Editor’s Note: This book was featured May 12, 2013 in FDL’s Book Salon with Mr. Alperovitz, hosted by David Dayen.

If you’re like me you’ve read several books that list inspiring examples of worker owned businesses and co-ops, suggesting that expanding on such models might begin to right the wrongs of an incredibly unequal society that is growing even more unequal by the day.

Gar Alperowitz’s What Then Must We Do?

The best such collection I’ve found is in a new book by Gar Alperovitz called What Then Must We Do?  This book also offers a powerful argument that radical change is needed, albeit an argument with some possible flaws.  First the inspiring examples:

Workers own and run factories in Cleveland, Atlanta, Washington DC, Amarillo, and many other cities.  Labor unions that once opposed worker ownership, including the Steelworkers and several others, now create worker-owned companies.  Forty percent of Americans are members of cooperatives, including credit unions.  People moved hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, from large banks to credit unions and small banks in 2011 and 2012.  (That should continue!)  Then there are community development corporations and land trusts, alive and thriving.  There are even corporations redesigned, and labeled B Corps, chartered under new laws in 12 states to allow them to legally pursue the social good as well as profits.

Employee stock ownership plans make U.S. workers owners of their businesses in great numbers — three million more than are members of unions in the private sector.  Federal tax incentives (don’t tell Congress!) encourage business owners to sell to their employees.  Worker-owned firms are becoming more common.  They are also more profitable than other similar companies.

It occurs to me that we need a Union-Label type operation to label and catalog the products of worker-owned companies so that we can put our support there.

Local governments are investing in local businesses and land development.  A quarter of U.S. electricity comes from publicly owned co-ops.  These power companies are more efficient and tend to be greener.  The model is being followed by public broadband service.  Proposals that meet the textbook definition of socialism are alive and growing in red and blue states alike, and at the local and state levels.

This matters because the national government in the United States is so thoroughly corrupted.  I’m not sure Alperovitz ever directly answers the question of how a national plutocracy will be prevented from halting local and state progress on the ownership question, as it has halted local and state progress on other matters.  If the trend toward democratizing ownership is happening under the radar, how can it possibly be kept there while succeeding on the necessary scale?  If this approach to economic justice is somehow more inherently “American” than other more foreign ideas, how exactly does that protect it?  Weren’t family farms and free elections and the Fourth Amendment deemed very American at one point too?  Alperovitz recommends a state-by-state approach to single-payer healthcare, but the refusal of California legislators to enact it has come at the bidding of those in Washington.  None of which is to suggest that Alperovitz is wrong to promote this strategy — just that it may be very difficult, and some other strategies may help too.

Alperovitz frames his discussion within an understanding of serious systemic failure.  Persistent long-term trends toward income and wealth inequality, monopolized corporate power, mass incarceration, and environmental devastation churn ahead in the face of elections, activism, lobbying, and reform legislation, not to mention flip-flopping between Republican and Democratic so-called “leadership.”  Alperovitz paints these as even longer term trends than we often suppose by dismissing the gains of the middle of the 20th century as an aberration produced by the Great Depression and World War II, and as gains that could not have come without a large labor movement — something he now deems virtually impossible.

Most activist groups, Alperovitz points out, react to cuts in public services by demanding no cuts.  This is purely defensive.  Alperovitz acknowledges that some also advocate for progressive taxation, but deems this “obviously inadequate” although the obviousness of its inadequacy is not apparent to me, except in the sense that (just like the worker-ownership model) it hasn’t succeeded yet on a major scale. Yes, the plutocrats buy the elections.  The system is rigged against tax reform.  But the goal of advancing the taxation (and elimination) of billionaires as power is gradually obtained seems critical.

Alperovitz seems at times to buy into the notion that there just isn’t enough money around, even if the billionaires were to be taxed at 90 percent.  But this is wrong, of course.  The nation is rolling in money, and the money is piled up in the hands of several hundred people.

It’s somewhere else as well, somewhere Alperovitz doesn’t propose to look for it.  President Obama’s proposed budget for 2014 devotes 57% of discretionary spending to an illegal, immoral, counterproductive, and economically destructive operation known as war and preparation for war.  While Alperovitz suggests that World War III could save the U.S. economy (were a new world war possible, which he says it isn’t), economists say military spending as it exists does less for the economy than other public spending and even less than tax cuts for working people; that is to say, it is worse than nothing.

Alperovitz seems unaware that roughly half of military spending is outside the Pentagon, in Homeland Security, in the CIA, in the State Department, in the Energy Department, etc.  So he uses the Pentagon budget alone to argue that military spending is low as a percentage of GDP.  This does not of course make it low in terms of actual dollars or as a percentage of global military spending or as a percentage of public spending in the United States.  Alperovitz believes there’s little money for spending on human needs, but seems not to notice where 57% of discretionary spending is going.

While Alperovitz raises the topic of healthcare because it takes up, he says, 20 percent of GDP, the war machine that swallows 8 or 9 percent of GDP from U.S. government purchases alone (U.S. companies also dominating international weapons sales) gets no consideration.  Leo Tolstoy, from whom the book’s title is borrowed, would have noticed the existence of the military industrial complex.  He would have considered the possibility of economic conversion.  Connecticut created a commission this month to pursue conversion from war to peace manufacturing.  I suspect Alperovitz would like that model if he took a look at it.

So, here’s where I come down.  We should be pursuing everything Alperovitz recommends, and then some.  We should create worker ownership, tax the rich, cut the military, invest in our society, and act strategically at the local, state, and national levels.  We should take very seriously long-term structural failures and stop imagining that another election will fix anything by itself.  And we should, as Alperovitz wisely recommends, be preparing the ground for the best possible activism when a moment of greater possibilities arrives, or when we have succeeded in creating it.

Mr. President, if I were a professional con artist paid to give you the pros and cons on engaging in a war in Syria, here’s what they would be:

As you know, former president Clinton, probably understood by many to also be speaking on behalf of his wife, has called you a wuss.  Virtually nobody remembers or cares that you said “I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”  The majority of Americans, exercising that mindset, want you to get us into a new war in the first place if the alternative is having a wuss in the White House.  I don’t have a poll on that, but trust me.

This is not contradicted by public opposition to U.S. engagement in the war in Syria (as seen in the polls).  If U.S. casualties are minimized and if the financial cost can come out of the base DOD budget — at least at first — then the political cost is negligible while the political gain is enormous.  Unless you drag this out.  The military budget is being increased right now, and in violation of the sequester, and nobody gives a rat’s ass.  They think it means jobs and non-wussiness.  Unless you drag it out.

With regard to claims of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government, the best approach is to claim certainty, and to insist on the necessity of secrecy for the evidence.  You’ve had a great deal of success with this approach on drone kills, NSA programs, etc.  Let the conversation focus on a demand for the evidence.  This allows you to talk about the scary dangers requiring secrecy, and to question whether your opponents have the appropriate level of patriotic barbarism.

Meanwhile, everyone has completely forgotten that both sides in Syria are using hideous weaponry and committing horrible atrocities, while we’re only aiding one side rather than both.  Nobody, in this framework, will be capable of thinking about the internationally condemned weapons we deploy, or wondering whether killing Syrians to prevent Syrians from being killed by the wrong kind of weapons even makes sense in our humanitarian (wink wink) scenario.  Much less will the legality or morality of using war to prevent war be questioned or even be questionable.  Keep the focus on the extensive evidence of chemical weapons use by Assad, one of the few individuals in the world — we should say constantly — evil enough to do such a thing.  Stop mentioning Syria at all.  Always refer to Assad.

Key also is swiftness.  Get this battle started!  Get progress and movement toward victory underway immediately.  If possible get a very small number of Americans killed, and killed by Assad.  Remember that the resistance to the 2003 invasion of Iraq shriveled away once the invasion happened, and that the same sort of resistance is not even here now for you.  Your image is firmly established as a non-killer.  Your telling the New York Times about your kill list terror-Tuesday meetings did nothing to change that.  Your bin-Laden announcement did nothing to change that.  The danger for you is not Texan sadist.  The danger for you is Wuss.

The secondary danger is drawing the thing out.  You’ve been able to escalate and prolong the war on Afghanistan for five years only because you’ve labeled it your predecessor’s war.  The House just voted that you only get another year-and-a-half there unless they vote again.  I know, I know, it’s cute how they think we give a shit what they vote for.  But Syria is not Bush’s war.  If you drag it out you’ll be in trouble.  And here’s why you might: The people of Syria are largely against the rebels and will be even more strongly against the United States or NATO.  There won’t even be a momentary flowers-and-chocolate welcome.  Both sides are heavily armed already, and the more popular side is winning.  You’re proposing to fight on the less popular side in support of overthrowing a more popular government in exchange for a government that could end up opposed to Iran, but which will also be opposed to the United States, not to mention its opposition to restraint in mutilating and murdering blasphemers.  There will be a temptation to try to fix and control what is guaranteed to be broken and uncontrollable.  And that’s if the whole thing doesn’t expand internationally into a broader war involving several nations and costing you practically as much as Wussihood.

So, what you need is swiftness and overwhelming strength, devastation sufficient to shock and awe the Syrians as it were.  And then get the hell out of there and leave those people to their catastrophe.  That would be my advice.  You don’t need, and the weapons makers and contractors who will show you their gratitude don’t need, a lengthy war in order to profit.  You need an example of a successful war that can be held up as potentially needed again.  Because, of course — while you must absolutely not say this yet — this is what will get you into Iran.  And Iran is where the real men go, Mr. President.

You need to clamp down on Senator McCain and all other voices connecting Syria to Iran.  The two need to be separate and happen sequentially.  You need to control the media by continuing to beat the existing sticks of intimidation, while offering some carrots as well.  Do they want to break the story of the chemical weapons evidence? Do they? Do they? Then they need to watch what they say.  This can be a win-win for everyone involved, Mr. President.  The footage of the bombing of Syrian air defense batteries in urban centers will be stunning.  It should come before the Fourth of July.

Footage from the ground in those cities, however, should be banned under the threat of indictment for aiding the enemy.  This is important.  Syria is not Libya.  A lot more people are going to die, and we do not want those images except in one key case.  We want the death of Assad on every television.  And we want it from a bomb, not a night raid.  We want to justify the killing of tens of thousands through the killing of someone so demonized that his killing justifies all killing.  At that point, you can forget anyone caring about the fate of Syria.  Just look at Iraq.  It’s worse off right now than Syria is, and I can count on one hand the number of Americans who give a damn.

Courage, Mr. President!  Don’t be a wuss! Read the rest of this entry →

Erin Niemela’s recent proposal that we amend the Constitution to ban war is provocative and persuasive.  Count me in.  But I have a related idea that I think should be tried first.

Did we outlaw war after WWI?

While banning war is just what the world ordered, it has about it something of the whole Bush-Cheney ordeal during which we spent years trying to persuade Congress to ban torture.  By no means do I want to be counted among those opposed to banning torture.  But it is relevant, I want to suggest, that torture had already been banned.  Torture had been banned by treaty and been made a felony, under two different statutes, before George W. Bush was made president.  In fact, the pre-existing ban on torture was stronger and more comprehensive than any of the loophole-ridden efforts to re-criminalize it.  Had the debate over “banning torture” been entirely replaced with a stronger demand to prosecute torture, we might be better off today.

We are in that same situation with regard to war.  War was banned 84 years ago, making talk of banning war problematic.

We were in that same situation, in fact, even before the U.N. Charter was drafted 68 years ago.  By any reasonable interpretation of the U.N. Charter, most — if not all — U.S. wars are forbidden.  The United Nations did not authorize the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, the overthrow of the Libyan government, or the drone wars in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia.  And by only the wildest stretch of the imagination are these wars defensive from the U.S. side.  But the two loopholes created by the U.N. Charter (for defensive and U.N.-authorized wars) are severe weaknesses.  There will always be those who claim that a current war is in compliance with the U.N. Charter or that a future war might be.  So, when I say that war is illegal, I don’t have the U.N. Charter in mind.

Nor am I thinking that every war inevitably violates the so-called laws of war, involving countless atrocities that don’t stand up under a defense of “necessity” or “distinction” or “proportionality,” although this is certainly true.  Banning improper war, while useful as far as it goes, actually supports the barbaric notion that one can conduct a proper war.  The situation in which a war would be a “just war” is as mythical as the much-imagined situation in which torture would be justified.

Nor do I mean that U.S. Constitutional war powers are violated or fraud is perpetrated in making the case for war, although these and other violations of law are frequent companions of U.S. wars.

I also do not want to dispute the advantages of banning war in the highest law, the Constitution.  There is a common misconception that holds up lesser, statutory law as more serious than the Constitution or the treaties that it makes “supreme law of the land.”  This is a dangerous inversion.  Edward Snowden is right to expose violations of the Fourth Amendment.  Senator Dianne Feinstein is wrong to insist that those violations have been legalized by statutes.  Amending the Constitution to ban war would (if the Constitution were complied with) prevent any lesser law from legalizing war.  But a treaty would do that too.  And we already have one.

THE 84-YEAR-OLD BAN ON WAR

It is little known and even less appreciated that the United States is party to a treaty that bans all war.  This treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the Peace Pact of Paris, or the Renunciation of War, is listed on the U.S. State Department’s website (go here, open the document, scroll to page 454).  The Pact reads:

The High Contracting Parties solemly [sic] declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

Pacific means only.  No martial means.  No war.  No targeted murder.  No surgical strikes.

Read the rest of this entry →

Already over 30,000 people have signed a thank-you note to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden at SupportEdwardSnowden.org — a website set up by RootsAction.org.

The note reads: “We thank Edward Snowden for his principled and courageous actions as a whistleblower, informing the public about vast surveillance by the National Security Agency that undermines our civil liberties.”

A few of the thousands of comments added read as follows:

“Your courage and integrity give hope to a hardened cynic. I will do what I can to raise awareness and campaign for change, and for your personal safety and liberty. Thank you.”

“If only we had more people with your courage and convictions. You have helped restore my faith in humanity.”

“What you’ve done will inspire kindred spirits around the world to take moral action despite the risks.”

“Your character and courage are inspirational.  I only hope that if put in the same position I would do the right thing, as you have.  Thank you for your lesson in being a human.”

“‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ –George Orwell.  Thank you.”

“Thank you for your courageous actions in the defence of democracy, liberty and justice. You have demonstrated the highest form of loyalty and for that you have my respect and admiration. Good luck.”

“They are trying to make a criminal out of the person who exposed the crime!”

“Just think how this world would be if everyone did the right thing!  Thank you Edward.”

“Your courage is so rare — thank you for this brave action to defend the 4th amendment.  Wishing you well.”

“Thanks for calling attention to the Police State that we have become.”

“Thank you, Edward.  We can no longer say, as did people in Nazi Germany, that they didn’t know what was going on.”

“Thank you for stepping up for freedom. I am proud to join with the people of the world in applauding your conscience.”

“Thank you for your honesty, incredible sacrifice, and clarity. We will not allow the government or the media call this anything less than a courageous move and wake up call to resuscitate Democracy.”

“I can’t thank you enough for this act of  courage and personal sacrifice.  You give me hope that the forces of oppression can eventually be overcome.”

“Your bravery and your actions are more than commendable. I stand with you. Keep your spirit up in the challenges ahead. Thank you for standing up for Democracy and your fellow citizens. Well done. You are a true hero.”

“Bravery for principle is very contagious, thank you!”

“Thank You Edward. ‘The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.’ – -Albert Einstein”

“You and Bradley Manning are my heroes. I am proud of you.”

“Thank you for stepping forward and putting your life at risk to save our precious liberties.  Thank you for believing in the bill of rights.  Thank you for doing what is right even when our government prohibits it.  Thank you for your efforts to stop the decline into the novel ’1984′.”

“Finally someone with guts.”

“Bravo, Edward! You are an inspiration to all freedom-loving people!”

“Thank you for your courageous actions. I hope this will be contagious and result in many more stepping out to join you in exposing the terrible state of freedom here.”

“Thank you for letting me know just how far towards fascism my supposedly democratic country has slid, all in the name of ‘keeping me safe’. I salute your courage.”

“Thank you Edward. We’re with you all the way.”

The note will be delivered to Snowden with all signatures and comments that anyone adds at SupportEdwardSnowden.org

Many loyal Republicans opposed impeaching George W. Bush.  So did most liberal and progressive activist groups, labor unions, peace organizations, churches, media outlets, journalists, pundits, organizers, and bloggers, not to mention most Democratic members of Congress, most Democrats dreaming of someday being in Congress, and — toward the end of the Bush presidency — most supporters of candidate Barack Obama or candidate Hillary Clinton.

Remarkably in the face of this opposition, a large percentage and often a majority of Americans told pollsters that Bush should be impeached.  It’s not clear, however, that everyone understood why impeachment was needed.  Some might have supported a successful impeachment of Bush and then turned around and tolerated identical crimes and abuses by a Democrat, assuming a Democrat managed to engage in them.  But this is the point: whoever followed Bush’s impeachment would have been far less likely to repeat and expand on his tyrannical policies.  And the reason many of us wanted Bush impeached — as we said at the time — was to prevent that repetition and expansion, which we said was virtually inevitable if impeachment was not pursued.

Can You Hear Me Now?

“You just hate Republicans” was the most common argument against impeachment, but there were others.  “It’s more important to elect someone different.”  “Why do you want President Cheney?”  “Why do you want President Pelosi?”  “Why distract from good work?”  “Why put the country through trauma?”  “Why not focus on ending war?”  “Why not do investigations?”  “Why divide the Democrats?”  “Why start a process that can’t succeed?”  “Why destroy the Democratic Party the way impeaching Clinton destroyed the Republican Party?”  We answered these questions as patiently as possible at great length and enormous repetition for years and years.

People pursued alternatives to impeachment, from spreading the word about how bad the crimes and abuses were, to pushing legislation to redundantly re-criminalize Bush’s criminal behavior, to promoting supposedly lesse-evil candidates, to promoting truly good candidates, to constructing ways to drop out of society and wash one’s hands of it.  The trouble was that when you let a president spy without warrant, imprison without charge, torture, kill, lie, make war, operate in secret, rewrite laws, and persecute whistleblowers, you can predict — as we predicted for years — that the next president will adopt and build on the same policies.  Nothing short of punishing the offender will deter the successor.

In fact, the new president, working with Congress and all of his other facilitators, has turned abuses into policies.  The scandal and secretiveness have been replaced with executive orders and legislation.  Crimes are now policy choices.  Checking off lists of murder victims is official open policy.  Secret laws are normal.  Secretly rewritten laws are established practice.  Spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment is openly defended and “legalized,” with sporadic bursts of public outrage and establishment excusing, following new detailed revelations.  Whistleblowing is being transformed into treason.

This moment offers certain opportunities.  It is well-placed in between the election seasons that so debilitate the nation.  Also, bravery and integrity seem to be spreading like a contagion.  Intimidation is backfiring.  Resistance is growing, and so is whistleblowing.  Bradley Manning and Thomas Drake and Matthew Hoh and Coleen Rowley and John Kiriakou and Jesselyn Radack and many others are inspiring new whistleblowers like Edward Snowden (support him here!), and like the member of the Joint Special Operations Command who spoke out for the first time at our forum on the opening of the film Dirty Wars in D.C. on Saturday.

However, what failure to impeach Bush has done to legitimize his crimes is nothing compared to what it has done to delegitimize impeachment.  If a tyrannical president who liberals hated and who talked funny and who didn’t even pretend to be killing for some higher benevolent purpose can’t be impeached, then who can?  Surely not an intelligent, articulate African American who pretends to agree with us and gives speeches denouncing his own policies?

But this is the same problem as before.  Making speeches against Bush’s abuses was not enough.  Clapping for speeches against Obama’s abuses — even speeches by Obama — is not enough.  There is a reason why people abuse power.  Power corrupts them.  And absolute power corrupts them absolutely.  Telling a handful of Congress members who are forbidden to speak about it, and most of whom don’t really give a damn, what sort of outrages you are up to is not a system of checks and balances or the rule of law.

Refusal to impeach pulls the foundation out from under representative government.  Congress won’t impeach for violation of subpoenas, so it avoids issuing subpoenas, and it therefore can’t compel production of witnesses or documents, so it doesn’t take a position on an important matter, so the unofficial U.S. state media takes no position either, and people follow the media.

Would impeaching Obama invite rightwing delusional charges?  Would it send confusing signals rather than clear ones, given Bush’s free pass?  Not if Obama and Bush were impeached together.  They’ve both committed many of the same high crimes.  Impeachment can take place after leaving office.  The time has come to restore seriousness to the serious tool the Constitution provides for checking presidential power.  The time has come to impeach Bush and Obama.

Saturday June 8 is packed in Washington, D.C.  Here’s where I’ll be and I hope to see you! –David Swanson

PROTEST CIA DRONE KILLS
I’ll be speaking to a group of protesters of drone murder in front of CIA headquarters.  We’ll be there from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.  You can park next door at Langley Fork Park at 6414 Georgetown Pike McLean, VA 22101.  Join us!

REMEMBER THE USS LIBERTY
USS Liberty survivors and their families and friends will gather at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery at noon to remember the 34 who were killed on June 8, 1967. Memorial services will commence at 1:15 p.m. Sign up here to join us!
https://www.facebook.com/events/186293598165055/

VIEW SCREENING OF DIRTY WARS
Following the 2:30 screening of Jeremy Scahill’s film “Dirty Wars” at E Street Cinema
Yemeni-American activist Rooj Alwazir and I will lead a discussion of the film and in particular of an imprisoned journalist whose story is told. The theater is at 555 11th St NW, Washington, DC.  You’ll want to buy tickets now:
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/WashingtonDC/EStreetCinema.htm

Check out other screenings with other speakers
http://warisacrime.org/content/dirty-wars-opens-dc-weekend-june-7-9

JOIN JEREMY SCAHILL TO DISCUSS DIRTY WARS
Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and star of the film by the same name.
Rooj Alwazir, Yemeni-American activist and co-founder of SupportYemen media collective.
And a former operative with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (name to be revealed at the event).
Join us at 5-7 p.m. at Busboys and Poets restaurant at 5th and K Streets NW, Washington, DC
http://www.busboysandpoets.com/about/5th-k

SPONSORS: Amnesty International, Code Pink, Peace Action, Iraq Veterans Against the War, RootsAction, Veterans for Peace.

Busboys is a restaurant, and you can order dinner during the event.
Books will be sold and signed.

Sign up on Facebook for Busboys event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/463016100456362/?fref=ts

and for opening weekend in general:
https://www.facebook.com/events/275208689282159/

Learn more: http://dirtywars.org/screenings/details/1785/5791

Of course, old people should know these things too, and some small percentage does know them, but energy seems better invested in trying to teach them to young people who have less to unlearn in the process.

1. Obedience is extremely dangerous. 

Young activists from the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey

This seems like it must be either wrong or misleadingly incomplete.  And that would be true if we were talking about children.  If a two-year-old is about to run in front of a car, please do yell “stop!” and hope for as much obedience as possible.

But I’m talking to young people, not children.

When you grow up, your obedience should always be conditional.  If a master chef appears to be instructing you to prepare a revoltingly bad dinner but wants you to obey his or her instructions on faith, you might very well choose to do so, considering the risk to be tolerable.  If, however, the chef tells you to chop off your little finger, and you do it, that will be a sure sign that you’ve got an obedience problem.

This is not a trivial or comical danger.  The majority of volunteers in experiments are willing to inflict severe pain or death on other human beings when a scientist tells them to do so for the good of science.  Watch this video of such an experiment.

Had the actor in this experiment who pretended to be a scientist told the participants to cut off their little fingers, I bet they wouldn’t have done it.  But they were willing to do far worse to someone else.  The good old Golden Rule is a counter to this deficiency, but so is resistance to blind obedience.  Most suffering in the world is not created by independent individuals, but by large numbers of people obeying when they should be resisting.

Here’s a story in the news right now about a man deeply upset that he sat at a desk and obeyed orders and killed over 1,600 people.  This was not an experiment, but tragically real.  Watch this video:

We should think about how not to put ourselves in positions in which we are expected to blindly obey.  It is possible to find jobs that don’t include that unhealthy expectation.  And we should prepare ourselves to refuse immoral instructions whenever we receive them.  As we’ll see below, we all do receive them all the time.

2. People in power manipulate us into acceptance

Several years ago a lot of people were protesting the U.S. war in Iraq.  The president and most of Congress and most of the big media outlets were busy giving out the impression that such protests were ignored or even counter-productive.  But former president George W. Bush’s memoirs recall the Republican Senate Majority Leader secretly telling him the pressure was becoming too great and they’d need to end the war.  Bush signed an agreement with the government of Iraq to leave in three years.

Read the rest of this entry →

If we think at all about our government’s military depopulating territory that it desires, we usually think of the long-ago replacement of native Americans with new settlements during the continental expansion of the United States westward.

One of the residents of Diego Garcia who were forcibly relocated for military purposes.

Here in Virginia some of us are vaguely aware that back during the Great Depression poor people were evicted from their homes and their land where national parks were desired.  But we distract and comfort ourselves with the notion that such matters are deep in the past.

Occasionally we notice that environmental disasters are displacing people, often poor people or marginalized people, from their homes.  But these incidents seem like collateral damage rather than intentional ethnic cleansing.

If we’re aware of the 1,000 or so U.S. military bases standing today in some 175 foreign countries, we must realize that the land they occupy could serve some other purpose in the lives of those countries’ peoples.  But surely those countries’ peoples are still there, still living — if perhaps slightly inconvenienced — in their countries.

Yet the fact is that the U.S. military has displaced and continues to displace for the construction of its bases the entire populations of villages and islands, in blatant violation of international law, basic human decency, and principles we like to tell each other we stand for.  The United States also continues to deny displaced populations the right to return to their homelands.

At issue here are not the bombings or burnings of entire villages, which of course the United States engages in during its wars and its non-wars.  Nor are we dealing here with the millions of refugees created by wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan or by drone wars like the one in Pakistan.  Rather, the following are cases of the intentional displacement of particular populations moved out of the way of base construction and left alive to struggle as refugees in exile.

In the Philippines, the United States built bases on land belonging to the indigenous Aetas people, who “ended up combing military trash to survive.”

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave.  The island has been devastated.

In 1942, the Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders.

President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island.  He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place.  In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island.  U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements.  Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll.  A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and — in 2003 — to stop bombing the island.

On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.

The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption.  Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.

Beginning during World War II and continuing through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia — where land and money were promised but not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers.  They are being denied the right to return.

DIEGO GARCIA

The story of Diego Garcia is superbly told in David Vine’s book, Island of Shame.  Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants from this island in the Indian Ocean.  On orders from, and with funding from, the United States, the British forced the people onto overcrowded ships and dumped them on docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles — foreign and distant and unwelcoming lands for this indigenous population that had been part of Diego Garcia for centuries.  U.S. documents described this as “sweeping” and “sanitizing” the island.

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By Sherwood Ross

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Overall, President Obama has been “a force for destruction” who has “advanced inequality, wealth concentration, deportations, imprisonments, and the de-funding of basic services in order to fund banks, billionaires, and bombers,” distinguished peace activist David Swanson says.

In an exclusive interview with this reporter, Swanson, a former staff aide to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaigns, said Obama has done nothing  to better the lot of the nation’s poor, including Americans in the ghettos, apart from reducing “the disparity in crack-powder cocaine sentencing.”

Noting that Obama has attempted to identify himself with the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Swanson was asked if he saw any resemblance. His reply was “Two eyes and two ears and two feet and in Obama’s case two mouths. He got a Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything for peace,” Swanson said. “So did King, and King followed through and retroactively earned it. Perhaps that led to the ludicrous bestowing of the prize on Obama, who proceeded to give a pro-war acceptance speech in which he insultingly and arrogantly denounced King’s approach to world change.”

Asked if either Obama or his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might carry out their threat to make a nuclear attack on Iran, Swanson said, “I think they are willing to and would find joy in it. Watch the video of Clinton laughing over the killing of (Libya’s ruler Muammar) Gaddafi. Watch the video of her talking about ‘obliterating’ Iran. She takes obvious pleasure in such talk, as does Obama. I don’t think it’s at the top of their to-do list, but as long as they allow Israel and Congress to roll ahead, as long as they support the propaganda against Iran, as long as they pursue sanctions as an ‘alternative’ to war that usually brings war closer, the danger will grow.”

Swanson was asked if the U.S. could defeat powerful enemies Germany and Japan in three and one half year in World War II how it has been in Afghanistan for well over a decade with no victory in sight, and whether this was not a deliberate plan to continue a high level of military funding.

“Motivations clearly include irrational machoistic power, financial profit, election campaigning, domination of territories and resources, and the inertia of the war machine,” Swanson said. “I don’t think there’s just one reason, but I think all the reasons are bad ones.”

He went on to say, “I agree that many want to keep the wars going, including those so deluded as to imagine that wars produce jobs. Connecticut’s new commission to plan economic conversion is the most encouraging step I’ve seen in a long time. Forty-nine states need to sit up and take notice.”

Asked why there is so little popular opposition to President Obama’s warlike policies compared to the public outcry during the Viet Nam war, Swanson replied: “Less of it (the opposition) is shown in corporate media, resulting in its actual diminishment. The propaganda—including the lie that people are impotent to effect change — has become much slicker. People are directed into entertainment, ignorance, and ineffective types of activism, above all electoral campaigning.”

“Our schools are worse, our news media is worse, our political system is more corrupted. Propagandists and recruiters are more skilled. The draft is a poverty draft, presented as a favor to its direct victims rather than an assault on them. And knowledge of the crimes to be protested barely exists. A majority of Americans believes Iraq benefitted from a war that destroyed Iraq. People won’t protest that which they don’t know about.”

Asked how deeply totalitarianism is ingrained in American life, Swanson said that “Americans are among the most obedient and subservient people around. We imagine just the reverse and certainly our tendency toward obedience competes with out tendency toward independence and rebellion. But the majority of politically engaged Americans radically alter their demands depending on which of two very similar political parties is in the White House, accept imperial powers for presidents without thought, ingest corporate propaganda without resistance, and believe that even popular activism is dependent on the divine appearance of an all-powerful leader.”

Swenson went on to say, “A majority of Americans oppose drone murders of Americans but support drone murders of non-Americans. A majority of Americans want different rules for their country and other, lesser countries, including accepting the launching of wars on other nations, whether for genocidal or humanitarian reasons.”

Asked what it will take to get the pacifist message through to the multitudes, Swanson replied, “It may take some combination of independent media and infiltration of corporate media. The latter will only effectively follow the former. So our priorities are backwards right now. We need a much greater emphasis on building independent journalism. And we need a movement to educate people to rely on it. If potential activists won’t take anything seriously that they don’t see on corporate media, it does us little good to get it to them by other means.”

Swanson hosts “Talk Nation Radio” and is the author of numerous anti-war books that have drawn wide attention and praise. These include “The Military Industrial Complex at 50” and “War Is A lie.”

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(Sherwood Ross formerly contributed weekly columns to United Press International and Reuters. He is now a national public relations consultant based in Miami, Florida.  Reach him at sherwood.ross@gmail.com )

There’s no end to the pro-war movies we’re subjected to: countless celebrations of bombs, guns, and torture.  They come in the form of cartoons, science-fiction, historical fiction, dramas, and reenactments pre-censored by the CIA.  Movies show us the excitement without the suffering.  War in our theaters resembles almost anything else more than it resembles war.

Journalists appear in our movies too, usually as comic figures, talking-head air-heads, numskulls, and sycophants.  In this case, the depiction is much more accurate, at least of much of what passes for journalism.

But, starting in June, a remarkable anti-war / pro-journalism film will be showing — even more remarkably — in big mainstream movie theaters.  Dirty Wars (I’ve read the book and seen the movie and highly recommend both) may be one of the best educational outreach opportunities the peace movement has had in a long time.  The film, starring Jeremy Scahill, is about secretive aspects of U.S. wars: imprisonment, torture, night raids, drone kills.

Dirty Wars won the Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2013 and, recently, the Grand Jury Prize at the Boston Independent Film Festival.  Variety calls it “jaw-dropping … [with] the power to pry open government lockboxes.”  The Sundance jury said it is “one of the most stunning looking documentaries [we've] ever seen.”  I agree.

Typically, information that does not support our government’s war agenda appears only on the printed page, or perhaps in a power-point presented to the usual heroic crowd of aging white activists gathered outside the range of corporate radar.  But stroll through an airport and you’ll see hardcopies of Dirty Wars displayed at the front of the bookstores.  Check out the movie listings in June and July, and you’re likely to see Dirty Wars listed right alongside the latest super-hero, murderfest, sequel of a sequel of some predictable Hollywood hackery.

I wrote a review of the book some time back, after which I picked up a job helping to promote the film.  But I’m promoting the film because it’s a great film, which is different from calling it a great film because I’m paid to promote it.  And my interest remains less in selling the film tickets than in recruiting those who see the film into an active movement to change the reality on which the film reports.

This is not Zero Dark Thirty.  You can’t walk into Dirty Wars supporting drone strikes, night raids, and cluster bombs and walk out with your beliefs reinforced.  Most viewers of Dirty Wars will leave the theater believing that U.S. wars make the United States less safe.  In that moment, when people who are usually otherwise engaged have come to realize that the Department of So-Called Defense endangers us (on top of impoverishing us) is when we should sign those people up to take part in activities the following week and month and year.

The film opens by contrasting embedded war journalism — the regurgitation of spoon-fed propaganda — with what the viewer is about to see.  And what we see is investigative journalism.  The film begins by providing us with an understanding of night raids, including from the point of view of family members who have survived them.  We see the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell Scahill that night raids that kills civilians should not be investigated.  And then we see Scahill investigate them, his search leading him to secretive branches of the U.S. military involved in a variety of dirty tactics in various countries.

The film does have a failing.  It doesn’t tell people anything they can do about the horrors they’re exposed to.  But, of course, activism is possible and far more effective than any journalism — good or bad — will tell you.

One of the stories told in the film and the book of Dirty Wars is the story of the destruction of al Majala.  On December 17, 2009, U.S. Tomahawk missiles and incendiary cluster bombs rained down on the tiny Yemeni village of al Majala, killing 21 children, 14 women, and 6 men, and burning all the homes and their contents. The government of Yemen falsely claimed responsibility.  Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye disproved that claim.

Shaye reported on the carnage, including photographing missile parts labeled “Made in the United States.”  He reported on subsequent U.S. strikes in Yemen, working with the Washington Post, ABC News, Al Jazeera, and other outlets.

Shaye is in prison in Yemen for the crime of journalism, at the insistence of President Obama.  A coalition has launched a petition today urging Obama and Yemen to set Shaye free.  Fans of Dirty Wars who want to begin to do something to end the crimes committed in their names can be sent to RootsAction.org.

While the United States was searching for its citizen Anwar Awlaki to kill him, Shaye repeatedly tracked him down and interviewed him.  These were tough and serious interviews, with Shaye asking Awlaki how he could possibly support acts of violence.  Awlaki’s image was not helped.  But the U.S. government began warning media outlets not to work with Shaye, falsely accusing him of supporting al Qaeda.  The Yemeni government kidnapped Shaye, threatened and released him, then snatched him again and gave him a one-sided “trial,” universally denounced as a sham by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

On February 2, 2011, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, under public pressure, had drawn up, printed out, and was prepared to sign a pardon of Shaye.  But Saleh received a phone call from President Barack Obama, who opposed release of the journalist.  Saleh ripped up the pardon.

The White House is feeling a little pressure over recent revelations of government spying on and seeking the prosecution of U.S. journalists.  It took the targeting of a U.S. journalist for prosecution to start people like Chuck Todd and Dana Milbank chattering about Obama treating journalism as a crime.  But have you heard U.S. media outlets raising concerns over the imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist at the instruction of the U.S. president?

There is much else that we are not regularly told to be found in Dirty Wars.  Organizations that would like to help promote this film and organize around it in U.S. cities should contact me.  With any luck, together we’ll change the conversation to one aware of and unaccepting of acts of murder anywhere on earth.