Your Letters
MATT SHEPHERD
Thank you so much for your great Peace Calendar, which I get every year. I gave a copy of this year’s calendar to my friends, a transgender person and their partner, married for 35 years. They were really impressed by the inclusion of the killing of Matthew Shepherd in the Peace Calendar. There is really a war on homosexuals and transgender people in this country. War is not only taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan, which of course aren’t wars so much as illegal invasions.
Phyllis Bennett
Freeport, Florida
SEPARATE CORPORATION & STATE
Yes, the elections have been a big deal. Yes, the economy is terrible and crazy. However, the most important thing going on with the United States of America is war. Our country has now overtly invaded four countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.
A basic tenet of our government is a separation of church and state. I think we need to strive also for a separation of corporation and state. Perhaps then the greedy will not be allowed to ruin our economy or push our government into invasion, torture, and murder.
The U.S. government could begin to change by eliminating all political action committees, all lobbyists, and all donations to government workers; adhering to strict term limits; restricting campaign spending; and eliminating the employment of corporately connected people at all levels of government.
Like the rest of the corporate world, the military industrial complex has become a voracious monster that consumes human life and needs to be stopped. Let it starve to death. It has no conscience and no place in our government.
Bill Donnelly
Highland Heights, Kentucky
NAVY VET NEW SCHOOL PREZ
Bob Kerrey was known to us at Civilian Congress during his time in the U.S. Senate. We were puzzled that the trustees of The New School chose him as president. Our many queries to the university for their biographical press release on Kerrey were neither acknowledged nor answered. We hope the Radical Student Union has his public military records and continues to call for his resignation.
Jack Fitch
Civilian Congress
San Francisco, California
EQUAL TIME FOR PEACE
Earlier this year, I viewed a nationally televised sporting event on my local NBC television affiliate. As the game progressed, I witnessed numerous military recruiting advertisements for three of the four major service branches: Army, Marines, and Navy. During the event, however, I failed to see one commercial informing our parents and youth about opportunities for self-development and community service through volunteer and employment roles with organizations and groups that teach and train on peace-building principles and values.
In 2006, the Department of Defense’s collective recruiting budgets included $800.7 million for its recruiting programs and $663 million for its advertising campaigns. The RAND Corporation reports that in 2007, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps collectively spent more than $600 million on recruiting advertising, which represents a 150 percent increase over 1999 levels.
To compare, in fiscal year 2006 the operating budgets for AmeriCorps (Programs and Education Award) and Peace Corps were $525.6 million and $318.8 million respectively—both figures lower than the 2006 recruiting advertising budgets of the military. In other words, on recruiting advertising alone, the military was appropriated more funds than the total amount of government financial support provided AmeriCorps and Peace Corps.
I urge fellow citizens who are concerned about issues related to peace and justice to contact President Obama and local congressional representatives to appeal for a substantial increase in funding for organizations that work on behalf of progressive and systemic change and an end to violence, especially structural violence, through a commitment to raise awareness about the positive and meaningful outcomes of (1) nonviolent conflict resolution (2) justice and accountability in social, economic and environmental areas, and (3) sustainable development.
Besides the matter of funding and the sources receiving that funding, I believe we need to address accessibility and priority issues. NBC is owned by General Electric (GE), one of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers. It is in GE’s interest, at least financially, to support military recruitment and the growth of our military. In addition to urging President Obama and Congress to reform appropriation policy, we must contact media corporations including NBC Universal, Inc., to appeal for greater moral and ethical responsibility in their decision-making regarding access to organizations advocating nonviolence, peace, and justice.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
Brian J. Trautman
Albany, New York
THE BIG BUBBLE
Bill Fletcher Jr.’s article, including “A Qualifying Thought,” was on target. I would qualify it by adding that Obama’s handlers are de facto seeking to sell him as [Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio] Lula [da Silva] II. Which is bad news. Any economist who knows his/her ass from a watermelon knows that in a catastrophe, you put the money on the ground. A fact this administration, so far, does not grasp. As Shakespeare put it, “While the grass grows, the horse dies.” Utilizing semantics while selling hope is a con game. This is not a recession, nor is it a depression; it is a catastrophe for millions upon millions of Americans. Doing too little too late is the Herbert Hoover road map.
The Bush-Obama response to this crisis has been to enrich the very people and institutions that caused the problem in the first place and to continue the same approach! More of the same. More free markets. More free (subsidized) trade, more and more credit. For 300 years, predatory capitalism has been one bubble after another after another, with promised recovery founded upon yet another bubble. Marx discussed this, in part, vis-à-vis “fictitious capital” in Kapital III. DC politicians long ago decided to solve all these enormous economic problem bubbles by creating the biggest, most fantastic bubble the world has ever seen: the American national debt. The only way this country has been able and is able to finance all these endless nonstop wars and concomitant expenses is to borrow more and more money on the credit of American workers, and loading more debt on their backs. Meanwhile, the selling off of America, its assets, business, land, etc. is picking up speed. Who is now the second-largest owner of the New York Times?
For the mainstream media-constructed blame game—TIME, Feb. 23, 2009, page 20—the fingers are pointed at a variety of characters, including “American consumers.” In other words, since everyone is guilty no one is guilty.
Super-slick apologetics for a failed system. Machiavellians. Pimping for a system that can give everything to everyone and owe nothing to anyone! The political label on the bottle has been changed, but that did not change the contents of the bottle. It makes one wonder about the amount of black budget funds finding their way into mainstream media pockets.
Robert J. Zani
Tennessee Colony, Texas