Iraq, Afghanistan & Pakistan

Below is a letter to the editor I wrote, which was recently printed in the Register-Guard. Below that is a petition to the Oregon Congressional delegation from Eugene PeaceWorks, posted on the Oregon Progressive Network website.

If you live in Oregon, I suggest following the link provided to sign the petition. I encourage readers in other states to contact your senators and representative and tell them to vote no on all war funding. They all have websites where you can fill in a simple form and send them a message. It only takes a few minutes. I always keep it short. You can find their websites by Googling their names. If you don’t know who they are, see http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/.

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What our government is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan is completely insane.

The war in Afghanistan never made any sense in the first place. Now we’re expanding it into Pakistan, destabilizing a country that has nuclear weapons.

Nothing seems to matter but keeping the U.S. on top. On top of what, a mountain of bones and rubble?

Since Congress and Obama are incapable of rational thought, we have to tell them that if they continue this war we will vote against them in 2010.

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Please visit  Oregon Progressive Network to sign the following petition to the Oregon Congressional delegation.

Congress will shortly be voting on a supplemental funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanstan. They will also be considering a fiscal year 2010 Defense appropriations bill that will include funding for the wars.

Petition to Oregon Congressional delegation to cut war funding

Please vote against all further funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the only practical way Congress can stop these wars.

Both wars are immoral and illegal, because neither qualifies as self-defense.

Iraq had not harmed the U.S. before our invasion, and was not a threat to us. Even if one believed in the presence of Iraqi WMDs, all we had to do was leave the U.N. inspectors in place to finish their work.

The 9/11 attack on the U.S. was not carried out by the Iraqi or the Afghan people. As a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban was accused of “harboring” Al Qaeda. The U.S. has effectively imposed years of collective punishment on the Afghan people, who have no mechanism for collective responsibility. A tribal society living in small villages in mountain valleys, many do not see themselves as a nation, nor do they function as one.

According to one study, the U.S. may have caused the deaths of a million people in Iraq, and thousands in Afghanistan. Continuing this wanton destruction cannot be justified. Likewise, there is no justification for the deaths and wounding of thousands of American soldiers, many of them working-class people who enlisted because they had no way to make a decent living as civilians.

These wars are also ruinously expensive, driving this country ever more deeply into debt. Trying to maintain an ever-expanding American empire, the U.S. is spending its way into bankruptcy.

We ask that you take a stand to stop these wars by refusing to pay for them any longer.

Out of hiding

I recently read The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen, a political novel that lays out one possible near future for this country. In the tradition of 1984. Worth you’re time, if you’re willing to be fully awake.

A friend tells me she is “hiding from my culture.” I wish I could do that. The problem is, if most people do that, and don’t put up any resistance, the culture gets worse. It’s a downhill slide. Just electing a biracial Democrat doesn’t change that. Nor does happy talk.

What I see in our immediate future is a return to 1982. See you at the unemployment office. Oh wait, I’m retired! So maybe I get to sit this one out. Maybe not. I’m living on government benefits. A lot of people would like to throw us overboard, on the grounds that they can’t afford us. While blowing trillions borrowed from China on evil wars and fat cat bailouts. Then they’ll use the resulting yearly federal budget deficits and skyrocketing national debt to justify cutting entitlements and postponing universal health care, probably forever. It’s a con game, supported by the mainstream news media.

Which is why I’ve mostly quit reading the Register-Guard. I don’t need to absorb any more corporate propaganda from the wire services, The New York Times and the Washington Post. I get all the news I need on the Internet, mainly from commondreams.org.

As far as action goes, I’m stuck in the middle between the organizers and the apocalyptics. I believe we need large-scale multi-issue organization, but it’s hard to get anyone behind that, at least locally. There are national groups that are trying: United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), Peace Action, Peace Action West, etc. MoveOn, the original model for mass email activism, appears to have become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, making it useless. Recently I read that MoveOn is not going to oppose the war in Afghanistan, to which Obama is sending another 17,000 troops. But it’s okay because he’s a Democrat. Isn’t it?

Where is The Resistance?

As an activist, I try to be somewhat pragmatic. I will work with just about any other activist in the areas where our interests overlap, which they always do to some extent. I don’t have to agree with someone on every issue, or about every strategy, to work with them. But let’s be clear: There is a lot of anger among activists, and it’s not going to go away. We cannot all just join hands and be nice. What I would like to see is the kind of organization that could seriously challenge politicians and, if necessary, put tens of thousands of people in the streets to shut things down. It has been done before, we just couldn’t sustain it.

Obama needs to deliver. At a bare minimum, we want our troops quickly out of Iraq and Afghanistan, an end to the bailouts and “stimulus” packages, universal health care, a rebuilt safety net to take care of those dropping off the bottom, a limiting of corporate power, and something serious done about global warming. If we don’t get all that before the end of Obama’s first term, expect the Left to desert him in 2012, as we bailed on Gore in 2000.

Creating war limits with protests

“Protests failed to stop the war in Iraq. However it is possible that international outrage stopped the administration from fulfilling neoconservative desires to follow up on the invasion with assaults on Syria and Iran.” — Mark Engler, How To Rule the World, The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, 2008

I’ve read similar claims about the 1960s antiwar demonstrations, that they may have prevented Johnson and Nixon from nuking North Vietnam. It is, of course, hard to prove a case by what didn’t happen, but this idea seems credible to me, then and now.

I’m wondering if peace activists will be willing to protest against a Democratic administration, when Obama reduces the Iraq war, while leaving tens of thousands of troops there, and escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Engler’s book is excellent. He says that the American ruling class is not unified, that there are different factions with different interests. War, he writes, only serves the economic interests of a minority of American corporations, mainly those involved in weapons production and energy. For the rest war is bad for business, or simply irrelevant. Neither faction is interested in democracy, or meeting the needs of most of the world’s population. Trying to make that happen is our job.

Subprime Primer

This is seriously funny.  Click on the little icon at top right of Scribd window to blow it up so you can read it, or use link at bottom to see it on Scribd.

View this document on Scribd

No bailout

I wrote this letter to the Register-Guard:

Columnist David Brooks (R-G, 9/20) writes that cracking down on subprime loans would have been saying, “Don’t loan money to poor people.”

Yes, that’s exactly right. Don’t loan money to anyone who can’t afford to pay it back, to buy a house, a car, or anything else. Don’t give them credit cards or payday loans at exorbitant rates of interest.

You’re not doing them any favors, you’re just helping them dig themselves ever deeper into a hole they’ll never get out of. Which by the way is very profitable for the lenders — they make a lot of money off of poor people — until the crash.

And don’t turn around and sell these debts as so-called investments to other financial institutions and middle-class people who should know better. “Mortgage-backed security” is an oxymoron. A debt is not an asset.

Unregulated capitalism doesn’t work. Never has, never will, not for long.

Folks, the party is over. The longest spending binge in American history has ended. You cannot live a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages. Read the book “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and learn to downsize.

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I was happy to see the bailout plan go down to defeat in the House. No socialism for the rich. My Rep. Peter DeFazio voted no after receiving 3,000 phone calls and 3,000 emails, one of them mine, against the bill. A Los Angeles Times article credits an outpouring of anger from the voters for stopping the bill. Despite what the “leaders” of both parties wanted, “The voices of angry constituents seemed to count most.”

I am not convinced that the U.S. economy will collapse if we don’t give $700 billion to the investment banks whose reckless greed got us into this mess. We cannot afford to borrow this money from Saudi Arabia and China and add it to the already huge deficit and skyrocketing national debt. Interest on the national debt is already costing us $400 billion per year.

Nor do we need to do that. The money can be raised through taxes on the rich and on stock market transactions, discouraging speculation in the process. Speculation has replaced investment. For some concrete proposals on how to do this, see “The nation’s social bargain with the rich,” by Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe.

The big financial institutions that are in trouble, and not all of them are, should be allowed to fail, not bailed out. The sooner we get them off the playing field the better.

DeFazio was quoted recently in the Register-Guard as saying that any business that is “too big to fail is too big to exist.” He advocates that we start enforcing the antitrust laws. Which were passed because this country has been here before.

I should add that rich people do have their uses. Someone wrote that they “are a good source of protein.”

ABC news today was blatantly biased in favor of the bailout bill, with almost no attention paid to its critics. Which reminds me of why I seldom watch TV news, the propaganda machine of the establishment. They said the stock market took a 7 percent dive today, the largest single-day loss in history. Yeah, so? All that money that was supposedly lost was digital money. An increase in value of a stock you own, or a house for that matter, doesn’t really exist until you cash it out. Outside of buying government bonds, investing means taking a risk. You can lose, and lose big, so don’t “invest” any money you can’t afford to lose. And always remember that the people running things are liars.

Most people only learn through pain. If investors don’t feel any pain from this, they won’t learn not to do it again.

Yes, I think we should do something. We should put money into all the safety net programs — unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. — that are needed to catch all the people who will fall off the bottom during this recession. Tax the rich. Re-regulate financial institutions so they won’t do this again. Start educating people that there is no tooth fairy and that they will have to live on their income.

Start a national discussion on class, inequality and the need to end America’s cheap labor policy. Rebuild our infrastructure, including health care and education, and build the new energy infrastructure needed to produce a greener country and reduce climate change, creating jobs in the process. There is no reason not to do all this except the vested interests that are making money off of the status quo, and the middle class fear of change.

Graphic below from the NY Times. Bush’s first term started in January, 2001. I presume by “Security” they mean war. Social Security and Medicare should not be counted as part of the federal budget, since they both have trust funds. Politicians do that so they can count trust fund surpluses as income, reducing the apparent size of the yearly deficit.

Click on graphic to see a larger version.

War funding votes table

I’ve compiled a table of 11 votes on war funding bills, December 2005 to June 2008, by the Oregon congressional delegation and the two presidential candidates.  You can find the table online at http://tinyurl.com/warfunding.

 

Please note that the bill and roll call vote numbers are links to the source of the information. 

 

If you live in another state, you can click on the roll call links and quickly find the votes of your representative and two senators.  

 

There are notes at the bottom for each bill, with links to further information.

 

For most of these bills there wasn’t just one vote in the House and one in the Senate, there were a whole string of votes as the bill bounced back and forth between the two houses.  The vote on the last bill was especially complex — major game playing — and I depended on an analysis from United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) to decide which vote to count.  See note.

 

For the other bills I used my best judgment.  Someone else, with more knowledge than I have, might make a different choice.  I tried to pick the last vote in each house where there were a significant number of votes on each side.  If only a few people voted against it I figured it was probably minor.  I’m sure there is a better way, but I haven’t found it yet.  If you see any problems with this table, I would like to hear about it.  Feel free to add a Comment to this post.

 

In any case, I think our legislators should have voted “no” every time.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will never stop until Congress cuts the funding.  I hope this table will help you to hold them accountable.

Getting the U.S. out of the Middle East

I wrote this in response to emails from a reader who was concerned that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, as advocated by Ralph Nader, would lead to chaos in the region, control by the Taliban, and further suffering.

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We are not preventing chaos in the Middle East, we are causing it.

I doubt that the Taliban will take over Iraq. Al-Qaeda, which is fundamentalist Muslim but not the same thing as the Taliban, has quickly worn out its welcome in Iraq by indiscriminate killing. Iraq was a secular country before we invaded and set off a civil war which has killed around a million people, a strange way to keep Iraqis from suffering.

I don’t like the Taliban, but my feelings about them are irrelevant. It is up to the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan to decide how they want to run their countries. Right now we’re supporting a loose coalition of warlords in Afghanistan, and killing a lot of noncombatants. We are not the good guys in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, we’re the bad guys.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, so it is very dangerous for us to further destabilize it by invading along its border with Afghanistan, which Obama wants to do, and which Bush is already doing to some extent, or by trying to force the Pakistan government to fight the border tribes. We are spreading the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, just as Nixon spread the Vietnam war into Thailand and Cambodia, with genocidal results. Where does it stop, when the whole Middle East is in flames?

As I understand it, the most basic problem with Middle Eastern countries is that their populations are very young, with lots of unemployed young men, and autocratic governments which aren’t doing anything about creating enough jobs. This creates fertile ground for recruitment by fundamentalists.

There are also long-standing, well deserved resentments against the U.S. and other rich countries for supporting those autocratic governments, in order to control the oil and do business. Doing business includes selling large numbers of weapons to these governments, a great opportunity for our “defense” industry. The U.S. is one of the world’s leading arms dealers.

Our troops are not in Iraq or Afghanistan to protect the people. That’s not what they do. They kill people. That is their job, what they are paid to do. The majority of the people they kill are noncombatants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a CNN panel discussion, an Iraqi said that their houses are very close together, so when we bomb one it also takes out the houses on either side. The U.S. uses air power as much as possible to keep down our troop casualties.

One of the soldiers interviewed in “The Ground Truth” talked about what happens when they take fire from an area. They just saturate the area with return fire. This suppresses the incoming fire, but it also kills or wounds everyone else in the area. This is what the soldiers are told to do by their commanders. They come back with guilty consciences and PTSD.

We invaded Iraq in order to control its oil and use its land for military bases to extend control over the rest of the Middle East, and its oil. We have the blood of over a million people on our hands. This is murder for profit, to protect our middle-class way of life, and there is no way it can be morally justified. We have to get out, as quickly as is physically possible. I won’t vote for anything less. To do so would make me morally responsible for the killing which will happen in the following years, as we drag it out.

By the way, Joe Biden, Obama’s new VP, was a prime mover in starting the Iraq war. He advocated it years before it started. This is the man Obama picked for his foreign policy “experience.” Today’s Register-Guard has an approving editorial making an unfortunate comparison with Kennedy picking LBJ because of his political experience. We know how that turned out. Experience doesn’t cure stupidity.

Reply to Tom Hayden re Barack Obama

I sent this letter to Eugene Weekly, but had to cut out a couple of paragraphs to get below their word limit:

Tom Hayden’s August 21 EW essay, “Dreams of Obama,” struck me as weary resignation and damning with faint praise. It is hardly necessary to add to all the negative things he said about Obama, but here are a few.

Obama keeps saying, when we complain about his flip-flopping on the Iraq war, that the American left hasn’t been listening to him. Listen up folks. In a July 26 interview with Newsweek he said that the size of the residual force he would leave in Iraq, after the 16 month withdrawal of the rest, is “entirely conditions-based.” In other words, he’s not going to tell us.

Marjorie Cohn, in a July 29 essay on commondreams.org, writes that “Obama favors leaving between 35,000 and 80,000 U.S. occupation troops indefinitely to train Iraqi security forces and carry out ‘counter-insurgency operations.’”

Obama may de-escalate the war in Iraq, depending on “conditions,” but he’ll just move the troops to Afghanistan, to bomb more wedding parties. We have no more business being in Afghanistan than we do in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is not about 9/11, whose perpetrators came from Saudi Arabia and are now in Pakistan, it’s part of the larger effort to get military control of the Middle East and its oil.

U.S. foreign policy is, and always has been, aggressive and bipartisan. Liberalism has always stopped at the water’s edge. The Democratic-Republican contest is a rivalry between two factions of the rich, a good cop-bad cop con game. Democrats have made a deal with the devil, where they trade a slightly kinder domestic policy for killing large numbers of foreigners.

Both parties have been drifting to the right for decades, as became obvious during the Clinton years. The only hope the American left has is to set up a political force on the left that can threaten Democrats with losing close elections, and make them move to the left to compete for our votes.

Ralph Nader will be on the November ballot, nominated by the newly formed Oregon Peace Party. I’ll be voting for him.

Eugene health care town hall meeting

On Tuesday night I attended the town hall meeting in Eugene held by our state rep. Nancy Nathanson. She had several people on a panel, including state senator Alan Bates, one of the cosponsors of SB 329, the Healthy Oregon Act, passed by the legislature in its last session. The panelists did most of the talking, with audience participation limited mainly to writing questions on cards.

Bates said that SB 329 had three main goals:

1. Expand Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) coverage by 140,000 people. This would take advantage of the 1-2 match between state and federal funding.

2. Set up an “insurance exchange” through which the rest of the uninsured could buy insurance. This would be subsidized through FHIAP, the Family Health Insurance Assistance Program. It’s another joint state-federal, matching funds program.

Bates said it has been underfunded. Its website says that 4,300 adults lost their FHIAP subsidies on May 31, and that they’re not accepting applications at this time because of “new federal fund limits.” You can get on a waiting list for them to send you an application, but you’ll probably wait 1 1/2 to two years.

3. Drive down health care costs. The only way I heard him propose to do this was through “tort reform.” Apparently it’s not so much the cost of liability insurance for doctors that is the problem, but that the threat of being sued forces them to practice “defensive medicine,” which means lots of unnecessary and expensive tests. He claims that doctors are doing too many CAT scans, and that the radiation increases cancer. He didn’t explain what the “tort reform” would be.

Bates said that SB 329 would eliminate “pre-existing conditions” as a consideration in selling insurance policies. He didn’t say if age and other factors could still be considered. Nor did he mention any other way of controlling the cost of insurance, unless it’s supposed to be done by the insurance exchange, functioning as a pool, with the power to negotiate with insurance companies. But he didn’t say that.

An unanswered question, he said, is whether the purchase of insurance should be mandated. He spoke approvingly of the Massachusetts plan.

Bates, a doctor, said that the U.S. has “one of the most bizarre health care systems in the world, and that it has been “broken for 20 years.” Costs are escalating, but we’re not seeing any improvement in outcomes.

He doesn’t support single-payer, and doesn’t believe it’s the reason other countries do so much better than we do, at much less cost, in medical care. He said Germany and some other countries don’t have single-payer. He also claimed the state could not legally do single-payer at the state level. I presume that would be because we can’t include Medicare. I would think we could include everyone else, theoretically. Bates didn’t seem to have any interest in cutting administrative expenses associated with insurance, or at least he didn’t mention it.

Bates believes that the main reason U.S. health care is less effective than it should be is that we have, and pay, the wrong mix of doctors. He said that only 25 percent of U.S. doctors do primary care, with the rest being specialists. We need more primary care. We need to pay doctors more for actually seeing patients, not just ordering tests.

All the panelists seemed to agree with the importance of preventative, primary care. One said that we are not managing apparently simple things, like vaccinations, very well. A tetanus vaccination, which Parade Magazine says adults need every ten years, can prevent a long expensive stay in the hospital.

Asked about illegal aliens, Nathanson said their impact on the medical system in Oregon is very small. Most, she said, prefer to stay out of the system and below the radar. Bates said most are young and healthy, and they pay taxes.

As for the Oregon Health Fund Board, which is trying to turn SB 329 into a plan to present to the legislature, Nathanson and Bates said as of now there are no “words on paper.” Both of them hope a number of bills will be considered, not just a single, omnibus plan, which Nathanson said would be too risky. She doesn’t want to put all the eggs in one basket.

I didn’t hear any good ideas from the panel, aside from federal matching funds, on how to pay the cost of any plan to increase medical care availability, although they agreed that this will be the main issue in the legislature, and probably with the public. What I heard were increased taxes on tobacco, alcohol and fast food.

Health care, food, energy

For my last post, I should have looked up the figures for the millions of U.S. medically uninsured and underinsured.  Eugene health care activist Ruth Duemler tells me, “Now it is about 50 for uninsured and 25 for underinsured.”  So a total of about 75 million. 

So much data, so little mind.

 

“We waste between a quarter and a half of all the food we produce…  One reason is that, since food travels 1500 miles on average to reach your plate, some of it spoils in transit.” — Parade Magazine. In Eugene supermarkets, I’m told, most of our fresh produce is trucked up from California.  I’m trying to buy locally grown produce, at Kiva and farmers’ markets.  I also buy frozen vegetables at supermarkets, so I don’t waste so much from spoilage in my refrigerator before I can eat it.

 

Energy

 

“Almost 70 percent of the oil used daily in the United States goes to transportation….  Home to only 4 percent of the world’s population, the nation slurps up about a quarter of the planet’s oil — and Americans’ daily use is nearly twice the combined consumption of the Chinese and Indians….” — NY Times, “American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot“

 

Our energy use per capita, is much higher than in other countries, even the rich ones. An American uses about twice as much oil as someone in the UK.  The U.S.-China per capita oil consumption ratio is 6:1.

 

The Times article is a good review of where we’ve been.  We could have headed off this oil problem if we had started thirty years ago and stuck to it, as Japan did.  Instead we dragged our feet.  Newt Gingrich is quoted as saying, ““Our culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression.”  Yeah, well the times they are a changing. 

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I hope the price of gas stays high to drive people out of their cars, especially the big ones. I am concerned about the impact on poor and working-class people. We need to do something to compensate them for the increase in cost of living, like lowering their taxes. Yes, the poor do pay taxes. State and federal taxes used to take 25 percent out of my paycheck when I was making $10 per hour, although I got some of that back when I filed.

However, speaking as a poor person, if you’re poor it doesn’t make any sense to own a car. You’re living beyond your means. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Walk, ride a bike, take the bus, move to a smaller city where things aren’t so damn far apart.

We need electric cars. A 2006 Dept. of Energy study said that “off-peak electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of the country’s 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics…. Current batteries for these cars can easily store the energy for driving the national average commute – about 33 miles round trip a day – so the study presumes that drivers would charge up overnight when demand for electricity is much lower.”

“Researchers found that even with today’s power plants emitting greenhouse gases, the overall levels would be reduced because the entire process of moving a car one mile is more efficient using electricity than producing gasoline and burning it in a car’s engine.”

A purely electric car would be much simpler and would be sufficient for commuting or around town trips. For long-distance travel, it would make more sense to use rail, which is the most energy efficient. So how do we go camping? That needs a hybrid for now, but the development of better batteries will probably make intermediate range travel possible in electrics.

Also see EV World.

I can’t vouch for this, will keep looking, but a comment on Common Dreams gives the following figures for typical carbon footprints of various electrical energy sources. This includes the carbon released in making the equipment that generates the energy. His point was that in comparison to coal and natural gas, other energy sources generate very little carbon. He also pointed out that you can use alternative energy, rather than fossil fuels, to manufacture the equipment.

Coal:……900 grams/kilowatthour
Nat Gas:…400 “
Solar:……45 “
Nuclear:….25 “
Wind:…….15 “
Big hydro:..10 ”

The question is, can alternative energy sources be scaled up to cover a significant amount of our energy needs? Germany has become the world leader in solar energy, by requiring utilities to buy solar-generated electricity at profitable rates. The country has freeways lined with solar cells, and solar “farms,” even though their weather tends to be cloudy. Yet solar electricity is still less than 0.5 percent of their total energy production, which they hope to increase to 3 percent by 2020.

In Eugene, solar power advocates say it is presently only economically feasible with federal and state subsidies. But these subsidies — tax credits — have been off and on, resulting in a roller coaster ride for the industry. Even with tax credits, I’ve heard that it would cost several thousand dollars for someone to put solar cells on the roof of their house, although in time the installation would pay for itself through savings on electric costs. Still, the upfront costs put it out of the reach of most people.

They also suggest it might be more feasible for neighborhoods to build a common solar system, using roofs of large buildings, platforms over parking lots, etc. Large businesses also might find it economically viable.

In time technical advances and mass production may bring down the price of solar cells.

I keep hearing that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reduction per dollar invested, our best bet is conservation, also referred to as efficiency. More efficient heating and air conditioning systems, home appliances. More insulation in walls, roofs and around water heaters. Weather stripping. Florescent light bulbs. Smaller cars, hybrids, hopefully soon plug-hybrids. Better mass transit and rail systems. More compact cities, less urban sprawl.