This week, Congress will vote for another $95 billion for the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan (Af/Pak).
But 40 House Progressives can end these wars if they simply vote NO. That’s because all 178 Republicans opppose $5 billion added for the IMF, and 178+40=218, a House majority.
Tell Congress: Healthcare Not Warfare
http://www.democrats.com/healthcare-not-warfare?cid=ZGVtczMwNDc0MGRlbXM=
On May 14, 51 Democrats voted NO. Now those 51 are under immense pressure to switch to YES. Don’t let them switch! Check if your Representative is here:
http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/Supplemental
As the Orlando Magic face off against the Los Angeles Lakers for the 2009 NBA championship, casual hoops fans may wonder where their rooting interests should lie. If the players or teams don’t excite you, I humbly suggest that you choose your team based not on players, colors or coaches but on owners. Why? Because the victorious owner, whether Lakers boss Jerry Buss or Magic helmsman Richard DeVos, stands to make a fortune by winning, as well as elevate his personal profile. If you do choose to root for a team based on its owners, there is absolutely no contest for progressives: break out the lavender and gold and pray for a Lakers victory. It’s not that Buss is any great shakes; it’s the fact that DeVos operates the Magic like the sporting arm of a radical right- wing empire whose reach extends from makeup to militias.
As co-founder of Amway, the 83-year-old DeVos has amassed a fortune of more than $4.4 billion. Through Amway, he popularized the concept of what is known as network marketing, where salespeople attempt to lure their friends and neighbors into buying products. Sixty percent of what Amway salespeople traffic are health and beauty products. The rest of their merchandise is a veritable pu pu platter of homecare products, jewelry, electronics and even insurance. To put it mildly, DeVos doesn’t do his political business off company time. Amway has been investigated for violating campaign finance laws by seamlessly shifting from network marketing to network politicking. DeVos has used not only his company but his own epic fortune at the service of his politics. He could be described as the architect, underwriter and top chef of every religious-right cause on Pat Robertson’s buffet table. The former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, DeVos is far more than just a loyal party man. For more than four decades he has been the funder in chief of the right-wing fringe of the Christian fundamentalist movement. Before the 1994 “Republican Revolution” made Newt Gingrich a household name, Amway contributed what the Washington Post called “a record sum in recent American politics,” $2.5 million. In the 2004 election cycle Amway and the DeVos family helped donate more than $4 million to campaigns pumping propaganda for Bush and company, with around $2 million coming out of Devos’s own pocket.
During the Bush years DeVos received a decent return on these investments, with tax cuts that saved him millions and tax exemptions for people who sold Amway out of their homes. He then used these extra gains to further empower his nonprofit, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, to direct millions to groups that support radical reparative gay therapy, antievolution politics and other “traditional” family values. The organizations they support include Focus on the Family, the Foundation for Traditional Values, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Media Research Center, among many others. They also supply grants to the Free Congress Foundation, which claims that its main focus is on the “Culture War.” It hopes to “return [America] to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture.”
DeVos is also a senior member of an organization called the Council for National Policy. Imagine the most shadowy right-wing organization, and CNP is the sort of group that rests in its shadows and inspires fevered talk of “vast right-wing conspiracies.” The CNP makes members of the Masons look like paparazzi-hungry starlets. Its membership includes the elite of the John Birch Society. Richard DeVos served on both the executive committee and the board of governors for the CNP.
Another leading member of the CNP was fellow Michigan-based billionaire Edgar Prince. In what Nation contributor Jeremy Scahill has described as a royal coupling in the tradition of feudal Europe, Prince’s daughter Betsy married Richard’s son Dick Jr. Scahill also writes, “[The DeVos family was] one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence.”
Betsy Prince’s brother, and Edgar’s son, Erik Prince, would become first a Navy SEAL and later founder and CEO of the infamous Blackwater corporation. Blackwater is the company of private mercenaries hired to help occupy Iraq, Afghanistan and even post-Katrina New Orleans. Famous for rolling through Baghdad in black SUVs, rock music blaring and making far more money than US soldiers, they are an outsourced army, unaccountable to the government and inciting resentment and anti-Americanism wherever they are stationed. Since 2000, Blackwater has received nearly $1.25 billion in federal contracts, of which $144 million came in small-business set-aside contracts. This isn’t a vast right-wing conspiracy: it has been an openly incestuous and highly beneficial coupling between the DeVos/Prince clan and the Republican Party.
None of this would matter to sports fans if the DeVos family kept its politics out of the Orlando Magic or if it didn’t rely on public funds for the team. Neither is the case. At Amway Arena, the DeVos hold Faith & Family Nights, multiple home-school nights and other events replete with Christian rock and player testimonials.
DeVos’s use of the team for his own profile and profit has spurred protests in Orlando. To get people to protest in Orlando, you have to know you’re doing something wrong. Outside Amway Arena, there have been demonstrations to raise awareness among fans of DeVos’s contribution of $100,000 to Florida4Marriage, a group that supports Amendment 2, which would add Florida’s existing ban on gay marriage to the state Constitution. Protesters believe the amendment could halt all domestic-partnership benefits for even straight unmarried couples. “He’s the biggest contributor to the amendment from Orlando,” protest organizer Jennifer Foster told the Orlando Sentinel. “And he’s getting $1 billion in taxpayers’ money to build the arena. That sends a bad message.”
It’s more than a bad message. The DeVos model is organized theft of public funds that then turns arenas into slush funds for radical right politics. As Foster mentioned, ground has now been broken for a $1.1 billion Orlando mega-entertainment complex, the center of which would be a $480 million new arena. DeVos and his people have publicly boasted about how much they are donating to the project. But as Neil deMause, co-author of Field of Schemes wrote, “The actual Magic contribution toward the $480 million price tag, then, is probably somewhere around $70 million.”
It’s a frighteningly effective political money-laundering scheme: our tax dollars are being funneled through a stadium and into the pockets of the DeVos family, where they are then spit out into think tanks, activist organizations and political efforts that most Americans would find noxious. For these reasons, I will do my political duty and root for the Lakers to win it all. We should all want to kick back, enjoy this series and keep politics and sports separate. Unfortunately, Dick DeVos won’t let us.
Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.
Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.
Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.
In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.
War without Declaration
The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, an ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada.
Each attack was an act of war and drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated. But since no one admitted carrying them out, the diplomatic protests had no place to go.
The “privatization” of war, with its use of armed mercenaries, has come under heavy scrutiny, especially since a 2007 incident in Baghdad in which guards from Blackwater USA (now Xe) went on a shooting spree, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding scores of others. But the “covertization” of war has remained largely in the shadows. The attackers in the Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan were not private contractors, but U.S. and Israeli soldiers.
Assassination Teams
In his book The War Within, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward disclosed that the U.S. military has developed “secret operational capabilities” to “locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups.”
In a recent interview during a Great Conversations event at the University of Minnesota, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a U.S. military “executive assassination ring,” part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Hersh says that “Congress has no oversight” over the program.
According to a 2004 classified document, the United States has the right to attack “terrorists” in some 15 to 20 nations, including Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. The Israeli military has long used “targeted assassinations” to eliminate Tel Aviv’s enemies. U.S. and NATO “assassination teams” have emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, according to the UN, they have killed scores of people. Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council charges that secret “international intelligence services” allied with local militias are killing Afghan civilians and then hiding behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.
When Alston protested the killing of two brothers in Kandahar, “not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved,” he told the Financial Times.
In Iraq, such special operations forces have carried out a number of killings, including a raid that killed the son and a nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. The Special Operations Forces (SOF) stormed the house at 3AM and shot the governor’s 17-year-old son dead in his bed. When a cousin tried to enter the room, he was also gunned down.
Such “night raids” by SOFs have drawn widespread protests in Afghanistan. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, night raids involve “abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry,” and only serve to turn Afghans against the occupation.
Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Kamal al-Maliki charged that a March 26 raid in Kut that killed two men violated the new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.
The Predator strikes have deeply angered most Pakistanis. Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, calls the drone strikes “counterproductive,” a sentiment that David Kilcullen, the top advisor to the U.S. military in Afghanistan, agreed with in recent congressional testimony. The U.S. government doesn’t officially take credit for the attacks.
Budgets and Strategy
If Congress agrees to the Defense Department budget proposed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates, attacks by SOF and armed robots will likely increase. While most the media focused on the parts of the budget that step back from the big ticket weapons systems of the Cold War, the proposal actually resurrects a key Cold War priority of the 1960s.
“The similarities between Gates’ proposals and the strategy adopted by the Kennedy administration are too great to ignore,” notes Nation defense correspondent Michael Klare. These similarities include “a shift in focus toward unconventional conflict in the Third World.”
Gates’ budget would increase the number of SOFs by 2,800, build more drones like the Predator and its bigger, more lethal cousin, the Reaper, and enhance the rapid movement of troops and equipment. All of this is part of General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine.
The concept is hardly new. The units are different than they were 50 years ago – Navy SEALS and Delta Force have replaced Green Berets – but the philosophy is the same. And while the public face of counterinsurgency is winning “hearts and minds” by building schools and digging wells, its core is 3AM raids and Hellfire missiles.
The “decapitations” of insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is little different – albeit at a lower level – than Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 40,000 “insurgent” leaders in South Vietnam during the war in Southeast Asia.
Hidden Wars
In the past, war was an extension of a nation’s politics “too important,” as World War I French Premier Georges Clemenceau commented, “to be left to the generals.”
But increasingly, the control of war is slipping away from the civilians in whose name and interests it is supposedly waged. While the “privatization” of war has frustrated the process of congressional oversight, its “covertization” has hidden war behind a wall of silence or denial.
“Congress has been very passive in relation to its own authority with regard to warmaking,” says Princeton international law scholar Richard Falk. “Congress hasn’t been willing to insist that the government adhere to international law and the U.S. Constitution.”
The SFOs may be hidden, but there are eight dead people in Syria, four of them reportedly children. There are at least 39 dead in northern Sudan, and more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of civilian dead in Pakistan runs into the hundreds.
The new defense budget goes a long ways toward retooling the U.S. military to become a quick reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is: Where will the shadow warriors strike next?
The most powerful grassroots organization of the peace movement, MoveOn, remains silent as the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan simmer or escalate.
Last December 17, 48.3 percent of MoveOn members listed “end the war in Iraq” as a 2009 goal, after healthcare (64.9 percent), economic recovery and job creation (62.1 percent) and building a green economy/stopping climate change (49.6 percent–only 1.5 percent above Iraq.) This was at a moment when most Americans believed the Iraq War was ending. Afghanistan and Pakistan were not listed among top goals which members could vote on.
Then on May 22 MoveOn surveyed its members once again, listing ten possible campaigns for the organization. “Keep up the pressure to the end the war in Iraq” was listed ninth among the options.
Afghanistan and Pakistan were not on the MoveOn list of options.
Nor was Guantánamo nor the administration’s torture policies. (”Investigate the Bush Administration” was the first option.)
MoveOn is supposed to be an Internet version of participatory democracy, but the organization’s decision-making structure apparently assures that the membership is voiceless on the question of these long wars.
What if they included an option like “demanding a diplomatic settlement and opposing a quagmire in Afghanistan and Pakistan”? Or “shifting from a priority on military spending to civilian spending on food, medicine and schools?”
This is no small matter. MoveOn has collected a privately held list of 5 million names, most of them strong peace advocates. The organization’s membership contributed an unprecedented $180 million for the federal election cycle in 2004-2006. Those resources, now squelched or sequestered, mean that the most vital organization in the American peace movement is missing in action.
What to do? There is no point raving and ranting against MoveOn. The only path is in organizing a dialogue with the membership, over the Internet, and having faith that their voices will turn the organization to oppose these escalating occupations. The same approach is necessary towards other vital organs of the peace movement including rank-and-file Democrat activists and the post-election Obama organization (Organizing for America) through a persistent, bottom-up campaign to renew the peace movement as a powerful force in civil society.
This is not a simple matter of an organizational oligarchy manipulating its membership, although the avoidance by MoveOn’s leadership is a troubling sign. There is genuine confusion over Afghanistan and Pakistan among the rank and file. The economic crisis has averted attention away from the battlefront. Many who voted for Obama understandably will give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.
Silence sends a message. The de facto MoveOn support for the $94 billion war supplemental reverberates up the ladder of power. Feeling no pressure, Congressional leadership has abdicated its critical oversight function over the expanding wars, not even allowing members to vote for a December report on possible exit strategies. In the end, a gutsy sixty voted against HR 2346 on May 14, but many defected to vote for the war spending, including Neil Abercrombie, Jerry Nadler, David Obey, Xavier Becerra, Lois Capps, Maurice Hinchey, Jesse Jackson, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Patrick Kennedy, Charles Rangel, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Loretta Sanchez, Rosa De Lauro, Bennie Thompson, Jerry McNerney, Robert Wexler and Henry Waxman. (Bill Delahunt, Linda Sanchez and Pete Stark were not recorded.)
If there were significant pressures from networks like MoveOn in their Congressional districts, the opposition vote might have approached 85.
Appropriations chair David Obey in essence granted Obama a one-year pass to show results in Afghanistan. If the war appears to be a quagmire by then, he claimed, the Democrats will become more critical. Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the same message; according to the Washington Examiner, May 6: “There won’t be any more war supplementals, so my message to my members is, this is it.” Pelosi’s words were carefully parsed, saying that the White House would not be allowed another supplemental form of appropriation, which is different from an actual pledge to oppose war funding.
This one-year pass means that the grassroots peace movement has a few months to light a fire and reawaken pressure from below on the Congress and president. In the meantime, here are some predictions for the coming year:
• Iraq: Will Obama keep his pledge to withdraw combat forces from Iraq on a sixteen-month timetable, and all forces by 2011? At this point, the pace is slowing, and the deadline being somewhat extended, under pressure from US commanders on the ground. Sunnis are threatening to resume their insurgency if the al-Maliki regime fails to incorporate them into the political and security structures. The president insists however, that he is only making adjustments to a timetable that is on track. Prognosis: Precarious.
• Afghanistan: Will the Obama troop escalation deepen the quagmire or become a successful surge against the Taliban by next year? Another 21,000 troops and advisers are on their way to the battlefield. Civilian casualties are mounting, causing the besieged Karzai government to complain. Preventive detention of Afghans will only expand. US deaths, now over 600, are sure to increase this summer. Taliban may hold out and redeploy in order to stretch US forces thin. Prognosis: Escalation into quagmire.
• Pakistan: US policies have driven Al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the United States is attacking with Predators and turning Pakistan’s US-funded armed forces towards counterinsurgency. Public opinion is being inflamed against the US intervention. Prognosis: An expanding American war in Pakistan with greater threats to American security.
• Iran: With or without US complicity, Israel may attack Iran early next year, with unforeseeable consequences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prognosis: Crisis will intensify.
• Global: The United States will fail to attract more combat troops to fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Europe or elsewhere, causing pressure to increase for a non-military negotiated solution. Prognosis: Obama still popular, US still isolated.
• Budget priorities: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will deeply threaten the administration’s ability to succeed on the domestic front with stimulus spending, healthcare, education and alternative energy. Prognosis: false hope for “guns and butter” all over again.
Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than 2C of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4C. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.
This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week. It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government. It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for instance, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with 4C of warming by the end of the century. At the moment, emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?
Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up their hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the options.
Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by Clinton, abandoned by Bush, attended halfheartedly by the other rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total failure. The targets they have set bear no relation to the science and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like the UK, which is meeting its obligations under the Kyoto protocol, have succeeded only by outsourcing their pollution to other countries. And nations like Canada, which is flouting its obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.
Lord Stern made it too easy: he appears to have underestimated the costs of mitigation. As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has shown, Stern’s assumption that our consumption can continue to grow while our emissions fall is implausible. To have any hope of making substantial cuts we have both to reduce our consumption and transfer resources to countries like China to pay for the switch to low carbon technologies. As Helm notes, “there is not much in the study of human nature – and indeed human biology – to give support to the optimist”.
But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option. We don’t. If you think our attempts to prevent emissions are futile, take a look at our efforts to adapt.
Where Stern appears to be correct is in proposing that the costs of stopping climate breakdown, great as they would be, are far lower than the costs of living with it. Germany is spending €600m just on a new sea wall for Hamburg – and this money was committed before the news came through that sea-level rises this century could be two or three times as great as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted. The Netherlands will spend €2.2bn on dykes between now and 2015; again they are likely to be inadequate. The UN suggests that rich countries should be transferring $50 to $75bn a year to poor ones now to help them cope with climate change, with a massive increase later on. But nothing like this is happening.
A Guardian investigation reveals that the rich nations have promised $18bn to help the poor nations adapt to climate change over the last seven years, but they have disbursed only 5% of that money. Much of it has been transferred from foreign aid budgets anyway: a net gain for the poor of nothing. Oxfam has made a compelling case for how adaptation should be funded: nations should pay according to the amount of carbon they produce per capita, coupled with their position on the human development index. On this basis, the US should supply more than 40% of the money and the European Union over 30%, with Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea making up the balance. But what are the chances of getting them to cough up?
There’s a limit to what this money could buy anyway. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that “global mean temperature changes greater than 4C above 1990-2000 levels” would “exceed … the adaptive capacity of many systems”. At this point there’s nothing you can do, for instance, to prevent the loss of ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of major ice sheets. Elsewhere it spells out the consequences more starkly: global food production, it says, is “very likely to decrease above about 3C”. Buy your way out of that.
And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above 3C of warming, the world’s vegetation will become “a net source of carbon”. This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to 5C or 6C: the end – for humans – of just about everything.
Until recently, scientists spoke of carbon concentrations – and temperatures – peaking and then falling back. But a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that “climate change … is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop”. Even if we were to cut carbon emissions to zero today, by the year 3000 our contribution to atmospheric concentrations would decline by just 40%. High temperatures would remain more or less constant until then. If we produce it, we’re stuck with it.
In the rich nations we will muddle through, for a few generations, and spend nearly everything we have on coping. But where the money is needed most there will be nothing. The ecological debt the rich world owes to the poor will never be discharged, just as it has never accepted that it should offer reparations for the slave trade and for the pillage of gold, silver, rubber, sugar and all the other commodities taken without due payment from its colonies. Finding the political will for crash cuts in carbon production is improbable. But finding the political will – when the disasters have already begun – to spend adaptation money on poor nations rather than on ourselves will be impossible.
The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but “not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human wellbeing and ethics”.
Yes, it might already be too late – even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow – to prevent more than 2C of warming; but we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender.
The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated, 24-year-old Green Beret, who was electrocuted while taking a shower at a US base in January 2008. His death, the result of improper grounding for a water pump, has been classified by the US Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) as a “negligent homicide.” Maseth’s death had originally been labeled an accident. Bonuses were paid to KBR in 2007 and 2008, after CID investigators had officially expressed concerns about the quality of KBR’s electrical work. For its part, KBR denies any culpability for the electrocution deaths.
This information was revealed at a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. According to the committee’s chair, Sen. Byron Dorgan, the rewards KBR received under its LOGCAP contracts were supposed to be for work of the “highest quality” with “no deficiencies” or problems. Dorgan said KBR’s work was “shoddy” and “unprofessional.” Some eighteen US soldiers have died since 2003 as a result of KBR’s “shoddy work,” according to Sen. Frank Lautenberg. KBR/Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000, has been the single largest corporate beneficiary of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It continues to operate globally on US government contracts.
Charles Smith, the former Army official who managed the contracts under which KBR performed electrical work in Iraq, testified that it was “highly inappropriate” that KBR received these bonuses for what he called “dangerously substandard” work. He said that the Army was well aware of KBR’s “poor performance” since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, and yet continued to reward KBR because the military was “afraid” KBR would cease work. He said there was “a culture that decided KBR was too big to fail and too important to be held to account.” The “perverse incentive is that there was no incentive” for KBR to do quality work because they received bonuses for poor work.
Senator Dorgan said there are “tens of thousands of examples” of unnecessary risks to US soldiers, including deaths that have arisen as a result of KBR’s work. “Why should [KBR] be getting more contracts now that we know all this information?” asked Sen. Bob Casey. “The Defense Department has not answered these questions.”
James Childs, a master electrician hired by the Army to review electrical work in Iraq during 2008, testified that KBR’s work in Iraq was the “most hazardous, worst quality work” he’d ever seen. He said his investigation found improper wiring in “every” building KBR wired in Iraq (of which there are thousands) and that KBR’s rewiring work in buildings that were previously safely wired resulted in the electrical system becoming unsafe. Childs said that KBR did not do any work “according to code.” He also testified that the same risks exist in Afghanistan, which he recently visited. “While doing inspections in Afghanistan, I found the exact same code violations,” Childs said.
Eric Peters, a master electrician who worked for KBR in Iraq as recently as 2009, said that 50 percent of the KBR-managed buildings he saw were not properly wired. “I worried every day people would be injured or killed as a result of this work,” Peters testified. He estimated that at least half the electricians hired by KBR–many of them cheaper-costing Third Country Nationals (TCNs)–to service the US military in Iraq would not have been hired to work in the United States, saying they were not trained in US or UK electrical standards. TCNs–from places like India, Bangladesh and Bosnia–are estimated to have done some 60 percent of the electrical work for KBR in Iraq. Peters charged that KBR allowed trainees to take notes in to certification tests, making it very easy to be cleared for work.
Peters also charged that KBR “frowned upon” any refusal to sign off on work that Peters deemed incomplete or unsafe. Peters and others who testified said that “all over theater,” meaning everywhere in Iraq, KBR would effectively double-bill US taxpayers by leaving electrical work half-done or incorrectly done and then billing taxpayers again to repair its own shoddy work.
Peters characterized KBR managers as “completely unqualified” and said he is not a “disgruntled former employee” but rather a “disgusted former employee.”
I’ve decided to start using my graphic/developer/artistic abilities to start spreading some good old fashion propaganda. The first in a continual series is this “Buy Before You Die” shirt. The inspiration for this shirt comes from this article that I posted a while back. Hopefully, you’ll be seeing more clear cut propaganda in the Jacksonville streets in the future.
*All proceeds from the shirt will go towards maintaining the Fire Starter blog, other JaxMDS projects, and future art projects.
There are only 4 shirts available. 2 men’s small (white), 1 men’s medium (white), and 1 women’s small (purple). $10 bucks each (plus free zine, sticker, and newspaper about the IMF protests)
Email me at info@jaxmds.org to buy the shirt.
May 13th,2009
Art |
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SOLIDARITY TOUR
Amanda Camacho, Colombian Union Leader in Central Florida
Every year for Mother’s Day millions of beautiful cut flowers are bought and sold in the United States… But where do these perfect flowers come from, and how are they produced? Here in the U.S. and abroad, particularly in Colombia, workers in the flower industry, many of whom are women, face a variety of labor problems on a daily basis. Injustices against these workers range from low wages and unpaid overtime to an excessive workload and an unsafe working environment, including exposure to harmful pesticides.
Speaking Events:
May 14, 2-4 p.m.: Apopka
Farm Worker Association of Florida
1264 Apopka Blvd.
Apopka, FL 32703
407-886-5151
May 14, 7:30 p.m.: Gainesville
Civic Media Center
433 S. Main St.
Gainesville, FL 32601
Parking for the CMC is located just to the south at S.E. 5th Ave., or at the courthouse, just north of S.W. 4th Ave., after 7 p.m.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Presented by the Farmworker Association of Florida
the National Farmworker Ministry
Central (Florida) Jobs with Justice
South Florida Jobs with Justice
For more information, please contact:
Jeanie Economos, 407-886-5151 (FWAF)
Denise Diaz, 407-451-2472 (JwJ)
This early period of Obama’s presidency is an opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan. It is a chance to become clearer than “out now,” while still using the same force in opposing the war. In addition to education on the specifics of the administration’s plan and the after-effects in Afghanistan, take these concrete steps to build infrastructure from the bottom up.
1. The immediate demands should be opposition to more troops, predator attacks, human rights abuses and escalating budget costs.
2. Support a regional diplomatic solution (exit strategy), including withdrawal of US/NATO troops and bases. Read Tariq Ali’s book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.
3. Demand of Congress and President the same accountability that was demanded of Bush and never won: verifiable casualty figures, transparent budgeting, oversight of contractors, compliance with human rights standards, including women’s rights–clear metrics to measure progress towards a defined exit strategy.
4.With these focuses in mind and using United for Peace and Justice as an organizational base:
• assist in doubling their membership
• build a local e-mail list of at least 300 names
• build a coalition (at least a letterhead or leadership alliance) of clergy, academic, human rights, environmentalists, African-Americans and Latinos, labor and other progressive organizations.
5. Criticize Obama’s war from within the Obama structure and MoveOn.org. (Since neither of these structures have a focus on the war, contact them or start on a discussion on Afghanistan under another heading).
6. Start or join a group against military recruiters.
7. Build a visible network in your Congressional district. Buy and wear antiwar buttons, T-shirts and banners.
8. Build a local media list and meet with the editorial board.
9. Start Friday night streetcorner pickets. These are the hundreds of groups in every region that hold up placards on Friday nights. This is the heart of the antiwar movement.
10. Support other organizations, such as American Friends Service Committee, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink etc.
By Ralph Nader
“No more fine print; no more confusing terms and conditions.” This is what Barack Obama told a White House gathering of leading credit card issuers this week.
Right afterward, President Obama told the press that “there has to be strong and reliable protections for consumers, protections that ban unfair rate increases and forbid abusive fees and penalties.”
This soaring rhetoric places a heavy burden on Mr. Obama to stand up to the giant power of the credit card bosses and their monetized allies on Capitol Hill. Yet he has shown little interest in re-instating a Presidential consumer advisor as did Lyndon Johnson with the formidable Betty Furness and as did Jimmy Carter with the legendary Esther Peterson.
Deep recession times are tough for the nation’s over 200 million consumers. Still, no consumer voice in the White House, though consumer groups asked Mr. Obama to move promptly on this tiny advocacy office months ago.
The corporate chieftains have easy access to the White House and the new President, whether these bosses come on missions demanding power or missions of beggary for bailouts. When will he meet with the leading heads of consumer protection groups with millions of dues-paying members who could give him the base to hold accountable and regulate the democracy-denying, economy-wrecking corporate supremacists?
“Where’s the Backbone?” asked Ruth Marcus, the usually-restrained lawyer-columnist for The Washington Post. On April 15, 2009 she wrote: “When will President Obama fight, and when will he fold? That’s not entirely clear—and I’m beginning to worry that there may be a little too much presidential inclination to crumple.” Ms. Marcus asserts that “for all the chest-thumping about making hard choices and taking on entrenched interests, there has been disturbingly little evidence of the new president’s willingness to do that.” This is the case even with his allies in Congress, never mind his adversaries.
Just four days later, The New York Times weighed in with a page one news article that said President Obama “is well known for bold proposals that have raised expectations, but his administration has shown a tendency for compromise and caution, and even a willingness to capitulate on some early initiatives. …His early willingness to deal or fold has left commentators, and some loyal Democrats, wondering: ‘Where’s the fight?’” Like the Post, the Times gave examples.
It is not as if Mr. Obama is lacking in public opinion support. Overall he has a 65% approval rating. People know he inherited a terrible situation here and abroad from the Bush regime and they want action. Large majorities believe America is declining, that there is too much corporate control over their lives, and that the two parties have been failing the American people.
But the President’s personality is not one to challenge concentrated power. A Zogby poll reports that only six percent of the public supports the financial bailouts for Wall Street. The vast majority of people do not think the bailouts are fair.
The upcoming 100 day mark for the Obama administration is a customary time for evaluations by the politicos, the pundits, and the civic community. While his supporters can point to the pay-equity law for women, more health insurance for poor children, and a $787 billion economic stimulus enactment, the general appraisal by the liberal-progressive intelligentsia is decidedly mixed and gentle with undiluted hope.
Mr. Obama nourishes these mixed feelings. He showed some courage when he agreed, as part of an ongoing court case, to release the four torture memos written by Bush’s Justice Department. Graphic photos of prisoner treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be released next week. Yet Obama came out against a Truth Commission regarding the alleged crimes of the Bush regime and said he would “look forward and not look back.” For Obama that means immunity for anyone from the Bush Administration who may have violated the criminal laws of the land.
It is remarkable to read those oft-repeated words by lawyer Obama. Law enforcement is about looking back into the past. Investigation and prosecution obviously deals with crimes that have already occurred. That’s the constitutional duty of the President.
After 100 days it is far too early to render many judgments about Obama. One can, however, evaluate his major appointments—heavily Clintonite and corporate. One can also look at what he hasn’t gotten underway at all—such as labor law reform, a living wage, and citizen empowerment.
Next Monday, the Institute for Policy Studies ( www.ips-dc.org ) releases a detailed report card on Obama’s first 100 days titled “Thirsting for a Change.” While The Nation held a panel discussion on April 22 in Washington, D.C., the panelists largely gave Obama the benefit of the doubt so far, and declared that only grassroots mobilizing will move him forward on such matters as “single-payer” health care, corporate abuse, and the demilitarization of our foreign policy and our federal budget.
Panelist William Grieder coined the phrase “independent formulations” to describe the citizen action needed.
It is important to note that a transforming President has to ask for and encourage this pressure from the citizenry, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the 1930s.