Labor Day: Real Labor {Responsibility} for Peace

As Battlefields Shift, Old Warrior for Peace Pursues the Same Enemy

The Rev. Carl Kabat inside the fence at a Colorado missile site before his recent arrest.

GREELEY, Colo. — It had been nearly 30 years since the Rev. Carl Kabat and a group of peace activists, including his fellow Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, barged into a General Electric weapons plant outside Philadelphia. Known as the Plowshares Eight, they battered missile nose cones with hammers in an effort to disable some of the world’s most fearsome weapons, and sprinkled blood on classified documents to protest the cold war, before they were arrested.

Snip

“I thought, ‘What a beautiful place this is except for this damnable thing in the ground that could kill two or three million people,’ ” Father Kabat said later in an interview at the Weld County Jail, where he is being held on misdemeanor criminal mischief and trespassing charges. “It’s insane.”

Snip

“You can’t just kill babies and children and old people indiscriminately,” he said. “It should be unreasonable for every human person to accept nuclear weapons............

Nuclear Balance

Indian Navy's nuclear sub and China's encirclement

This is a recent Real News Network Video, not up on YouTube yet!
While the leaders? ramp up the rhetoric about Iran, our Friend India Expands The Nuclear Defense Of!!

An NDTV panel in India discusses the launch Sunday of lndia's nuclear ballistic submarine INS Arihant

A Just Foreign Policy

YES Magazine, Summer '08 Edition, has a number of really good articles, and an interview, that should be read and obsorbed as to some of what we should be putting into public discussion as we try to turn this ship of state around and head in a direction that should already have been. These articles touch on a number of important issues, Very Important, not only for us, as a country, but our place in the world and for the world as a whole. They are also a matter of our Security and the Security of the planet

This one with Shultz might sound abit familiar for any who heard him talking when they returned from this conferance, but this is an Extremely Important subject and not only for us, and our National Security but the Security of everyone.

George Shultz: No Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons abolition is not only possible, but necessary for our security and perhaps even our survival.

It starts of thus:

George Shultz was there when nuclear disarmament slipped through our fingers. Today, he says, action is even more urgent. Sarah van Gelder interviews George Shultz, former Secretary of State.

This near the end stood out:

Shultz: I’m not trying to prescribe for the next president. We’re trying to get the building blocks ready. We’ve talked to people from some other countries, and they’re interested enough so that if the United States, working with Russia, were to take this initiative and get other people to join, it might be pretty exciting. And it might once again put us in the role of doing something that people feel good about.

"Doing someting the people feel good about." Not just something, for we have an awful lot to do, but this issue would bring back much of what we lost in our Moral Standing as a world neighbor. The Neo-Cons, or whatever label one would smack on them, have not only destroyed the arms talk tables, they are developing other uses, under the Nuclear Umbrella, for ordinance, with no worry as to the damage it will inflict nor the long term lasting effects, all for the Now, in Power and Blood Wealth!

Smart Security and the End of War
David Korten's thoughts on a just foreign policy and an emergent social movement calling the world’s parliaments to adopt the principles of Article 9 added to the Japanese Constitution following World War II.

This touches on a number of important issues and leads off thus:

David Korten’s thoughts on a just foreign policy (the theme of the summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine). “We humans have arrived at a defining moment. We must bring ourselves into balance with one another and Earth or suffer the consequences of social and environmental collapse. It creates a unique opportunity for bold action to end war as an instrument of foreign policy, convert to a peace economy, and create a world that works for all.”

He breaks this down to topics on:

The End of Excess

A Defining Challenge

The Last Superpower

Getting Smart

A Global Movement

A Smart Security Policy for the United States

And ends it with this:

It is an opportunity to at once increase our security, improve the quality of our lives, and regain a position of principled global leadership.

Talking NAFTA and Immigration.

Reclaiming Corn and Culture
For 14 years, NAFTA has displaced farmers and spurred migration. The answer from Mexico’s grassroots: co-ops and fair trade.

Mexicans doing it themselves, and to help solve the immigration problems We should be helping them.

They have sounded their voices loudly in Mexico’s capital, while quietly developing their own answers to NAFTA in farming communities throughout the country—working models of “fair trade” that consider people and the environment, not just profit margins.

Who are the losers.

By 2003, 1.3 million Mexican peasants had lost their livelihoods because of NAFTA. Many of the displaced farmers came north in search of work. Mexican migration to the U.S. increased an estimated 75 percent in the five years after the trade agreement took effect.

And in the name of Corporate, not to mention others seeking lowscale wage earners, profits and to force wages down, what has been presently going on.

Pickard has been a vocal critic of a new trade initiative under the Bush Administration that broadens NAFTA with increased emphasis on border security and corporate access to natural resources. The initiative, called the “Security and Prosperity Partnership,” or SPP, was launched two years ago in a series of negotiations with the Mexican and Canadian governments. Because the SPP is not a treaty, there is no congressional oversight, nor any process for citizen comment. The only input comes from a council of 30 advisors, ten selected by each government. The list reads like a Who’s Who of corporate North America, including the CEOs of Bell Canada, Chevron, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Home Depot/Canada, Kimberly-Clark/Mexico, Lockheed Martin, Scotiabank, and Wal-Mart.

Just the Facts: Military Spending versus Foreign Aid
The U.S. spends piles of money on foreign aid, right? See how the spending actually stacks up.

Just The Facts Poster in PDF

The top link above gives a smaller version of the tables on spending, the PDF can be downloaded and saved.

Raiding the War Chest
How to cut billions in unneeded weapons systems—and redirect the money towards health care, the economy, and climate.

It’s called “defense” spending, but how much of it is actually about defense? Here’s how we could save billions, and still have billions left to make the U.S. and the world more secure.

This speaks for itself, our continuing wasteful Huge and ever growing Defense Budgets, Questions Never Asked, Schrugs when coruption comes to light, and back to continuing growth of budgets, lining the pockets of the few rather than giving Us what we led to believe we are getting.

An economy slouching toward recession, or—depending on who you talk to—already there, has produced two seemingly contradictory effects. It has pushed the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history off the top of the list of citizen concerns. And it has simultaneously gotten those citizens, and even their members of Congress, talking much more about that disaster’s economic costs.

And how much are the 'Look the other way' Representatives, Our Representatives, reaping.

Since 2001 the Administration’s military budgets have more than doubled. Congress has approved every one, sometimes even expanding them a bit

No accountability for the "Worst Foreign Policy Disaster in U.S. History!", just rubber stamp what's requested, and tack on more, to continue the disaster, the disaster not only for us but especially for those we reaped it upon

Just some of what should be eleminated.

A half-dozen items that top this list are:

* The F/A 22 Raptor:
An obsolete, ever-more-costly aircraft designed to counter a Soviet model that was never built.

* Ballistic Missile Defense:
A system that doesn’t work for a threat that doesn’t exist.

* Virginia-Class Submarine:
Any conceivable mission for this new sub can be handled by the existing fleet.

* DD(G-1000) Destroyer:
Another cost-escalating program whose missions are well-covered by existing ships.

* V-22 Osprey:
This hybrid plane-helicopter is being rushed into service in Iraq despite safety, technical, and cost problems, both old and new.

* C-130J transport plane:
Has 168 documented deficiencies that render it unsafe.

And closes with this:

And while we’re repairing the damage to our relations with the rest of the world, we will need to put some of the money into repairing the social contract with our own citizens, by investing in our battered economy.

Just investing in our infrastructure would reap benefits across a number of area's, and investing in other much needed area's would expand those benefits and keep expanding them.

You can go here:

Theme Guide :: A Just Foreign Policy

To catch the ones above and a few more, all in the same issue, and online.

Superpower? Get Over It

Five years into the occupation of Iraq, the American public has had it. Add in an overstretched economy, spreading nuclear arms, climate disruption, and scrambles for scarce resources, and many are ready to ditch the superpower role and join a world of equals to confront our common challenges.

bet you thought I was through passing on some good reads and important information, well I'm not

The ACLU Releases Navy Files On Civilian Casualties In Iraq War (7/2/2008), this will take you to the Press Release.

Public Has A Right To Unfiltered Information About The Human Cost Of War, ACLU Says

Today's documents are available online

Attorneys involved in this project are Bargzie, Ben Wizner and Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU National Security Project. In a separate lawsuit, the ACLU sued for records concerning the abuse of prisoners held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. To date, that request has resulted in the release of more than 100,000 pages, all of which are available online

And another documentary of importance:

The Trailor

ON THE LINE is an inside look at the people behind one of the largest nonviolent movements in America today: the movement to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC, a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American soldiers. In a world where politics, passion, and Constitutional rights collide, protesters discuss their activism, the dark side of U.S. foreign policy, and the challenges of protesting since 9/11.

The principal cast includes:

* Martin Sheen, actor

* Susan Sarandon, actor

* Fr. Roy Bourgeois, Founder of School of the Americas Watch

* John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman

* Bob Barr, political analyst and former US Congressman

* Gerry Weber, ACLU-Georgia

The film is 55 minutes long.

"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." -- John F. Kennedy

Nuclear Disarmament and the Global Trade of Small Weapons

The present administration, as we all know, have done a totally distructive job in the policies it has set forth, with the help of those in congress that fall under the same political umbrella, or at least say they are, Republican and Conservative, as they tried to set about to enforce an Imperialist Presidency!

One has been the total destruction of the Nuclear Disarmament Table of discussion and diplomacy on ridding the Planet of Nuclear Weapons. Instead they threaten other countries with their fear propaganda and than act surprised that these countries start to seek their own defense under the Nuclear Umbrella, and attempt to put fear into the American Public, and others, on the growing Nuclear threats which they themselves have been forcing on others! As the United States developes other uses of Nuclear Weaponry and uses it!

The Ploughshares Fund has been front and center in the attempt to make a Peaceful World without Nuclear WMD's

Their spokesperson was interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation today, that spokesperson is actor Michael Douglas.

You can visit the Talk of the Nation page to read a short writeup, which includes this:

"The sight of the ruins left by the nuclear explosions in 1945 may seem a part of old history," Douglas said in an address to the United Nations. "Yet the fact is that the instruments of possible global annihilation ... many on high alert, remain a part of our contemporary history."

As well as listen to the 16min interview, with phone calls, or you can click here to listen

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He was in Washington to talk to Lawmakers on behalf of The Plowshares Fund.