Out of Iraq and back to the American city

Dennis J. Kucinich, Democratic Candidate for President of the United States
10th Annual Wall Street Project Conference
Sheraton New York & Towers, Monday, January 8, 2007

We are losing our nation to a philosophy of war and destruction. It is time for policies of peace and construction. It is time for the philosophy of peace, nonviolence and economic justice. This was the philosophy of Dr. King, Gandhi, Jesus, Fredrick Douglas, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, and Jesse Jackson.

We are all united with the philosophy which birthed the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the dreams of social and economic justice which could be called forth by those who were ready to stand up, to speak out, to march, to demand, to testify about the good news:

National press conference for border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean

This Wednesday (Jan. 10, 2007) Grassfire will be in Washington, D.C. to present more than 200,000 petitions at a national press conference for border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

This could be the last opportunity to make a plea for these agents who are scheduled to begin their decade long prison terms on January 17!

These men have been abandoned by the justice system, and now with their final hours of freedom dwindling, we are calling on members of our team to help us make one final, energetic plea to pardon these men and right this wrong.

+ + Please Alert your Friends

We have just surpassed 200,000 petition signatures--with more than 40,000 new signers added over the last two weeks!

We have witnessed an incredible turnout on behalf of agents Ramos and Compean. And as we near this final press event, we want to punctuate this amazing show of support by adding an additional 15,000 signatures over the next 24 hours!

It is an aggressive push, but Americans are a great group, and if they are told of the plight of these two agents, they will react...

Stand up against the surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

            It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

            His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Mr. President, surge this

Here's a statement that's blasphemy both in the peace movement and in the halls of the warmongers:

Whether we escalate the war or not is unimportant. 

Here's the situation we're in.  President Bush and his gang lied us into a war.  The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction or 9-11 or Saddam Hussein or democracy or making Americans more safe.  There is no reason for this war respectable enough to discuss in public.  And so, the U.S. corporate media does not discuss the reason, or absence of any reason, for the war.  Instead we're treated to endless debates over whether the war is a civil war, or we're given hundreds of hours of coverage of a report that has no legal force and no coherent point to it.  Or we learn all about new appointees and how their personalities differ from those of the outgoing war-makers.  Or we learn about new committee chairs and power-shifts in Congress.  Or we hear about polls and surveys on the war.  Or media coverage focuses on whether to escalate the war by sending in an additional number of troops that is small relative to the number already there. 

If not now, when?

Passing the grim marker of 3,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq briefly focused Americans’ attention on the war.  But we live in a big country with lots of malls. 

To be sure, the death of 3,000 soldiers is tragic and sickening, yet we are a nation of over 300 million and most families have not lost a loved one.  Even with some 32,000 G.I.’s requiring medical evacuation for wounds, most Americans still do not personally know a casualty of this war. 

But what if our fellow citizens were killed and wounded at the same rate as people in Iraq?  Here’s the math. 

Last fall the British medical journal “Lancet” published a study done by researchers from Johns Hopkins University estimating that the midrange number of Iraqis dead “as a consequence of the war” was about 2.5 percent of that country’s population, or roughly 655,000 people.  Over 90% of those died from violence.   

Comparable casualties in our country would mean that every person in Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and Philadelphia would be dead.  Every.  Single.  Person. 

How to Impeach a President

How to Impeach a President
2006, The Center for Constitutional Rights
Producers: Valerie Merians and Dennis Johnson, Melville House Productions Director: Dennis Johnson
Based on the book “Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush,” 143 p.
Run Time: 29 minutes

In less than a half hour, ordinary citizens can learn from constitutional scholars how to proceed thru CCR’s five-step strategy to impeach the president. With one member of Congress recently introducing Articles of Impeachment (Cynthia McKinney), all that remains is for citizens to begin lobbying their representatives to support impeachment.

Four articles of impeachment against Bush are outlined in the DVD and detailed in the book of the same title. The book also appends the Articles of Impeachment against Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974, and Bill Clinton in 1998, although David Swanson reports that Bush is the tenth president to face such action. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2007/2329

A different story

Back to Saddam one last time, and his trial and death, and the strong possibility - indeed, the common-sense conclusion - that part of the point of the charade was to silence him.

Why else try him only for his earliest crimes when the later ones racked up the big numbers (and, incidentally, served so nicely as a moral cover for our own activities in Iraq)?

Our alliance with Saddam in his "foment war with Iran" phase is so well documented - who hasn't seen the photo of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan's special envoy, in 1983, for instance? - that there's almost certain to be something hideously compromising in the secret record, which an ex-dictator at large would surely have talked about and a real trial would have unearthed.

The headless Horseman of the Apocalypse

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago. “The madness of militarism.”

We can blame Bush all we want -- and he does hold the reins right now -- but his main enablers these days are the fastidious public servants in Congress. They keep preparing the hay, freshening the water, oiling the saddle, even while criticizing the inappropriately jocular rider. And when the band plays “Hail to the Jockey,” most of the grown-up stable boys and girls can’t help saluting.

The people who actually live in Iraq have their own opinions, of course. UPI reported at the end of December that a new poll, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that “about 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today.” Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll last month, 11 percent of Americans support sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.

Buried in a New York Times news article on January 9 was this

Jamaica today: the legacy of Michael Manley

I recently visited the Caribbean island of Jamaica to deliver the fifth annual Michael Manley Memorial Lecture, in Kingston. It was, for me, a wonderful “homecoming.” I first visited Jamaica back in 1983, when I spoke as the “International Speaker” at Manley’s People’s National Party annual conference. I became friends with Manley, who served as Jamaica’s Prime Minister from 1972 to 1980, and again from 1989 to 1992. After combating prostate cancer, Manley died in 1997.

Through our friendship I came to understand why Michael Manley became beloved by so many millions of people throughout the world. As a champion of the poor and disposed, as a visionary spokesman for the politics of social justice, Michael Manley continues to inspire all who struggle for a more democratic, egalitarian social order.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney makes the case for impeachment

As some people learned from the minimal and abusive media coverage, on December 8, 2006, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney introduced Articles of Impeachment (http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/ node/16230) against President George W. Bush, making him the 10th president of the United States to face such action. Of course, McKinney was on her way out of office and thus more willing to challenge the Democratic Party leadership by upholding basic Constitutional principles.

Fewer people are aware that Congresswoman McKinney on December 27, 2006, entered into the Congressional Record (pages E2253 - 2255) extended remarks on impeachment that merit our close attention. Why would she do such a thing on her way out the door with no chance of reintroducing her bill in the new Congress? For one thing, she clearly would agree with the response Congressman John Conyers gave to Lewis Lapham when asked what he thought the point was of publishing a lengthy report laying out evidence of Bush's impeachable offenses. Conyers' response was: "to take away the excuse that we didn't know."

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