 and 2006. (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/world/1999-us-document-warned-of-depleted-uranium-in-kosovo.html; http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/dutch-military-in-iraq-delays-troop-transfer-from )
A handful of U.S. targeting coordinates held by the Dutch Ministry of Defense, and released after a Freedom of Information Act request, show that U.S. war planes used DU weapons against a far wider range of targets and sites than previously suspected, including Iraqi troops. The U.S. and British governments have long asserted that DU is only for use against armored vehicles. They have often been called “tank busters.”
Radiation exposure guidelines ignored
Depleted Uranium, a by-product of uranium enrichment for reactor fuel and H-bombs, is categorized as an intermediate-level radioactive waste; contaminated rubble and scrap metal are considered low-level radioactive waste. The Dutch study finds that international guidelines for dealing with both kinds of waste ¾ from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (http://www.icrp.org/) ¾ were ignored and that the Iraqi government did not have the technical capacity to safely manage such contamination.
Lack of clean-up obligations
Unlike anti-personnel landmines and other explosive remnants of war, no treaty currently obliges DU users to help clean-up after the war. However, civil radiation protection standards place the responsibility firmly at the foot of the polluters.
Low estimates suggest that at least 440,000 kilograms (488 tons) of DU was fired by the United States in both Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003. Civilians living near contaminated sites, scrap yard workers, Iraqi doctors, and researchers have repeatedly voiced concerns over the effects of DU on health and the environment.
Hans von Sponeck, a former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told the Guardian last October, “There is definitive evidence of an alarming rise in birth defects, leukemia, cancer, and other carcinogenic diseases in Iraq after the war.” (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/oct/13/world-health-organisation-iraq-war-depleted-uranium)
“In 2001, I saw in Geneva how a World Health Organization mission to conduct on-spot assessments in Basra and southern Iraq, where DU had led to devastating environmental health problems, was aborted under U.S. political pressure,” Sponeck said.
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.
Public Not Warned Of Bomb Test Fallout
U.S. Warned Kodak, Not Steve O’Neil, About Bomb Test Fallout
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Atomic Energy Commission doused the entire United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131 — and 300 other radio-isotopes — by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn the photographic film industry about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.
In 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company had threatened a federal lawsuit over the nuclear fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. Film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes being fallout-contaminated. By agreeing to warn Kodak, etc., the AEC and the bomb program avoided the public uproar — and the bomb testing program’s possible cancellation — that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the public, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to be defending.
This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997 in the New York Times headline, “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, About Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “[W]hile the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s radioactive iodine-131caused thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.
According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, which discovered the cover-up, children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and since their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radio-iodine from grass, to cows, to milk with extreme efficiency — a fact known to the government as early as 1951. Ingested iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland where it can cause cancer. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.
Radioactive fallout spread to every corner of the U.S.
My friend Steve O’Neil of Duluth, Minnesota, who was born in 1951, has been a public spirited political activist all of his adult life, an advocate for the homeless and a campaigner against the causes of homelessness. As a St. Louis County Commissioner in his third term, Steve made headlines this month by announcing that he has been attacked by an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. Steve is not alone in his affliction — more than 60,000 thyroid cancers will be spotted this year in the U.S. Tens of thousands of them have been caused by our government’s nuclear weapons establishment.
The National Cancer Institute disclosed in 1997 that some 75,000 thyroid cancer cases can be expected in the U.S. from just 90 — out of a total of 235 — above-ground bomb tests and that 10 percent of them will be fatal. That year, the NCI said, about 70 percent of the thyroid cancers caused by iodine-131 fallout from those 90 tests had not yet been diagnosed but would appear years or decades later.
The 14-year NCI study also said the 90 bomb blasts produced more than 100 times the radioactive iodine-131 than the government had earlier claimed. The NCI estimated that they dispersed “about 150 million curies of iodine-131, mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957.” The study reported that all 160 million people in the country at the time were exposed to the iodine-131 (the only isotope out of more than 300 that were dispersed by the bomb blasts that it studied). Children under 15, like Steve O’Neil and all the Baby Boomers, were particularly at risk.
High doses of fallout were spread nation-wide. Wind patterns and local rainfall caused “hot spots” from Montana and Idaho to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond.
In 1962, according to IEER, officials in Utah and Minnesota diverted possibly contaminated milk from the market when iodine-131 levels exceeded radiation guidelines set by the Federal Radiation Council (FRC). The FRC reacted harshly and declared that it did “not recommend such actions.” The FRC also announced that its radiation guidelines should not be applied to bomb test fallout because “any possible health risk which may be associated with exposures even many times above the guide levels would not result in a detectable increase in the incidence of disease.” IEER’s scientists condemned this fabulously implausible assurance, writing: “Since thyroid cancers can develop many years after radiation exposure and are therefore not immediately detectable, this reassurance was highly misleading.”
Thyroid cancers are tip of Bomb test cancer iceberg
The NCI’s 1997 study said about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. annually, and that 1,230 would die from the disease. This estimate turned out to be a gross under-statement.
Today the NCI reports that 60,220 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and that 1,850 of them will be fatal. The thyroid cancer “balloon” is with us because the nuclear weapons complex under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy attacked the very people it was said to be defending. Yet, it gets worse.
The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb. It is not idle speculation to suggest that the cancer pandemic afflicting the people of the U.S. has been caused by our own government’s deliberately secret and viciously reckless weapons program. //
John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, edits its Quarterly newsletter, and is syndicated through PeaceVoice.
Corporate Billions In Offshore Havens
Loopholes Costs U.S. $150 Billion a Year
AUSTIN, Texas – As Texas taxpayers raced to beat the midnight filing deadline on April 15, another year has come and gone with the nation losing out on billions of dollars because of offshore corporate tax havens. The loopholes that allow for the hiding of income need to be closed, according to many citizens, businesses and groups, including the American Sustainable Business Council. CEO David Levine declared that it is time to level the playing field.
“Many of the small and medium and even the large responsible companies are paying their fair share of taxes, whereas some of the large multinational corporations are hiding their profits overseas and not paying any taxes back in this country,” he said.
It’s estimated that every year, corporations and wealthy individuals in the U.S. avoid paying $150 billion in taxes by using complicated accounting tricks to shift their profits to offshore tax havens.
Levine said that lost revenue has negative effects on the nation from coast to coast because it could be used for deficit reduction or needed investments.
“The funding at the local, state and national level for infrastructure, from transportation to energy to support for education systems, that funding is just not going to be there because of the large amounts of funds in these tax havens,” he explained.
Also in support of closing the loopholes are a majority of the nation’s small-business owners. A new poll found that three-fourths of those owners, of all political persuasions, want to see Congress act to stop the abuse of offshore tax havens.
Among them is Mitch Rofsky, owner of Better World Club, an eco-friendly provider of insurance and roadside assistance, who called the current system “egregious” on a number of levels.
“The first is just a question of not paying American taxes on real earned income,” he said. “And then, related to that, you could set up phony offices in the Cayman Islands and avoid paying legitimate taxes that way, as well.”
Legislation that would close offshore tax haven loopholes already has been introduced in the U.S. Senate and a similar bill in the U.S. House is expected to be introduced.
More information is at bit.ly/10MfxlB.
Time To Teach Every TX High Schooler CPR?
Only about 11 percent of Americans who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital setting survive. But with bystander CPR, their odds of survival are doubled or even tripled. HB 897 would require all students in Texas to be taught CPR prior to graduation. Courtesy of American Heart Association.
AUSTIN, Texas – A hearing was held recently at the State Capitol on a bill that has the potential to save thousands of lives, by having CPR taught to all Texas high school pupils before graduation.
Among the supporters of the legislation is Dr. Ellen Pringle of the University of Texas, who said the hands-only CPR method is easy to learn and should be one of those basic life skills.
“We learn how to change oil, we learn how to balance checkbooks, but we don’t learn one of the most vital things that there is – and that’s saving someone that’s either a friend, a family member – if something bad happens,” she asserted. “So we’re excited about it. We hope we can get the bill passed.”
Also urging lawmakers to pass the legislation is Matt Nader of Austin, who was 17 years old when he suffered cardiac arrest during a high school football game. Nader’s parents were there and immediately started CPR on their son. Nader survived, and now he’s among those who want to turn everyday people into an army of lifesavers.
Matt Nader suffered from cardiac arrest while playing a high school football game. He survived thanks to bystander CPR by his parents and is now an advocate for having CPR taught to all Texas high schoolers.
“There’s no substitute in adequate preparation for anything,” Nader declared. “People that are able to understand the situation. They’re prepared and they’re confident. And when it comes down to saving somebody’s life, that’s the most important thing.”
For those opposed or uncertain about the requirement, one concern is about adding another cost to strapped school budgets. But Pringle said it can be done with little to no cost, since certification is not needed and many emergency responders will conduct the training for free.
“Houston Independent School District has done this training in the past and we’ve gone in free of charge to help the students learn this,” she cited as an example. “It’s very simple.”
The bill under consideration would have all pupils in the state take just one 30-minute CPR class at some point between seventh grade and high school graduation. The measure is supported by nearly 80 percent of Texans, according to polling by the American Heart Association. Heart disease is the state’s leading killer.
Around 300,000 Americans suffer cardiac arrest away from the hospital every year. Those who have bystander CPR administered are twice or even three times more likely to survive.
More information is at legiscan.com.
EPA Fails To Protect Bees From Pesticides
A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups filed suit Thursday, claiming the EPA allows products – which are highly toxic to honey bees – to get to market with little oversight. Photo By Derek Keats
AUSTIN, Texas – A lawsuit has been filed against the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming the EPA is not doing enough to protect the nation’s declining bee population.
The suit was brought by a coalition of beekeepers and environmental groups, including the Pesticide Action Network.
Paul Towers, organizing and media director for the Pesticide Action Network, says the EPA has failed by allowing bee-toxic pesticides in dozens of widely used agricultural products for years.
“EPA has acted as a rubber stamp for these neonicotinoid products,” he says. “They’ve rushed the products to market, and even when they’re on the market, they’ve failed to provide the right protections on these pesticide labels. So EPA has really shirked its responsibility and that’s why we’re taking them to court.”
Research points to a combination of factors likely to blame for honeybees disappearing, including pesticides and bacterial infections.
Beekeepers in the United States have been losing about a third of their bees annually and this past year there was a record high, with many reporting losses of 40 to 50 percent.
It was even worse for Steve Ellis, who owns the Old Mill Honey Company and is among the plaintiffs.
Ellis says he lost nearly two-thirds of his bees this year and, like many other keepers, didn’t have enough to fulfill his pollination contracts with almond growers in California.
Ellis says that will have a ripple effect on a variety of crops and consumers nationwide.
“You sit down at the breakfast table and you want to have your blueberries and your apples and your cherries and your almonds,” he says. “And if those yields are going to be impacted by insufficient pollinators, the price is going to go up and the availability is going to go down.”
With the filing of the suit, Paul Towers says the Pesticide Action Network hopes to force the EPA to review these products independently, and through the normal and more rigorous process.
“And in the interim, it should impose restrictions on the use of these pesticides that are toxic to bees,” he says. “Those are the clear and easy steps that the agency can take to ensure the success of bees, of pollination and to support our food system.”
It is the EPA’s policy to not comment on pending litigation.
Magnitude Of Gulf Oil Spill Still Unfolding
Taken in 2010 following the Deepwater Horizon spill, this photo shows an oil covered pelican. Of particular concern today is the spill’s continuing impact on sea turtles and dolphins. Courtesy of Louisiana Governor’s Office.
AUSTIN, Texas – Nearly three years after the Deepwater Horizon spill, a new study says the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is far from over.
Oil still is washing ashore, said Doug Inkley, a senior scientist for the National Wildlife Federation and lead author of the report. Inkley said the impact continues to be felt by wildlife, including sea turtles and – of particular concern – dolphins.
“We know that dolphins are still dying in high numbers in the areas that have been affected by the spill,” he said, “and that these ongoing deaths – particularly in a species at the top of the food chain – are a strong indication that something is seriously amiss in the ecosystems of the gulf. ”
The April 20, 2010, explosion on BP’s Deepwater rig killed 11 people and ultimately sent more than 4 million barrels of oil into the gulf, in the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.The full impact of the spill won’t really be known for years, but Inkley said the other major concern now is the continued loss of the gulf’s coastal wetlands.
“They have been in dramatic decline for decades,” he said. “In fact, in the last 80 years, Louisiana alone has lost coastal wetlands the size of the state of Rhode Island. Restoring Gulf coast wetlands is urgent, and it’s critical for maintaining the gulf’s rich fish and wildlife resources as well as the local economy.”
Capt. Ryan Lambert, owner of Buras, La.-based Cajun Fishing Adventures, has made a living in the gulf for more than 30 years. Lambert said the spill led to unprecedented – and continuing – coastal erosion.
“There’s total islands gone,” he said. “There are large areas of marsh that are gone. And what it’s doing is, it’s taking away the vegetation and the things that held the marsh into place. So now, every time you get a tidal surge or just day-to-day tides coming in and out, we’re losing marsh at a rate more rapid than I’ve seen in all my years here.”
The report’s release comes as BP and other companies involved are on trial in federal court in New Orleans for violations of multiple environmental laws. The Department of Justice has concluded that BP was grossly negligent. BP says the spill was a tragic accident resulting from multiple causes and involving multiple parties.
The report is online at nwf.org.
Rockets’ Red Glare And Bombs Bursting In Air
By John LaForge
A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.
With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. U.S. drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from supercarriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Saturday, June 24, when US bombs destroyed four houses.
Every child killed or maimed by U.S.-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013, in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”
Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass U.S. military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.
If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by U.S. drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017, directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.
U.S. offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]
In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a U.S. gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.
The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.
Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.
This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as U.S. drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.