Author's posts
May 07 2008
An economic stimulus for the antiwar movement?
Is the U.S. Treasury, which can’t print money fast enough to pay for the trillion-dollar tragedy in Iraq, about to give an economic stimulus to peace organizations working to stop the war?
It seems highly unlikely, but if it doesn’t happen it won’t be because the antiwar folks haven’t tried. Many seem to be on the same wave length as an email I received yesterday from United for Peace and Justice:
Spend your stimulus check on peace! The sooner the war ends, the more money the nation saves. Not to mention the lives and futures of millions of people. So let’s use the stimulus money to stop the war, bring all of the troops home and get the nation’s budget back on track.
We invite you to spend your stimulus check, or some portion of it, on the one thing the Bush administration doesn’t want you to invest in: Help strengthen the peace and justice movement!
Steve Burns, a staffer for the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, like UFPJ a coalition of many groups, didn’t even wait to get his check. He wrote to President Bush in March to tell him how he was spending his stimulus check:
May 01 2008
Thought for the day: Failure accomplished
“Let me say that no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.”– John McCain.
Five years since Mission Accomplished. 3,920 American deaths since then — 97% of US fatalities. 
While we debate whether Barack Obama was too harsh to Jeremiah Wright, the killing continues.
While Americans say the price of gasoline is a more important issue than the war in Iraq, the blood keeps flowing.
While House Democrats try to pass a bigger appropriation for the war than anyone has aked them for, the death toll mounts.
Four thousand US service deaths. Thirty thousand wounded. Countless thousands damaged for life.
Perhaps a million Iraqis dead. We don’t even try to count. Four million forced from their homes.
Lives and families destroyed, here and in Iraq.
And the beat goes on.
Why can’t we stop this war?
What is wrong with this country?
Don’t talk to me about race or bitterness or the media or the economy.
What is wrong with us as a people?
How can we let this continue in our name?
And how can we possibly be considering electing a candidate who still talks about “victory?”
I can’t write any more; I’m making myself despondent.
I’ll let MoveOn have the last word.
Apr 30 2008
Immigrants: Bienvenidos, Zoo Siab Txais Tos
Want to find out what your neighbors really think about the immigration issue?
Try putting one of these signs in your yard or window.
They were produced by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ), just in time for some May Day marches that focus on justice for immigrants.
The signs feature handwritten messages of "welcome" in six languages by people from many of Wisconsin's immigrant communities. The two-sided yard sign features "welcome" in Spanish and Hmong, single-sided 11×17 window signs feature either Spanish or Hmong.
The Milwaukee event is billed as a statewide action, organized by Voces de la Frontera and endorsed by Peace Action Wisconsin. The movement is growing and linking up with the antiwar movement.
Organizers at Voces say:
The immigrant rights movement has made great progress over the last two years in defeating some of the most anti-democratic legislative proposals in the history of this nation. All three remaining presidential candidates support some form of immigration reform. However, we face continued efforts to criminalize both employers and workers through initiatives like the Social Security No Match Letters, increased raids that tear families apart, and anti-immigrant local and state ordinances that have led to increased racial profiling, civil rights abuses, and economic damage to local communities.
Last year at least 80,000 people of all races and ages from across the state marched in Milwaukee to support civil rights for immigrants. This year we must mobilize again in massive numbers to send a clear message of the need for change.
This year's themes:
* Stop the raids and separation of families
* Just legalization
* Access to driver's licenses
* Stop Social Security No Match Letters
* Fair International Trade Agreements for Workers
* Good Jobs and Health Care for all
* End the War in Iraq
If you’d like a sign, here’s the info: Window sign: $2 plus postage. Call (608) 250-9240 or email [email protected] to order. For PC fashionistas, T-shirts are $15. Be the first on your block.
Apr 28 2008
Standing together, in groups big and small, for peace
From our friends at the Iraq Moratorium:
Reports from Moratorium Day #8, just over a week ago, are still coming in and being posted on the Iraq Moratorium website, and a few got us thinking. One report, our first ever from Point Arena, CA said:
Three of us came out to honor Iraq Moratorium on Friday, April 18, 2008 in front of the local post office.
We carried a sign and displayed it prominently, and we handed out flyers to interested people.
The weather was very cold and exceptionally windy; I think that kept people away. However, we felt really good about joining people all over the U.S. to stand against the Iraq war.
Looked at in a vacuum, three people doesn’t sound too impressive, does it? Well, we Googled Point Arena. It’s a tiny rural town with a population of 486. Not an easy place to build an anti-war presence. And for us, their conclusion gets to the essence of the Moratorium:
“We felt really good about joining people all over the U.S. to stand against the Iraq war.”
Apr 22 2008
Earth Day’s real, lasting legacy
Happy Earth Day.
Maybe we should start with a disclosure that I am Gaylord Nelson’s biographer, which may give me a somewhat different perspective on Earth Day, founded by Senator Nelson (pictured), than some others.
That said, do take time to read Meteor Blade’s commentary and Q-A with Denis Hayes, who has been associated with Earth Day since Gaylord Nelson hired him to coordinate the first one in 1970.
Earth Day, it is true, has not solved all of the world’s environmental problems. But it has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on how people think about and relate to the environment.
Gaylord Nelson’s primary goal in launching Earth Day was to get environmental issues a prominent place on this country’s political agenda, and it certainly accomplished that long ago. On the first Earth Day, seven months after Nelson announced plans for what he envisioned as a campus environmental teach-in, 20 million people — 10 per cent of the US population at the time — participated in some way.
Earth Day introduced the Environmental Decade, an unparalleled period of legislative and grassroots activity to protect the nation’s environment. More significant environmental legislation was signed into law during the eleven-year “decade” (1970-1980) than during the 170-year period prior to Earth Day. Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental laws, and hundreds of other public lands bills to protect and conserve natural resources.
Philip Shabecoff, a noted environmental writer, described it this way:
After Earth Day, nothing was the same. Earth Day brought revolutionary change and touched off a great burst of activism that profoundly affected the nation’s laws, its economy, its corporations, its farms, its politics, science, education, religion, and journalism… Most important, the social forces unleashed after Earth Day changed, probably forever, the way Americans think about the environment.
Apr 20 2008
Milwaukee Moratorium: Spring sorta sprung
It was very spirited, with large student contingents from Fratney Street Elementary School and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Progressive Students organization, and a few high schoolers, too. Iraq Veterans Against the War, Peace Action Wisconsin, Veterans for Peace and Kids for Peace were all represented, with lots of creative signs. A dog urging “Bones, not bombs” also joined us.
Flags, signs, banners, music from a boom box and a return of the chaing gang — Bush, Cheney and Rice in their prison suits — all added to the upbeat atmosphere. Fifty degree weather, the warmest in months, didn’t hurt either. Huge positive responses from passers-by who honked their horns, waves and yelled encouragement, with rarely a discouraging word. After a long, cold, dark winter of monthly vigils, this was rejuvenating.
More reports about other actions are beginning to trickle in to the Iraq Moratorium website
Apr 17 2008
Do something on Friday to end the war
Not even General Petraeus can see any light at the end of the tunnel.
There’s no exit plan, no timetable, not even any criteria to know when we’ve achieved the “victory” that George Bush keeps promising.
The Pentagon keeps sending the same troops into the combat zone, over and over and over.
And as long as that continues, the antiwar effort must continue just as doggedly, month in and month out, over and over and over. There is no other choice except to surrender to the warmongers.
Friday is Iraq Moratorium #8, a day to do something to show that you want the war and the occupation to end. Please do something.
Apr 16 2008
The invisible fatality toll; 150,000 US dead in 5 years
Imagine not 4,000+ Americans dead, but 150,000 American fatalities in the last five years.
Thirty or more American deaths on the average day, week in and week out, with no end in sight.
Would that be enough to arouse the citizenry, to demand an end to the killing and bloodshed?
You’d think so. But the answer is no.
The 4,000 US fatalities in Iraq pale beside the 150,000 Americans killed by firearms in this country over a five-year period.
Wednesday, the first anniversary of the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech, the media paid a little bit of attention to memorials and observances around the country.
But there is no real outcry and no concerted national effort to end firearms violence, even though 32 — the number of people killed by gunfire at Virginia Tech — is also the number of gun homicides recorded on an average day in the United States.
That’s because many gun-toting Americans seem to think we have a constitutional right to kill each other with firearms, or at least to be free of any sensible restraints that might limit or prevent gun violence.
Apr 15 2008
How pissed off are you, anyway?
We know you’re plenty pissed off about the war.
Pissed off enough to write about it and comment on it, and to resort to some pretty rough language to describe how you feel.
Five years. Thousands of Americans and perhaps a million Iraqis dead. Four million refugees. Trillions of dollars wasted. Government spying. Torture. Lies. Coverups.
It’s enough to piss anyone off.
But are you pissed off enough to do something?
Apr 14 2008
Now! Just for you! Your own $3-trillion shopping spree!
We asked recently what you would rather have than a war.
Now, from Brave New Films, an easy, amusing way to make those choices:
The occupation of Iraq will cost $3 trillion, America’s most expensive conflict since WWII.
Can YOU spend that money better?
Here’s your chance to go on a virtual $3 trillion shopping spree and prove it!
Browse our online store, fill up your cart, click the checkout button, and send virtual gifts to everyone you know.A private island fortress? Healthcare for all? Anything you can imagine, and if you can’t find it, add it yourself!
Watch the video, then load up your cart here.
Apr 14 2008
Tax Day: Figures don’t lie, liars figure
Tuesday is Tax Day, which prompts people to ask: What is the government doing with my money?
Well, there’s a trillion or two or three for the Iraq war.
Not to worry, says President Bush. The war is consuming only a “modest fraction” of the country’s wealth.
The National Priorities Project says that in 2007 the federal government spent 42.2 percent of every income tax dollar on military spending.
There’s an old cliche that figures don’t lie but liars figure. Who you gonna believe — the guy who lied us into the war?
Apr 10 2008
Help! We’re being outspent a trillion to one
WARNING: Fund-raising appeal ahead.
When a handful of people decided to launch the Iraq Moratorium to take on the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, we knew it wouldn’t be a fair fight.
We knew we’d be outmanned, outgunned and outspent by those whose interest seems to be to keep this nation at war.
But we didn’t realize that the Pentagon would spend as much on the war every five seconds as the Iraq Moratorium spends in a year to try to stop it.
We’ve done a lot with very little money. Since September, more than 800 events, from Vermont to California, from Florida to Washington state, have joined under the Iraq Moratorium umbrella to call for an end to the war and occupation. Tens of thousands have taken individual action as well on the Third Friday of each month.
But we really need your financial help to keep this national grassroots movement alive and growing.
The magnitude of what we’re up against really hit us with recent reports of the war’s cost — $5,000 a second! That’s more than double what we spend in a month.