LAWRENCE WITTNER – Your doctors are worried about your health―in fact, about your very survival. No, they’re not necessarily your own personal physicians, but, rather, medical doctors around the world, represented by groups like International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). As you might recall, that organization, composed of many thousands of medical professionals from all across the globe, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for exposing the catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons.
Category: Analysis
On Memorial Day Let’s Remember That War is Hell
JOHN LAFORGE – Benjamin Franklin said there never was a good war or a bad peace, but you’d never know it from Memorial Day in the United States.
Why I Don’t Want to See the Drone Memo
DAVID SWANSON – A president is not legally allowed to invent criteria for killing people. Never mind that he doesn’t meet his own criteria. We should not be so indecent or so lawless as to engage in such a conversation. We should not want to see the blood-soaked memo.
Time to Wake Up – Replace Violence with Nonviolence
MICHAEL N. NAGLER – Maybe a kind of awakening is beginning. Former New York Mayor Bloomberg is setting up a $50 million fund to counteract some of the political muscle of the NRA, which is an interesting first step. But most politicians, when in office, are apparently unprepared to listen to this kind of reason. When that happens it is opportune to start small – simply don’t expose yourself to violent media and try to live in trust instead of fear. We make a difference as individuals, and we must make our difference in the right direction.
What To Tell People When They Say We Should Use the Military
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – Is overwhelming national military power a reliable source of influence in world affairs? If so, the United States should certainly have plenty of influence today. For decades, it has been the world’s Number 1 military spender. And it continues in this role.
Olympic Capitalism: Bread and Circuses Without the Bread
DAVID SWANSON – The author of Brazil’s Dance With the Devil, Dave Zirin, must love sports, as I do, as billions of us do, or he wouldn’t keep writing about where sports have gone wrong. But, wow, have they gone wrong!
Who Says Disaster is Inevitable?
K.C. GOLDEN – Having aligned myself against a battalion of seemingly irresistible forces over the years, I’ve become a student of “inevitability.” How do environmentally destructive choices become inevitable? Near as I can tell, it starts when the people who will benefit from these choices simply begin to assert their inevitability. We’re especially receptive to inevitability right now.
Veterans’ Violence Is An Uncounted Cost of War
PRITAM K. ROHILA, PhD. – Unprovoked shootings at Fort Hood by army personnel in 2009, and 2014, require serious discussion. The truth is that young men and women who are trained to kill and destroy the “enemy” sometimes turn against their own colleagues, members of their families and community, and even themselves!
We Can’t Afford to Lose Another Decade
ROBERT C. KOEHLER -“We cannot afford to lose another decade.†My God. There’s more darkness in this quote than the New York Times intended. I winced when I read these words of Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the committee that wrote the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC report, which the Times quoted in a recent editorial headlined “Running Out of Time.â€
From Outside or Inside, the Deck Looks Stacked
GRETCHEN MORGENSON – “The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes.†That’s Elizabeth Warren talking, the former consumer advocate and law school professor and now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. I interviewed her about her new memoir, “A Fighting Chance,†in which she discusses one of America’s biggest challenges: how to level the playing field so that Main Street doesn’t always come second to Wall Street.
How to Tap Latent Conservative Support for Climate-Change Policy
SEAN MCELWEE – Both last month’s Senate Climate Talkathon and Tom Steyer’s $100 million dollar pledge to back environment-friendly candidates indicate the same thing: Democrats are getting serious about global warming again. But even when Democrats have managed to close ranks behind previous legislative efforts like Waxman-Markey, Republicans have stymied them. Can the left forge a coalition to tackle the problem?
If War Was Funded Like College Tuition
DAVID SWANSON – If wisdom about the counter-productive results of militarism spread, if nonviolent alternatives were learned, if free college had a positive impact on our collective intellect, and if the fact that we could end global poverty or halt global warming for a fraction of current military spending leaked out, who knows? Maybe militarism would fail in the free market.
Looking Back on Easter 2014—and Forward to Easter Next
WINSLOW MYERS – Effective leadership must now initiate on the basis that the self-interest of my country is intimately bound up with the self-interest of my “adversaries.†Shia will not be secure until Sunnis feel secure. Israelis will not feel secure until Palestinians feel secure. Ukraine will not feel secure until Russia feels secure. No one will feel secure until we start spending less on weapons and paying more attention to resolving conflict nonviolently, developing compassion and empathy, and enlarging our frame of reference to include all of humanity and the whole earth. That is what it will take to bring new life to dead bones.
The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong
DAN PALLOTTA – The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how the things we’ve been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world.
U.N. Panel: Renewables, Not Nukes, Can Solve Climate Crisis
HARVEY WASSERMAN – The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has left zero doubt that we humans are wrecking our climate. It also effectively says the problem can be solved, and that renewable energy is the way to do it, and that nuclear power is not.
Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence
REBECCA SOLNIT – If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part.
America’s Peace Ship – Powerful Advocate for Nuclear Sanity
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Is there an emotional connection between the oceans and the pursuit of peace? For whatever reason, peace ships have been increasing in number over the past century.
Why We Need Media Critics Who Are Fiercely Independent
NORMAN SOLOMON – The most renowned media critics are usually superficial and craven. That’s because — as one of the greatest in the 20th century, George Seldes, put it — “the most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.†No institutions are more image-conscious than big media outlets. The people running them know the crucial importance of spin, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to promote media criticism that undermines their own pretenses.
Federal Judge Ignores the Law in Plowshares Case
JOHN LAFORGE – Any courtroom in China or Iran could have been the scene: An 84-year-old Catholic nun in prison garb, chained hand-and-foot and surrounded by heavy Marshals, is shuffled jangling into court. Her attorney asks if she might be allowed one free hand in order to take notes. The nun has been convicted of high crimes trumped up after her bold political protest embarrassed the state. A high-ranking judge lectures her about law and order and then imposes a three-year prison term.
Solartopia: Winning the Green Energy Revolution
HARVEY WASSERMAN – High above the Bowling Green town dump, a green energy revolution is being won. It’s being helped along by the legalization of marijuana and its bioÂfueled cousin, industrial hemp. But it’s under extreme attack from the billionaire Koch Brothers, utilities like First Energy (FE), and a fossil/nuke industry that threatens our existence on this planet. Robber Baron resistance to renewable energy has never been more fierce.
“Limited” Nuclear War: 2 Billion at Risk
IRA HELFAND and ROBERT DODGE – As physicians we spend our professional lives applying scientific facts to the health and well being of our patients. When it comes to public health threats like TB, polio, cholera, AIDS and others where there is no cure, our aim is to prevent what we cannot cure. It is our professional, ethical and moral obligation to educate and speak out on these issues. That said, the greatest imminent existential threat to human survival is potential of global nuclear war.
What Do World’s Two Biggest Dangers Have in Common?
DAVID SWANSON – War and environmental destruction don’t just overlap in how they’re thought and talked about. They don’t just promote each other through mutually reinforcing notions of machismo and domination. The connection is much deeper and more direct. War and preparations for war, including weapons testing, are themselves among the greatest destroyers of our environment.
Taking the War Activists to Task
DAVID SWANSON – War activists, like peace activists, push for an agenda. We don’t think of them as activists because they rotate in and out of government positions, receive huge amounts of funding, have access to big media, and get meetings with top officials just by asking — without having to generate a protest first.
World Has No Idea How U.S. Decides on Wars
DAVID SWANSON – This, dear world, is more or less how the world’s largest-ever killing machine operates. It turns its eyes away from the machine’s work and, if pushed, debates the care of the machine itself — maintaining more or less complete obliviousness to the horrors the machine produces in those far away places where you live and die.
Thanks for Killing the Planet, Boomers!
TIM DONOVAN – The world as we know it is ending, and the indifference by Americans, politicians and mainstream press is maddening.
From Helen to Hillary: Women in War
DAVID SWANSON – The relationship of women to war has changed dramatically in recent decades, even while remaining the same. But make no mistake, waging war at the behest of female politicians is no different than waging war at the command of male politicians.
Thermonuclear Monarchy and Revolution
DAVID SWANSON – Do nuclear weapons, by the nature of their technology, violate the U.S. Constitution? Do they violate the basic social contract and all possibility of self-governance? Thus argues a new book called Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry. It’s not unheard of for people to see out-of-control nuclear spending as a symptom of out-of-control military spending, itself a symptom of government corruption, legalized bribery, and a militaristic culture. Scarry’s argument suggests a reversal: the root of all this evil is not the almighty dollar but the almighty bomb.
Close Scrutiny of Pentagon Budget Shows Lavish Spending
JON RAINWATER – When people hear “the Army is being cut to pre-World War II levels,” they are thinking about military forces as a whole. But the Air Force didn’t even exist in 1940. The Marine Corps has grown exponentially since that earlier era. After the post- 9/11 spike is trimmed, a force far larger than before World War II remains. But the bigger problem with the reduction narrative is that the proposed $496 billion for the Department of Defense represents historically sky-high spending.
National Security: Going “Up†or “Down?â€
SUSAN C. STRONG – In his January State of the Union message, President Obama said two noteworthy things: the first was “America must move off a permanent war footing.†Of course this remark was preceded and followed by a lot of predictable stuff about keeping America strong by military means. But the President did preface the bold remark I’ve cited above with another comment of interest, “But I strongly believe that our leadership and our security cannot depend on our military alone.†What if, instead of just dismissing these items as pure political boilerplate, we edit his statements just a bit.
Aftermath Would be Worse than a Nuclear War
KENT SHIFFERD – What could be worse than a nuclear war? A nuclear famine following a nuclear war. And what follows famine is epidemic disease. What can you do? The only way to assure ourselves this global disaster will not happen is to join the global movement to abolish all weapons of mass destruction.
Obama Pronouncements about International Law Are Hypocritical
NORMAN SOLOMON – International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.†. . . Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.
The Purposely Confusing World of Energy Politics
RICHARD HEINBERG – Life often presents us with paradoxes, but seldom so blatant or consequential as the following. Read this sentence slowly: Today it is especially difficult for most people to understand our perilous global energy situation, precisely because it has never been more important to do so. Got that? No? Okay, let me explain. I must begin by briefly retracing developments in a seemingly unrelated field—climate science.
Why Nonviolent Direct Action?
RALPH HUTCHINSON – [Editor’s Note: In the wake of the sentencing of 3 nonviolent objectors at the Y12 bomb plant in Oak Ridge, TN to long prison terms, this author takes the judge to task for the advice he offered the defendants from the bench. He develops his challenge into an insightful explanation of the way nonviolent direct action works to effect social change.]
Fast Track to Income Inequality
LORI WALLACH – Corporate interests were fiercely lobbying for President Obama to dedicate serious time in this State of the Union speech to pushing fast track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in order to try to overcome growing congressional and public opposition to both, but instead he made only a brief passing reference. No doubt one explanation is that there is no upside to generating public debate on this issue.
If Obama Orders the CIA to Kill a U.S. Citizen, Amazon Will Be a Partner in Assassination
NORMAN SOLOMON – President Obama is now considering whether to order the Central Intelligence Agency to kill a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. That’s big news this week. But hidden in plain sight is the fact that Amazon would be an accessory to the assassination.
The Mythological Basis of Foreign Policy
DAVID SWANSON – War gains support and acceptance from widespread belief in false information, and the accumulation of false information into generally false concepts or myths about war. This is good news, because it means we are not intractably divided by ideology or worldview. Rather, we will find more widespread agreement about war if we can just achieve more widespread awareness of accurate information.
A Nickel a Year Could Prevent Starvation in Afghanistan
KATHY KELLY – In Afghanistan, funds have been available for tanks, guns, bullets, helicopters, missiles, weaponized drones, drone surveillance, Joint Special Operations task forces, bases, airstrips, prisons, and truck-delivered supplies for tens of thousands of troops. But funds are in short supply for children too weak to cry who are battling for their lives while wasting away.
New Year’s Resolution: Push US to Withdraw Military from Afghanistan
JOHN LAFORGE – After so much blood and destruction in Afghanistan, a lot of people dream of Secretary of State John Kerry reviving his monumental 1971 question, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?â€
They Never Announce When You Prevent a War
DAVID SWANSON – If we can stop one war, if we can stop two wars, why can’t we stop them all and put our resources into protection rather than destruction? Why can’t we move to a world beyond war?
The Keystone Principle: Stop Making Climate Disruption Worse
KC GOLDEN – President Obama was all over the map on climate in his State of the Union address Tuesday night — exhorting us to do what’s right and necessary to protect our grandkids, then turning around and defending his senseless and climate-destroying “All of the above” energy policy. But now, the president faces a defining and unambiguous real-world test of his resolve on climate: whether to issue a permit for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Will 2013 Be the Year Coal Died?
ANGUS DUNCAN – What was the biggest energy story of 2013 in the United States? Most observers would point to the vast, unlooked-for quantities of natural gas and oil released by new “fracking†recovery techniques. National oil production has surged by 30 percent just since 2011. Five yearsago the natural gas industry was looking for sites to import liquefied natural gas (LNG); today it’s flipping those sites around to export the stuff. But, the real energy story of 2013 may turn out to be the death of coal.
Nuclear Power: Not a Green Option
KENT D. SHIFFERD – There are other ways to make electricity, namely solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro dams, and there is always conservation. Why would anyone in their right mind risk going nuclear as a way to deal with global warming?
Retirement Theft in Four Despicable Steps
PAUL BUCHHEIT – The fear of running out of money in retirement is America’s greatest financial concern. It’s a fear greater than death. But the American workers who have paid all their lives for retirement security are being cheated by wealthy individuals and corporations who refuse to meet their tax obligations, and who have found other ways to keep expanding their wealth at the expense of the middle class.
Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous
NORMAN SOLOMON – American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain. A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos — who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder. The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud†computing deal with the CIA.
Let’s Learn from the History of the American People’s Support for War
LAWRENCE WITTNER – There would certainly be less disillusionment, as well as a great savings in lives and resources, if more Americans recognized the terrible costs of war before they rushed to embrace it. But a clearer understanding of war and its consequences will probably be necessary to convince Americans to break out of the cycle in which they seem trapped.
U.S.’s Shame: Gitmo Violates Human and Legal Rights
JOHN LAFORGE – Four more innocents were released from America’s Robben Island this month. Our offshore penal colony at Guantanamo Bay still holds 158 prisoners, 84 of whom have been cleared for release. The men sent home were never charged with a crime and were cleared four years ago.
MLK’S Lessons for the Climate Justice Movement
JOSE-ANTONIO OROSCO – Today, the annihilation of humanity looms again as a possibility because of climate change. In 1964, King could not have imagined the particular features of global environmental destruction that we now face. Yet, he had reflected carefully on the forms of action needed to avert mass extinction before, so his work can still be useful today in thinking about directions for the climate justice movement.
Looking Beyond the Current Budget Agreement
GLEN GERSMEHL – It’s time for a serious New Year’s resolution: Among our friends and in citizen groups and faith communities to which we belong, we must discuss budget priorities and the elimination of wasteful and unnecessary defense spending. And we must take the next step and urge our elected officials to focus on our nation’s real priorities and on where we can find the resources to pay for them. That is what our members of Congress most need to hear. It also suggests some New Year’s resolutions that they should be making.
Conflict of Interest: The Washington Post and the CIA
NORMAN SOLOMON – News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark.
Want to Win the Climate Debate? Stop Debating
LUCY EMERSON-BELL – In early November the Diane Rehm Show on NPR featured an episode on the natural gas boom in America. After panelists glorified the natural gas revolution, Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, chimed in by saying, “Nobody (on this panel) has mentioned climate change. What we should acknowledge is that production of oil and gas is undermining our goals to achieve a stabilized climate.”