Marching Against The War and Against Spending For War

New York City - Apr 5, 2009

Given the seriousness of the times we live in it should have been a million people in the streets of my city yesterday demanding change.

Why a million marching? Because we're witness to bailouts for banker/criminals but no bailouts for the people who are losing their homes by the thousands a day. Because obscene multi-million dollar bonuses are handed to the very crooks who brought us what might be the new Great Depression but nothing for the almost 700,000 newly-jobless in March.

And while we're at it, here's a sobering statistic: since Reagan inhabited the White House there have been some seven million industrial jobs scrapped. Disappeared. Shipped abroad where super-profits can be made while factories are closed in our home towns and cities. The latest crisis is the net result, the end game, of that stinking an decadent process of de-industrialization brought to us by those great patriots: the U.S. Senate and Congress, our past presidents and the corporate bosses who run this country. Free Trade has been their mantra as they foisted their NAFTAs and other get-rich-quick trade deals on Americans and then shipped the jobs to low wage countries leaving a vast and rusty wasteland in their wake. The Great American Dream has become a nightmare as decent, union jobs that gave dignity and a decent standard of living to millions of American families have been lost forever.

So it should have been millions marching in the streets of our cities today as they are marching around the world to protest the great unfairness that haunts society: unfairness in that the very ones who brought us to this crisis seem to be the ones who are being rewarded even as they are blamed for the stinking mess they've created! Something is drastically wrong with this picture. And that must be set right in the months ahead.

Our new President has inherited this terrible mess which has been made so much more terribly worse over the last eight years by the bandits and thieves that ran our country into the ground. It wasn't just greed on Wall Street as much as it was greed coupled with a Bush-wacking government that intentionally looked the other way, or even lent a helping hands to the bankers, as the crimes were being perpetrated.

Grover Norquist, one of the leading ideologues of the Neo-Con movement and a prime architect of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy once said:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

And that was precisely what Bush and his gang did for eight years. They packed government agencies and departments with corporate lackeys who then proceeded to eviscerate regulations and undo laws designed to safeguard Americans in every aspect of their lives: the protection of our environment and nature, the safety of our food and medicines, the right of American workers to a safe workplace, the maintenance of our health standards, the right of women to control their bodies and the maintenance of our democracy and constitutional liberties.

Then they launched an illegal war based on outright lies so the oil companies could occupy and control a country known to possess the second largest oil reserves in the world. Over 4,000 young soldiers have lost their lives in that illegal adventure. Countless Iraqi citizens were wounded, made homeless or killed and their country destroyed. While the war raged, the Bush and Cheney crony corporations such as Halliburton and Blackwater (and dozens more) emptied our Treasury with no-bid contracts handed out without oversight or control, profiting on the blood of our troops and of the tragic and poor citizens of Iraq.

Just as the corporate bandits have not been punished so has the Bush administration been allowed to retire without any restitution for the terrible crimes they committed: they sullied and dragged our Constitution into the mud of illegal arrests and detentions, rendition (kidnapping) and torture.
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This is the terrible legacy of the Bush years. And this destructive regime was finally retired by the American people in November of last year. President Obama has promised to reverse these crimes and, to a large extent, he has begun to do exactly that. But the forces that brought us to ruination are still alive and well. Though defeated in November, they are wealthy and strong - many still inhabit the halls of Congress and live in the corporate board rooms throughout our country and will do their best to restore the previous direction taken under Bush. We need to counter them with the loud voice of protest and continued demands for changes not yet fulfilled.

Yesterday, thousands marched in New York. They were in high spirits and filled with high expectations that the "Yes, we can" hopes of yesterday's elections will be turned into a "Yes we did!" reality in the months and years ahead.

Brooklyn For Peace was well represented.

Thousands marched on Wall Street - the symbol of all that's wrong in our country.

Were you there? You can still do your part by calling your Congress member at (800) 828-0498 and the White House at(202) 456-1111.

President Obama has said that he wants to hear from the American people who elected him. So it is entirely appropriate, indeed necessary, to tell him:

"End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bring all our troops home now - safe and alive.
Negotiate don't escalate!
Cut the Pentagon war budget in order to fix the economy and build a new society based on peace not war, human needs not greed."

The good folks from Fort Greene Peace were there.

If you want to see a slideshow of
all of yesterday's photos, just CLICK HERE.

I'm Marching For Peace Today.

Apr 4, 2009

I'm marching today in New York City. I'm marching against the continued war in Iraq and against an escalated war in Afghanistan.

Here's why.

I celebrated (like most Americans) the election of our new President. And I breathed a huge sigh of relief at the end of our national nightmare - the bad dream that was the ugly and frightening reality of the Bush regime. I worked for that election. Stacey and I spent a day in Philadelphia to help determine, in some small way, the outcome in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

With the election of Barack Obama, Americans were saying that they had had enough! Enough of war. Enough of the racism that had divided our land for so long. Enough! They wanted to restore our country's image in the eyes of the world. They voted to turn it in a different direction than Bush and his gang had taken it. They wanted to, it seemed to me, begin directing our national treasure toward meeting the dire needs of our people: for universal health care, for a revitalized system of education, for affordable housing.

The election took place with the war and occupation of Iraq raging in the background. That was, perhaps, the single most important and glaring difference between the candidacies of Obama and McCain. Obama wanted to end that tragic and immoral episode in our nation's history not only because it was wrong but because it was robbing our country of any possible solution to the economic crisis that was stalking the land. McCain, on the other hand, wanted to press on in Bush's endless "war on terror."

Brooklynites mark the death of the 3,000th U.S soldier and the countless Iraqis who died in that war. Today, the count is well over 4,0000 and the war continues.

Today, sadly, the war in Iraq is far from over. Though he promised to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the very day he would take office at the rate of one division per month, still, as of today, virtually none have returned home. And even at the end of President Obama's stated withdrawal, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in that country - rebranded as "advisers" by a Pentagon that insists on keeping a toehold in that oil-rich country.

Then there is Afghanistan. The so-called "good" war; the war that some insisted should have been fought in the first place after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. According to press reports, Mr. Obama, ignoring the advice of his Vice-President not to get involved in a morass that history has shown it to be, has seemingly sided with his generals who, stupidly and blindly, see a military solution to the deteriorating situation in that country and, beyond, to Pakistan.

This escalation in Afghanistan will be, in the prediction of many, a tragic mistake. It brings to mind the tragic history of the Johnson administration which had made plans for a War On Poverty and a Great Society only to find them obliterated by the skyrocketing costs of the the Vietnam war. The question raised then was whether we could have both "guns and butter. The answer that history supplied was an emphatic "NO."

There is no military solution to be imposed in Afghanistan. As Obama, himself, told us during the campaign, negotiation not endless war is the way forward. But if that's so, why allow the generals to send another 24,000 U.S. troops to a conflict that we are already losing? Sending more troops is a slippery slope that has a motive force and a driving logic all its own. And it's counter-productive: A recent BBC and ABC poll showed that 70% of Afghans are opposed to an increase in U.S. troops. Instead of overcoming our enemy, an escalation, with its increase in misery and death for the beleaguered population, will only serve to strenghten the Taliban and Al Queda by driving new recruits their way.

These wars will continue to rob our country of the funds we need to solve the problems that are overwhelming us: increasing joblessness, lack of decent and affordable housing, a school sytem in dire need of resources and a health care system that is the disgrace of the industrialized world. Just as LBJ's Great Society foundered on the funds usurped for the Vietnam War, so surely will Obama's grand and much-needed reforms collapse on the continuation of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles.

Martin Luther King said it far more eloquently than I could ever write when, in 1967, he parted company from the other civil rights leaders to bravely stand on principle in opposition to the war in Vietnam. In his famous "Beyond Vietnam" speech on April 4th of that year in New York's Riverside Church he said:

"Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land."

That is why I march today. I want to guarantee that the most progressive president this country has ever seen is successful in turning our country around and leading us to a new society that values its people more than its material things, or as Dr. King so profoundly said in 1967 "we need to rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society."
(Dr. King's entire speech is reprinted here.)

If you're in New York, you can join the march by gathering on White Street (2 blocks south of Canal Street) between Broadway and Lafayette at 11 am. One of Dr. King's associates and a pioneer of our civil rights movement, Rev. James Lawson, will be walking with us. I suspect that Dr. King would have been marchng for peace today as well.