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People and Peace Over Plutocracy

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When Bill McKibben picks Bernie Sanders as his model, he's picking one of our better legislators.  He shouldn't be picking any of them as a model for activism.  Instead he should be looking to leaders of our civil rights movement, women's rights movement, labor, peace, and justice movements.  He should be looking to activist models in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.

Activists' work is to speak the truth and nonviolently move the nation.  Loyalty to political parties and officials is misplaced.  Elections are relatively unimportant.  We need teach-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, protests, marches, and direct actions and artwork and education of every variety.  We have so much to do that elections ought not to be sitting anywhere near the top of the list, much less distracting people with something bordering on obsession.

I must have received emails from a dozen large organizations this week on the topic of Social Security with the message "This isn't what we voted for."  They meant to say "This isn't what we want."  They may have even meant to say "This isn't something we'll stand for."  But they did vote for it in voting for President Barack Obama.  We knew he would try to cut Social Security and now he's trying to.  You may believe that backing some other candidate wouldn't have stopped him or would have been worse.  But we have to recognize a certain incompleteness in a strategy that says, "We will vote for you no matter what, and please end the war and don't build the pipeline and don't pursue NAFTA on steroids in the Pacific and don't cut Social Security and don't prosecute whistleblowers and don't go through a list of men, women, and children every Tuesday and pick which ones to have murdered."  Even when that strategy shifts to saying, "We voted for you and now we would really like you to end that war and stop building that pipeline and break off the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and take back your proposal on Social Security and Medicare and free Bradley Manning and abandon the kill list and ground the drones," there's still something notably incomplete, at the very least, in such an approach.

President Obama has not killed the same number of people President Bush did.  And President Bush gets some of the blame for having expanded the powers that Obama now abuses.  But Obama has expanded those powers further still, and he too must take some of the blame for what all future president do now. 

I helped draft about 70 articles of impeachment against Bush, from which Congressman Dennis Kucinich selected 35 and introduced them.  I later looked through those 35 and found 27 that applied to President Obama, even though his own innovations in abusive behavior weren't on the list.  Bush's lying Congress into war (not that Congress wasn't eager to play along) is actually a standard to aspire to now.  When Obama went to war in Libya, against the will of Congress, he avoided even bothering to involve the first branch of our government.

When Bush locked people up or tortured them to death, he kept it as secret as he could.  Obama -- despite radically expanding secrecy powers and persecuting whistleblowers -- does most of his wrongdoing wide out in the open.  Warrantless spying is openly acknowledged policy.  Imprisonment without trial is so-called law.  Torture is a policy choice, and the choice these days is to outsource it.  Murder is, however, the new torture.  The CIA calls it "cleaner."  And Americans tell pollsters that they oppose killing U.S. citizens but support killing non-U.S. citizens.  And activists begin to focus on the danger to U.S. citizens, as if that were the strategic way to generate opposition.

President Obama runs through a list of men, women, and children to murder on Tuesdays, picks some, and has them murdered.  We don't know this because of a whistleblower or a journalist.  We know this because the White House wanted us to know it, and to know it before the election.  Think about that.  We moved from the pre-insanity state we were in circa 1999 to an age in which presidents want us to know they murder people.  That was primarily the work of George W. Bush, and every single person who yawned, who looked away, who cheered, who was too busy, who said "it's more important to elect a new president than to keep presidential powers in check," or who said "impeachment would be traumatic" -- as if this isn't.

The war in Afghanistan is twice the size it was when Obama arrived, and we talk about it as if it's ending, even though they tell us it will continue for longer than most wars have taken from beginning to end.  Military spending has risen in the Obama years.  Foreign bases have expanded.  The CIA has been given war making powers (and is being regularly protested just next door to Dick Cheney's house mentioned earlier).  Special forces are operating in more countries.  A new form of war, waged with drones, has been taken into new nations without any say from Congress or the U.N. or we the people.  The Pentagon is moving into Africa in a major way. 

And when we spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations through various government departments, it's a banker bailout we never get back.  Inequality of wealth in this country has been growing under Obama even faster than under Bush.  The super-profitable, super-corrupt, and super-unaccountable war industry is part of the reason why.  Any one of the 10 richest people in this country could set aside his income for one year and buy housing for every person who doesn't have housing.  The poorest 47% of Americans own less than nothing.  The poorest 62% of Americans own less than the richest 400 people.  Only three nations on earth are more unequal than the land of the free and home of the suckered.  The Wall Street crash reduced median wealth 66% for Latinos and 53% for African Americans.  Dr. King said if we continued to spend more on war than on programs of social uplift we would approach spiritual death.  The question now, these many years and wars later, is whether we can manage spiritual resurrection.

To do so, we'll need unity.  We can't lack understanding for the student who goes into the military in order to become a dentist.  We must appreciate the economic bind that we've all been put in.  But that doesn't mean its wise to oppose cuts to Social Security by hyping the supposed "service" that veterans have done for us in wars.  For one thing, just stop and consider where all the money is going that could lower the retirement age rather than increasing it.  It's going to billionaires and the war machine.  Glorifying the war machine is not a smart way to change that.

President Kennedy once wrote that war would continue until the conscientious objector had the prestige and honor that the soldier has now.  Of course, soldiers would have to lose prestige as conscientious objectors and other resisters gain.  The two cannot be honorable together.  But opposing participation in the military is not the same thing as condemning any person who has done it.  Most do it for economic, among other, reasons.  I'm proud to be an associate (non-veteran) member of Veterans For Peace.

We also must separate the sin from the sinner when we consider employment in the weapons industry.  When Congress funds a war machine that builds momentum for war, and does so for the stated reason of creating jobs, that's sociopathic.  When someone with a family to feed takes one of those jobs, that's often a matter of survival.  When the state of Maryland, even while banning the death penalty, forces Montgomery County to give millions of dollars to Lockheed Martin, that's pure corruption.  But Lockheed's employees can't be expected to all just quit without alternative employment.

Our goal should be economic conversion from making weapons to making windmills and every other useful product.  Bills to begin coordinating this at the national level made progress in Congress from the 60s through the 80s but haven't been heard of in recent years.  One opportunity to begin this at the local level is anywhere that war jobs are actually lost during the much exaggerated current cuts, if any.  Localities and states are starting to create commissions to lobby for more war money.  Instead they should be studying the advantages of conversion.

The advantages include: more and better paying jobs, significantly so according to a study from the University of Massachusetts.  The labor movement, which has been rather weak on opposing wars for many years in this country, should be opposing war spending even for purely economic reasons.  Even tax cuts for working people produces more jobs than military spending.  The only way you can cut military spending and get fewer jobs is if you give the money to that crowd we call the Job Creators. 

Another advantage is, of course, safety.  The Department of Defense endangers us.  De-funding it is in fact in the interests of what they call national security.  But there are many more advantages.

Civil liberties groups have done heroic work in this country in recent years opposing warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, assassination, and other atrocities generated by military spending.  These groups ought to heed President Eisenhower's warning and oppose the root of the problem.  Some of them are not just refraining from opposing war spending.  They're actually supporting wars, even while opposing various evils that wars involve.  We need to work on this with people concerned about civil liberties.  When we recently passed a resolution against drones in Charlottesville, Va., it opened up a discussion about drone use abroad as well.  I recommend that.  I'll be glad to talk with you about how to do it.  Also please be at the U.S. Senate hearing on drones a week from Tuesday morning if you can.

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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