Friday, November 28, 2008
Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
Every year I await the arrival of Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Stories. I like to get the book version even though the basic stories are online. There's a fair amount of extra material in the book version not available online, making it worth the price in my opinion.
Their number one story was "Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation". These figures are consistently glossed over by the American press. I was shocked by this:
Their number one story was "Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation". These figures are consistently glossed over by the American press. I was shocked by this:
"...an Associated Press poll conducted in February 2007, which asked a representative sample of US residents how many Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The average respondent thought the number was under 10,000, about 2 percent of the actual total at that time."The whole "we don't do body counts" attitude by the US military seems clearly designed to trivialize and marginalize the Iraqi dead and displaced.
Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.
Even with the lower confirmed figures, by the end of 2006, an average of 5,000 Iraqis had been killed every month by US forces since the beginning of the occupation. However, the rate of fatalities in 2006 was twice as high as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or over 300 Iraqis every day. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.
Monday, September 22, 2008
The Shallowness of American Politics
I continue to be amazed at the limitations of US politics and the narrowness of acceptable solutions by politicians. To use an entirely overworn metaphor, our political options remain in a box controlled tightly by the media and "elites".* Solutions "outside the box" are usually dismissed without serious consideration and usually without ever even seeing the media light of day.
So it is with our current economic crisis. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in our policies that led to our current problems and acting to correct them, we are left with applying emergency fixes in a crisis. Thus we have bailouts of huge private economic linchpins allowed to grow unregulated until our economy is dependent on them. De-regulation of areas of financial markets turns into the sub-prime fiasco.
Yet we hear from many pundits that it is those people who got these sub-prime loans who are to blame for poor fiscal responsibility, for getting loans they knew they couldn't pay back. What's lacking in this analysis is the economic optimism encouraged by American society since WWII. Until relatively recently, Americans were used to thinking of themselves as continually moving up the economic ladder. Hard work leads to advancement and increased pay.
This hasn't been true for a long time but the attitude remains a core value and assumption for many American workers. Never mind that wage stagnation has been the rule for many years, the future's so bright I need sunglasses, right?
So what solutions do we hear proposed? Crisis band-aids and studiously forgetting the role money managers might have played in creating the problem. Top management keeps its billions of dollars in pay and bonuses despite their evident culpability while homeowners lose homes for want of a few thousand dollars.
We live in a kind of pyramid scheme called Capitalism. Where do those wealthy top 1% get their money? Conventional thought is that it comes from their bold investment of money with the risk of loss on a large scale. In other words, what most people do all the time when they make large purchases like an automobile or a home. The difference is that when those at the bottom of the pyramid make a poor decision, it is personally catastrophic.
One pundit recently said when some people end up defaulting on mortgages, they just put the keys in the mailbox and walk away, leaving the bank with the problem. I find that a fascinating perspective. I have to wonder how many people in today's society can actually just "walk away" from a bad debt. Unless they somehow have a new identity waiting, debt tends to follow someone around for a long time in one form or another. People don't just get disapproving looks for bad debt; they get phone harassment, revoking of credit lines, raising of credit card interest rates, and much more.
I seem to have strayed far from my initial subject but perhaps not too far. Our politicians seem bound by political expediency and fear of upsetting the big ticket contributors to their campaign coffers. So don't say the problem is de-regulation and overdependence on complex shuffling of paper money. The problem is the borrowers because the borrowers have all the power in the situation, right?
When the house of cards comes down, we are left wondering why our politicians didn't see it coming years ago. In a way, they did. Their solution was to focus on the "War on Terror". Iraq. Afghanistan. Because we still live with the post-WWII prosperity idea that wars benefit our economy. And wars did help our economy when we produced real goods. In a services economy like we've got today, not so much.
Wars do distract the population, though, keeping them from demanding too much or the right things.
*I use "elites" here to mean practically all national politicians and 98% of the "authorities" seen on any TV news or commentary.
So it is with our current economic crisis. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in our policies that led to our current problems and acting to correct them, we are left with applying emergency fixes in a crisis. Thus we have bailouts of huge private economic linchpins allowed to grow unregulated until our economy is dependent on them. De-regulation of areas of financial markets turns into the sub-prime fiasco.
Yet we hear from many pundits that it is those people who got these sub-prime loans who are to blame for poor fiscal responsibility, for getting loans they knew they couldn't pay back. What's lacking in this analysis is the economic optimism encouraged by American society since WWII. Until relatively recently, Americans were used to thinking of themselves as continually moving up the economic ladder. Hard work leads to advancement and increased pay.
This hasn't been true for a long time but the attitude remains a core value and assumption for many American workers. Never mind that wage stagnation has been the rule for many years, the future's so bright I need sunglasses, right?
So what solutions do we hear proposed? Crisis band-aids and studiously forgetting the role money managers might have played in creating the problem. Top management keeps its billions of dollars in pay and bonuses despite their evident culpability while homeowners lose homes for want of a few thousand dollars.
We live in a kind of pyramid scheme called Capitalism. Where do those wealthy top 1% get their money? Conventional thought is that it comes from their bold investment of money with the risk of loss on a large scale. In other words, what most people do all the time when they make large purchases like an automobile or a home. The difference is that when those at the bottom of the pyramid make a poor decision, it is personally catastrophic.
One pundit recently said when some people end up defaulting on mortgages, they just put the keys in the mailbox and walk away, leaving the bank with the problem. I find that a fascinating perspective. I have to wonder how many people in today's society can actually just "walk away" from a bad debt. Unless they somehow have a new identity waiting, debt tends to follow someone around for a long time in one form or another. People don't just get disapproving looks for bad debt; they get phone harassment, revoking of credit lines, raising of credit card interest rates, and much more.
I seem to have strayed far from my initial subject but perhaps not too far. Our politicians seem bound by political expediency and fear of upsetting the big ticket contributors to their campaign coffers. So don't say the problem is de-regulation and overdependence on complex shuffling of paper money. The problem is the borrowers because the borrowers have all the power in the situation, right?
When the house of cards comes down, we are left wondering why our politicians didn't see it coming years ago. In a way, they did. Their solution was to focus on the "War on Terror". Iraq. Afghanistan. Because we still live with the post-WWII prosperity idea that wars benefit our economy. And wars did help our economy when we produced real goods. In a services economy like we've got today, not so much.
Wars do distract the population, though, keeping them from demanding too much or the right things.
*I use "elites" here to mean practically all national politicians and 98% of the "authorities" seen on any TV news or commentary.
Labels: debt, economy, elites, jobs, politics, war
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Who needs context?
On page 12 of the current Newsweek (July 2-July 9, 2007) is a short piece titled Iran: Broken War Drums? Framed by comments by Joe Lieberman and associates is this sentence:
The more I read that sentence the more I'm curious about the editorial choices behind it. And, yes, I understand the concept that tensions and conflict between countries can get so bad war is, for practical purposes, inevitable. But this sentence embodies an attitude, a throwback to Cold War brinksmanship. It assumes that major nation-state players/actors are the sole considerations for such jockeying for position. That really isn't true for many situations.
Perhaps my naïveté is showing through.
Another [intelligence] official said U.S. government experts were also concerned that any American cross-border raid into Iran might produce an unintended escalation of violence between the United States and Tehran. [emphasis decidedly mine.]I'm trying to imagine a situation where border incursions by one country into another would not produce "escalation of violence." Unintended? I know of quite a few historic situations where one country deliberately provoked another country to violence as an excuse to invade.
The more I read that sentence the more I'm curious about the editorial choices behind it. And, yes, I understand the concept that tensions and conflict between countries can get so bad war is, for practical purposes, inevitable. But this sentence embodies an attitude, a throwback to Cold War brinksmanship. It assumes that major nation-state players/actors are the sole considerations for such jockeying for position. That really isn't true for many situations.
Perhaps my naïveté is showing through.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Memorial Day Fear and Loathing
One problem I've always had with Memorial Day is its very inclusiveness of all military veterans from all US military actions. This dovetails a little with my problems with "Support Our Troops" stickers, a stance which glosses over exactly what those troops are doing.
How do I separate out the veterans of wars and conflicts I think had some justification for US involvement and those military actions which were illegal and/or immoral? Particularly when the last century has seen so many such actions by the US military? Do I get to choose which veterans and wars I want to celebrate? Of course not. It's pretty much an all-or-nothing deal, an uncritical and flag-waving patriotic event which denies such nuance. Love all the military on this day or be branded a subversive anti-American allied with and sympathetic to "the terrorists."
Memorial Day is our annual event to help reinforce nationalist jingoism. It serves to recall all past military glories in a nostalgic and positive light while attempting to firm public resolve for present/future military action. When the most militarily powerful nation on the earth celebrates its military, we also reinforce an arrogance, an attitude that whenever we use our military it is justified. When we confuse military might for moral superiority, we have lost something precious.
The flip side of celebration of the US military and victories is the dead, maimed and displaced on the other side of our military actions. It's facile to say such results are not our responsibility. We were forced into action by our enemies. That's a little like a man who batters a woman saying "It's her fault. I had to hit her."
Am I saying military action is never justified or that the US has never mobilized its military for just cause? No. But I'm hard pressed to think of a US military action in the last sixty years which I would put in this category.
For all the talk of honor and duty in our armed services, their large-scale actions are always directed by politicians. Politicians don't really take the same vows of honor and duty. National politician's oaths are both vague and specific to defending the Constitution of the US. And I get the distinct sense that these oaths are considered optional to many politicians. Or at least open to radical interpretation.
So while I am grateful, in a general way, for what our military has done to safeguard and defend our country, I have very mixed feelings about many of the specifics in recent history.
How do I separate out the veterans of wars and conflicts I think had some justification for US involvement and those military actions which were illegal and/or immoral? Particularly when the last century has seen so many such actions by the US military? Do I get to choose which veterans and wars I want to celebrate? Of course not. It's pretty much an all-or-nothing deal, an uncritical and flag-waving patriotic event which denies such nuance. Love all the military on this day or be branded a subversive anti-American allied with and sympathetic to "the terrorists."
Memorial Day is our annual event to help reinforce nationalist jingoism. It serves to recall all past military glories in a nostalgic and positive light while attempting to firm public resolve for present/future military action. When the most militarily powerful nation on the earth celebrates its military, we also reinforce an arrogance, an attitude that whenever we use our military it is justified. When we confuse military might for moral superiority, we have lost something precious.
The flip side of celebration of the US military and victories is the dead, maimed and displaced on the other side of our military actions. It's facile to say such results are not our responsibility. We were forced into action by our enemies. That's a little like a man who batters a woman saying "It's her fault. I had to hit her."
Am I saying military action is never justified or that the US has never mobilized its military for just cause? No. But I'm hard pressed to think of a US military action in the last sixty years which I would put in this category.
For all the talk of honor and duty in our armed services, their large-scale actions are always directed by politicians. Politicians don't really take the same vows of honor and duty. National politician's oaths are both vague and specific to defending the Constitution of the US. And I get the distinct sense that these oaths are considered optional to many politicians. Or at least open to radical interpretation.
So while I am grateful, in a general way, for what our military has done to safeguard and defend our country, I have very mixed feelings about many of the specifics in recent history.
Labels: Memorial Day, military, war
The CR FAQ - An Introduction to Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism
