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A built-in cure for war

Erin Niemela's recent proposal that we amend the Constitution to ban war is provocative and persuasive. Count me in. But I have a related idea that I think should be tried first.

While banning war is just what the world ordered, it has about it something of the whole Bush-Cheney ordeal during which we spent years trying to persuade Congress to ban torture. By no means do I want to be counted among those opposed to banning torture. But it is relevant, I want to suggest, that torture had already been banned. Torture had been banned by treaty and been made a felony, under two different statutes, before George W. Bush was made president. In fact, the pre-existing ban on torture was stronger and more comprehensive than any of the loophole-ridden efforts to re-criminalize it. Had the debate over "banning torture" been entirely replaced with a stronger demand to prosecute torture, we might be better off today.

We are in that same situation with regard to war. War was banned 84 years ago, making talk of banning war problematic.

We’re overwhelmingly for it, unless we’re overwhelmingly against it!

On June 8, the Columbus Dispatch carried a poll that measured people’s opinions on issues concerning affirmative action, race, and LGBT questions. While the results were generally what readers here would consider positive, the affirmative action/race, questions & answers were far more revealing in how it was said and it what wasn’t said.

First of all, the LGBT results showed the basically positive movement in people’s opinions that all media outlets have been reporting recently. Marriage equality was supported by 52%, vs. 43% in opposition. Support for anti-discrimination legislation that includes gays, lesbians was higher, with 73% supporting it and only 22% stating opposition.

Where the poll got really interesting was the next, affirmative action section.

In answer to the question;

“In order to make up for past discrimination, do you favor or oppose programs that make special efforts to help blacks and other minorities get ahead?”

The results were a positive, and overwhelming, 68% in favor with only 24% in opposition.

However, in answer to the very next question, worded as follows:

Hearings held on ‘Right-to-work’ in Ohio

After hearings on June 4, packed by angry, vocal opponents, the Manufacturing & Workforce Development Committee of the Ohio legislature, unanimously voted to table three so-called ‘right-to-work’ bills. Those bills had been introduced by right wing GOP legislators Ron Maag & Kristina Roegner a month earlier. Backed by the Tea Party, the bills were touted as the “Workplace Freedom Act,” but are actually designed to break up Union workplaces, after workers had voted to be represented by unions. Hundreds of workers rallied on statehouse grounds, protesting the proposed legislation, while the hearings were held.

“Ohioans have spoken, and did so overwhelmingly, on these ongoing attacks on working families and the middle class,” stated Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga. “When corporate politicians gave us Senate Bill 5, to wipe out public worker’s bargaining in the state, the people overwhelmingly said NO! We wish these guys would get the message. We need jobs, health care, a decent, safe workplace & a good economy, not more of these divisive attacks on working families and the middle class!”

Three things young people should know to save the world

Of course, old people should know these things too, and some small percentage does know them, but energy seems better invested in trying to teach them to young people who have less to unlearn in the process.
1. Obedience is extremely dangerous.

This seems like it must be either wrong or misleadingly incomplete. And that would be true if we were talking about children. If a two-year-old is about to run in front of a car, please do yell "stop!" and hope for as much obedience as possible.

But I'm talking to young people, not children.

When you grow up, your obedience should always be conditional. If a master chef appears to be instructing you to prepare a revoltingly bad dinner but wants you to obey his or her instructions on faith, you might very well choose to do so, considering the risk to be tolerable. If, however, the chef tells you to chop off your little finger, and you do it, that will be a sure sign that you've got an obedience problem.

For All Children Everywhere

We can end war.

Please, before you read on, let those four words float in silence for half a minute, until you actually hear them - until they come alive with meaning as insistent as a hatching egg. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may be to promote it, no matter how thoroughly it runs the global economy and dominates almost every government.

We can shut down this system of self-perpetuating violence and geopolitical chicken. We can dismantle the glory machine and redefine patriotism. We can curtail the most toxic enterprise on the planet. We can end war.

Oh, the audacity to say such a thing! Yet it amounts to no more than saying: We can evolve, individually and collectively. We can bring wisdom to conflict. We can reclaim the institutions that run our lives. We can look into the eyes of children, those we know and those we don’t know, and vow to protect them. We can start caring again about future generations and bring their well-being into our thoughts and plans.

"Worst in the Nation"

The new legislation introduced in the Ohio House is "one of the nation's all-time worst abortion bills," according to Think Progress. I agree.

Between the state budget and bills intended to shame and demean our patients, Ohio women have never been the subject of such severe political attacks. We're fighting back and we need you with us. Next week, join me and some Planned Parenthood patients for a telephone town hall.

Register here.

During this call, I’ll be answering questions from Ohio women just like you -- women who want to know what affect politicians' actions will have on their health care.

After registering, the night of the call, the only thing you need to do to participate is answer the phone. On the evening of June 19, we'll call you. Just stay on the line to hear us discuss the current political environment with Planned Parenthood patients and supporters. You'll have the chance to participate in the discussion if you choose.

Please join us to learn how to fight back.
Stephanie Kight

Election Day in Iran: Meet the candidates

Iranians will head to the polls tomorrow to elect a new President. Iran has been a major player in the Middle East for decades and, considering the country’s loose remarks about nuclear energy and existential warfare throughout the past few years, all eyes will be directed on Iran come Election Day. This will also be the first vote for Iranians since the 2009 re-election of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A dismal occasion for Iranian voters, the 2009 election was almost certainly rigged in Ahmadinejad’s favor. However depressing, that election in 2009 did manage to inspire what became known as the Green Movement, comprised of Iranian moderates and liberals, which still seeks to reform Iranian public policy. Unfortunately for those Iranian moderates, liberals, and independents, the slate of candidates that will appear for selection on Election Day are far from reform candidates. If a candidate fails to win more than 50% of the vote on Friday, then a runoff election will occur on June 21.

Has Twitter been retweeting your every move to the NSA all along?

Since the beginning of the current privacy scandal, Twitter has been careful to brand itself as a champion of privacy rights – but are they? As other tech titans first denied complicity, then joined together seeking permission to discuss it in the compliant American media, Twitter remained outside the fray.

In response to widespread public anxiety that Americans' social networking information is being funneled into the NSA's controversial PRISM program, a concerted effort has been made by Facebook, Google and Microsoft to be seen as defenders of privacy.

Microsoft released a statement on Wednesday urging the government to consider that "greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including FISA orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues." Facebook made a similar public statement earlier this week, and Google asked the government "to help make it possible for Google to publish in our transparency report aggregate numbers of national security requests."

The national security state thanks you for your participation

On a cold night in January 1990 in Berlin, a mob of angry citizens and western intelligence agents struck a blow for freedom. They stormed the headquarters of Stasi, the secret police service of the GDR. Guards were beaten, furniture was thrown, files were stolen, files were destroyed. The most effective and pervasive apparatus of surveillance the world has known until today was exposed and dismantled.

After the dust settled and the CIA agents had spirited away the files that concerned them most, the public of a reuniting Germany was confronted by a harsh reality: their world was riddled with secret policemen and snitches. According to some estimates, as many as one in 166 East Germans spied on their fellow citizens as a full time employee of the Stasi and as many as one in seven were parttime snitches. Spouses spied on each other. The system was effective and rewarded the citizen who participated materially and psychologically.

How the Pentagon removes entire peoples

If we think at all about our government's military depopulating territory that it desires, we usually think of the long-ago replacement of native Americans with new settlements during the continental expansion of the United States westward.

Here in Virginia some of us are vaguely aware that back during the Great Depression poor people were evicted from their homes and their land where national parks were desired. But we distract and comfort ourselves with the notion that such matters are deep in the past.

Occasionally we notice that environmental disasters are displacing people, often poor people or marginalized people, from their homes. But these incidents seem like collateral damage rather than intentional ethnic cleansing.

If we're aware of the 1,000 or so U.S. military bases standing today in some 175 foreign countries, we must realize that the land they occupy could serve some other purpose in the lives of those countries' peoples. But surely those countries' peoples are still there, still living -- if perhaps slightly inconvenienced -- in their countries.

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