Armistice Day Message from Veterans for Peace

In honor of Veterans' Day, I am reprinting here the 2010 "Armistice Day Message" from the Veterans for Peace website:

November 11 is a cause for mixed emotions among those former members of the military who wish to permanently halt the horror of war.

A holiday in our name is indeed an honor, as was our service itself, but “Armistice” somehow still sounds more suitable. That word refers to the end of a conflict, the end of the killing, the maiming, the destruction, the inhumanity, the erosion of civilized personal behaviors that have taken centuries to mold. While “Armistice” does not connote lasting peace, at least it does connote a chance for societies to grasp hold of themselves and, if able, to pull back from the abyss.

Veterans For Peace, while grateful for the parades recognizing our duty and the ultimate sacrifice of our fallen comrades, would prefer a time of reexamination of the jaded justifications and obscene outcomes of the military causes we served. All too frequently those justifications have been morally insufficient to vindicate the malevolent international conflicts to which they gave such ignoble birth.

For these reasons Veterans For Peace gratefully acknowledges the heartfelt recognition which our nation solemnly offers us today. But we fervently urge that tomorrow our great nation devote its equally heartfelt and solemn attention and talents to the cessation of existing wars and to the prevention of similar calamities in the decades to come.

Kurt Vonnegut, the internationally acclaimed author from our country and a POW in Dresden during the Allied firebombing of that city in WWII, gives us something to think about on this day of remembrance.

"…November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy all the people of all the nations which fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I've talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not…Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things."

The Wellstone Files

Senator Paul Wellstone, the progressive Democratic Senator from Minnesota, tragically died in a plane crash eight years ago this month, just before Election Day, as he was running for a third term. Minnesota Public Radio has obtained hundreds of pages from the FBI's file on Wellstone, beginning when he participated in protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. The files go right up to the plane crash and its aftermath, as the FBI investigated tips indicating the crash was a result of sabotage.

Read the full story here: The Wellstone Files | Minnesota Public Radio News

Coal Baron Fuels Toomey's Senate Race

Pat Toomey, the Republican running for the open Senate seat from Pennsylvania currently held by retiring Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter (?-PA), says on his website that "Washington is threatening new and heavy costs and burdens on businesses", and that government instead should be "cutting taxes and decreasing regulation." This has apparently attracted the interest, and money, of a multimillionaire coal executive who normally confines his political activity to West Virginia.

Don Blankenship is the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, a job which paid him $17.8 million in 2009. Massey was in the news this past April when an explosion at their Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 mine workers. Although the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that high levels of methane gas inside the mine may have led to the explosion. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had repeatedly fined Massey for violating safety regulations, including those requiring proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane. Presumably these are among those pesky regulations that Toomey wants to decrease if he's elected to the Senate.

According to the Federal Election Commission website, Blankenship gave a personal contribution of $2,000 to Toomey's campaign in September 2009. He is also a director of the National Mining Association, whose two political action committees COALPAC and MINEPAC have also contributed to Toomey.

Blankenship has a history of involvement in his native West Virginian politics. In 2004 he spent $3 million to help defeat state Supreme Court justice Warren McGraw. He was photographed vacationing on the French Riviera with another state judge, Elliot "Spike" Maynard, who later voted to set aside a $76 million judgement against Massey Energy. Having lost his re-election to the court, Maynard is running this year for Congress against Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall. Blankenship, of course, is listed among Maynard's contributors.

Blankenship's newfound interest in Pennsylvania campaigns may have something to do with Massey Energy's expansion into the state. In May 2010, Massey got permission to buy the Mathies coal mine near Pittsburgh, which is now the first Massey-owned mine in Pennsylvania. Given Massey's record of safety and health violations, many people living near the Mathies mine are concerned about this takeover.

Blankenship claims he cares about the safety of coal miners, as well as creating more mining jobs. If that's so, then you would expect the coal miners to follow his political priorities. However, the United Mine Workers of America labor union, through its PAC, has contributed not to Toomey but to Joe Sestak, the Democratic House representative from the Philadelphia suburbs who defeated Specter in the primary. It seems that the mine workers know that Sestak is more likely to be on their side than Blankenship's friend Toomey.

Hopefully, when Pennsylvania voters go to the polls on November 2, they will remember the song "Which Side Are You On?", written by the wife of a UMW coal miner in Kentucky, and vote against the candidate funded by a coal CEO who profits while his employees are killed on the job.

Coexist

In memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, as well as all people who have lost their lives since then in wars, bombings, and other acts of senseless violence.

Keep The Trains A-Rollin'

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

- "City of New Orleans", by Steve Goodman

Power outages along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor this morning caused delays and cancellations, not only for Amtrak trains but also for trains operated by regional agencies NJT (New Jersey Transit), SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), and MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) which use Amtrak's tracks and power lines.

The reaction of most people in the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington metropolitan areas to this news was probably, "what, again?". Entering "Amtrak power outage" or "Amtrak signal problems" into your search engine will give you an idea of how often this seems to happen.

Unfortunately, each time an incident like this occurs, it reinforces the idea that train travel is unreliable, and makes people more likely to use their cars. "Better pull your car out of the garage if you need to get to work on time", chirped one local TV newscaster this morning.

With the growing recognition that we, as a country, need to break our oil addiction, we need to find ways to encourage more, not less, train travel. Our overconsumption of oil, fueled in part by daily reliance on the personal automobile for commuting to work, has given us the Deepwater Horizon disaster (killing 11 workers and ruining the Gulf coast ecosystems), global warming, and military operations aimed at ensuring the steady flow of petroleum from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Encouraging more people to ride the train to work is an essential part of changing our energy use, but this can only work if the trains actually run on time. For this reason, funding for mass transit must be part of the equation whenever bills dealing with energy or climate change are debated; the issues are inextricably linked.

Government funding was used to build the interstate highways (beginning under the Republican Eisenhower administration in the 1950s), and continues to subsidize travel by car and plane. Government funding is now needed for capital improvements to our existing rail lines, as well as to build new lines, to give people more reasons to leave their cars in the garage each day and take the train to work.

Hiroshima - The Original Ground Zero

Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, on August 9, our military dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. These were the first, and so far the only, uses of nuclear weapons in attacks against people.

The official story promulgated in the U.S. is that these two A-bomb attacks were necessary to force a recalcitrant Japanese government to finally surrender and bring an end to World War II; without them, a high-casualty land invasion would have been necessary. My father, an Army Corporal serving in the Pacific at the time, was one of the soldiers being prepared for this invasion force, and was relieved that this use of atomic weapons had cancelled that invasion and probably saved his life.

Others, however, were horrified by these new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and called on governments to limit their use and stockpiling. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project scientists in developing these A-bombs, spoke out publicly against starting a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which led to the loss of his security clearance and thus his ability to continue any government employment. U.S. physicist Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell coauthored a manifesto in 1955 which stated, in part: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock (author of "Baby and Child Care"), Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins and others formed The Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy.

Governments eventually began to listen. On August 5, 1963 - the day before the 18-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack - the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which limited testing of nuclear weapons to underground tests, out of rising public concerns over radioactive fallout from testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or in the Pacific Ocean. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was intended to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing or acquiring these weapons, although the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to sign the treaty and their development of their own nuclear arsenals has weakened the treaty, as has the glacial pace of the promised disarmament by the established nuclear "club". The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), completed in 1996, was signed by President Clinton but failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The time may be right, though, for a new round of efforts to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. For the first time, the U.S. government sent an official representative (John Roos, our Ambassador to Japan) to the annual August 6 memorial service at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park near Ground Zero of the 1945 detonation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also there, along with representatives of nuclear powers Britain and France. Peace groups, including the Quakers' Friends Committee on National Legislation, are recommending we contact our Senators to push for ratification of the CTBT as well as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed in April by U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev.

The fact that this would put peace advocates on the same side of this issue as Henry Kissinger, who has been preaching nuclear abolition since 2007, should not deter us. Military hawks and their armchair cheerleaders initially welcomed atomic/nuclear bombs as the epitome of efficiency; they meant that a city could now be destroyed by a single bomber dropping a single bomb, rather than the multiple bombers dropping hundreds of incendiary bombs it took to destroy Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. However, they soon grew frustrated as political leaders refused to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam; what's the use of having such a great weapon, they grumbled, if we're not allowed to use it? Kissinger is probably just continuing his practice of realpolitik, deciding that if the U.S. and its allies can never actually use the darned things, we might as well just ban them forever.

This may be the first time in my life that I've ever agreed with Henry Kissinger on anything.

Arizona's "He Don't Look Right To Me" Law

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,

Get him up against the wall!

- "In The Flesh", Pink Floyd

Arizona's Senate Bill (SB) 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", was scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, July 29. Although a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary injunction blocking key portions of the bill, including those requiring police to check the U.S. citizenship status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally, other portions of the bill will still become law tomorrow, and further judicial action could lift the injunction. Moreover, the judge apparently didn't question the constitutionality, let alone the morality, of asking some people, but not others, for ID based on their appearance; the judicial proceedings appear to be more of a pissing contest between state and federal governments than a real debate about human rights.

SB 1070 is usually referred to as an "immigration law", but that's misleading. It's really an identification law, intended to permit authorities to categorize people based on their nationality or ethnic background. While allegedly passed out of frustration and alarm over "illegal immigration", in practice the law would most certainly have been used more against some immigrants than others. For example, chances are that the au pair from Ireland or the college student from Sweden who overstayed their visas would not have been forced to produce their identification papers. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of neighboring California, whose still-thick accent from his native Austria ought to make passing police officers wonder about his citizenship status, would also probably be spared from producing ID on the spot. The Arizona law was clearly targeted against the brown-skinned Hispanics who are imagined to be pouring over Arizona's southern border from Mexico, Central America, and South America. What's more disturbing than the specific mechanics of the law is the motivation behind it.

Is it merely coincidence that this law was drafted and passed during the term of this country's first non-white President? The news is frequently full of all-white protest groups who clearly hate the fact that Barack Obama is President, question whether he was actually born in the United States ("papers please, Mr. President"), and insist that they want "their" country back, presumably taking it back from those people in Washington who don't look the same as they do.

It's also interesting to note that this law was passed in Arizona, which as a territory during the Civil War requested, and was granted, membership in the Confederate States of America and swore their allegiance to CSA President Jefferson Davis. Back in the good ole days of the Confederacy, you didn't need to rely on papers to determine a person's status, other than to find out which white person legally owned a particular black slave.

Going even further back in history, the Arizona territory was originally formed out of land taken by the U.S. military from Mexico by force, in the Mexican-American War (which, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln opposed as a member of Congress). Arizona is also home to many native Americans, who might have been better off if they had taken the SB 1070 approach to illegal immigration when the first ships arrived from Europe.

When I was in the 12th grade, my high school German class took a trip to Munich, in what was then called West Germany. We took a train to Salzburg, Austria, and as we approached the border between the two countries, the porters walked up and down the train cars saying "Papiere bitte" (papers please). We all froze at the sound of that phrase, which immediately conjured up images from countless movies about World War II in which Jews and other refugees from the Nazi German authorities got caught without proper identification. On that same trip, we also visited the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, where many of those people without the right papers ended up. Is this where we want to end up as a country?

My two daughters were both born in Peru, and adopted by me and my wife when they were infants. They are now naturalized U.S. citizens, but those official certificates from the federal government which prove that status are not among the items carried in their pocketbooks on a daily basis. If our family decided to take a vacation in Arizona, and SB 1070 were allowed to be fully implemented as originally planned, would my daughters be stopped and questioned, and perhaps taken away from us, because their brown skin makes them look like they don't belong?

A judge may have temporarily blocked this specific law, but not the underlying racism behind it. SB 1070 wasn't really the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". It should have more properly been named the "Support Our White Neighborhoods Act."

Peace and Love, from Ringo to the World

Today is the 70th birthday of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. One could say he's had a pretty successful life: fame and fortune as drummer with The Beatles, successful solo recording and acting careers, even marrying a "Bond girl" (Barbara Bach). So whenever he's asked what he wants for his birthday, his answer is simple: "Peace and Love".

As explained on his website, each year on his birthday (July 7, or "the seventh day of the seventh month", as he explains in Muddy Waters fashion), Ringo asks people to flash peace signs at 12:00 noon, local time wherever they are, and say "Peace and love". If enough people do this each year, he figures, maybe we'll actually get it.

Ringo seems to be echoing the sentiments of a former bandmate from Liverpool, who asked us to "Give Peace A Chance" and reminded us that "All You Need Is Love". It certainly seems to be what the world needs now.

So here goes:

PEACE AND LOVE

Happy birthday, Ringo.

The Coffee Spill at BP HQ

The Upright Citizens Brigade has created this comedy video showing what would happen if BP executives tried to deal with a spilled cup of coffee during a business meeting the same way they've addressed the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Irony, British (Petroleum) Style

Here's my entry for Rachel Maddow's BP poster contest:
Rachel Maddow, on her nightly MSNBC show, has been asking viewers to take this photo of a BP gas station, where BP sternly warns its customers that they "are responsible for spills", and combine it with some appropriately ironic pseudo-motivational commentary on BP's absence of clarity about cleanup responsibility when they're the ones doing the spillage.

You can find all the necessary links and instructions to create your own BP poster on Rachel's blog here.

Year Of The (Rich) Woman

This past Tuesday's primary wins by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, along with other high-profile campaigns by women for federal and state offices, has many pundits declaring the 2010 election to be "The Year Of The Woman". A closer look at some of these candidates, however, indicates that their personal wealth, and their willingness to use that wealth to finance their campaigns, may have more to do with their electoral success than gender.

Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, spent about $71 million of her personal wealth, estimated to be in the billions, to win the Republican primary for Governor of California.

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, spent $5.5 million from her own pocket to become the Republican candidate for Senate from California. Some of that money may have come from the $21 million severance pay she received when HP fired her in 2005.

Linda McMahon (no relation to me, thank goodness), the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), spent $14 million of her own money to win the endorsement of the Connecticut state Republican convention last month as that party's candidate for the U.S. Senate. Yes, the person who brought us "professional wrestlers" Hulk Hogan and The Rock on TV shows like "Raw" and "Smackdown" now wants to help run the federal government.

The irony is that all of these free-spending Republican candidates are running on a platform of "fiscal conservatism". Go figure.

Instead of examining how these candidates made their fortunes, or questioning the wide pay disparities between CEOs and average workers at these corporations, the media is instead focusing on Alvin Greene, who won Tuesday's primary in South Carolina to become the Democratic candidate for Senate, and asking how an unemployed vet got the $10,400 filing fee to get on the ballot. Perhaps the fact that media corporations receive millions of dollars from candidates like Whitman, Fiorina, and McMahon for TV and radio ads, while Greene did not buy any media advertising time, has something to do with it?

Class, rather than gender or ethnicity, is still the strongest dividing line in our society. Individuals and corporations with a great deal of money have far more influence in the decisions which affect our lives than the average citizen. Citigroup even acknowledged this situation in their infamous 2005 report by calling the U.S. a "plutonomy". Electing a female millionaire, who made her fortune in the corporate world, will be no more liberating than electing male millionaires has ever been.

In 1973, Pink Floyd's song "Money" has the rich narrator saying "Think I'll buy me a football team" as a fun way to spend some excess cash. Today, the preferred form of recreational spending for the rich seems to be buying a Senate seat or governorship (former Goldman Sachs partner Jon Corzine managed to buy both in New Jersey before the voters finally got sick of him), but sometimes they'll settle for a mayor's office (Michael Bloomberg in New York City).

Money, so they say,

Is the root of all evil today

Memorial Day Layoff By Defense Contractor

On Tuesday, June 1, upon returning to work following the long Memorial Day weekend, 45 engineers at the L-3 Communications facility in Camden, New Jersey were told by the company they were being laid off.

Meanwhile, TheStockAdvisors.com recommends investing in L-3, "a leader in a fast-growth niche of homeland security and defense: Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, often abbreviated C4ISR or ISR."

The investment advice article goes on to say that "We see L-3 Communications as one of the best companies in the robust defense sector."

There are at least 45 engineers out there who might disagree with that statement.

The Defense Industry Racket

You fasten all the triggers for the others to fire

Then you set back and watch when the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion as young people's blood

Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud.

- "Masters of War", Bob Dylan, 1963

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,

easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious...It is the only

one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

- "War Is A Racket", General Smedley Butler, 1935

Memorial Day is supposed to be a time for remembering our soldiers who have died fighting in wars. While we pay respect to the memory of these men and women who volunteered to serve their country and sacrificed their lives, let's also remember the segment of our society which actually profits from war - the defense contractors. These corporations have appeared to be largely recession-proof, continuing to post profits and pay out bonuses to their executives, although some are now beginning to lay off their non-executive workers.

Bob Dylan called them "masters of war" in his 1963 song, but Smedley Butler called them racketeers nearly thirty years earlier. Butler spent 33 years in the U.S. Marines, earning the Medal of Honor twice and rising to the rank of Major General before retiring in 1931 as the most decorated Marine at that time. After leaving the Marines, he became extremely critical of companies which profited from selling to the military, as well as those which he believed persuaded our government to use the Marines to stabilize countries for the purposes of business investments. In his 1935 book "War Is A Racket", he detailed how the profits of companies such as DuPont, Bethlehem Steel, and Anaconda Copper increased an average of 200 percent during World War I, and proposed paying "the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories...the same wage as the lads in the trenches get."

In 1961 another retired general, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his farewell address as President and explained how the relationship between the military and corporations had changed: "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." Eisenhower went on to warn us that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Today, Eisenhower's "permanent armaments industry" is so well ensconced that it apparently doesn't have to worry about minor things like obeying the law. The nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) maintains a Federal Contractor Misconduct Database showing companies which continue to win government contracts despite their histories of misconduct, including contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations. It should come as no surprise that the top 9 companies on the current list, sorted by amount of federal dollars, are defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, United Technologies, BAE, and SAIC. Lockheed Martin is in first place, receiving over $38 billion in federal dollars during fiscal year 2009 despite 50 reported instances of misconduct since 1995. Their reported profit for that period was $3 billion. Of these 9 defense contractors, the one with the smallest number of violations is L-3, with 6; they made $901 million in profit on $7 billion of FY2009 federal contracts.

One reason, perhaps, that our government is reluctant to punish these corporations is the jobs they're supposed to provide as a form of military Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who proposed using government spending to stimulate demand during times of high unemployment. The application of his policies in both FDR's New Deal and the military spending of World War II is widely believed to have pulled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Following that war, government spending in the form of contracts to military suppliers (now euphemistically renamed "defense contractors") was seen as a way to continue job creation and prevent the return of a depression. The recent use of stimulus packages to counter our current recession has been called a return to Keynesian economics, but defense contracts have represented a system of permanent stimulus spending since the 1940s.

Unfortunately for the employees of those defense contractors, the continuation of two active wars and large Department of Defense budgets may no longer translate into job stability. A recent article in The Hill reports that some of the same profitable defense contractors in the POGO list are now laying off large numbers of employees. Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems & Sensors (MS2) division recently reduced its workforce by about 972 employees through a combination of voluntary packages and involuntary layoffs; a spokesman said they needed to "size its workforce to meet projected workload and remove redundancies." Raytheon says it needs to lay off 225 workers in Arizona to "achieve the right mix of talent to remain competitive in the marketplace." BAE is laying off 610 workers in Ohio and 373 in Tennessee because the "major spike" in military contracts due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "has now passed and we are adjusting our workforce levels." The L-3 Communications division in impoverished Camden, NJ announced a layoff of 65 workers in April "to make our products and services more affordable in today's competitive environment."

However, the Hill article also quotes David Berteau of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who points to another reason behind these layoffs; "defense companies, responsible to their stockholders, must keep profits high enough to compete for capital as they anticipate reductions in the defense budget." It's not that these corporations are at risk of not turning a profit; it's that the profits must be "high enough" to satisfy investors on Wall Street, even if that means cutting jobs at a time when the federal government, which provides the money for those profits, is trying to create jobs to bring the country out of recession.

These jobs being cut are some of the relatively few remaining for skilled workers such as scientists and engineers that are somewhat immune to overseas outsourcing. Most defense contracts require employees to hold security clearances, which are only available to U.S. citizens.

This Memorial Day, as we honor the patriotic sacrifices of our soldiers during times of war, perhaps we need to begin demanding some patriotic sacrifices by the executives of our defense contractors. Have they started looking in the mirror to see if they can "remove redundancies", or considered reducing their multimillion dollar compensation packages to make their companies' products "more affordable"? If they're not willing to do so, then perhaps taxpayers should begin questioning why their money is used to subsidize for-profit corporations which are no longer willing to hold up their end of the bargain by providing stable jobs for the middle class. The public rage at "government bailouts" of banks and auto makers could pale compared to what should be an even larger rage at the decades-old government subsidy of the defense industry. It's time to look closely at "too big to fail" corporations like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and consider either breaking them up into smaller, less powerful companies or nationalizing them so that the taxpayers can purchase what the military truly needs at cost, without paying the additional cost of executive bonuses, profits to Wall Street investors, and layoffs aimed at keeping those profits as high as possible.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Zimmerman

In honor of Bob Dylan's birthday today (born May 24, 1941 as Robert Zimmerman), I listened to a healthy cross-section of his songs in my collection, ranging from his early protest folk songs up through the Traveling Wilburys supergroup, and marveled again at how well his lyrics perfectly captured whatever mood and imagery he was targeting.

His "Blowin' In The Wind" put the question of civil rights before us all:

"How many years can some people exist,

before they're allowed to be free?"

In "Masters of War", he denounced the military-industrial complex only two years after President Eisenhower had coined the term:

"Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns

You that build the death planes, you that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks,

I just want you to know I can see through your masks."

His "Subterranean Homesick Blues" contained the lyric that inspired the name of the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS):

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Even when Dylan turned his rage on personal relationships rather than social injustice, his lyrics captured things perfectly. How many of us have found ourselves in situations where these parting words seem all too fitting:

"You just kinda wasted my precious time,

Don't think twice, it's all right."

My personal favorite, though, is from "Positively 4th Street":

"You've got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend

When I was down, you just stood there grinning...

I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you"

Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman, for giving us so many great lyrics. As you said in "My Back Pages", you were so much older then, you're younger than that now.

Another World Is Possible

The main theme underlying this blog is that groups of people working together can challenge entrenched interests, not only to block or reverse harmful actions but to imagine new approaches and new ways of doing things that are more positive, healthy, and sustainable.

Many like-minded people are making plans to attend the US Social Forum June 22-26 in Detroit, MI. The theme of this event is "Another World Is Possible - Another US Is Necessary." This will be the second US Social Forum (the first was in 2007), and is one of many regional gatherings which grew out of the World Social Forum, an alternative to the annual gathering of the world's economic elite in Davos, Switzerland. Rather than accept the label of "anti-globalization" assigned to these activities by the media, participants instead stress their vision of a different kind of globalization - one driven by the people of different communities working together on shared goals, rather than the agendas of for-profit corporations.

One group which will be represented at the US Social Forum is Healthcare NOW!, the single-payer advocacy group which held a "house-warming" event at its new Philadelphia office today to raise funds for the trip to Detroit. National Organizer Katie Robbins spoke with the group of 30 supporters, as did Donna and Larry Smith, who were featured in the Michael Moore film "Sicko". Donna now works for National Nurses United, and both she and Katie certainly offer the possibility of a different way of delivering healthcare in the United States; one in which all people have access to the care they need, without regard to their ability to pay, and that access cannot be lost due to job loss or graduation from school. That vision has been hard to communicate in the face of the corporate-driven healthcare "debate" which only permits discussion of minor tinkering within the existing employment-based private health insurance system, but it's a vision we must keep discussing.

These single-payer supporters enjoyed some laughs while watching the film "The Yes Men Fix The World", in which a pair of pranksters who pose as corporate executives or government officials help us imagine a world where Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility for the 1984 pesticide plant accident in Bhopal, India and sets up a fund for the medical needs of its victims, or the New York Times publishes articles on the passage of Maximum Wage legislation.

Challenging corporate power, as well as the paradigms they've encouraged us all to accept as unchangeable, is an essential step towards building a better world. People like Katie Robbins, Donna Smith, and the Yes Men are all helping us to think of creative ways to do this. As Donna said today, the balance of power is currently badly tipped away from the people, but each of us has to do our part to restore the balance, and we can never know which action will be the one that finally does so.

Or as John Lennon sang:
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

Pennsylvania Democrats Reject Specter

In a historic upset, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) has defeated incumbent Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) in today's Democratic primary. Sestak will now move on to the general election in November as the Democratic candidate, facing Republican candidate Pat Toomey.

Specter, to his credit, conceded shortly after 10:00 p.m. and has so far not pulled a "Lieberman", i.e., declared a run as an independent after losing a party primary.

Considering the effort expended by national and local party officials, from President Obama and Vice-President Biden to Governor Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, on Specter's behalf once this longtime Republican rebranded himself as a Democrat, the choice of Sestak by a majority of the state's Democratic voters should be seen as a strong rebuke to the party establishment.

After all, isn't the point of a primary to let the voters choose their candidates? Wasn't the primary supposed to be a reform to move away from the old "smoke-filled room", where the party's power brokers met in secret to choose their official slate of candidates?

It seems the establishment of the Democratic Party has forgotten about small-d democracy.

As Sestak said tonight, "This is what democracy looks like: a win for the people."

BP: Too Big To Drill?

Oil company BP has been in the news ever since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and started a massive oil spill that has yet to be stopped.

A new group called Seize BP organized protests around the country on May 12 and is collecting signatures on this online petition:

"The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP."

The last time a government attempted to seize BP, that government was overthrown and replaced with an autocrat who was less of a threat to BP's profits. At that time, BP was known by its former name, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the British government increasingly relied on its steady supply of oil from Iran, profitably supplied by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The Iranian people, however, were increasingly unhappy with the terms of this arrangement. AIOC underpaid its Iranian oil workers and denied them positions in management. The royalties paid to the Iranian government were a lower percentage of revenues than that of many other oil producers, and it was eventually discovered that AIOC used a false second set of books to hide their true revenues, and thus the true amount of royalties owed, from the government of Iran.

The secular, democratically-elected government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the assets of AIOC and created the National Iranian Oil Company. AIOC and its British patrons were not happy, and began to plan a change in government, along with the U.S. government. In 1953, the CIA organized Operation Ajax which resulted in a coup d'etat against Mossadegh and the return of the Shah of Iran to his throne, where he ruled until the 1979 revolution. The National Iranian Oil Company was converted into a multi-corporation consortium, mainly controlled by AIOC and five U.S. companies. In 1954 AIOC changed its name to British Petroleum, perhaps to distance itself in the public mind from this episode.

British Petroleum was also the primary oil company behind the construction of the Alaska Pipeline in the mid-1970s. Although Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) is largely blamed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the pipeline's owner and operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, shares the blame by not being properly prepared to respond to and clean up the spill once it happened, making the environmental damage far worse than it should have been. British Petroleum (renamed yet again to "BP" in 2001) is the largest shareholder in Alyeska.

In 2006, a section of BP's pipes in Alaska developed holes due to corrosion and created a large oil spill near Prudhoe Bay. BP pleaded guilty to violations of federal law and was fined $20 million.

If BP were a person (and 5/9 of the Supreme Court would argue that it is, according to their Citizens United v. FEC ruling), this type of sociopathic behavior would lead to jail time. In the case of a corporation like BP, shouldn't we at least take away its right to continue doing business?

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Warriors

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, that annual holiday which is celebrated by sending cards and flowers to our mothers, sharing a family meal, or participating in a run or walk to raise money for breast cancer research. One of the earliest proponents of establishing Mother's Day, however, instead saw it as a way to stop nations from waging war against each other.

Although she had written the words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", which became a rallying song for the Union Army in the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe later became horrified by the carnage of that war and became a pacifist. She became convinced that if women had more decision-making power in government, wars would become less likely, since women who had worked so hard to raise their sons would never allow them to go off to war and kill some other woman's son. Clearly, Howe would have been disappointed if she had lived long enough to meet the likes of Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir, whose terms as Prime Minister of England and Israel, respectively, proved that women could lead their nations to war just as easily as men.

Let's start a new Mother's Day tradition this year of reading Howe's original proclamation and seeing if we can all think of ways to make her vision a reality.

Mother's Day Proclamation
Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Forty Years Ago: Four Dead In Ohio

Forty years ago, on May 4, 1970, soldiers from the Ohio National Guard fired their rifles into a crowd of students at Kent State University who had been protesting President Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War into what had been neutral Cambodia on April 30.

When the shooting stopped, four students were dead and nine were wounded. Two of the killed students hadn't even been part of the protests, but had been walking between classes when the shooting started.

Neil Young was so shaken by this incident that he quickly wrote the song "Ohio", went into the studio with bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash to record it, and convinced Atlantic records to rush out the single, even though their hit "Teach Your Children" was still on the charts. Soon the story of this tragedy was blasting through radio speakers everywhere:

"This summer I hear the drummin', Four dead in Ohio...
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?"

Ten days later, police opened fire on student protesters at Jackson State College in Mississippi, killing two and injuring twelve. The Steve Miller Band addressed both incidents later that year in their "Jackson-Kent Blues":

"Four were shot down by the National Guard troops...
Shot some more in Jackson just to show the world what they can do...
Nothing any good is gonna come from a war"

The shooting and killing of college students by armed police and soldiers had so shaken up this country that even the normally apolitical Beach Boys found they could not stay silent. Singer Mike Love took the old Coasters song "Riot In Cell Block #9" and rewrote the lyrics to address these and other shootings, calling it "Student Demonstration Time":

America was stunned on May 4, 1970
When rally turned to riot up at Kent State University
They said the students scared the Guard
Though the troops were battle dressed
Four martyrs earned a new degree
The Bachelor of bullets
I know we're all fed up with useless wars and racial strife
But next time there's a riot, well, you best stay out of sight

On this anniversary, we need to remember the "four dead in Ohio" and the two dead in Mississippi, while we also mourn the thousands of deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that they were trying to prevent, as well as the deaths our government continues to cause today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As Pete Seeger sang in "Where Have All The Flowers Gone": "When will they ever learn?"

Kent State casualties, May 4, 1970:
Allison Krause, 19
Jeffrey Miller, 20
Sandra Scheuer, 20
William Schroeder, 19
Jackson State casualties, May 14, 1970:
Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21
James Earl Green, 17

A Specter Is Haunting The Senate

Just about a year ago, on April 28, 2009, Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) announced his party switch from Republican to Democrat. On May 18 of this year (primary election day), the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania will have their chance to say whether they accept him as a Democrat, or if they prefer current Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA).

Specter's coming-out as a born-again Democrat was hailed at the time by the national party as another stepping-stone to their holy grail of a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. The Democrats finally obtained that 60-member caucus in July 2009 with the swearing-in of Al Franken (D-MN), delayed for months by sore loser Norm Coleman's endless court challenges, and it lasted until February 4 of this year, when Scott Brown (R-MA) was installed in the late Ted Kennedy's seat.

So did those 7 months of unstoppable Democratic hegemony usher in a progressive utopia? Hardly. That could only have happened if the Democrats in the Senate were all unabashed New Dealers, which they're not. For every progressive like Barbara Boxer (CA) or Sherrod Brown (OH), there's a corporate shill like Blanche Lincoln (AK) or Ben Nelson (NE). Even the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (VT) and self-described megalomaniac Joe Lieberman (CT), cancel each other out on most issues. With all those existing internal contradictions, welcoming Arlen Specter into the Democratic fold did not win us the Employee Free Choice Act's union-friendly organizing rules, a public option in the health insurance reform bill, or a rush of agency appointments; the long-standing vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board were finally filled in late March by recess appointment, not by a Senate vote. The only one who benefited from Specter's switch was Specter himself, who avoided a challenge from his right, in the form of Pat Toomey, in the Republican primary.

In other words, Specter's party switch was all about Arlen Specter. It was yet another act of expediency by a person whose entire political career has been notable for its opportunism.

Single Bullet Specter
Specter's first recorded act of political expediency may be his most infamous: his creation of the "single bullet" theory as a staff attorney for the Warren Commission in 1964. You don't have to be a conspiracy buff to marvel at the story behind this portion of the Commission's conclusions.

The FBI had presented the Commission with its conclusion that presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots. Three empty shell casings had been found on the floor near the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. Also, the film of the motorcade taken by spectator Abraham Zapruder with his 8mm movie camera established a timeline of the shootings, and FBI marksmen demonstrated that the bolt-action rifle found in the Book Depository could only have been loaded, aimed, and fired three times during that timespan. Since there appeared to be three sets of wounds - first President Kennedy in the neck, then Governor Connally's torso and wrist, and finally Kennedy's fatal head wound - this seemed consistent with the three shots from Oswald's rifle. Three shots, three wounds, one gunman; case closed.

Except there was a third person wounded that day in Dealey Plaza. James Tague had been watching the motorcade from a sidewalk across the street from Zapruder. After the shooting was over, a police officer came over to Tague to ask if he was all right; his right cheek was bleeding. Together they found a chip missing from the curb, and concluded that a bullet had hit the curb and caused a cement chip to scrape Tague's face. The Warren Commission didn't want to hear about this story, because all bullets had already been accounted for. If Tague had been wounded as a result of a fourth bullet, and Oswald's rifle could only have fired three bullets, that seemed to imply the presence of a second gunman, and thus a conspiracy.

Enter staff member Arlen Specter to the rescue. Specter theorized that, since Connally was sitting in front of Kennedy in the limousine, the first bullet could have gone through Kennedy's neck and then proceeded to travel through Connelly's torso and wrist before finally embedding itself in his thigh. Tying both men's wounds to a single bullet freed up the second bullet to miss the limousine entirely and hit the curb where Tague was standing. The third bullet was still available to be the kill shot for the President. That's four sets of wounds caused by only three shots. Presto - Specter had come up with a way for the Warren Commission to stick to its lone gunman conclusion!

What's incredible about this piece of history is that Specter's theory was not based on forensics, ballistics, or physics; it was only based on Specter's eagerness to come up with a story that fit the conclusion his bosses seemed to want.

First Party Switch
Hot off his Warren Commission gig, Specter went to work in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, where he soon set his sights on the top job. When the local Democratic Party wouldn't let him run for DA, he decided his ambition was more important than his party membership (sound familiar?) and ran as a Republican.

During his two-term reign as Philly's top prosecutor, Specter hired another young ambitious lawyer from his alma mater (University of Pennsylvania) named Ed Rendell, starting him off on his own successful political career. Rendell, now the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, is naturally an enthusiastic supporter of his former boss' re-election campaign.

Anita Hill
A defining moment of Specter's Senate career was his character assassination of Anita Hill during Senate hearings in 1991. Specter had angered many Republicans by voting against President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, and he was eager to win back their favor by supporting President Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas, especially since he was up for re-election in 1992. When Hill came forward with allegations of sexual harassment while Thomas had been her supervisor, Specter mercilessly attacked her through a hostile interrogation that painted her, not Thomas, as the one at fault.

Women all over the country were so outraged by Specter's treatment of Hill that it reportedly led to a record number of female candidates for office in 1992, as well as a heightened awareness of the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Specter, meanwhile, had proven that he could be a loyal Republican; Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, from which he still gives us disastrous decisions like the Citizens United v. FEC corporate personhood case, and Specter was rewarded with another six-year term in the Senate.

Not A Loyal Democrat
Shortly after his April 2009 party switch, Specter attempted to paint himself as an independent-minded maverick, pointing out on Meet The Press that "I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat." Given his history, why would we expect him to be? In fact, he reminds me more of Joe Lieberman than anyone else. In 2006, Ned Lamont challenged Lieberman from the left in the Connecticut Democratic primary and won. Rather than graciously accept the will of his party's voters and retire, Lieberman instead ran in the general election as an independent, accepting money and endorsements from Republicans, and kept his job. Specter tried to avoid that scenario by bolting from the Republican Party before Toomey could defeat him in the primary, but Sestak has interfered with his plans for an uncontested Democratic primary.

Sestak is not exactly a progressive alternative; this former Navy vice-admiral would probably be closer in policy positions to Jim Webb than Russ Feingold in the Senate. However, Sestak has already done more for Democrats in his short political career than Specter. In 2006, during his first-ever political campaign, Sestak not only defeated twenty-year Republican incumbent Curt Weldon, he also helped the Democrats win a majority in the House and enthusiastically supported Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in her bid to become the country's first female Speaker of the House. During the 2008 Presidential primaries, Sestak took time out from his uncertain re-election bid to actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, who would have become the country's first female President had she won. Anita Hill would be proud.

Arlen Specter has proven time and time again that he is willing to do almost anything to advance his own career. Last year's party-label switch was nothing more than his most recent act of expediency to try to keep his job in the Senate, and even Vice-President Biden's recent campaign appearances for him can't convince me otherwise. Let's hope that Pennsylvania's Democratic primary voters can help Arlen Specter do what he seems incapable of doing for himself - put him on the unemployment line.

Healthcare For People, Not For Profit

Below is the text of a Declaration of Health Independence and Security which was written and adopted during the single-payer healthcare conference in Wayne, PA on April 10. Click here to add your name to the list of signatures and learn how to get more involved.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for citizens of this nation and its separate but equal states to transform conditions related to the common good within our control and necessary in order to assure the basic human rights of all, recognition of our common humanity and a decent respect to the opinions of humankind compel us to declare those conditions for which we demand such a transformation.

Healthcare is a basic human right. To this end, we the undersigned citizen representatives of these assembled states, declare our dedication to the transformation of the profit-driven healthcare system into one of our shared humanity under a social insurance model–a publicly funded, privately and publicly delivered system, equally available to all. Current expenditures on healthcare can and must fund this systemic transformation.

Working in our individual and several states, we will educate our fellow residents, petition our legislators for our collective redress of grievances under the current system, and pursue passage of citizen-driven healthcare policy legislation.

We hold these truths still to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal and have certain unalienable rights. Among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that in order to enjoy these rights, access to healthcare without regard to financial or any other barriers must be secured.

Signed this 10th day of April, 2010, at Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Beating Swords Into Scalpels

Five days before the April 15 income tax filing deadline, at a time when more people than usual are pondering government spending priorities as they calculate their annual tax bill, I spent the day with a group of activists working to divert the money we currently spend on war into guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) sponsored this one-day conference in Wayne, PA, which drew participants from ten states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts, California, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). The photo above, taken by PDA National Field Coordinator Conor Boylan, shows a working group discussing efforts to take the fight for single-payer healthcare, or "Medicare For All", from the national level to individual states. As one participant from Ontario reminded us, the Canadian single-payer system began in the province of Saskatchewan, then moved to other provinces before eventually being implemented at the federal level.

If the woman at the table looks familiar, you probably remember her from the Michael Moore film Sicko, where Donna Smith was shown moving in with her daughter after the medical bills from her cancer treatments and her husband's heart attacks had forced her into bankruptcy. Donna is now Co-Chair of PDA's Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, and she helped lead most of the day's discussions, together with Chuck Pennacchio, who ran as a progressive alternative to Bob Casey in the 2006 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and is now Executive Director of Health Care For All Pennsylvania.

Ben Day, Executive Director of Mass-Care (shown to Donna's left in the photo), explained the failures of the Massachussetts healthcare reform and its individual insurance mandate, on which the just-passed federal bill was based. Rather than control costs, premiums have continued their double-digit annual increases since this Romneycare came into being. People are also getting less coverage for these higher premiums, as the commercial health insurance companies move towards high-deductible plans that increase out-of-pocket expenses.

Dan Hodges of Health Care For All California (shown to Ben's left) discussed the single-payer bills which passed the state legislature in 2006 and 2008, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dan reminded us that the public campaigns around each of these bills presented a teachable moment which educated more Californians about how health insurance companies operate as a cartel to fix prices, and how existing single-payer systems in Canada and the U.S. (Medicare) operate more efficiently and with lower overhead rates.

Vic Edgerton, Chief of Staff for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), urged us to continue building visible grassroots support for single-payer outside the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, so that kindred spirits inside the legislatures, like his boss, can have more weight behind their arguments. As President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly told a group of reformers, "you've convinced me; now go out there and make me do it."

For those who might ask how our government would pay to cover everyone, the $33 billion supplemental spending bill to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, scheduled to be voted on by Congress this month, was identified as a good healthy start. That's right, this is another supplemental war bill, on top of the money already appropriated in the regular budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite President Obama's promise that he would end this practice held over from the Bush regime.

It was invigorating to spend the day with these activists who take seriously Dr. Martin Luther King's admonition from his April 4, 1967 speech at New York City's Riverside Church: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

April 4: Remembering MLK "In The Name Of Love"

Today is April 4, a date to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967, King gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

In that speech, he stepped outside the boundaries which had been established for him as a civil rights leader and denounced the U.S. government's military involvement in Vietnam and other developing nations. He expressed his concerns that our government was on the wrong side of revolutionary movements, and that the huge sums of money being spent on wars would result in the underfunding of the anti-poverty programs which the civil rights movement had just convinced the federal government to begin:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

As both Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyers reminded us on two excellent PBS shows during this past week, the reaction against King's Riverside speech was swift and harsh. Newspapers which had supported King as a civil rights leader editorialized against his latest words the very next day, saying he had lost credibility. President Johnson saw this speech as a personal attack on him and refused any further meetings with King. Even some of King's supporters thought he would lose his focus by joining the peace and anti-military movements.

On April 4, 1968 - one year to the day after that speech - King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.

That date is memorialized in the U2 song "Pride (In The Name Of Love)":

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

Note the use of the word "they", not "he" - "they took your life". For even though the bullet that struck down King was fired by a single gunman - whoever he was, and whoever else was involved - the growing atmosphere of hatred towards King made such an act of fatal violence inevitable.

King was in Memphis in March and April of 1968 to support the black sanitation workers whose efforts to unionize were being resisted by the city government. The city's white establishment mocked the black workers' picket signs declaring "I Am A Man". After a March 28 demonstration in Memphis was brutally broken up by the police, King was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate the next day by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), who urged that "the Federal Government take steps to prevent King from carrying out his planned harassment of Washington, D.C. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Byrd was referring to King's planned Poor People's March on Washington; King was assassinated before that march took place. Senator Byrd reminded his fellow Senators that the "first duty" of government "is to preserve law and order."

Arthur Murtagh, an FBI agent in the Atlanta office, claims that when news of King's shooting reached them, there was celebration, with one supervisor yelling, "They got the son of a bitch! I hope he dies!".

The forces of law and order had apparently prevailed - and they chose April 4, the one-year anniversary of King's denunciation of the profitable but deadly military-industrial complex, to make their point.

The Runaways: Five Girls Who Loved Rock'n'Roll

This past weekend, I dragged my two daughters and my wife with me to see The Runaways, the new film about the groundbreaking all-female rock band of the 1970s. Hopefully they learned that "Girl Power" was not a concept that started with the Spice Girls.

Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and Jackie Fox were all teenagers when their eponymous debut album was released in 1976. The leadoff single, "Cherry Bomb", certainly grabbed the attention of those of us fortunate enough to hear it on the radio, although most critics dismissed the band as a novelty act offering more titillation than talent. The critics were wrong; band members wrote most of the songs, making an exception to cover Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll" from his Velvet Underground days, and the girls played their instruments better than most of their garage band peers.

The film is based on a book by Currie, and Jett is an executive producer, which probably explains why it focuses mostly on these two characters, played by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, respectively. When Stewart, as Jett, is told by a guitar teacher that "girls don't play electric guitar", that patronizing brushoff, combined with Jett's defiance, establishes the film's theme - don't tell girls they can't do something just because they're girls. But Ford's lead guitar playing and West's drumming also proved the point that girls could rock just as hard as boys, and their part of the story deserves more screentime. Fox's name isn't even uttered in the movie, partly for plot simplification (the band went through several bassists in their short lifetime) and partly due to legal disputes.

While Ford's musical style leaned towards heavy metal, Jett was more drawn to glam rock and the emerging punk rock movement, two sounds she combined and parlayed into a successful post-Runaways solo career with songs like "Bad Reputation" and "I Love Rock'n'Roll". Jett's attitude as well as her songwriting talent are still very much in evidence today. Her most recent album, 2006's "Sinner", encourages listeners to "Change The World", and bashes the then-reigning Bush administration in "Riddles" by sneering at the Newspeak names of Bush policies such as "Healthy Forests" and "No Child Left Behind", screaming "wake up, people!", and finally ending with non sequitur soundbites from Bush and Rumsfeld.

Joan Jett was also one of the first women in rock to start her own independent label, Blackheart Records, when she couldn't get a record deal after the Runaways' breakup (folk rocker Holly Near may have been the first with her Redwood Records). In addition to putting out Jett's new releases as well as CD reissues of her back catalog, Blackheart has a stable of new bands like Girl In A Coma and The Dollyrots.

The Runaways played an important part in rock history, paving the way for The Go-Go's, The Bangles, The Donnas, Hole, Veruca Salt, and The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. The Runaways film captures the essence of their sound and attitude, and shows the difficulties this all-female band faced in a male-dominated industry. If this movie inspires a new generation of teenage girls to pick up guitars and drumsticks and start a band, or in fact express themselves in whatever way they feel inspired, it will have succeeded in its goal.

Four Strong Winds Of Change

In honor of Women's History Month, here are four American women who made history by standing up for their beliefs and principles, even in the face of strong opposition.

• Jeannette Rankin: The first woman in Congress, she was elected to two separate terms in the House of Representatives (1917-1919, 1941-1943). Her first election, in 1916, was four years before ratification of the 19th Amendment gave all women in the U.S. the right to vote; she had been a leader in the movement which led to women's suffrage in her home state of Montana in 1914. As a pacifist, she voted against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, and again against entry into World War II in 1941, saying: "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else." Both votes were unpopular and led to her failure to win re-election to consecutive terms. In between her two terms, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). True to her principles, she spoke out against the Korean War in the early 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, leading an all-woman protest march in 1968 at the age of 88.

• Helen Keller: Most people know about this deaf and blind girl from the film The Miracle Worker, but she was also active on the political left. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and supported Eugene Debs in his presidential campaigns on that party's ticket. She wrote frequently on labor struggles, and supported the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "wobblies") in contrast to what she saw as the AFL's conservative policies and its emphasis on skilled white male workers. Newspapers and prominent figures who had earlier praised her academic accomplishments, including earning a degree from Radcliffe, attempted to dismiss her socialist pronouncements by reminding people of her disabilities. Keller responded to these critics by observing that, while she was physically blind and deaf, they were "socially blind and deaf" for defending the system that she was working to change. Her activities earned her a thick FBI file, where Director J. Edgar Hoover described her as a "writer on radical subjects" who therefore needed to be monitored by the government.

• Angela Davis: This philosopher, academic, and activist was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party (CP). When she started teaching at UCLA in 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan fired her because she was a CP member. She eventually was able to return to teaching, and is still today on the faculty of the University of California in Santa Cruz. In the early 1970s, Davis was arrested and put on trial for her alleged role in a failed attempt to free a convict. She was acquitted by the jury, and many felt she had been targeted because of her radical politics, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who wrote and recorded their song "Angela" about her. Davis ran for Vice-President of the U.S. on the CP ticket in 1980, four years before the Democratic Party nominated their first female VP candidate (Geraldine Ferraro) and twenty-eight years before the Republican Party nominated their first female (Sarah Palin). When her 1980 running mate, Gus Hall, sided with the Soviet Union's reactionary old guard in their 1991 attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Davis and others who had supported Gorbachev's reforms left the CP and founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, where she continues to serve on its Advisory Board.

• Dolores Huerta: This labor leader was a co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) along with Cesar Chavez. Huerta led the UFW's nationwide grape boycott in the 1960s which pressured the California grape industry into negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. She is credited with coming up with the UFW's slogan "Si, se puede", which roughly translates to "Yes, it can be done" or "Yes we can". Barack Obama used the "Yes, we can" version as the slogan of his successful 2008 Presidential campaign, although Huerta officially nominated Hillary Clinton for President at the Democratic National Convention. She currently serves as President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and serves as an Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Working Class to Banks: We're 'Mad As Hell'!

On March 19, my wife Susan and I used our lunch breaks to attend a labor rally in Philadelphia. Over a thousand of us cheered as several speakers pointed out the stark contrast between bank executives, who used taxpayers' money to rescue their companies from their high-risk actions and are now rewarding themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses, and the average American worker, many of whom have lost their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them.

Several speakers paraphrased the slogan delivered by Peter Finch's character in the 1976 film Network ("We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"). A minister called these bankers sinners, and told us it was just as much of a sin for us to vote for their enablers in Washington. Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA), who must have thought his mere presence on the stage would help his re-election campaign, looked nervous. Bill George, head of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, spoke of revolution.

Following the speeches, I marched with the rallyers as national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka led us to the nearby Bank of America office building. A small group of us entered the lobby with Trumka as he asked to speak to the management, then we marched through the lobby to another set of doors after his request was denied. As Trumka explained to the crowd outside, "I guess they're too busy counting the money to speak with us."

This was a perfect example of how to channel the palpable populist rage that's out there into a progressive proposal: instead of making rich bankers richer, let's tax the banks and use that revenue to build and repair infrastructure, thus putting people back to work. It's a message that could redirect peoples' anger away from government, where the tea baggers have focused it, to corporations as the real root cause of the economic collapse, and more of our elected Democratic representatives should be leading this charge.

Instead, we get President Obama saying, in a February 10 interview with Bloomberg, that he doesn't "begrudge" JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon his $17 million bonus, nor Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein his $9 million bonus. “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen", he said. Well, President Obama, you should get to know some of the workers who charged through the Bank of America building in Philly, instead of hanging out with CEOs (is this what Sarah Palin was thinking of when she accused Obama of being pals with terrorists?).

Filmmaker Michael Moore was on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann a few nights ago, and observed that Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) had said, in reference to his proposed financial reform bill, that "we don't want to punish Wall Street". Actually, Moore said, "yes we do."

Moore and Trumka have the right idea about how to react to Wall Street greed. Are any of our elected Democrats in Washington listening?

A Hunting We Will Go

During a House committee's questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder on March 16, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) complained about using law enforcement tactics and civilian trials for alleged terrorists, explaining: "Texans understand that when you are at war the goal is to hunt down your enemy and either kill them or capture them."

Be very, very quiet, everyone...we're hunting rabbits...er, I mean, terrorists...

When I heard Rep. Culberson's quote on NPR the following morning, my first thought was of Elmer Fudd singing "Kill The Wabbit" as he hunted down Bugs Bunny in an old cartoon. However, a little bit of research, such as entering the phrases "hunt down your enemy" and "kill them" into a search engine, reveals how popular this tempting base instinct has become, from Clint Eastwood's westerns and "Dirty Harry" movies to dozens of video and computer games in which the instructions to the player are no more complicated than Rep. Culberson's instructions to our soldiers.

The problem is, Rep. Culberson has got it wrong. Hunting down people as if they were animals is not our goal, nor should it be. A civilized nation, which is what we aspire to be, is supposed to be above that sort of thing, and the various attempts by nations to write down some rules of war have reflected that. For instance, the Hague Convention of 1907 included among a list of forbidden actions "to declare that no quarter will be given". But the document that Rep. Culberson and his fellow wabbit-hunters should really brush up on is the U.S. Army Field Manual on Operations, FM 3-0, which states the following:

"The disciplined and informed application of lethal and nonlethal force is a critical contributor to successful Army operations and strategic success. All warfare, but especially irregular warfare, challenges the morals and ethics of Soldiers. An enemy may feel no compulsion to respect international conventions and indeed may commit atrocities with the aim of provoking retaliation in kind. Any loss of discipline on the part of Soldiers is then distorted and exploited in propaganda and magnified through the media. The ethical challenge rests heavily on small-unit leaders who maintain discipline and ensure that the conduct of Soldiers remains within ethical and moral boundaries. There are compelling reasons for this. First, humane treatment of detainees encourages enemy surrender and thereby reduces friendly losses. Conversely, nothing emboldens enemy resistance like the belief that U.S. forces will kill or torture prisoners. Second, humane treatment of noncombatants reduces their antagonism toward U.S. forces and may lead to valuable intelligence. Third, leaders make decisions in action fraught with consequences. If they lack an ethical foundation, those decisions become much, much harder. Finally, Soldiers must live with the consequences of their conduct. Every leader shoulders the responsibility that their subordinates return from a campaign not only as good Soldiers, but also as good citizens with pride in their service to the Nation."

Fortunately, it is these words of guidance which our soldiers are obligated to follow, not the vigilante rantings of John Culberson.

Aside from playing video games, the other source for Culberson's bloodlust may be the following passage from Leviticus 26:7, in which God promises the people of Israel that if they observe his commandments, "You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword" (the New International Reader's Version puts it even closer to Culberson's language: "You will hunt down your enemies. You will kill them with your swords."). Conservative Christians love to quote from the book of Leviticus, because it seems to set up an easy-to-follow moralistic universe which they no doubt find comforting. However, they seem to forget that most of the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, which they claim to believe, refutes those older teachings. As Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 5:43-45, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

If Jesus showed up today and tried saying things like that, he'd be accused of being soft on terrorism and run out of town quicker than you could say "kill the wabbit."