Researcher warns: Right wing "populist moment" could get worse

Post Date February 06, 2010
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Category DMZ-Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina In the News, Militarization of Society, Spying and surveillance

Message to the Left: stop whining and organize!

Last night in Honolulu, Chip Berlet, senior researcher of Right wing movements for Political Research Associates and veteran organizer, spoke about the Right wing populism in the U.S. and its current resurgence in the so-called “Tea Party movement” and attacks on President Obama.  He described the history of populist moments in the U.S. as volatile and unpredictable. Often these moments could tip either to the Left or the Right depending on which camp is best able to frame the message and organize legitimate anger.  He cautioned that the Left dismiss or ridicule Right wing populists at their own peril.   The Tea Party movement, like other populist moments, arise from real anger and insecurity about economic and social conditions. However, the Right has tapped this anger and (mis)directed it towards scapegoated groups –  Jewish banking conspiracies on the one hand (elite  parasites) and immigrants, gays and lesbians, Muslims, and the poor (lazy, sinful, subversive parasites). If this trend continues, he warns, conditions could get much worse, veering towards the abyss of fascism.

Populism-chart-handout(2)Berlet described how Right wing movements typically mobilize fears about losing some form of unfair privilege, whether it be economic, political power or social status.  They turn this into a neat rhetorical trick whereby victimizer becomes victim.

The solution, he challenged the audience at the Honolulu Friends Meeting House, is not to make ourselves feel morally superior by dismissing or insulting people who join these movements, which is just a form of retreat, but rather to out organize them. There is no reason why the Left should not be able to build broad coalitions and movements by taking on the real grievances of the people and directing the anger towards more just systemic change.

Regarding the Right wing attacks on Obama and Left wing disappointment, Berlet said that we should “have his back, and kick his butt.”  That is challenge racist attacks on Obama, but also protest and push him on progressive issues.   Berlet faults the centrist Democratic insiders that surround Obama for insulating him from the upwelling anger rather than making him take on these issues.  This has isolated Obama and made him appear aloof and “out of touch” with the struggles of ordinary folk.

He told a story about important lessons from the fight to defeat the anti-gay ballot measure 9 in Oregon in 1992.  A Christian right group called the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to make homosexuality illegal in Oregon.  Gay rights political heavyweights from national organizations did the polling and concluded that with the support of liberal urban centers of Portland and Eugene, they could defeat the ballot measure.  They framed a message that amounted to “smart liberal city folk wouldn’t vote for such an ignorant and bigoted measure”.  Basically, the pollsters and spin doctors were calling everyone outside of the cities ignorant red necks.  This would have been a disaster. most of the state is rural and fairly culturally conservative.  Such an arrogant and short sighted tactical decision would have alienated 80% of the counties and made it impossible to organize for progressive issues for decades.

Instead, progressive organizers pushed the national groups out and decided that their long term success meant organizing on principled unity between a broad coalition of groups, in other words, solidarity.  This was tough because there were contradictions and prejudices against gay rights among many constituencies in the state.  The organizers decided that it was better to fight in a way that built a grassroots movement based on principled unity and solidarity for the long term and possibly lose at the ballot than to pick the politically expedient tactic to win the ballot measure, but poison the political water for decades – a courageous decision and a heavy burden for the organizers to bear.  Ballot Measure 9 was defeated.

Berlet said that the research shows that the best way to win people over and get them to join your group or movement is through face-to-face encounters and respectful, principled dialogue and debate.  Sorry, “internet warriors”.   The point is not to convert the ideologically consolidated leadership, but rather to win over the people who may have reactionary politics on some issues, but who have not yet hardened in their ideological stance.

He challenged the audience to take risks and build broad coalitions to fight for justice and peace. He shared the story of the White Rose Society to make his point.  The White Rose Society was a Catholic student movement in Nazi Germany that courageously educated and organized against Nazism, fully certain that they would be defeated and most certainly killed.   But they felt that morally and politically, they had no choice but to resist the fascist tide.  The leaders were executed, but they inspired others to resist. And anti-fascist movements grew. The emblem of the  white rose has become the international symbol of anti-fascism.

What does all this have to do with demilitarization?   If Right wing populism becomes more powerful and virulent, it may one day turn the existing infrastructure and mechanisms of authoritarian rule and military power into a nightmare of state violence.  One of the “first principles” of the Tea Party movement is “National Defense”, which includes endless wars, runaway military spending, torture and extraordinary rendition, warrantless spying and other attacks on civil liberties.  To rephrase the famous admonition from the radical labor organizer Mother Jones, “Don’t whine, organize!”

Resources for organizers can be downloaded here: http://www.publiceye.org/movement/handouts/berlet.html

Berlet will speak twice on Hawaii island:

Monday, February 8, 2010

2 pm  University of Hawai’i – Hilo, UCB115

7 – 9 pm Keaau Community Center


Inouye and Obama clash on funding for Joint Strke Fighter

Post Date August 23, 2009
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Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

Senator Inouye is again backing an expensive exotic weapon system that the Pentagon doesn’t want or need.   Now he’s locking horns with President Obama.

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Democratic Sen. Inouye Bucks Fellow Hawaiian Obama on Defense Spending

In the first major clash between the two Hawaii-born Democrats since Obama entered the White House, Inouye is pursuing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an alternative jet engine for a new aircraft dubbed the Joint Strike Fighter

AP

Sunday, August 23, 2009

HONOLULU — Sen. Daniel Inouye, one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful politicians by dint of his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is bucking President Obama on two high-profile spending controversies.

In the first major clash between the two Hawaii-born Democrats since Obama entered the White House, Inouye is pursuing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an alternative jet engine for a new aircraft dubbed the Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon and Obama insist the second engine is unnecessary.

The eight-term senator, who leads both the full appropriations panel and its defense subcommittee, also pushed spending for more F-22 jet fighters despite opposition from the administration. However, funding for the additional planes now appears to be dead.

His aides would not disclose Inouye’s position on the VH-71, a new presidential helicopter that Obama has criticized as too costly and elaborate.

Obama last week lambasted the defense industry and Congress over what he called wasteful military spending.

“The impulse in Washington to protect jobs back home building things we don’t need has a cost that we can’t afford,” the president told a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“This waste would be unacceptable at any time. But at a time when we’re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit, it’s inexcusable. It’s unconscionable,” he added. “It’s an affront to the American people and to our troops. And it’s time for it to stop.”

The president did not target any lawmaker by name. And none of the parts for the F-22 or the second F-35 engine are made in Hawaii.

Still, Inouye has been a loyal supporter of both programs. The F-22 was designed as a Cold War weapon but could be vital against a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a Russian war in the Baltics, Inouye contended on the Senate floor last month.

“Unless we truly believe that we will never face another nation state in a conventional conflict, then the F-22 is indeed necessary,” he said.

The plane was originally designed to replace Air Force F-15s, and 20 of them are still planned to go to the Hawaii Air National Guard. But at $140 million a copy, it was criticized as far too expensive.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates sought to cap its production at almost 190 aircraft. Administration officials in June warned Congress that the defense appropriations bill — of which Inouye’s committee is a primary author — would likely be vetoed if it included funding for more of them.

Last month, the Senate complied, killing $1.75 billion in further spending on it. Inouye and Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, backed the plane.

A few days later, senators by voice vote eliminated $439 million for the second F-35 engine. The administration also had threatened a veto over that program too, though in less declaratory language than it used in its warning on the F-22.

But Inouye recently told Congressional Quarterly that he wants to resurrect funding for the engine in his committee’s defense appropriations bill, due next month, because “it makes good sense.”

Inouye spokesman Peter Boylan said the senator has met with Gates and Vice President Joe Biden on defense spending, including the second engine. But Inouye continues to favor it so long as it does not cause cost overruns or delay the entire F-35 program, Boylan said.

“If you have a single supplier, you can guarantee…the government will pay a premium,” Boylan added.

However, the price tag for the F-35 program, now at $80 million to $90 million a copy, is rising and the Pentagon wants to cover those costs with money slated for the second engine, said Todd Harrison at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington D.C. think tank.

But if Inouye and Congress persist, the money for the alternate engine has to come from somewhere. Critics worry that Inouye will raid military operations and maintenance accounts, a frequent target of congressional appropriations committees that insist on financing a weapons project.

“It shrinks the money available for training and maintenance and those kinds of operational needs of the armed forces,” said Winslow Wheeler, who heads the military reform project at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington D.C. think tank. “The committee and its staff simply don’t care.”

Still, Inouye is under heavy pressure from both colleagues to back job-producing defense projects and the White House to make the cuts, said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer and longtime defense analyst for the Lexington Institute.

“Inouye is a veteran who usually backs funding of military programs,” Thompson said in an e-mail. “So it takes a lot to convince him that something the military wants is unnecessary.”

Though the administration persuaded Inouye not to buck Obama too much on the F-22, Thompson added, the White House “can’t count on overriding the military every time because Inouye trusts the judgment of the war fighters.”

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/23/democratic-sen-inouye-bucks-fellow-hawaiian-obama-defense-spending/

Obama increasing use of mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan

Post Date June 06, 2009
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Category Afghanistan, Iraq, Militarization of Society, War and Peace

http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://rebelreports.com//140378/

Obama Has 250,000 ‘Contractors’ Deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and is Increasing the Use of Mercenaries

By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on June 1, 2009, Printed on June 6, 2009

A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,” Schmitz said. “And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”

When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right.

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country. These numbers relate explicitly to DoD security contractors. Companies like Blackwater and its successor Triple Canopy work on State Department contracts and it is unclear if these contractors are included in the over-all statistics. This means, the number of individual “security” contractors could be quite higher, as could the scope of their expansion.

Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a whopping 242,657 contractors working on these two U.S. wars. These statistics come from two reports just released by Gary J. Motsek, the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Program Support): “Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, and Afghanistan and “Operational Contract Support, ‘State of the Union.'”

“We expect similar dependence on contractors in future contingency operations,” according to the contractor “State of the Union.” It notes that the deployment size of both military personnel and DoD civilians are “fixed by law,” but points out that the number of contractors is “size unfixed,” meaning there is virtually no limit (other than funds) to the number of contractors that can be deployed in the war zone.

At present there are 132,610 in Iraq and 68,197 in Afghanistan. The report notes that while the deployment of security contractors in Iraq is increasing, there was an 11% decrease in overall contractors in Iraq from the first quarter of 2009 due to the “ongoing efforts to reduce the contractor footprint in Iraq.”

Both Pentagon reports can be downloaded here.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Obama White House "wants to collect six to eight 'scalps'"?

Post Date March 14, 2009
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Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

This article from the right wing Lexington Institute expresses worry that the new administration is looking to cut 6-8 major military programs, including reducing the number of aircraft carriers to 10. It also contains a little snippet that should buoy the anti-bases movement:

There’s only one problem with all this. It reduces the United States’ capacity to project power from the sea at the same time that access to foreign bases is becoming doubtful.

http://www.upi.com/Security_Industry/2009/03/11/Obama_hunts_US_Navys_supercarrier_force/UPI-36041236781176/

Security Industry

Obama hunts U.S. Navy’s supercarrier force

By LOREN B. THOMPSON

Published: March 11, 2009 at 10:19 AM

ARLINGTON, Va., March 11 (UPI) — The word within the U.S. Department of Defense is that the White House wants to collect six to eight “scalps” — major program kills — in this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

Some of the cuts already are being considered as Defense Secretary Robert Gates rewrites the 2010 budget. You can expect to hear a lot of rumors about which programs are being targeted between now and when the Pentagon releases details of its budget request in April. But while most of the military services are scrambling to protect programs, at least one is getting ready to offer up a signature weapons system. The U.S.. Navy will propose removal of one aircraft carrier and air wing from its posture, dropping the number of carriers to the lowest number since 1942.

Of course, today’s aircraft carriers make World War II carriers look like toys. With nuclear propulsion, supersonic fighters and more than four acres of deck space, they are the biggest warships in history. But at any given time some are being repaired, some are being replenished, some are in training and some are in transit; if the fleet is cut to 10, then maybe half a dozen will be available for quick action on any given day.

The U.S. Congress didn’t think that was enough, so it mandated in law that at least 11 carriers must be maintained in the force. But with big bills coming from the Obama administration and other items like healthcare costs pressuring Navy budgets, the service has repeatedly sought relief from that requirement. This year’s quadrennial review is the likely venue for another such bid.

The issue is coming to a head now because the pace of new carrier commissionings is not keeping up with the rate of retirements. Kitty Hawk, the last carrier in the fleet powered by fossil fuels, was removed from the force last summer after nearly 50 years of service. The Navy plans to decommission the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise in November 2012, leaving the fleet with only the 10 flattops of the Nimitz class for three years, until the next-generation Ford class of carriers debuts in September 2015.

Going to 10 isn’t supposed to happen under present law, but since the service hasn’t made budgetary provisions for maintaining the Enterprise and its crew until the Ford class arrives, it looks like 10 carriers will be the total number in the fleet.

In the current budget environment, once the Navy gets used to having 10 carriers, that’s probably where it will stay. Navy insiders think the service will decide to forgo the nuclear refueling of the USS Lincoln, which is scheduled for 2012. And when the decision to stay at 10 is formalized, the service also can move to eliminate one of its carrier wings.

That step would cut the Navy’s projected shortfall in strike aircraft by half. So billions of dollars are saved by skipping the refueling, cutting the purchase of aircraft, and eliminating the need to sustain 6,000 personnel associated with ship operations and air-wing support.

There’s only one problem with all this. It reduces the United States’ capacity to project power from the sea at the same time that access to foreign bases is becoming doubtful. And why is such a move necessary? Because the Obama administration has decided to stick with Bush-era plans to grow the size of ground forces by 92,000 personnel, and the Navy must pay part of the bill for that.

Yet the administration is getting ready to depart Iraq, which was the main reason for increasing the size of ground forces in the first place. There are precious few other places where the war-fighting scenarios for the next QDR suggest a big ground force will be needed. Most of the scenarios envision reliance on air power for the big fights of the future — the kind of air power delivered by carriers. So cutting carriers to build a bigger ground force doesn’t make much sense.

(Loren B. Thompson is chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank that supports democracy and the free market.)

William Blum: "Change (in rhetoric) we can believe in."

Post Date February 04, 2009
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Category American Empire, Asia, International politics & law, War and Peace

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer66.html

The Anti-Empire Report

February 3rd, 2009

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org

Change (in rhetoric) we can believe in.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away – Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims – It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows – or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying “I’m not going to get into these matters.”1 Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran
Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem”. They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnaping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”2

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia
Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions – The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.3

Cuba
Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.4

Iraq
Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”5 The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia
Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti
Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia
Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela
Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”6

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”7 This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office – that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia
Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan
Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel
The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea
Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”8 But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.

Central America
Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.

Vietnam
In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo
Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO
From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”9. You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas
Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture
Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” – kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.10 Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi
Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing – as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 – not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons.11 Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

Notes
Washington Post, January 24, 2009 ↩
Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009 ↩
Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008 ↩
http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/polpris.htm ↩
Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1 ↩
New York Times, January 11, 2009 ↩
Washington Post, January 19, 2009↩
Newsweek, May 27, 2002 ↩
Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007 ↩
Washington Post, November 26, 2008 ↩
http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm ↩
–

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

Will Obama's nominee for Secretary of Education militarize our schools even more?

Post Date January 18, 2009
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Category Youth and Militarization

The Duncan Doctrine

The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education

By Andy Kroll

On December 16th, a friendship forged nearly two decades ago on the hardwood of the basketball court culminated in a press conference at the Dodge Renaissance Academy, an elementary school located on the west side of Chicago. In a glowing introduction to the media, President-elect Barack Obama named Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools system (CPS), as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education. “When it comes to school reform,” the President-elect said, “Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn’t just a theory in a book — it’s the cause of his life. And the results aren’t just about test scores or statistics, but about whether our children are developing the skills they need to compete with any worker in the world for any job.”

Though the announcement came amidst a deluge of other Obama nominations — he had unveiled key members of his energy and environment teams the day before and would add his picks for the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior the next day — Duncan’s selection was eagerly anticipated, and garnered mostly favorable reactions in education circles and in the media. He was described as the compromise candidate between powerful teachers’ unions and the advocates of charter schools and merit pay. He was also regularly hailed as a “reformer,” fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.

Yet a closer investigation of Duncan’s record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that’s hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a “reformer,” his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.

Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan’s belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago’s school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he’s started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.

Rather than handing Duncan a free pass on his way into office, as lawmakers did during Duncan’s breezy confirmation hearings last week, a closer examination of the Chicago native’s record is in order. Only then can we begin to imagine where public education might be heading under Arne Duncan, and whether his vision represents the kind of “change” that will bring our students meaningfully in line with the rest of the world.

The Militarization of Secondary Education

Today, the flagship projects in CPS’s militarization are its five military academies, affiliated with either the Army, Navy, or Marines. All students — or cadets, as they’re known — attending one of these schools are required to enroll as well in the academy’s Junior ROTC program. That means cadets must wear full military uniforms to school everyday, and undergo daily uniform inspections. As part of the academy’s curriculum, they must also take a daily ROTC course focusing on military history, map reading and navigation, drug prevention, and the branches of the Department of Defense.

Cadets can practice marching on an academy’s drill team, learn the proper way to fire a weapon on the rifle team, and choose to attend extracurricular spring or summer military training sessions. At the Phoenix Military Academy, cadets are even organized into an academy battalion, modeled on an Army infantry division battalion, in which upper-class cadets fill the leading roles of commander, executive officer, and sergeant major.

In addition, military personnel from the U.S. armed services teach alongside regular teachers in each academy, and also fill administrative roles such as academy “commandants.” Three of these military academies were created in part with Department of Defense appropriations — funds secured by Illinois lawmakers — and when the proposed Air Force Academy High School opens this fall, CPS will be the only public school system in the country with Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps high school academies.

CPS also boasts almost three dozen smaller Junior ROTC programs within existing high schools that students can opt to join, and over 20 voluntary middle school Junior ROTC programs. All told, between the academies and the voluntary Junior ROTC programs, more than 10,000 students are enrolled in a military education program of some sort in the CPS system. Officials like Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley justify the need for the military academies by claiming they do a superlative job teaching students discipline and providing them with character-building opportunities. “These are positive learning environments,” Duncan said in 2007. “I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline.”

Without a doubt, teaching students about discipline and leadership is an important aspect of being an educator. But is the full-scale uniformed culture of the military actually necessary to impart these values? A student who learns to play the cello, who studies how to read music, will learn discipline too, without a military-themed learning environment. In addition, encouraging students to be critical thinkers, to question accepted beliefs and norms, remains key to a teacher’s role at any grade level. The military’s culture of uniformity and discipline, important as it may be for an army, hardly aligns with these pedagogical values.

Of no less concern are the types of students Chicago’s military academies are trying to attract. All of CPS’s military academies (except the Rickover Naval Academy) are located in low-income neighborhoods with primarily black and/or Hispanic residents. As a result, student enrollment in the academies consists almost entirely of minorities. Whites, who already represent a mere 9% of the students in the Chicago system, make up only 4% of the students enrolled in the military academies.

There is obviously a correlation between these low-income, minority communities, the military academies being established in them, and the long-term recruitment needs of the U.S. military. The schools essentially functional as recruiting tools, despite the expectable military disclaimers. The Chicago Tribune typically reported in 1999 that the creation of the system’s first military school in the historically black community of Bronzeville grew, in part, out of “a desire for the military to increase the pool of minority candidates for its academies.” And before the House Armed Services Committee in 2000, the armed services chiefs of staff testified that 30%-50% of all Junior ROTC cadets later enlist in the military. Organizations opposing the military’s growing presence in public schools insist that it’s no mistake the number of military academies in Chicago is on the rise at a time when the U.S. military has had difficulty meeting its recruitment targets while fighting two unpopular wars.

It seems clear enough that, when it comes to the militarization of the Chicago school system, whatever Duncan’s goals, the results are likely to be only partly “educational.”

Merging the Market and the Classroom

While discussing his nomination, President-elect Obama praised the fact that Duncan isn’t “beholden to any one ideology.” A closer examination of his career in education, however, suggests otherwise. As Chicago’s chief executive officer (not to be confused with CPS’s chief education officer), Duncan ran his district in a most businesslike manner. As he put it in a 2003 profile in Catalyst Chicago, an independent magazine that covers education reform, “We’re in the business of education.” And indeed, managing the country’s third-largest school system does require sharp business acumen. But what’s evident from Duncan’s seven years in charge is his belief that the business of education should, first and foremost, embrace the logic of the free market and privatization.

Duncan’s belief in privatizing public education can be most clearly seen in Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 plan, the centerpiece of his time in that city. Designed by corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney and backed by the Commercial Club of Chicago, an organization representing some of the city’s largest businesses, Renaissance 2010 has pushed hard for the closing of underperforming schools — to be replaced by multiple new, smaller, “entrepreneurial” schools. Under the plan, many of the new institutions established have been privatized charter or “contract” schools run by independent nonprofit outfits. They, then, turn out to have the option of contracting school management out to for-profit education management organizations. In addition, Renaissance 2010 charter schools, not being subject to state laws and district initiatives, can — as many have — eliminate the teachers’ union altogether.

Under Duncan’s leadership, CPS and Renaissance 2010 schools have adopted a performance-driven style of governance in which well-run schools and their teachers and administrators are rewarded, and low-performing schools are penalized. As Catalyst Chicago reported, “Star schools and principals have been granted more flexibility and autonomy, and often financial freedom and bonus pay.” Low-performing schools put on probation, on the other hand, “have little say over how they can spend poverty funding, an area otherwise controlled by elected local school councils… [Local school councils] at struggling schools have also lost the right to hire or fire principals — restrictions that have outraged some parent activists.”

Students as well as teachers and principals are experiencing firsthand the impact of Duncan’s belief in competition and incentive-based learning. This fall, the Chicago Public Schools rolled out a Green for Grade$ program in which the district will pay freshmen at 20 selected high schools for good grades — $50 in cash for an A, $35 for a B, and even $20 for a C. Though students not surprisingly say they support the program — what student wouldn’t want to get paid for grades? — critics contend that cash-for-grades incentives, which stir interest in learning for all the wrong reasons, turn being educated into a job.

Duncan’s rhetoric offers a good sense of what his business-minded approach and support for bringing free-market ideologies into public education means. At a May 2008 symposium hosted by the Renaissance Schools Fund, the nonprofit financial arm of Renaissance 2010, entitled “Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market of Public Education,” Duncan typically compared his job running a school district to that of a stock portfolio manager. As he explained, “I am not a manager of 600 schools. I’m a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I’m trying to improve the portfolio.” He would later add, “We’re trying to blur the lines between the public and the private.”

A Top-Down Leadership Style

Barack Obama built his campaign on impressive grassroots support and the democratic nature of his candidacy. Judging by his continued outreach to supporters, he seems intent on leading, at least in part, with the same bottom-up style. Duncan’s style couldn’t be more different.

Under Duncan, the critical voices of parents, community leaders, students, and teachers regularly fell on deaf ears. As described by University of Illinois at Chicago professor and education activist Pauline Lipman in the journal Educational Policy in 2007, Renaissance 2010 provoked striking resistance within affected communities and neighborhoods. There were heated community hearings and similarly angry testimony at Board of Education meetings, as well as door-to-door organizing, picketing, and even, at one point, a student walk-out.

“The opposition,” Lipman wrote, “brought together unions, teachers, students, school reformers, community leaders and organizations, parents in African American South and West Side communities, and some Latino community activists and teachers.” Yet, as she pointed out recently, mounting neighborhood opposition had little effect. “I’m pretty in tune with the grassroots activism in education in Chicago,” she said, “and people are uniformly opposed to these policies, and uniformly feel that they have no voice.”

During Duncan’s tenure, decision-making responsibilities that once belonged to elected officials shifted into the hands of unelected individuals handpicked by the city’s corporate or political elite. For instance, elected local school councils, made up mostly of parents and community leaders, are to be scaled back or eliminated altogether as part of Renaissance 2010. Now, many new schools can simply opt out of such councils.

Then there’s the Renaissance Schools Fund. It oversees the selection and evaluation of new schools and subsequent investment in them. Made up of unelected business leaders, the CEO of the system, and the Chicago Board of Education president, the Fund takes the money it raises and makes schools compete against each other for limited private funding. It has typically been criticized by community leaders and activists for being an opaque, unaccountable body indifferent to the will of Chicago’s citizens.

Making the grade?

Despite his controversial educational policies, Duncan’s supporters ultimately contend that, as the CEO of Chicago’s schools, he’s gotten results where it matters — test scores. An objective, easily quantifiable yet imperfect measure of student learning, test scores have indeed improved in several areas under Duncan (though many attribute this to lowered statewide testing standards and more lenient testing guidelines). Between 2001 and 2008, for instance, the percentage of elementary school students meeting or exceeding standards on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test increased from 39.5% to 65%. The number of CPS students meeting or exceeding the Illinois Learning Standards, another statewide secondary education achievement assessment, also increased from 38% in 2002 to 60% in 2008.

When measured on a national scale, however, Duncan’s record looks a lot less impressive. In comparison to other major urban school districts (including Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.) in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “The Nation’s Report Card,” Chicago fourth and eighth graders ranked, with only one exception, in the bottom half of all districts in math, reading, and science in 2003, 2005 and 2007. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, the Chicago Public Schools district failed to make “adequate yearly progress” as mandated by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Even if Duncan’s policies do continue to boost test scores in coming years, the question must be asked: At whose expense? In a competition-driven educational system, some schools will, of course, succeed, receiving more funding and so hiring the most talented teachers. At the same time, schools that aren’t “performing” will be put on probation, stripped of their autonomy, and possibly closed, only to be reopened as privately-run outfits — or even handed over to the military. The highest achieving students (that is, the best test-takers) will have access to the most up-to-date facilities, advanced equipment, and academic support programs; struggling students will likely be left behind, separate and unequal, stuck in decrepit classrooms and underfunded schools.

Public education is not meant to be a win-lose, us-versus-them system, nor is it meant to be a recruitment system for the military — and yet this, it seems, is at the heart of Duncan’s legacy in Chicago, and so a reasonable indication of the kind of “reform” he’s likely to bring to the country as education secretary.

Andy Kroll is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a student at the University of Michigan. His writing has appeared at the Nation Online, Alternet, CNN, CBS News, CampusProgress.org, and Wiretap Magazine, among other publications.

Copyright 2009 Andy Kroll

Source: TomDispatch.com

Kanaka Maoli Open letter to Obama

Post Date January 01, 2009
Comments 1 Comment
Author
Category Hawaiian Sovereignty, Land, Culture & Human Rights

[Editor’s Note: When the newspapers failed to publish the original Kanaka Maoli Open Letter to President-Elect Barack Obama, the letter was revised and many more signers added to it.  We’ll post the revised version of the letter when it is finalized. ]

Why 2009 Could Eat Barack Obama Alive

Post Date December 28, 2008
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Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex

MotherJones.com / interview / 2008

Why 2009 Could Eat Barack Obama Alive
Political filmmaker Eugene Jarecki to idealists: Don’t you dare go MIA during the Obama presidency.

Matteen Mokalla
December 17, 2008

Award-winning filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s political documentaries-on topics like Henry Kissinger’s alleged war crimes in Asia, or the American military industrial complex-are often depressing affairs.

His first book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, isn’t much cheerier, but it does offer activists a blueprint for civic engagement in 2009. He spoke about America’s political system recently with Mother Jones.

Mother Jones: You suggest that the American political system makes it difficult for one politician to change our political climate, especially overnight. Could you comment on this in terms of Barack Obama, since so many have high hopes for the president-elect?

Eugene Jarecki: America tends to fall victim to an overzealous belief in the cult of personality. For Americans, history seems to begin way back with Jesus, Mohammad, and Genghis Khan, and then sometime later there is Hitler and Martin Luther King, until we reach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and now Barack Obama. That is a wrong-headed view of history. Surely the big individuals in our collective history matter, but they are always a reflection of mass movements underneath them.

I think a lot of people see in Barack Obama a chance to feel young again, and that’s great, but it’s not great if you have an overzealous view of what he alone can do. But I don’t want to discourage anyone in any way about Barack Obama. My book is more a blueprint for civic action.

MJ: You have put forth that today’s economic crisis, where the government is bailing out several industries, is a direct result of the military industrial complex. Can you explain that in more detail?

EJ: This all goes back to Dwight Eisenhower. He gave us the term “military industrial complex” out of his shared concern about military expansionism and economic profligacy.

Eisenhower believed that no nation could ever achieve perfect security, any more than we [as individuals] can. We all know that we could walk out of the house tomorrow morning and get hit by a car; that’s just part of being alive. Yet nations, particularly the United States, tell their people that it’s possible to destroy evil in the world. Eisenhower viewed this as illusory and dangerous. A nation trying to achieve perfect security will never get there, but along the way it can bankrupt itself on several levels: militarily, economically, politically, and of course spiritually.

The picture I have in my mind is of a house: That’s America. As America got richer and more powerful, it had all sorts of riches in the house that it increasingly worried about the world envying. As we become more and more of an empire, of course, the barbarians are always at the gate. We become that much more paranoid, like a paranoid tycoon who thinks everyone wants a piece of him. So the richer the house got, the more fearful we got of it being under threat, as ironic as that might seem. So what do you do? You get a gun.

Increasingly, you start pawning the articles in the house to get a bigger and bigger gun. After a while, if you take that to its logical extreme, you will pawn the entire house to get the biggest gun, and you forsake all of the things that made the house valuable. At the end of the day, you’re standing in front of an empty house with a great big gun.

MJ: It’s fascinating that Eisenhower was a critic of the military system. He’s seen as such a Republican “man’s man,” for lack of a better phrase.

EJ: It’s no wonder members of the Eisenhower family, namely John Eisenhower, his son, and Susan Eisenhower, his granddaughter, have felt compelled to leave the Republican Party in recent years. That’s not so much a statement on the GOP as it is on the American political system per se. Eisenhower would be significantly to the left of today’s Democrats.

MJ: In reading your book it appears as if Congress hasn’t done that much better than the executive branch in trying to control the military industrial complex.

EJ: Congress’ effect on the soundness of the American system has plummeted as the corporate system has risen.

In any given district, a congressperson’s No. 1 job is to bring two things in: jobs to his district and money to his campaign coffers. In order to do that he has to please his corporate benefactors in his district, and in order to do that he has to do their dirty work by lobbying the federal government.

For example, imagine you are a congressperson in a district that makes the F-22. The F-22 fighter is a plane that we have spent 70 billion dollars on. It is an air-to-air combat aircraft, but we don’t have an enemy with an air force. It would stand to reason that that plane might come under review, particularly in a time of economic difficulty. If you are the maker of the F-22 you are not stupid: You have already succeeded in making sure the plane is not made in just one congressional district or another, but rather in many districts and, as it turns out for the F-22, in 45 US states.

That’s a process called political engineering. It is the first step by which you make the members of congress your functionaries in the process of securing your own private interests.

Members of congress will fall in line when the time comes to vote on weapons systems because they are relying on the jobs they provide and the friendship with the company that brings them campaign money.

MJ: While we’re on the subject of members of Congress, what’s your reaction to President-elect Obama appointing Rahm Emanuel, a pro-Iraq War Democrat, as his chief of staff?

EJ: Party doesn’t matter at all; the history of the military industrial complex and the history of how corporate power has come to take over Washington has no party stripe. Republicans and Democrats share equally in that history. Anyone who thinks that Republicans own the copyright on war or on corporate cronyism in America hasn’t read a history book.

Who Obama chooses to put in his Cabinet is less interesting to me than whether the public weighs in on it. What is happening right now is that the public voted for change, so it has a great deal of idealism invested. It is imperative that the public look at these appointments and ask itself, “So far, does this look like what I was expecting?” Instead, what is happening is that the public has gone lame duck. We cannot afford that. Left to its own devices, Washington will absolutely devour Barack Obama.

MJ: You talk a lot about the role of the public in government, and I think the readers of Mother Jones would agree with you that it is vital. What should the average citizen do during the Obama administration?

EJ: Well, first of all, I am the public. It just happens that I have the convenience factor of what I do for a living, which is implicitly political.

When I talk to fellow citizens, I am very aware that for other people it is harder to conceive what they can do to change the system. We are all overworked; we operate in a totally dysfunctional economy in which long hours and multiple jobs do not pay for the costs to live. We find ourselves in a kind of a dysfunctional game where it doesn’t add up. It is incredibly taxing.

For someone like me who does political work for a living, to stand on a soapbox and say “You need to be doing more” is offensive. To say to the public, “You have to be a Jefferson! You have to be a Madison! This country is a work in progress, you are a vital part of it, and it will go to hell in a handbasket without your vigilance,” is hard…And yet it’s true.

Matteen Mokalla is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is at work on a book about Iran.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress

Military wants $450 billion increase over five years

Post Date December 24, 2008
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Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

http://www.alternet.org/story/113789/

Pentagon Tries to Lock Obama Into an Outrageously Bloated Budget
By Mark Engler, In These Times
Posted on December 24, 2008

At the end of a long electoral season marked by bipartisan vows to bring “change,” America’s massive military budget remains a hulking and seemingly immutable fact of national life. Given the financial crisis and the promise of President Bush’s departure from office, many have hoped that overheated defense spending might give way to the need to addressing domestic problems.

Yet, countering these hopes, the Pentagon has already maneuvered to lock the Obama administration into greater military spending. On Oct. 9, Congressional Quarterly reported that a forthcoming spending estimate from defense officials would call for $450 billion in additional funds over the next five years. The publication Defense News subsequently confirmed with Bradley Berkson, the Pentagon’s director of program analysis and evaluation, that the military would indeed be seeking additional funds — although Berkson cited the figure of $360 billion over six years.

In either case, these billions would be increases on top of already escalating military budgets. The Pentagon is currently set to receive $515 billion for 2009, and $527 billion for 2010. Each sum is roughly five times what the federal government will spend annually on education, housing assistance and environmental protection combined.

‘Playing Chicken’

The last decade brought a momentous surge in defense appropriations. Even without the additional money called for in the October estimate, proposed military spending for 2010 almost doubles the already astronomical budget from fiscal year 2000, which was approximately $280 billion.

This, however, is not the whole story. Adding to the Pentagon “base budget,” an extra $16 billion goes each year to the Department of Energy to maintain nuclear weapons. And Congress funds wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with supplemental authorizations, which came to $180 billion in fiscal year 2008.

The country spends as much on the military in a single year as it did in the recent $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now calling for more.

Normally, the U.S. president submits a defense request to Congress early in the New Year as part of the regular budget process, and prior deliberations with military officials are not made available to the public. The purpose of leaking the new defense-spending estimate appears to be political. With Bush leaving office, and amid uncertainty about a new administration, the Pentagon presumably wants to set the bar high for military spending.

“The thinking behind [the document] is pretty straightforward,” Dov Zakheim, a top budget official at the Pentagon during Bush’s first term, told Congressional Quarterly. “They are setting a baseline for a new administration that then will have to defend cutting it.”

“It’s sort of like trying to play chicken with the new administration,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. “Armed Services puts it out there: ‘This is what we need to meet our mission. Let’s see if you have the guts to say otherwise.’ They won’t get all of it, but it will complicate matters. They may get more than they would have otherwise.”

The Pentagon in Times of Crisis

On the heels of Washington’s bailout for the financial sector, news reports have cited predictions from defense observers that military spending would plateau.

Philip Finnegan, a defense industry analyst at the Teal Group, told the Washington Post that the economic downturn “leaves the outlook for defense spending going from being strong to being dim.”

In late October, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) went so far as to suggest that a 25 percent cut in defense spending would be appropriate under current circumstances. The mere suggestion of such cuts led Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) to invoke images of a hostile foreign takeover. Talking with the Christian-oriented American Family News Network on Oct. 31, he decried the irresponsibility of such a move, , “You know, if we don’t make the right decisions about the military, nothing else will matter, will it? Because if we don’t have a free country … what do these other programs matter at all?”

Less alarmist voices contend that, with a recession looming, the time to curtail military spending in order to fund other priorities is ripe.

“War production doesn’t create real economic health,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in a commentary. “What do all those fancy missile systems, space weapons, battleships, even tanks and Humvees, produce other than a lot of dead Iraqis and dead Afghans?”

Instead, Bennis argued, government ought to “bail out our battered economy [by providing] real jobs to soldiers drafted by lack of opportunities, and [by redirecting] the hundreds of billions of war-spending into green jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, training new teachers and building new schools.”

In late September, during a question-and-answer session at the National Defense University, even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged that economic conditions might cool enthusiasm for Pentagon spending: “I certainly would expect growth [in defense budgets] to level off, and my guess would be [that] we’ll be fortunate in the years immediately ahead … if we were able to stay flat with inflation.”

Most scenarios presented by defense observers for a net decline in military spending do not see a reduced “base budget” for the Pentagon, but rather predict decreases in supplemental war funding.

Since 2001, Congress has appropriated $859 billion for Afghanistan, Iraq and other military operations related to the war on terrorism.

Under an Obama administration, which promises a gradual withdrawal from Iraq, this funding stream is expected to dry up in coming years — a development that would lead to an overall decline in military allocations.

Even Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) political platform called for reining in “emergency” supplemental allotments because military needs, as the national security statement on his campaign website explains, “must be funded by the regular appropriations process,” and relying on “supplemental appropriation bills encourages pork barrel spending.”

Amid widespread belt-tightening, some military analysts say that a new administration should prune defense funding for outdated Cold War weapons systems. The F-22 combat fighter — designed to tangle with a once-anticipated new generation of high-tech Soviet planes and priced at $300 million per plane — could well be on the chopping block, as could a pricey new issue of attack submarines. Additionally, government could swiftly save $10 billion per year by cutting ongoing funding for Star-Wars-style anti-missile programs.

Ghosts of Transitions Past

While the possibility of minor adjustments is real, the chances of any significant assault on the military budget are remote.

Travis Sharp, an analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, puts it this way: “One of the biggest lessons during the Clinton years when it came to White House-Pentagon relations was, ‘Don’t do something at the beginning of your administration that’s going to damage your working relationship with the military and disrupt the trust that the military has for you as commander-in-chief.’ ”

Sharp says President Clinton soured his relationship with the Pentagon and with senior military leaders because he got involved with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy soon after coming into office.

“No matter how good of a defense secretary President-elect Barack Obama chooses,” says Sharp, “if he proposes a 25 percent defense-spending cut, the military will hate him. And he will put himself up to be absolutely crucified by Republicans when he runs for re-election in four years.”

Not surprisingly, former U.S. Navy secretary Richard Danzig, an Obama adviser who is expected to be a candidate for secretary of defense, told the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 3 that he doesn’t “see defense spending declining in the first years of an Obama administration.” Even beyond the fear factor created by Clinton’s awkward first months in office, it is not clear from recent history that Democrats would be more frugal with defense spending than their Republican counterparts.

“Clinton and [Vice President Al] Gore, as part of the Democratic Leadership Council, tried to position themselves as tough Democrats who were not afraid to use force,” says Hartung of the New America Foundation. During the 2000 elections, “Gore actually was claiming that he would spend more than Bush on the military.”

An Obama Doctrine?

For his part, Obama has been consistently hawkish on Afghanistan and has called for a U.S. troop surge in that country.

Changing trends in military strategy may also lead to costly new spending. When Bush came into office in 2000, the hottest fad in defense planning was to deemphasize the use of ground troops, focusing instead on high technology and air power. This became known as the “Rumsfeld Doctrine,” after its leading proponent, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Subsequently, U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a backlash against this vision of reshaping the military. Officials such as Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central Command, have emphasized expanding the number of ground troops available for deployment.

Both Obama and McCain endorsed the more-boots-on-the-ground theory. Obama supports the military’s planned addition of 92,000 Army and Marine Corps personnel over the next five years, while McCain called for even more troops. According to defense officials, securing and equipping these forces will cost $117.6 billion through 2013.

Pentagon official Berkson cites “operations and maintenance support and capital support” for these troops as a primary rationale for requesting $60 billion a year above current budget levels.

On the one hand, abandoning the delusion that wars can be won on the cheap with high technology is a positive development. On the other hand, the ability of superpowers to succeed in counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations is itself highly suspect.

“So, you’re preparing to fight a kind of war that you’ve proven yourself unable to win?” asks Sharp of the U.S. military brass. “I’m not sure that makes sense.”

He adds: “If we have more troops, does that mean that we’re going to be more willing to go into the next Iraq or Afghanistan? If it does, then I question the proposal.”

America needs not simply a shift to a more fashionable way of thinking about how wars are fought. Rather, Congress and the Obama administration need to consider preventative models of security and address the fact that out-of-control military spending leaves little money for pressing social needs.

In September, the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States — a group of progressive analysts and former military officials convened by the think tank Foreign Policy In Focus (for which I serve as a senior analyst) — released a proposal to realign the defense budget. The report recommends eliminating superfluous military spending and using the money saved — about $61 billion — to fund neglected aspects of national security. These include stopping nuclear proliferation, improving transit security and building a foreign policy grounded in diplomacy rather than force.

“The big picture here is that the military-centered strategy of the declared global war on terror is the one that is not working,” wrote co-editors, Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies and Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, in their fiscal year 2008 report. “And diplomacy, peacekeeping and international police work are the ones that are.”

In the longer term, Hartung counsels a broader shift in thinking. “Instead of having 700-plus military bases, promising scores of countries that we’re going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them if they ever have a conflict, and being the world’s largest arms merchant, I think there should be a scaling back of what defense means,” he says. “The current approach is an aggressive posture, even if a lot of people in the United States don’t think of it in those terms.”

As U.S. economic difficulties worsen, the belief that the country can afford to maintain this posture may itself prove to be the most profound threat to our national security.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com.

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Foreign Occupations

Post Date February 28, 2008
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Category Accidents, American Empire, Environmental Impacts, Global Justice and Peace Movements, War and Peace

Here’s an article from Foreign Policy in Focus with many links to other articles covering different aspects of the U.S. Empire including military bases and missile defenses, economic crises and interventions in the affairs of other countries.

Source: www.fpif.org

World Beat
by JOHN FEFFER | Monday, February 25, 2008
Vol. 3, No. 8

Foreign Occupation

Imagine a foreign military base in the United States.

The European Union has developed an independent army. It maintains a strategic interest in its former colonies in the Caribbean. The dollar is weak, and the euro is strong. In exchange for canceling some of the U.S. debt owed to European countries, the EU says, “Hey, how about a spot of land on your southern coast where we can help ensure the security of the region?” The United States gives a Henny Youngman response: “Take Miami. Please.”

The U.S. public is concerned. Foreign soldiers on U.S. soil? That hasn’t happened since 1812, when the Brits burned down the White House. The U.S. government, desperate for a little debt relief, reassures the population: “They’re allies. You don’t have to worry about them. There’s been a spike of terrorist activity down there in the islands, and our European friends will be helping us defend you against the bad guys.” So the Europeans buy some cheap real estate in
downtown Miami and set up shop.

The problems with this little debt-for-bases swap emerge rather quickly. Our “allies” begin behaving badly. First it’s just a couple fistfights with the locals. Then one of the EU soldiers is accused of raping a young woman. Shortly after that, an EU armored personnel carrier, on a narrow road at dusk, strikes and kills a University of Miami sophomore on his bike. The controversy over these crimes escalates when, as per the status of forces agreement, the Miami authorities hand over the suspects to the EU, which is concerned about the rather barbaric U.S. habit of executing people whether they’re guilty or innocent. Meanwhile, Miami civic groups begin accusing the EU military officials of burying toxic chemicals on base property and releasing noxious fumes into the atmosphere. People living near the compound complain about the noise from the artillery range. Then there’s the grower whose entire crop of oranges is destroyed when an EU jet fighter drops a bomb that completely misses the testing ground.

Sound implausible? That kind of stuff couldn’t happen between allies. Except that it does. And you could get a bushel of similar stories from the people of South Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Diego Garcia, Guam, Cuba, Djibouti, and all the other places where the United States maintains one of its 700-plus military bases around the world. Until recently, South Korea hosted a huge military base in downtown Seoul. Over the course of its military presence on the Japanese island of Okinawa, U.S. service personnel have attacked, kidnapped, abused, gang-raped or murdered over 400 women (just this month a staff sergeant was arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl in Okinawa). Back in the 1990s, the U.S. Army estimated that it would cost $3 billion to clean up just the soil and groundwater pollution that the bases have caused abroad. And the United States has argued that these bases are necessary to protect not only U.S. interests but also the local people.

This week at FPIF, we debut our new strategic focus on the global U.S. military footprint – and how to shrink it. We start with Iraq, where the footprint is off the charts. As FPIF contributor Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com explains in The Million Year War, the Bush administration has put down roots in the country. “This administration has already built its state-of-the-art mega-bases in Iraq as well as a mega-embassy, the largest on the planet,”
Engelhardt writes. “Yet in April 2003, the month Baghdad fell to American forces, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first denied that the United States was seeking ‘permanent’ bases in Iraq. Ever since then, administration officials have consistently denied that those increasingly permanent-looking mega-bases were ‘permanent.'” The Bush administration is temporary but alas, the Iraq bases are looking very suspiciously permanent.

FPIF contributor Adil Shamoo provides two explanations for Bush’s strategy of an “enduring presence” in Iraq. “One is to intimidate future Iraqi governments from daring to break the relationship with the only superpower that can threaten their very existence,” he writes in The Enduring Trap in Iraq. “The second is to intimidate anyone who wins the U.S. presidential election with the accusation of ‘cutting and running’ in Iraq.”

In some parts of the world, the United States is reducing, retrenching, repositioning. But not Africa. With the new Africa Command – AFRICOM – the United States is aiming for full continental dominance. “The Pentagon claims that AFRICOM is all about integrating coordination and ‘building partner capacity,'” write FPIF contributors Daniel Volman and Beth Tuckey in Militarizing Africa (Again). “But the new structure is really about securing oil resources, countering terrorism, and rolling back Chinese influence. Given AFRICOM’s emphasis on defense over diplomacy, resistance to the initiative is possible not only from civic movements but even the U.S. State Department.”

The expansion of U.S. basing extends to Europe as well. The United States has been twisting arms in the “new” Europe – in Rummyspeak – to install 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar military base in the Czech Republic. But according to FPIF contributors Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison, it’s far from a done deal. Sixty percent of Poles and 70% of Czechs are opposed to the bases. “Resistance in Europe and elsewhere has received reinforcement from the U.S. Congress, which has hesitated to move forward with the bases,” they write in Pushing Missile Defense in Europe. “In May 2007, the Senate Armed Services Committee cut $85 million from the 2008 Defense Authorization act intended for site activation and construction work on the missile installation in Poland and radar site in the Czech Republic. The Senate committee action followed a House vote earlier in May to cut the president’s request for the anti-missile system by $160 million.”

This Wednesday, February 27, if you’re in the Washington, DC area, please join us for a protest we’re cosponsoring with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy against the proposed U.S. base in the Czech Republic. We’ll be meeting at 12:30 in front of the White House, just across from Lafayette Park. Bring your lunch, your signs, and your friends.

Welcome President Bush!

FPIF continued its coverage of President George W. Bush’s visit to Africa last week. In his sardonic contribution Welcome President Bush!, FPIF contributor Tajudeen Abdulraheem explains the difficulties of rolling out the red carpet. “The hassles of hosting a U.S. president are bad enough,” he writes. “His people take over your whole country and make our normally inefficient states go into overdrive and our egregious first ladies and their husbands go into overkill to show their hospitality.”

But the carpet is red for other reasons. As FPIF contributors Bahati Ntama Jacques and Beth Tuckey explain, the legacy that the U.S. president is leaving in Africa is a bloody one. “Bush knows that Rwanda’s involvement in the armed conflict in the DRC delays peace in eastern Congo, but he continues to authorize military aid to Rwanda,” they write in Rwanda and the War on Terror. “In 2007, the United States armed and trained Rwandan soldiers with $7.2 million from the U.S. defense program Africa Contingent Operations Training Assistance
(ACOTA) and $260,000 from the International Military and Education (IMET) program.”

The last stop on the trip was Liberia. As FPIF contributor Tim Newman points out in Rejecting Paternalism in Africa?, the Liberian case undercuts the president’s claim that he has boosted development on the continent. “Bush will end his trip by spending a few hours in Liberia,” Newman writes. “There he will try to cast himself in the role of the compassionate conservative who successfully intervened in Liberia’s long civil war, thus heralding in a shining new democracy led by Africa’s first democratically elected female president. In his
February 14 press conference, Bush celebrated increasing private capital flows to sub-Saharan Africa. But the workers supposedly benefiting from foreign private investment in Liberia might have a different perspective.”

A New State?

Kosovo, the predominantly Albanian enclave of Serbia, declared its formal independence last week. FPIF’s Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes both support the right of the Kosovars to self-determination. But they don’t see exactly eye to eye on the issue of recognizing the new state.

In our latest strategic dialogue, Ian Williams observes in A New Kosovo that “recognition of Kosovar independence has started with the United States and most of the European Union. Most Islamic countries
will probably follow suit, along with many non-aligned states. So far Belgrade has blustered and threatened to downgrade relations with the dozens of very important neighbors who will recognize Kosovo. But after the multiple defeats that Miloševic caused for Serbs,fortunately there is little appetite for military action.”

Stephen Zunes, in Kosovo and the Politics of Recognition, argues that the U.S. decision to recognize Kosovo, which President Bush announced during his Africa trip, was perhaps a bit hasty. He points to the potential for pushing Serbian toward right-wing extremism, the prospect of the Albanian minority in Macedonia pushing to join a greater Kosovo, and the encouraging of secessionist movements in the Caucasus. Finally, he notes, “the impact of Kosovo’s independence and recognition by the United States and other Western nations could also seriously worsen U.S.-Russian relations, exacerbating differences that hawks on both sides are warning could evolve into a ‘new Cold War.'”

After its recent elections, Pakistan almost qualifies as a new state. The victory of the opposition in the parliamentary elections may well herald the return of democracy to the ill-fated land. Alas, General Pervez Musharraf shows no signs of stepping aside, not when he still has America on his side. FPIF contributor Najum Mushtaq urges the United States to reconsider. “Washington should have reviewed its ill-directed, one-dimensional Pakistan policy long ago,” he writes in Letting Go of Musharraf. “Instead of persisting with the failed Musharraf option, Washington should put all its weight behind the new parliament, which represents the voice of the Pakistani people.

Breaking the Bank

The financial big boys are freaking out, reports FPIF columnist Walden Bello. George Soros and World Economic Forum host Klaus Schwab are suddenly sounding like the gravediggers of capitalism. “Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up
in more than just an ordinary recession,” Bello writes in Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood. “The falling dollar and rising oil prices have been rattling the global economy for some time. But it is the dramatic implosion of financial markets that is driving the financial elite to panic.”

You might think that U.S. politicians, when confronted with an escalating economic crisis, would reach into the biggest pot of money around to help get us out of the pickle. Not so.

President Bush’s treatment of the military budget as a sacred cow is at least consistent with his conduct over the last seven years. But what about the Democrats? As FPIF contributor William Hartung explains in Dems: What about the Military Budget?, “Not only have the major presidential candidates been largely silent on these record expenditures, but they want to increase them. Barack Obama has said we will probably need to ‘bump up’ the military budget in a new administration, and both he and Hillary Clinton have committed themselves to increasing the size of the armed forces by tens of thousands of troops.”

And Now for Something Completely Different

In our second installment of poetry to celebrate the upcoming Split This Rock poetry festival, FPIF contributor Susan Tichy reflects on what we think about when we think about war. Her American Ghazals, named after the Persian poetic form, describe a landscape of pain and fear, and yet in there too is beauty and compassion.

Finally, in the Russian tradition of “laughter through tears,” we present to you the job description for a great new opening: the head of Cuba.

FPIF’s humorist Alec Dubro provides the details: “The nation of Cuba is planning a massive restructuring that may or may not actually happen. Possible outcomes: become Chinese-model, free-market police state; acquire banana republic status; enter United States as a county of Florida; limp along without direction; or make the
transition to social democracy and prosperity. We want you to be part of this momentous change, or possibly stifle it.
Links

John Lindsay-Poland and Nick Morgan, “Overseas Military Bases and the Environment,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol3/v3n15mil.html).

Tom Engelhardt, “The Million Year War,” Foreign Policy In Focus(http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4977); There’s a risk that the United States will never withdraw from Iraq.

Adil Shamoo, “The Enduring Trap in Iraq,” Foreign Policy In Focus(http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5000); The Bush administration wants to place U.S. military troops and bases permanently on Iraqi soil despite strong objections from many Democrats.

Daniel Volman and Beth Tuckey, “Militarizing Africa (Again),” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4997); With the new Africa Command, the United States is increasing its military presence on an energy-rich continent.

Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison, “Pushing Missile Defense in Europe,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5005); The United States wants to establish bases in Poland and the Czech
Republic – over the objections of the citizens of those countries.

Tajudeen Abdulraheem, “Welcome President Bush!” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5002); Not only examines President Bush’s Africa trip itinerary, country by country, but also why he is visiting the continent in the first place.

Bahati Ntama Jacques and Beth Tuckey, “Rwanda and the War on Terror,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4999); U.S. administrations allow narrowly defined “national interests” – instead
of needs, priorities, and realities in a given country – to dictate foreign assistance. And Rwanda happens to be a perfect example.

Tim Newman, “Rejecting Paternalism in Africa?” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4973); Does President Bush’s view of trade and investment on workers in Africa truly end paternalism?

Ian Williams, “A New Kosovo,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4992); Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia. But there are still a few obstacles in the path of statehood.

Stephen Zunes, “Kosovo and the Politics of Recognition,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5006); The United States should have thought twice about rushing to recognize the new state of Kosovo.

Najum Mushtaq, “Letting Go of Musharraf,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5004); It’s time for Washington to wake up and smell the elections.

Walden Bello, “Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4996); Even the world’s top financiers are beginning to panic.

William Hartung, “Dems: What about the Military Budget?” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5009); The Democratic candidates will debate each other, but not the metastasizing military budget.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: http://www.splitthisrock.org/

Susan Tichy, “American Ghazals,” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5008); What we think about when we think about war.

Alec Dubro, “Job Opening (Cuba),” Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5007); Tired of your current job? Want more executive responsibility, good health care benefits, warmer weather? Cuba may want you.

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