Cost of Empire: $130 billion for occupying Iraq and Aghanistan (priceless!)

Thanks to Tim Musser for this commentary by Art Laffin, a Catholic Worker, on the recent military spending bill that President Obama passed into law.

680 billion military budget an affront to God, the poor
Nov. 12, 2009
By Art Laffin

President Obama signed into law Oct. 28 the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, the largest military spending bill of its kind. The bill includes $130 billion in funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and only modifies the military commissions system at Guantánamo Bay, rather than abolish it.

The bill included several military spending projects Obama had previously opposed, including $560 million for a new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter engine the Pentagon had rejected. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department's budget, money dedicated to maintaining the huge U.S. nuclear arsenal. Overall, the bill increases military spending $24 billion from the last fiscal year.

However the president or members of Congress may try to justify this military budget, it is an affront to God and constitutes a direct theft from the poor. This budget is more than a bailout for the weapons industries; it is a massive giveaway to the war profiteers.

Where is the moral outrage at this gross misuse of the public treasury and the political doublespeak used to justify it? How is it possible that so much money could be appropriated in this time of recession when so many billions of taxpayers' funds have already been used to bail out Wall Street, banks and other private financial institutions? Why are there few, if any, public officials saying that this money should instead be spent on providing universal health care for the poor, addressing the global climate crisis, and alleviating poverty? Finally, why is there such deafening silence from the church leadership regarding this colossal misappropriation of wealth and resources?

What would Jesus have us do? I believe Jesus would have us say that to appropriate any money for weapons, war and killing betray his command "to love one another," and is a sin that must be condemned without hesitation.

The poor and the victims cry out for justice — for bread, not nuclear weapons; for affordable housing, not F-35 Joint-Strike Fighters and drones; for universal health care, not war-making and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If people of faith and conscience won't speak out for the poor, the victims and the marginalized, call for an immediate suspension of this immoral war budget, and take action for justice and peace, who will?

Despite the difficult challenges we face, signs of hope abound. There are growing numbers of groups and individuals who are speaking out for peace and social justice, and who are taking nonviolent action to bring about universal health care, climate justice and economic justice; to end U.S. war-making in Iraq and Afghanistan; to stop the drone attacks in Pakistan; to abolish torture and close Guantánamo and Bagram U.S. military prisons; and to disarm our nuclear arsenal.

Recently, two disarmament actions of note have occurred. Oblate of Mary Immaculate Fr. Carl Kabat, who has spent more than 15 years of his life in prison for disarmament actions, is currently in jail in Greeley, Colo., and is facing trial in December for his Aug. 6 Plowshares action at a Minuteman III missile silo. On Nov. 2, All Souls' Day, five peacemakers called the "Disarm Now Plowshares" carried out a Plowshares action at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base Kitsap-Bangor in Washington state.

It is time to end all of our war-making, beat all the swords of our time into plowshares, and redirect all monies and resources of this military budget to meet the urgent human needs of our country and world.

[Art Laffin is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C.]

Najla Said, The Daughter of Edward Said, on Going to Palestine

Shout-Out to Come Together: Imagine Peace (poems)

Tom Healey, in his Best American Poetry blog post, gave a shout-out to Come Together: Imagine Peace yesterday.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall: Berlin and Israel/Palestine

This video shows Palestinian activists breaking down a section of Israel's "security barrier"/"apartheid wall" (depending on your point of view), on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Never let it be said that Palestinians are ignorant of history!

Ever since first reading Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," I've been thinking about the poem's political implications. The poem is a dramatization of a liberal speaker's attempt to understand his neighbor's conservative (and in this case, seemingly rather unthinking) arguments for keeping the wall between their two properties.

In a simplistic reading of the poem, the liberal speaker's questioning exposes the conservative neighbor's inability to think for himself. In the speaker's mind, really, there is no need for the wall at all. They don't keep animals that should be penned in. The trees won't eat each other. Why the wall? In the neighbor's mind, "good fences make good neighbors." But why, the speaker wonders. And we, too, are invited to wonder. The speaker sees the neighbor as "mov[ing] in darkness...not of woods only." He appears, suddenly, as "an old stone savage armed."

A more nuanced reading of the poem notes that the speaker himself was the one to remind his neighbor that it was time to mend the wall. And also, that the speaker himself turns out to be rather judgmental about the neighbor, creating a metaphorical wall between himself and the other.

Frost's poem, then, does not merely side with either, but dramatizes these two human impulses; the impulse to break down barriers, toward mobility and exploration, and the impulse to protect ourselves from incursion, invasion, and oppression.

The ecstasy of East Berliners liberated from their prison is something undeniable, but its also true that some walls protect and nurture. A wall between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast, to reduce conflict, seems to be working, but probably because both sides felt it an interim confidence-building measure. A crucial question might be: who gets to decide the wall is necessary?

Here's the poem:

"Mending Wall"

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

In a recent post, Robert Naiman offers a critique of what some call the "Apartheid Wall" that cuts between and into Israel/Palestine. What's at stake here is not just the wall per se, but where the wall is placed (in this case, often confiscating Palestinian land and between Palestinian towns).

Mr. Netanyahu, Tear Down This Wall
by robert naiman on 9 November 2009 - 4:41pm
On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders are full of self-congratulation. But their paeans to universal freedom ring hollow, when they bear large responsibility for another wall constricting human freedom: the apartheid wall dividing the Palestinian West Bank.

Israeli authorities refer to it as a "separation barrier," but that's misleading. The wall doesn't separate pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank. If that's all it did, it would be an entirely different political object. Instead, the wall cuts deep into the Palestinian West Bank, separating Palestinians from each other and from their land, and signaling to the Palestinians that Israel intends to annex territory that Palestinians want for an independent Palestinian state. The fact that Western countries that support the Israeli government - above all the United States - say nothing about the West Bank wall signals to Palestinians that Western support for Palestinian statehood is merely rhetorical.

Today, AFP reports, Palestinians tore down a chunk of the wall near Ramallah.

AFP notes that 85 percent of the planned wall is inside the West Bank, and it would leave 9.5 percent of the West Bank and 35,000 West Bank Palestinians between the barrier and the Green Line that marks the 1967 border with Israel.

The World Court issued a resolution in 2004 calling for those parts of the barrier that are inside the West Bank to be torn down and for further construction in the territory to cease. Israel and Western countries have ignored the World Court resolution.

Two years ago Israel's own High Court ruled against the route of the wall near the Palestinian village of Bilin, but the Israeli government ignored the ruling of its own highest court.

Today, the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" and the Palestinian Authority are at the brink of collapse, the New York Times reports.

We've reached this point in large measure because of the unwillingness of the Obama Administration to put real pressure on the Israeli government to implement past agreements - in particular, to implement a freeze on the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. When the first President Bush demanded a settlement freeze, he backed up his demand with real pressure - holding up loan guarantees to Israel. The Obama Administration never indicated that there was any "or else" associated with its demand for a settlement freeze, leading the Netanyahu government to conclude that it could just wait the Obama Administration out - a conclusion that appears to have been borne out by events.

This would be an especially opportune time for U.S. officials to indicate that they intend to meaningfully oppose the ongoing construction of "facts on the ground" that are constricting the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and undermining their hopes for national independence - facts on the ground like the apartheid wall.

The Fall of the (Berlin) Wall, Twenty Years Later

I don't recall being affected during the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago today, while a sophomore in college. Perhaps I was buried in my own neuroses and self-education. Perhaps, too, the triumphalism of the coverage made me instinctively distrust it--as if this, too, were confirmation of our superiority, that everyone (in the world) wanted to be just like us.

Twenty years later, my wife and I find ourselves welling up with emotion as we discuss it at the breakfast table to our seven and three year old girls, after a news report mentions the anniversary. I get out my chunks of the wall, given to me by Alyosha Maslov some three years after the fall, while I stayed with his family outside Moscow. We watch videos of the wall and its fall, and the jubilation of the people in the streets.

All I can say is that I couldn't help the weeping, in the words of the Jesus Jones song that commemorated it, "watching the world wake up from history."

Fort Hood and PTSD

I've been thinking about the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood, and completely devastated by the killings, and that the shooter was an Arab. Other Arabs will pay for this man's madness and pain.

The quieter deaths of the suicides of 75 Fort Hood soldiers, however, has not garnered the same attention. Such lonely acts of despair need to be accounted for as well as these chilling murderous turnings-outward.
Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2009

Washington - Fort Hood, the base stricken in Thursday's shooting rampage, is the largest U.S. military facility in the world - and a base that has a large share of the military's overall instances of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.

Army officials say that roughly 30,000 troops are stationed at the sprawling facility north of the Texas capital of Austin, while an additional 20,000 troops from the base are deployed to Iraq. Tens of thousands of military spouses and children live on the base and in adjacent suburbs.

The facility, which opened in 1942, houses the 1st Cavalry Division and the First Army Division West, as well as smaller aviation, logistics and military police units. It until recently also housed the Army's Fourth Infantry Division. The 1st Cavalry Division and the Fourth Infantry Division have each done three tours to Iraq.

Since the start of the Afghan war in 2001, the base has lost hundreds of soldiers in combat. More alarmingly to many senior commanders there, the base has also lost at least 75 of its soldiers to suicide, one of the heaviest such tolls in the U.S. military.

The base's former commander, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, used his tenure at the helm of the sprawling post to mount a broad campaign to reduce the incidence of PTSD and suicide among the soldiers on the post.
[...]
Despite the efforts, however, Fort Hood continues to be hit hard by suicide, PTSD and other related problems. Through October, 10 Fort Hood soldiers had taken their lives in 2009, the second-highest tally in the Army behind Kentucky's Fort Campbell, which had 16 suicides.

National War Tax Resistance Gathering (+ poetry!)

National War Tax Resistance Gathering and
Coordinating Committee Meeting
6:30pm FRIDAY, Nov 6 – noon Sunday, Nov 8, 2009

The Nehemiah Center — http://www.nehemiahmission.org
6515 Bridge Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio
(Near west side of Cleveland at West 65th and Bridge Ave.)

Deconstruct War
Use tax dollars to CONSTRUCT PEACE
A mini-conference about cutting off war’s money supply and funding life-affirming programs. The weekend begins with dinner at 6:30 pm Friday with a program at 7:30 pm. All are welcome to Sunday NWTRCC business meeting, 9 am - Noon

Hosted by Dorothy Day Peace Tax Fund, Cleveland Catholic Worker, the Cleveland Nonviolence Network, and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC)

The program includes presentations about war tax resistance and redirecting tax dollars to peace,
about all of our work against war and creating the world we hope to see. NWTRCC is holding its business meeting in Cleveland on Sunday morning, November 8 (open to all). Along with local activists, people from around the country who refuse to pay for war will participate in the mini-conference.

Come for the whole weekend or one session

PROGRAM
Representatives of war tax resistance (WTR) groups from around the country will attend and join local war resisters as presenters and facilitators for panels, group discussions, and workshops. Program planning is in progress. Please check the website or call for updated information.

FRIDAY EVENING, Nov 6


5 pm: Arrival, Registration,

6:30 pm: Dinner

7:30 pm: “Deconstruct War / Construct Peace” Building the world we want to see. How does our war tax resistance influence change? Facilitated by Cleveland hosts Maria Smith and Charlie Hurst, including a poetry project to explore our resistance with Philip Metres.

Phil Metres is the author of numerous books, including To See the Earth (poetry, 2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (anthology of peace poems, 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (criticism, 2007), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Saturday, Nov 7

8 am: Breakfast

9 am: Welcome, Introductions, and Logistics

9:15 am: Discussion

NWTRCC & the War Tax Resistance (WTR) Movement - Who we are, What we do, Where are we going?
Discussion of NWTRCC network and WTR activity in general, Program update on War Tax Boycott and other NWTCC activities. Open discussion of ideas for development of our efforts and/or changes needed. (Large and small group)

10:15 - Break

10:30 - Film Showing

"Death and Taxes" - New 30-minute (approx) film introduces the basics of war tax resistance. View and comment on NWTRCC's nearly completed film showing many faces of resistance. Hear from some of the resisters who appear in the film (Juanita Nelson, David Waters, Bill Ramsey, Ruth Benn) and time to follow up with some personal stories of resistance.

Noon: Lunch

1:15 pm - Panel and Discussion

"Making Connections/Working Together - WTR and the wider peace movement" With Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Sr. Diane Pinchot, OSU, artist and School of Americas Watch defendant; Phil Althouse, attorney and election observer in El Salvador.

1:45 - Small group discussions with each of the presenters to talk more in-depth on their presentation and area of work.

2:45 - Break

3:00 - Concurrent Workshops:

WTR 101: Basic introduction and getting started. Led by long-time war tax resisters.

WTR Questions and Answers for experienced resisters and counselors, with Ruth Benn, NWTRCC Coordinator

4:15 - Break

4:30 - Discussion: Deconstruct War / Construct Peace reprise - From our previous sessions, are there some priorities that emerged and that we should develop in our ongoing work?

Concurrent: Time for NWTRCC committees and special interest groups to meet - War Tax Boycott, Fundraising, Peace Tax Fund follow-up, WTR Penalty Fund/assistance programs

6:00 pm - Dinner

7:00 pm: Evening program to be announced

Sunday, Nov 8:

9:00 am - noon: NWTRCC Business Meeting
Agenda includes continuing work on boycott and video; priorities for coming year; fundraising and annual budget; literature updates and new resource ideas. All welcome!

1:30 pm - 5:30 pm WTR Counselor’s Training
Training for new and experienced counselors. Review information, techniques, and problems that might occur during a counseling session.

LOGISTICS

Location: The Nehemiah Center, 6515 Bridge Ave., corner of Bridge and West 65th St., Cleveland, OH, nehemiahmission.org. Hosted by Dorothy Day Peace Tax Fund, Cleveland Catholic Worker, the Cleveland Nonviolence Network, and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC).

Travel: Cleveland is served by buses, Amtrak, and flights to the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE). There is public transportation into the city from the airport. We will do our best to help with arrangements or connect people for shared rides.

Housing: Housing is at Nehemiah Center, nehemiahmission.org, with comfortable bunk beds. All those staying at Nehemiah are asked to bring their own bedding/sleeping bag, pillow, towels, and toiletries.

Meals: The program begins with dinner on Friday at 6:30 pm, and ends with lunch on Sunday (all welcome for the Sunday NWTRCC business meeting). Meals are vegetarian with vegan options. You may be asked to help with meal prep or serving.

Costs: $15 registration fee in advance, plus $25 per night for housing and meals at Nehemiah; $25 for one day meals/no housing. Pay what you can. Scholarships will be made available as needed, and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Local contact: Charles Hurst and Maria Smith 216-241-6594, caixa@prodigy.net

Further travel and program details will be on our website and sent to you in advance of the gathering.

Registration and Program Information
National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC)
(800) 269-7464, nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org


Fees and Registration Deadline

We are asking $15 registration fee for the weekend, or donations if you are attending part of the time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, although a collection may be taken up during the weekend if costs have not been covered. Additional donations in advance will help us house everyone at Nehemiah Center.

Enclosed is (please make checks payable to NWTRCC):

$15 registration fee, and,
$25 per night housing and meals, or,
$25 one day meals only, no housing

Julia Paulet's version of Carl Sandburg's "Autumn Movement"

This is from Julia Paulet, who's doing a dance about a poem, part of a project that I call the Poetry in the Everyday Project. What do you think?

Pablo Neruda Explains a Few Things

I've been reading Pablo Neruda in earnest over the past couple weeks, intensively and chronologically in a way that I hadn't. Actually, I'd really only read a chunk of the odes and some of the love poems, but since I got The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, I thought it was time to get up to speed on the most highly-regarded Latin American poet, and one of the most popular, even in English. What struck me was that though he began as a somewhat-obscure (in both senses) surrealist love poet, his time as a Chilean diplomat beginning at age 23 radically altered both his subject manner and his style.

When, in the 1930s, he saw the Spanish Civil War first hand, his radical politics were solidified irrevocably. That's when he wrote the following poem, "I Explain a Few Things," in which he stakes a claim for own transformation as a poet. When one speaks of the blood of children flowing in streets, metaphors fail. The poems of this phase are haunted, agitated and agitating, and founder upon their own irritable (and explicable) horror. They are occasional, but they also bridge the early Neruda to the great, brilliantly-flawed historical epic, Canto General, which attempts to tell the story of the Americas from its mythic beginnings, into Neruda's own present.

"I Explain A Few Things"

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

Veterans for Peace To Commemorate Veterans Day

Veterans for Peace, Chapter 39
will commemorate Veterans Day with a reading of letters and quotes from soldiers and their loved ones dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Their words speak of honor, rage, sacrifice, and despair, and carry a message as old as time. They speak loud and ring true.

Please join us as we share their words and honor their service.
WHEN: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 7:30pm
WHERE: St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 2747 Fairmount Blvd.,
Cleveland Heights, 44106 (Corner of Fairmount & Coventry)
COST: This event is free and open to the public
CONTACT: Bob Bemer at 440-777-9108


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Veterans for Peace - STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace. To this end we will work, with others
(a) To increase public awareness of the costs of war
(b) To restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations
(c) To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons
(d) To seek justice for veterans and victims of war
(e) To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
To achieve these goals, members of Veterans For Peace pledge to use non-violent means and to maintain an organization that is both democratic and open with the understanding that all members are trusted to act in the best interests of the group for the larger purpose of world peace.