Yesterday’s observance of International Women’s Day began for me with a sober reminder that women’s lives, and those of their children, are still under siege both here in the U.S. and everywhere. The front page of my morning newspaper carried this truly disheartening picture of women in black as it were, voting in Iraq, a testament to the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq, where previous to the U.S. invasion, women were among the most privileged in the Arab world. Now they are seen in restrictive clothing, voting while invisible.

Radio Free Europe reports that,

“There’s been significant attention paid to the role of women in this weekend’s parliamentary elections, both as voters and as candidates. Much of the discussion has centered around how Iraqi women will participate in the vote. There’s been some concern over the potential for Iraqi men to unduly influence the votes of their female relatives. A number of citizens speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq admitted that such pressure was commonplace.

One citizen, Abu Milad, told RFI that he was sure his wife would vote for whomever he votes for. Hussein Abdel-Rahman, a young college student, admitted that he will attempt to sway his sisters’ voting choices, but attributed this phenomenon to the nature of Iraqi society, which is dominated by what he calls the “Eastern view” of relations between men and women…

…Young women from a village in Diyala province told RFI that many women in rural areas were being told that they were not allowed to leave their house to participate in the elections. They added that the male members of many households had collected the voter registration cards of all the women in their family, and planned to cast ballots on behalf of their female relatives, in addition to their own.”

Democracy? Not. But what nailed me was the article directly beneath the picture reporting that our state legislature in Kentucky once again is suffering from an acute case of brain in paranoid dick disease with some of our abortion phobic representatives trying to hijack 2 bills aimed at improving children’s lives by insisting on the addition of anti-abortion language.

Call it a tale of 2 fundamentalisms. If we really wanted to end terrorism, the first place to look is clearly at home.

On a related note, the U.S. military continues to prey on our children, marketing the fighting of war as an opportunity for occupational training and education, while the fine print on the sign up contract tells a different story. Young women in particular however face additional risk of being sexually assaulted by these snake oil recruiters. Learning Not Recruiting* has issued their annual compendium of suspect behavior by recruiters that has been reported (which they quickly point out is likely to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of actual number of cases). As they note in an email,

“With whatever other crimes in frauding, drug dealing, questionable enlistments, etc. that are committed, the vast majority of the reports involve sexual assault, rape and manipulation of young girls by recruiters.”

Documented reports for 2009:

1. Police: Army recruiter had sex contact with teen
recruit
2. Army Recruiter Arrested on Sex Charge
3. Army recruiter pleads not guilty
4. Recruiter uses slur at high schools
5. Former Recruiter Gets 3 Years on Child Sex
Charges
6. National Guard recruiter pleads guilty in theft
7. Marine guilty in sex assault of stepniece
8. Army recruiter disciplined
9. Ex-Guard recruiter sentenced to prison
10. Area Navy recruiter charged with statutory rape of
teenager
11. Marine recruiter faces 14 felonies
12. Case impugns Marine recruiting
13. Parents of recruit sue the Army, say they were
misled
14. Marine recruiter gets 3 years for sexual assault
15. Air Force recruiter charged with selling drugs
16. Marine recruiter charged with pimping girl, 14
17. Recruiter allegedly propositioned student
18. Ex-CCHS Army recruiter under investigation
19. Former Marine recruiter pleads guilty of rape
20. Miramontes guilty of manslaughter
21. Recruiter charged in child prostitution sting
22. 2 recruiting bosses fired after suicide probe
23. U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal
Appeals: US v. Scholz (Conviction upheld against
recruiter who had sex with and impregnated 14-
year-old 9th grade student)
24. Low morale, stress blamed in Army recruiter
suicides
25. U.S. Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals: US v.
Curran (Conviction of recruiter on multiple sex
offenses upheld)
26. Marine gunnery sergeant jailed 90 days for
adultery
27. Substance abuse appears a problem among stressed
Army recruiters

We read about the abuse of child soldiers in what the press paints as darkest Africa, all too easy to ignore because it is over there and it is someone else’s children. But it isn’t just over there, it is here too. It is terrorism being committed against our own children, and most assuredly not the defense of democracy.

Meanwhile, the military enjoys impunity from the damage caused by dumping toxics near military bases, perchlorate pollution and weaponry leashed on civilian populations such as Fallujah causing all manner of health problems, especially for children whose tiny bodies are the most vulnerable and birth defects and miscarriages.

Yet hardly a day goes by that we do not hear from our country’s leaders that they are spending billions more to fight terrorism and keep us safe from the enemy while our schools are pretty literally reduced to holding bake sales to stay solvent. Orwellian doublespeak at its finest, or as Pogo would have said, we have met the enemy and he is we. Poisoning children, sexually assaulting women and girls, depriving women of their rights while the country goes bankrupt–we are not safer and any notion that this is democracy is delusional. We are not only terrorizing others, we are terrorizing (and killing) ourselves.

———-

*With many thanks to Ret. Col. Ann Wright for bringing the recruiting abuse story to my attention.

This morning I awoke to the image of a little girl in Afghanistan.  I don’t know her name, let’s call her the Accidental Terrorist–she had the prettiest dark eyes, wide open staring sightless at the sky, her body mangled and bloody, a victim of one of the recent U.S. bombing attacks. She was just a little girl.

She must have run outside to play despite warnings from the soldiers to stay inside and keep her head down.  She wasn’t a terrorist, and we are not safer for her death.  Instead, we have destroyed a piece of the future of the world.  It was not ours to so wantonly dismiss.

I wonder–did the young soldiers who dropped the bomb know that children would be killed?  Can they live with that?  What will they tell their children about the day they killed a little girl who  ran out to play in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile back in this country it seems that a Saudi prince known for financing terrorism is now the 4th largest voting shareholder at Fox News’ parent company.  You’ve got to admit, where Bin Laden left off, Glenn Beck has carried on quite nicely with his inaccurate, incendiary spew. Ingenious really.

We’ve gotten to a point in this country where it is almost like a case of mass assisted suicide.  Jonestown without the koolaid.  Our schools and roads are in disrepair. Sick, broke, unemployed and foreclosed have become our public lack of options.  Our air is unbreathable and our water undrinkable, our press corp spends countless hours reporting on Tiger Woods’ apology and boys who don’t go up in balloons and teabag rallies and whether Sarah Palin is a creditable candidate for President.  And in the name of ending terrorism, we send our children to kill other children half way around the world.

If Bin Laden is high-fiving somewhere out of sight, who can blame him for we have become the destructive force that he aspired to be.

She was just a little girl.

Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.

Now the U.S. military has a new version of this callously useless advice that they are using in Marjah, Afghanistan:

Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.

The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman’s well-worded summary of the results:

“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”

What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?

It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…

…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.

These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.

You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here.  Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.

Billions of dollars spent killing children.  How dare we talk about winning or honor.

Like many of you, I have discouragement fatigue. No matter what we do, it seems that the corporate and and government leaders are determined to take the fast road to hell in a handbasket. We keep waging war, we continue to destroy the environment, people are hungry and sick, too many have lost jobs and homes, our schools and roads are in disrepair. Getting out of bed in the morning sounds like a really bad idea. What difference will it make if we sign one more petition, call our elected officials one more time, let alone head out into frigid temperatures to a protest gathering?

One very good reason is that it is not so much about the impact our actions have on others but rather how our actions empower ourselves. I have written multiple times about the power of protest and standing up for what you believe in (here, here and here) but what is so difficult to capture in words is the spiritual empowerment of standing your ground. I’m not sure how many protests I attended before I came to understand this–quite a few–until one day, standing with a few friends protesting outside of a lecture given by Condoleezza Rice, I found myself feeling literally rooted to the cold sidewalk where we stood. That is something you have to feel to understand, not something that can be adequately said in words. But since that time, whenever I am out on the street, I stop to pay attention to the strength and connectedness that comes from standing your ground.

Wile at a vigil in 2005, two days after being arrested and jailed when trying to enlist at the Times Square Recruiting Center (left to right: Miriam Poser, Joan Wile, Cindy Sheehan, Carole Abrahams, Joan Kaye and Maggie Vall)

Joan Wile, founder of Grandmothers Against the War and one of my sheroes has a wonderful piece on her blog, where she talks about why the sense of empowerment that comes from standing up for what you believe in is so important in these discouraging times (and while both she and I are talking about standing in the literal sense, as I try to do in my writing every day, you can do a whole lot of standing up from a sitting down position :-). Describing the weekly gathering of Grandmothers Against War on the day after George Bush was re-elected she writes,

The other people standing on Fifth Avenue with me were equally depressed and ready to give up the struggle. You’ve never seen so many long faces.

Then, an amazing thing happened. As we stood there with our peace signs and banners, the black clouds in our minds began to waft away. Slowly, we began to smile and chatter in our usual good spirits. By the end of the vigil, we were practically jubilant. Nothing had changed — the grim reality was still the fact that the worst President in history was going to head the government for another four years and reap hideous injustices and catastrophes. But, WE had changed. We had decided to press on and continue battling for our issues.

It was clear that in the act of fighting back, we were able to banish our hopeless feelings.

Eve Tetaz at an anti-war protest in March 2007. By Lori Perdue.

Or put another way, in the words of Eve Tetaz, an almost 79 year old who has racked up her 21rst arrest for protesting puts it,

“In everything I do,” she said, flashing her large smile, “I want to be a reflection of my faith.”

Indeed. Imagine the power of what might happen if every person who feels that corporations should not be more powerful than people and every person who is unemployed and every person who cannot afford healthcare and every person who believes in the right to breathable air and drinkable water and every person who has lost a home or lost a child or spouse to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were to gather with their neighbors in the town squares of this country. Not in anger although goodness knows we have every right to be, but simply to empower ourselves with the act of standing up for our lives. That would be a force to be reckoned with.

Remember when you got that flatbed scanner and the first thing you did was scan your ass or your lips or your breasts and post them to your GeoCities site (and don’t even think about asking, I’m not going to repost them)?  Well now TSA  can do the same thing and zap you with a bunch of radiation at the same time which does not make me feel safer, in fact it scares the crap out of me.

What scares me a whole lot more though is just how fast the Gotta Have Scanners cheer went up after the Is That A Big Stick In Your Pocket Or Are You Glad To See Me bomber wannabe totally messed up his chance to please all the awaiting virgins in heaven.  If you recall, so barely 24 hours after September 11, 2001, we already knew who piloted the planes, where they were based and who sent them, a few weeks later, we mysteriously had a large enough supply of flags and decals for every car in America.  If  we were good enough to figure it out so quickly afterwords, lets face it, we knew ahead of time.  And it is pretty damned clear that just happened again.

If that isn’t enough to make you a tad cynical, the fact that Michael Chertoff is a big scanner cheerleader ought to.  As James Ridgeway points out, it’s all about the money, honey:

(T)he rush toward full-body scans already seems unstoppable. They were mandated today as part of the “enhanced” screening for travelers from selected countries, and hundreds of the machines are already on order, at a cost of about $150,000 apiece. Within days of the bombing attempt, Reuters was reporting that the “greater U.S. government shift toward using the high-tech devices could create a boom for makers of security imaging products, and it has already created a speculative spike in share prices in some companies.”

Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt “a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery”—all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan.

Want some swamp land in Florida too?  Meanwhile…there is now a new, new, new recommendation regarding mammograms:

This new advice, which is published in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology, comes from the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI) and the American College of Radiology (ACR). And these groups suggest just the opposite – that the screening does save lives.

The latest recommendations seem to be based primarily on bad-mouthing the earlier new recommendations to get less mammograms and dogged insistence that finding more cancers and finding them earlier saves lives.  This is the mantra that we have been made pepto aware of for years now, despite the questionable evidence to support it.  For more on this, see here, here and here.

I’m not a scientist, but what I do know is this:  No other country suggests that women have as many mammograms as we  do in the U.S.  And other developed countries where women start getting mammograms at a later age and less frequently have comparable or better survival and incidence rates.  But again, as with the airport scanners, we need to look at the money angle–if women don’t get mammograms on a regular basis before the age of 50 and then get them every few years, radiologists and imaging centers are going to lose a lot of money.  But that is not a justification for zapping our breasts unnecessarily.

Of course as a convenience for the busy traveler, maybe now we can just get mammograms at the airport.  But in all fairness since we now know you can hide explosives between your balls, how about we squish those too as a matter of national security.

But what really is key here is that our national security policy is a bad joke.  Scanners aren’t the answer (and lets be very clear here–any amount of radiation adds to our body load and is a risk).  Nor is stoking the fear of ‘terrorism’.  Nor is militarism. And like breast cancer, detection isn’t a cure-all.  If you want to end breast cancer, you need to find what causes it and eradicate the cause.  The same is true for global security. Real security comes from enabling people, not from disabling them.  Food, health, jobs.  For far less money, we would  reap far greater results.  But where’s the profit in that?

Remember that  careful list you think about making early in the year about how much you will spend on holiday shopping and then it all goes to hell in late December when you mostly just want to get done and go home…

With almost no debate…

The U.S. Senate approved a $636 billion military spending bill on Saturday that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also includes money to extend jobless aid and Medicare payment rates for two months.

By a vote of 88-10, the Senate approved the bill and sent it to President Barack Obama to sign into law. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Wednesday.

The bill covers Pentagon operations through September 30, 2010. But the $128 billion approved for ongoing wars probably will not be enough to cover Obama’s plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan…

…lawmakers funded 10 more Boeing Co C-17 transport planes than the Pentagon had asked for, at a cost of $2.5 billion.Congress also kept alive over the Pentagon’s objections the troubled VH-71 presidential helicopter, made by Lockheed, and an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter made by General Electric Co and Rolls Royce Group Plc.

Then there was the health care bill that we were told last summer would cost a trillion dollars over 10 years.  The cost of the current plan is unknown because the Senate has devolved into  a last minute Christmas shopper who has to buy a gift no matter what it costs, might find a bargain or have to pay full price but hey as long as you get  it before Christmas who cares.  And then  there is the Copenhagen “agreement“:

“Finally we sealed a deal,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The ‘Copenhagen Accord‘ may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this decision…is an important beginning.”

But a decision at marathon 193-nation talks merely took note of the new accord, a non-binding deal for combating global warming led by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The 193 nations stopped far from a full endorsement of the plan, which sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial times and holds out the prospect of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020 for developing nations.

The plan does not specify greenhouse gas cuts needed to achieve the 2 Celsius goal that is seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms and rising seas.

If asked, I wonder how President Obama would characterize his leadership style, because I don’t know what you call it when the Congress spends the better part of a year crafting an expensive, deadly healthcare plan while barely blinking an eye about spending even more money on poorly defined wars  while completely trivializing the issue of climate change that ought to be a national emergency priority item.

Without a question we need to re-prioritize our thinking and change our framework, to wit, profit at the expense of human rights and environmental degradation should be considered a treasonous act.  We also need to play a little round of six degrees.

The U.S. military is arguably the world’s biggest polluter.  When we spend money on the military we need to take into account that aside from funneling that money from education, health care and other vital services that make us more secure, we are also contributing to the further environmental degradation of the planet.  And courtesy of IrishAntiWar.org, here are some other connections between military spending and the environment:

• Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.

• CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road for one year.

• If the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do.

• The $600 billion that the US Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the US’s current electricity demand and cut 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions.

• In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.

• US president Obama has committed to spending $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure. The US spends that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.

I’ve also been thinking about the odd juxtaposition of the use of abortion rights as a tool of white, conservative American men to jettison meaningful health care in this country and the increasingly louder drumbeat, mostly by white, liberal American men to tie the benefits of family planning to the use of population control for the sake of the planet. Really?  Using the latter line of reasoning we should also cut maternal health care funds such as they are because hell, half a million (almost exclusively non-white) women die of maternal mortality every year and if we can up that number, that means less babies and mothers and that is good for the planet.  It is no accident that the colonization and control of women’s lives is being ratcheted up at the same time we trash the planet.  And we need to make that connection.

Derrick Jensen has an eloquent vision of the first step of what it would take to re-frame the discussion of how we are going to walk in this world, and I’ll leave you with that:

A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture-industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization-and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.

I’ll leave it to you to do the math.  You don’t need a calculator, just a heart and a brain.

The cost of war–

The annual U.S. military budget is almost $1 trillion — about $1.9 million every minute.

Granny bankruptcy plan–

President Obama called on Congress Wednesday to approve $250 payments to more than 50 million seniors to make up for no increase in Social Security next year.

The White House put the cost at $13 billion (slightly more than 1 hour of war).

1 Billion–The number of hungry people in the world.

Overdraft Protectionism–

A year after the financial system was brought to its knees, a resurgent JPMorgan Chase reported a second consecutive quarter of surprisingly strong profit on Wednesday, solidifying its position at the pinnacle of American banking.

JPMorgan’s results — $3.6 billion in profit for the third quarter — fanned hopes on Wall Street that the nation’s financial sector was entering a new period of prosperity, despite lingering troubles.

and:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s third-quarter earnings more than tripled from the depths of the financial crisis a year ago as higher trading profits offset a drop in investment banking.Goldman earned $3.03 billion in the July-September period, or $5.25 per share, easily beating analysts’ expectations of $4.24, the bank reported Thursday. Goldman also recorded $5.35 billion in compensation expenses.

The combined Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase quarterly earnings amount to $6.63 per hungry person. And the reason some of those folks are hungry is because:

Corporate earnings are up — mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies’ costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is a self-defeating strategy. If workers don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing them, they won’t buy, and company profits will disappear.

Oh and by the way,

There were 344,000 foreclosure filings  and banks re-possessed 88,000 homes last month.

Can’t say it better than this:  Robert Reich–

In other words, this is all temporary fluff, folks. Anyone who hasn’t learned by now that there’s almost no relationship between the Dow and the real economy deserves to lose his or her shirt in the Wall Street casino.

Meanwhile at the Wyobraska Tea Party–

An AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the same rifle that a man carried to an Obama rally in Minnesota last month, was auctioned off and scores of tickets were sold, raising about $2,300, with another approximately $500 donated to the group.

Here in the U.S. we have the best government money can buy.  As the healthcare debate has  illustrated all too well, corporate  lobbying goes a long way. But the problem goes beyond that. According to a new group on Facebook, Full Disclosure of U.S. Congress/Supreme Court Stock Portfolios NOW!
a look at investments in the defense industry held by members of Congress might make you wonder just what interests our military is defending.

According to the most recent reports of their personal finances, 151 current members of Congress had between $78.7 million and $195.5 million invested in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. In all, these companies received more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the budget watchdog group OMB Watch.

and,

in 2008, the Center for Responsive Politics, listed the following lawmakers as having the most money invested in companies with Department of Defense contracts:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) $28,872,067 $38,209,020
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) $12,081,050 $49,140,000
Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) $9,232,037 $37,105,000
Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis) $5,207,668 $7,612,653
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif) $2,684,050 $6,260,000
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich) $2,469,029 $8,360,000
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) $2,000,002 $2,000,002
Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis) $1,365,004 $5,800,000
Rep. Kenny Ewell Marchant (R-Texas) $1,163,231 $1,163,231
Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) $1,000,001 $5,000,000

The group is calling for support of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act) which:

would prohibit Members of Congress and their staff from using nonpublic information they are able to obtain through their official positions to enrich their personal portfolios.

This is an excellent idea and deserves the support of every American.