Due to some unexpected social activity (Tuesday night in Celle) I’m a little behind on my news-intake schedule. I don’t want to write about Wikileaks and the Afghanistan documents until I’ve gotten a bit more analysis, so today I’ll just make the quickest comment I’ve made so far and save the heavier stuff for the weekend.
A small opportunity now exists for Obama to push back against the perception that his administration has Foxnewsophobia. Helen Thomas was a member of the White House Press Corps (all those journalists who sit in on the daily briefing and press conferences) for decades and had a prime seat in the front row until controversial comments about Palestine forced her to step down. Now that seat is empty.
The two biggest contenders for who to take that seat are a reporter from National Public Radio or a “reporter” from Fox “News”. Given all the backlash from last week’s Shirley Sherrod debacle, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to give the seat to NPR.
My guess is they give it to Fox News and continue with their bullshit strategy of trying to appear as centrist and moderate as possible by constantly lending credibility to the network that spends nearly all of its time attacking them. After all, if they give it to NPR instead of Fox News, what would Glenn Beck say?
Luckily, you can make your voice heard. Signing this petition will basically say to the White House: “If you give the seat to Fox News, you suck.”
After almost a year of trying to build consensus, top Democrats on Thursday admitted that a sweeping climate and energy bill simply couldn’t be done, faulting Republicans for being unwilling to contribute neither votes nor ideas toward forging a compromise. At a press conference on the Hill, climate crusader Sen. John Kerry called the prospect “admittedly narrow.” Majority Leader Harry Reid followed with a frank conclusion: “We simply don’t have the votes.”
I would be much more angry about this if I thought that the legislation would have had a serious impact on America’s energy policy and the global climate crisis, but had they moved forward we would have no doubt ended up with something weak and ineffective that wouldn’t have really solved anything or brought about real change but would have somehow benefited the oil and coal companies.
Still, just in terms of the gesture itself, this is one big “fuck you” to everyone who voted for Obama and congressional democrats. A radical, “Apollo-style” transformation of American energy policy was one of Obama’s central campaign platforms, and they’re just saying it’s too difficult—they don’t have the votes.
Of course you don’t fucking have the votes! You never have the votes at the very beginning. Too many democrats (as well as every last republican) are owned by the fossil fuel industry. The last thing they want is to have to vote on something that will either piss off their constituents or piss off their energy-industry pals. You have to push the legislation and call on your supporters to put pressure on these people to do the right thing. You never start off with enough votes—you have to fight to get them.
But instead they’ve decided not to fight at all. They piss their constituents off, but there’s no prolonged battle, it’s not in the headlines, nobody is talking about it, and therefore [they think] nobody suffers any electoral consequences for it.
But the worst part is that they’re saying “Now is not the right time. It’s too difficult.” Right, with a Democrat in the White House and overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, passing legislation that the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have been demanding for decades is just too hard. Maybe after the mid-term elections when the Republican Party [presumably] takes over again, it’ll be easier.
Just a quick comment today on the upcoming repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. On last Friday’s episode of Countdown, author and strong gay-rights activist Dan Savage made an argument for repeal that I hadn’t considered before but which I think could actually get through to some hardcore conservatives no matter how homophobic they are.
If a soldier has to keep a secret from his fellow soldiers and commanding officers, that presents a security risk. If an outsider knows that secret, he or she can use it as leverage against the soldier. For instance, if a soldier beats up an Afghan civilian without provocation, that solider faces court-martial if anyone finds out. Witnesses to the event could use it against him, threatening to go to his commanding officer unless he looks the other way while they sell weapons to terrorists or something.
Being gay shouldn’t be something that anyone can hold against a soldier. By forcing gay soldiers to keep this a secret, the United States Army is handing over power to anyone—friend or enemy—who discovers that the soldier is gay. It may be unlikely but it’s not impossible that a gay soldier might let national security be compromised in order to protect his secret and keep his job.
It’s looking inevitable that repeal will happen this year, but there’s no harm in keeping pressure on Obama right now. As commander-in-chief he could, with a stroke of a pen, end implementation of the policy immediately and issue an order that no gay personnel are to be fired until the policy is repealed or the next president overrides his order. He almost certainly won’t do that because, as we all know, he has Foxnewsophobia and is too scared of Glenn Beck to do anything that might piss off conservatives. But every day that goes by in which gay soldiers have to be afraid of someone outing them is a day in which national security is a bit more compromised than it needs to be.
I know this is ancient history already, but I’ve been meaning to comment on it for days and more important stuff got in the way. I promise this isn’t as unimportant as it will seem at first.
So all the way back at the beginning of last week, Sarah Palin sent out a tweet regarding the plans to build an Islamic mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero:
Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate
Totally ignoring the substance of what she was saying, the Twitterverse apparently responded with resounding laughter over the completely made-up word “refudiate”. Palin then responded with another tweet trying to mitigate the damage from the first:
Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real
Seeing as how “refute” makes no sense in that context, that didn’t really help. Finally she offered up this gem:
“Refudiate”, “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
Immediately all of the focus shifted to the absurdity of Palin comparing herself to Shakespeare (not to mention the choice of “wee-wee’d up” as an example of a great new word). That is indeed hilarious, but it’s not the real issue. I’m going to give her a pass on the surface and condemn her on the substance.
For one thing, “Refudiate” is actually a great word. It even applies to what I’m doing in this blog post. It’s a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”—two things that often go together. So I will refute the idea behind Palin’s original tweet and repudiate her for saying it—thus refudiating her.
Here’s the thing: Why would a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero “stab” any reasonable person “in the heart”? The tacit claim made in this statement is that the same people behind the 9/11 attacks are the people who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero—that all Muslims are guilty of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Refutation: Not true at all. Are all Christians guilty of every crime ever committed by Christians throughout history? I didn’t think so. Are all Tea Partiers guilty of racism because some of them hold racist signs? I didn’t think so. So how can you claim that all Muslims are guilty of what a small segment of radicalized, violent Muslims decided to do? If an entire group of people bears full responsibility for what a small segment of that group does, then the whole Tea Party is racist and all Christians have a lot of blood on their hands.
Repudiation: Shame on you, Sarah. You’re contributing to the already massive level of intolerance on the part of Americans towards Muslims. By equating the word “Muslim” with “Terrorist” you’re inviting further violence against Muslims, and possibly even an attack on the mosque they’re building near Ground Zero—which, incidentally, will be home to a perfectly mainstream, peaceful branch of Islam that would no doubt condemn the actions of the 9/11 terrorists, as would the vast majority of all Muslims around the world. What you said is divisive and ignorant and you owe all Muslims an apology.
But thanks for the great new word! Now whenever someone says something both factually and morally wrong, we can refute and repudiate them at the same time! Refudiation! Got to celebrate it!
I’m on fire today, as you’ll know if you read the post below. I’m temporarily without internet access so until I take this computer to somewhere with a WiFi signal I can’t waste any time doing research and finding relevant links and videos—which is the most time-consuming part of blogging. So today I’m going old-school and just ranting straight from my head. As such I’m only covering the really important stuff—Sarah Palin will have to wait.
You wouldn’t know it unless you’ve been paying really close attention, but we’re approaching what will be one of the most defining moments of the Obama presidency. In fact, it may be the most important cross-roads that Barack Obama has ever come to. He’s faced with a choice—a choice that only he can make and for which the responsibility will rest on his shoulders alone. It would seem like a small decision, like just one of a thousand little decisions the president makes every day, but taken in the broader context it’s a decision that will define how he is perceived by the public for the remainder of his presidency. The decision is over who to appoint as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It’s no secret that the financial reform legislation that came out of the senate is weak and watered-down. It won’t change the way Wall Street does business and it won’t prevent future bailouts. The only thing it does that has the potential to do real, substantial good on behalf of the American people is the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which would serve as a much-needed watchdog to protect consumers from corporate greed and abuses of power.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will only be as strong as the people who control it. It it’s run by establishment insiders and friends of Wall Street bankers, it’s probably not going to do too much to protect consumers. It’ll just exist for the sake of public perception, to make it look like Obama accomplished reform.
The question on everyone’s mind is whether Obama wanted real reform and was just forced to accept what he could get from a congress drowning in Wall Street money, or whether he’s as complicit as they are and has no interest in changing the status quo either. When Obama chooses who to appoint as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we’ll know the answer.
Elizabeth Warren is the person who came up with the idea in the first place. From her current position as chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, she has been an incredibly forceful advocate on behalf of the middle-class and her zeal for standing up to big corporations on behalf of the little guy is well-known and celebrated by progressives everywhere. If she were put in control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, there is no doubt that she would give the corporations a run for their money. She would take the strongest possible approach to dealing with Wall Street and while she might still not have the power to prevent another financial crisis, she’d be able to warn everyone when she sees it coming, and people would have to listen to her because she would be in a position of power. We need a progressive in a position of power. We need someone who is not beholden to Wall Street with the capability to exert pressure on Wall Street.
If Obama appoints Elizabeth Warren, then nearly all of my cynicism about the financial reform legislation will evaporate. I’ll bow my head and concede that at least in this instance, Obama delivered on some of the Change he promised.
Obviously, the rich and powerful are completely opposed to Elizabeth Warren. She’s their worst nightmare. They’d rather have anyone but Elizabeth Warren at the helm of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Preferably, they want someone who isn’t really interested in protecting consumers. Someone like Tim Geithner whom they already know and whom they’re buddies with. Someone whose top priority will be protecting Wall Street first, and protecting consumers only insofar as it doesn’t interfere with the way Wall Street does business.
If Obama appoints someone other than Elizabeth Warren (assuming it’s not another progressive like Paul Krugman or Robert Reich), then you can rip the “Change We Can Believe In” sticker off your bumper and bury it six feet under ground, because the promise of the Obama presidency will be dead. It will be completely over. He will have raised the white flag and surrendered to the very establishment he said he was going to change.
Why is this decision so important as compared to all the others? Why will this be more of an indicator of Obama’s true character than, say, the fight over the public option? Because this time, there’s no one else to blame. This time the decision is squarely on his shoulders and there are no Joe Liebermans, Blanche Lincolns or Ben Nelsons to hide behind.
You can already see indications that the White House is leaning away from appointing Warren. They don’t want to piss off progressives too much so they keep insisting how much they like her and how great she is, but…
The ‘but’ is key. They’ll say “But there are other good options” when in reality the only other names being thrown around are friends of Tim Geithner—people with the Wall Street stamp of approval. They’ll say “But she’s unconfirmable because republicans will filibuster her” but in reality Obama could appoint her with the stroke of a pen. I’m pretty sure the way the legislation is written she doesn’t need senate confirmation, but even if she does there’s the option of a recess appointment.
The point is, it can be done and the only thing that would stop it is Obama deciding not to. He knows that progressives really want him to appoint Warren, but so far his whole governing strategy has been to ignore progressives and do everything he can to try and appear like a centrist moderate (see my rant below). So far, he seems to have done everything the establishment has wanted him to do.
Will the pattern continue? Will he decide not to appoint Warren because he’d take too much criticism from Fox News? There’s no doubt they’ll be throwing the entire Socialist/Maoist smear machine directly at her, but they’ll do that to anyone he appoints even it’s Lloyd Blankfein (the CEO of Goldman Sachs) himself!
Will he decide not to appoint Warren because Wall Street won’t stand for it? They’re almost certainly threatening to pull their funding from Democratic candidates this election if he goes with Warren, so he might think he has no choice but to cave in again.
Or will he just this once actually make the right decision and appoint Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Will he just this once accomplish some real Change? Will he listen to the people that got him elected just this once instead of spitting in their faces?
I doubt it. But I really hope more attention gets paid to this because it’s of monumental significance. This is a moment where Obama can really change course and begin to regain some of that progressive support he’s been losing since taking office by standing up to Wall Street and doing something that will actually help average Americans.
What’ll it be, Barack? Was the promise of Change just a big fat fucking lie that you had no intention of keeping? Or are you really trying to do the best you can? Your decision will reveal the answer, and we anxiously await it.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.
Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.
At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.
They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.
But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.
Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.
Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.
Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.
And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.
But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.
Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?
What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”
News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.
So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.
Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.
The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.
The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.
The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.
It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.
Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.
Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.
My supplier has cut me off. As of now, I can’t access the internet from my apartment. If I want to use the internet, I have to go to a café or to the Planeo office. Right now I’m at Planeo because it’s infinity percent cheaper.
Once upon a time, I had internet service that I never had to worry about. All payments were automatically deducted from my account, and I’d get e-mail every month from O2 merely telling me the amount of the bill. A couple of months ago I started noticing the amount of the bill getting higher and higher, to the point of absurdity. Was I downloading a lot more? Am I being charged by how much I use the internet? I definitely use it a lot.
But a warning letter from O2 cleared things up, and I found that the bills had just been piling up because payments were, for some reason, no longer being deducted automatically. Rather than go to an O2 service location and deal with figuring out the problem, I just manually made the payment, and did so again the following month—which is this month.
A few weeks ago, however, I got another bill from a company called “Inkasso” that I didn’t know anything about. It seemed to have something to do with O2, but I didn’t pay it because I’d just paid my O2 bill and it didn’t make sense that some other company would charge me for something I already paid for.
Apparently that was a mistake. I should have just paid the 33 euros, whatever it was for, because apparently Inkasso was going to cut off my internet service if I didn’t pay. They decided to do this at the most convenient possible time—Saturday morning.
Yes, Saturday morning. The longest possible time before the banks would be operating again, as in Germany they and most other business close down for the entire weekend.
It was a long process before I even figured out that the Inkasso thing was the problem. I called tech support and found out there was an issue with a bill but he’d have to have someone else call me, then I went to an O2 service location and after a long process of trying to figure out what was wrong the girl there informed me I needed to pay Inkasso but the situation wouldn’t be able to get resolved until the middle of the week. Apparently no one can just flick a switch and turn my internet back on. The bank has to contact Inkasso, Inkasso has to contact O2, and O2 has to flick the switch. In Germany all of this will apparently take several days, and the ball won’t even begin to get rolling until Monday at the earliest. Wahoo.
Not that it’s too much of an inconvenience. I only spend about a third of my life online. For the next few days it’ll have to be reduced to less than 5%. No big deal. It’ll be a nice opportunity to change up the routine, and I’ll appreciate having the internet at home all the more when I get it back, which hopefully won’t take months.
This will, however, make my resolve to put up at least one blog post a day much more difficult. Luckily I don’t have all that much I want to blog about. I was going to comment on the Sarah Palin / Mosque at Ground Zero thing, but I’ll save that for tomorrow and make this today’s contribution. Sorry it’s such a lame one.
The argument for American troops remaining in Afghanistan is essentially that Afghanistan needs our help. Without a strong U.S. military presence there, the Taliban will retake control, impose brutal Sharia law on all the citizens, and life for the Afghan people will be much worse than if we stay.
If that was all there was to it, I’d be saying we should stay. If we had the capability to really make Afghanistan a better country through our military presence, then I’d be the first to advocate intervening in their affairs. Not only that, but I’d also call for us to intervene in Somalia, Darfur, and everywhere else where people are suffering at the hands of brutal, corrupt, or nonexistent governments.
I’m not opposed to the idea of American Interventionism—I simply recognize that there is no “America” anymore, at least not in the sense that most people believe.
In the prophetic 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky spells it out brilliantly in the pivotal scene in which network chairman Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale, his news-anchor-turned-crusader-for-America, how the world really works:
For those who still believe that America can and should spread its ideals throughout the world and bring peace and democracy to all, I would emphasize these words:
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.
…
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
There is “America” and there is America. “America” is the land of the free, home of the brave, champion of human rights and individual liberty, and crusader for the rights of man worldwide. America, on the other hand, is a governmental structure which has made itself extremely well-suited to Big Business interests. Multi-national corporations can do extremely well by putting America to good use. Tax-loopholes, virtually no regulation, and the strongest military the world has ever seen.
The only flaw in Arthur Jensen’s speech is this:
And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.
In all fairness to Chayefsky, this is what the corporate titans who really control the world probably tell themselves to justify their actions—that when all the world is a business there will be no need for war. But they ignore one important thing: war is great business.
Military and defense contractors, oil companies, drug-lords, corrupt government officials, and a slew of multi-national corporations all stand to make loads of money through continued American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is their bidding that our troops are doing there. American interventionism is actually corporate interventionism conducted through America.
But what if “America” actually existed? What if, as a nation, we collectively decided to intervene in countries that needed our help? What if instead of deploying armies of soldiers equipped with guns and bombs, we deployed armies of doctors equipped with medical supplies?
If you have the time, I’d strongly recommending watching this clip from the Young Turks’ “Rethink Reviews” segment in which documentary-film critic Jonathan Kim discusses the film “Living in Emergency” (about Doctors Without Borders) with Cenk Uygur (discussion begins at 4:49):
Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that does exactly the kind of intervention I wish America would do—sending doctors into impoverished nations and war-zones to offer humanitarian assistance to the people who need it most.
For those of you without the time or patience to sit through the whole clip, here is what Doctors With Borders did in 2006 alone:
• Held more than 9 million out-patient consultations
• Hospitalized half a million patients
• Delivered 99,000 babies
• Treated 1.8 million people for malaria
• Treated 150,000 malnourished children
• Provided 100,000 people with HIV and AIDS retro-virus therapy
• Vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis
• Conducted 64,000 surgeries
They did this with a team of 20,000-26,000 doctors and nurses who work for free, either out of the goodness of their hearts or to pad their resumes. Either way, they do an amazing amount of good with an amazingly small amount of resources.
Here are the statistics that will blow your mind:
• In 2006, the United States spend about $2 billion per week in Iraq.
• Doctors Without Borders runs with a budget of about $400 million per year.
• For the price of a week in Iraq, we could have either funded Doctors Without Borders for five years, or quintupled the size of Doctors Without Borders and ran it for one year.
• It’s estimated that there are at most 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and we have about 100,000 soldiers there at a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year.
• This means we have about 1,000 troops per Al Qaeda member, which means we are spending $1 billion per Al Qaeda member.
• This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 2.5 years.
• National priorities: We can either chase one Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan for a year or fund Doctors Without Borders for two and a half years.
• This fiscal year, we’re spending $167 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 417.5 years.
Do I even need to spell it out? If the idea behind American Interventionism is to improve the lot of humanity on a global scale, there are far better ways of doing it than dropping bombs on civilians. If the main argument for staying in Afghanistan is that we’re helping the Afghan people, it is undeniable that the money could be spent in much wiser ways to help much more people. Not necessarily by funding Doctors Without Borders, but by modeling our overseas interventions as humanitarian rather than military campaigns.
Obviously, security is important and we need to have soldiers to protect the doctors we deploy as well as to support the national governments of countries threatened by violent insurgency. But right now the focus is far more on the cost of weapons than the cost of medical supplies.
The entire justification for the Global War on Terror is to fight the enemy overseas to keep America safe at home. But by making this an almost purely military endeavor, we’re only boosting the perception that America is an Empire and we’re occupying these foreign countries out of our own selfish interests. As such, more terrorists are recruited and we lose the support of allies who were otherwise willing to help us in the fight against violent extremism.
But if we spent the same amount of money on medicine and infrastructure as we do on weapons, the perception would be completely different. Our international image would be unassailable, and we’d once again be looked up to by the rest of the world with respect and admiration. What Muslim kid is going to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to fight the country that built his school or cured his father of a terminal illness? Terrorist organizations would find themselves obsolete within a matter of years.
Unfortunately, this is never going to happen, precisely because “America” as it was once understood no longer exists. We may be the most powerful nation-state on earth, but we’re not the most powerful entity. The multi-national corporations have all the power, and it’s in their best interests to keep the engines of war churning, to keep third-world nations impoverished, and to keep the peoples of the world divided, distrustful, and hateful of each other.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.
You can’t meddle with the primal forces of nature.
If you happen to live in the United States and own a television that you happen to have access to on weekdays at 4:00 p.m. you might want to check out the Dylan Ratigan show, if only for the regular appearances made by Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, which I will continue to plug on this blog until every last American is watching it.
Nobody shatters conventional wisdom better than Cenk:
That’s right—cutting taxes for the rich doesn’t always help the economy. Historically, the economy has always done the best when taxes on the wealthy are at their highest.
Of course to be fair, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. It might just be a coincidence that the Great Depression came at a time of low taxes for the rich, that the golden years of the 50s and 60s came at a time of high taxes for the rich, and the current “Great Recession” came after a period of historically low taxes for the rich thanks to George W. Bush’s deficit-inflating tax cuts which the republicans now want to make permanent.
But the reasoning makes sense. Republicans want us to think that if you let the rich keep more of their money, they’ll put it back into the economy and everyone will benefit. But it seems that what actually happens when you let them keep their money is that they just keep their money. If, on the other hand, they don’t have so much money to keep, they have to rely more on their businesses for income, and they reinvest more of their money into those businesses which opens up opportunities for everyone.
Is this debatable? Yes. But it’s a debate we should be having instead of just accepting what we’ve always been told.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the power-elites are targeting social security, creating the false impression that it’s in crisis and cuts need to be made when in reality the program is just fine and they’re only trying to funnel more money from the middle-class to the upper-crust. Yesterday I came across this YouTube video that makes this point much more effectively than I can:
Seriously, don’t buy into the bullshit. If you don’t believe me or this video, just do the research yourself.
But the point is that we can’t keep letting them take our money. Every time you get a paycheck, the government takes a huge chunk of that and puts it into the social security pool which you are then entitled to take from once you retire. They want to privatize that pool of money so they can gamble with it, just like they’ve been gambling with mortgages. To let them do that would be disastrous—upon retiring we’ll end up as financial burdens to our children, and if we don’t have children we’ll just be screwed.
So please take a moment to check out this website and sign the petition. The democrats are poised to concede to the republicans on this issue just to prove how moderate they are, so we have to let them know we’re paying attention and we won’t stand for it.
Just a guy sharing his thoughts and experiences as he wanders his way through life and the world. Mostly politics from a progressive angle, but also events from the life of an American living overseas, and philosophical thoughts about man's place in the universe. The hope is to connect with like-minded people, and to engage with those who think differently.
