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Posted by Melissa Norbeck

Well, maybe we can just make a few changes. What is wrong with our country?
Quite a few things come to mind: two of them are health care and greed. The health care issue here in the US is ridiculous. Some people don¹t have problems with health care and health insurance, but many do. And so what if one man has insurance and can get his teeth cleaned every six months when the child down the street just died because she doesn¹t have health insurance or enough insurance. Why is health care the way it is? Greed, plain and simple.
The higher-ups care more about money and less about helping people. Sometimes I really feel things are so bad (war, health care, greed, violence, global warming, animal cruelty, etc… that the world just needs to end and start over.

I think it¹s amazing that we the people stand for as much as we do. Supposedly we live in a Democracy ­ NOT. We do have freedom of speech, but that can only get us so far. We do what we¹re told, and that¹s the way it is. I¹ve been saying for a long time how I feel we do not live in a Democracy, and, ironically enough, I just came across a new word: Plutonomy = an economy that is largely influenced by the wealthy; where things are divided into two parts: the wealthy and the rest of us. That is definitely America.

It¹s a damn shame that people like teachers and cops -those who serve others and don¹t make much money as is- are taking pay freezes. When was the last time you heard of a CEO or someone who worked for a health insurance company or pharmaceutical company take a pay freeze?

America is the best country in the world but also the most corrupt. I wish
people worried about others not only themselves. To quote Michael Moore, I refuse to live in a country like this, and I¹m not leaving!

Posted by John Grant

Why you can’t call a spade a spade in this country

An op-ed in the New York Times deals with one of the most vitally important issues Americans could get their minds around — the difference between an Empire and a Republic and just who are we as a people as we deal with two foreign wars and a job-devouring recession caused by financial delusion and chicanery. Unfortunately the topic is not treated totally seriously, and the notion of an American Empire is ridiculed. I’ve encountered this attitude in a running dialogue on the topic I had with Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky. Stu sneers at the notion we’re an “empire.” He’s a decent guy, and I reduce his argument with me to: “OK, if we’re supposed to be this empire, where’s the emperor in a toga?” I may be obsessive, but I think it’s a good topic for serious discussion. It’s way too easy in the dumbed-down climate of debate in this nation to ridicule the notion of Empire and, thus, of course, avoid dealing with all the real historical and political decisions that lead to the real dynamics of our current reality that suck so much of the oxygen out of our capacity to solve neglected problems. The list is long; for starters there’s a loss of jobs, a lessening of competitiveness due to shortcomings in our education system, crumbling infrastructure and an over-dependency on oil versus developing alternative, green energies — all things we should have been investing more in for the past 40 years. Now, as we are funding two on-going wars, a Global War On Terror and a dismally failed Drug War, these neglected investments at home are coming home to roost. and unless we change, it will only get worse in the future.

Posted by John Grant

I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man”  that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”

Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth. 

The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure. 

It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.

It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.

John Grant

Posted by John Grant

Those of us who participated in the September 12th march on the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall recall the arrest of Cheryl Biren, along with six others. I remember Biren there taking photos, it turns out, for OpEdNews.Com, a news and opinion blog site. Biren was doing her job covering the event when she was arrested by Philadelphia police.
The AEC is a tax-funded, $13 million experimental store selling the US Army as a brand to kids as young as thirteen. It employs violent computer games (“war porn”) and shooting simulators with human targets to entice mall-crawling kids into joining the military — at a time the economy is staggering from a lack of jobs. The Center is controversial and raises serious questions about how we educate our youth in today’s world and how well we equip them to analyze information in a critical fashion. 

Many of us “free-lance” or “independent” or, let’s go all the way, “radical” journalists regularly encounter the kind of difficulty Biren ran into covering the AEC march, since police departments are more and more taking it upon themselves to decide who is a legitimate journalist and who isn’t. 
When cops decide who and what constitutes a real journalist they end up permitting only those working for the mainstream, corporate media, people with corporate ID cards, pre-arranged police permits, backup staff at the office, expensive equipment, van drivers and someone to get them coffee. Anyone on a tight budget and sympathetic to the ideas expressed by demonstrators at marches like the one at the AEC are seen as loose cannons and, naturally, suspect in the eyes of the police. And since no one in the mainstream, corporate media has much interest in covering such demonstrations — well, you can see the problem.

In my case, I was there and I took some photos. I, then, chose not to challenge the cops and I left as they began pushing people out the doors. My timidity, of course, is precisely what the police approach is meant to encourage. Any reporter who stayed behind to assert their first amendment right to witness and report the arrests was subject to arrest. This is what Biren did.
We see this sort of thing a lot these days; it’s a variant on the Facts On The Ground strategy. Act first — deal with the repercussions later. The police make an arrest to eliminate a journalist, no matter how illegal the action might be, then they drop the charges and employ public relations later. During the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, the city paid out millions in lawsuit settlements for illegal arrests. On January 13, the Philadelphia DA followed this pattern and dropped all charges against Biren – four months after her arrest and an uncertain amount of grief and legal expenses later.

The 1st Amendment outlaws “abridging” the “freedom of the press.” It does not say “freedom of the well-paid, corporate press with police permits.” When the 1st Amendment was written there were no press badges; all the bureaucratic hurdles and mazes came later. 
A.J. Leibling added this famous nugget to the mix: “If you really want freedom of the press you have to own one.” Leibling could not have foreseen the age we live in, but, now, with the advent of the internet and the capacity for virtually anyone to fashion a news blog and get out there and cover news, Leibling’s observation may be more than just a witty remark.
Maybe it’s time for those of us on the left to take a hint from James Bopp Jr., the right-wing conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, behind the recent Supreme Court case that opened the flood gates to corporate money in campaign ads. He calculated the whole thing and designed the case to obtain the decision recently dropped on American democracy like a bomb. He is now about to launch a similar case aimed to eliminate any and all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Maybe it’s time we tip our hats to the Bopps of this culture and do some original legal thinking of our own — pull off our own “Bopp coup” in the courts — to establish that the police cannot use prejudice or whim as a basis to decide who shall report on and document their actions and who shall not. As long as a reporter is cooperative, not violent or not actively participating in whatever the cops are focusing on, it should be made clear in law that sympathy for a cause or action being covered by a reporter is not a valid reason to lump that reporter in with those being arrested. 
It’s an important Constitutional question. Can a government police force quash, silence or prevent a reporter from doing his or her job by making a phony arrest? It happens so much these days it has become part of the fabric of our times, and it contributes to the distancing of citizens more and more from the decisions and actions of their government.

As the recent corporate funding case suggests, the current Supreme Court tends to come down on the side of money and power. But the Constitution clearly does not require a reporter be equipped with money or power, or more to the point, to be connected to a corporation. Current police practice in cases like Biren’s amounts to the harassment and silencing of reporters for failing to have the proper political “juice” behind them.
If the democratic vistas of the internet we hear so much about are real, then all a reporter needs to legitimately assert 1st Amendment rights is a pen & pad, a camera and a blogsite. 
To borrow the famous film line from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Photos Copyright John Grant 

Posted By John Grant

…….I was there in 1987 visiting a doctor friend who worked in a clinic in the middle of the island and made two-hour treks to tiny villages up in the mountains three days a week. One thing I will never forget is watching a man who worked in the clinic use a pair of common pliers to extract a tooth from the jaw of a 30-year-old peasant woman. He was having a hard time wriggling the thing out, and she was suffering immensely. But she did not let out even a peep! It gives me the chills just recalling the scene.

The 23-year-old memory of that woman’s stoicism actually inspired me six months ago to extract a painful, loose tooth of my own. In my case, it was considerably easier, and I saved a $100 dental bill. As comfortable Americans, we should purge ourselves of any sense of superiority vis-a-vis Haiti and learn to respect and honor Haitians for the suffering they have endured — and are enduring at this moment.  In that spirit, we should extend our hand.

If nothing else, the earthquake disaster should wake Americans up to what an amazing place Haiti really is — absolutely unique in the Western Hemisphere, an island liberated by Africans brought to this hemisphere in chains as slaves. While poverty and horror are the usual images that pop into Americans’ minds when they hear the word “Haiti,” the real story is much more complicated and full to the brim with stoicism, art and music. And, folks, if we get all superior and see voodoo as third-rate theatrics and nonsense, it’s no different than all religions — it’s people trying to make sense out of darkness and death. The fact is, we could learn a lot from Haiti.  

……John and I go back a long ways. He was the first journalist to write about my erotic photographs when he reviewed a solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, 1994. Pentimenti was the first gallery to take notice of the sea change to occur in the direction of my photographic career in the early nineties. We didn’t actually meet until years later, when we were introduced socially by a mutual friend, the great documentary photographer Harvey Finkle.

John and I became regulars at Harvey’s Monday Night football parties, where the food, wine and conversation flows on a variety of topics the least of which is football. We got to know each other a little more over the years as a consequence. Recently he has become a regular contributor to this blog. I asked his close friend Harvey to write a little something about the pictures that accompany the post, in an effort to introduce you to a man filled with many passions, including our over zealous agressions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am so honored to have John part of the Tony Ward Studio team. All photos courtesy of www.harveyfinkle.com.

.

John Grant

Renaissance man. A superb photographer, videographer, novelist, journalist and craftsman. John is also a leader, having been at the helm of the local Vets for Peace for about a decade. His facility with words is such that he constantly appears on the pages of our local newspapers in letters or guest op-eds. I first met John through our political activities. Both of us having traveled to Central America during the 1980’s, every once in a while I would grab a photo of John in a variety of actions. And, you can bet that any issue or subject that John touches, his knowledge is totally comprehensive. As well as a tremendous source of knowledge, he is my good friend. Harvey Finkle

Posted by John Grant

The column, below, by Stu Bykofski, ran in the Philadelphia Daily News recently. Aware of my views on the war, he had called and asked would I watch the Presidents speech with him at his home and, then, he would write about our exchange of views. I fully enjoyed the time with Bykofsky and consider him a valued new acquaintance. He even stopped by our little anti-war demonstration at City Hall the other day to say a quick hello. Bykofsky first went to work for the Daily News in 1972, and he is now one of its most respected columnists. So he fully understands the rough-and-tumble of ideas. Here is his column and a letter-to-the-editor response to the column I expect will run in the Daily News soon.  

Af-Pak speech: Both sides now
By Stu Bykofski
Daily News Columnist, December 3, 2009

PLYMOUTH MEETING’s John Grant supported and voted for Barack Obama, but it was “no sale” Tuesday night after the president outlined his plans for expanding the war and our chances for success in Afghanistan – which Grant sees as entering a fruitless, budget-busting quagmire.

Some of you may know Grant from his frequent Op-ed pieces that take issue with various American policies. A member of Veterans for Peace, the 62-year-old Vietnam vet is a self-described dope-smoking socialist, although he admits that he enjoys being a provocateur.

I invited Grant to watch the president’s speech with me because I knew how he felt – he was against entering Afghanistan in the first place – but I didn’t know precisely how I felt.

At the end, Grant disagreed with sending more troops, while I favored it, but it was not because of Obama’s persuasiveness.

His arguments had the flavor of leftovers, a meal we had eaten before. His speech came more from the head than the heart and lacked passion.

With that said, we now have an American president from the left after an American president from the right reaching the same conclusion: America’s safety and security are threatened by the swamp that is Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Are they both wrong? Are they both stupid? Are they both evil? Is it possible that both presidents saw things in the daily threat assessment that they cannot share?

Obama may be wrong, but when he says that our safety and security are entwined with Af-Pak, do I dismiss that?

Grant would say yes, because “the military-industrial complex has this guy by the balls.” Grant even grumped over Obama’s selection of West Point as the launchpad for his policy.

Several times during our conversation Grant described himself as a “radical” and, after the speech, when I asked him what the U.S. should do now, he returned to mistakes made after 9/11 because radicals are interested in root causes, he said.

When I pressed him to support a “radical” solution – pull all our troops out now, immediately, at once – he demurred, saying that he was a realist and that it would result in chaos. He would garrison our current troops behind the safety of walls.

For how long? When would we withdraw? How quickly? Grant said he didn’t have those answers and felt that I was trying to corner him.

In his speech, Obama said that maintaining the status quo – Grant’s plan – would lead to deterioration of the effort.

Grant said that if we escalate the war, al Qaeda and the Taliban might do the same. Fair point, they might. They also might retreat into the mountains, go quiet for 18 months and re-emerge as U.S. troops begin to leave, now that we’ve provided their military planners with our timetable.

We have no good options in Af-Pak.

Anyone who is certain that a strategy will succeed is a polemicist or a propagandist. There is no sure path. Oddly, what happens if we stay in is more certain than what happens if we quickly depart. If we stay in, more American deaths. If we exit, will the Taliban be satisfied to “own” Afghanistan again or will it offer a platform from which al Qaeda and radical Islam can attack Pakistan and other countries?

As an example of how complicated the situation is, one of Obama’s goals is to support the fragile democracy that is Pakistan.

That government is allied with us, but the majority of conspiracy-prone Pakistanis, according to polls, think that the U.S. is the greatest threat to world peace, and that bombs going off in Pakistani cities are planted by the CIA, Blackwater or Israel’s Mossad. With friends like these . . .

Obama didn’t mention “victory,” or the brutality and viciousness of the Taliban toward women. He avoided emotional appeals, yet it’s the same old “fear, fear, fear, the bogeyman, just like George Bush,” said Grant.

“I do not trust my government,” said Grant, even with Obama and the Democrats in control.

I won’t go that far, but I will trust Obama, now that he is an unwilling “war president,” to make the least bad of the miserable choices in front of him.

He could be wrong and so could I.

A response: Obama defends the government’s prestige

Dear Editor:

It was nice of Stu Bykofsky to invite me to his home to watch the speech by President Obama. I’m glad I was helpful to Stu for him to figure out how he “felt” about escalating the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan. He was a gracious host, and we had a fine time exchanging views. Unfortunately, he then used me a bit like a punching bag in his Thursday, December 3 column.

I’ve been in and out of the journalism business in Philadelphia for 34 years, and I went to Stu’s home fully aware of the risks. So I’m not complaining; in fact, I think Stu is a great guy.

Living in such a dangerous world, it’s easy to lose focus on exactly what the Obama West Point speech was about. As Stu pointed out, I’m a bit of a “provocateur,” so let me be provocative and suggest that Obama’s speech was not about Afghanistan at all or about really solving the threats to America’s security concerns. Obama’s speech was, instead, about reinforcing his political power as a Democratic President by not jeopardizing the prestige of the US government in time of war and, especially, the prestige of a post-Vietnam generation of generals led by General David Petraeus. Petraeus and others supporting his new counter-insurgency doctrine actually argue these days that we could have won the Vietnam War — if only we had been smarter. Obama’s speech established that he was fully invested in this new doctrine and, thus, as a “liberal” was not opposing the vast and entrenched power of the military-industrial complex, the institution General Eisenhower so eloquently warned the nation about in 1961 as he left the Presidency.

This idea about “prestige” is not mine. It is from Stanley Karnow’s highly respected book, Vietnam: A History. He writes about John Kennedy’s reluctance to escalate in Vietnam and how Kennedy said escalation was “like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” Karnow writes how, despite his reluctance, Kennedy could not in the end hold out against the strong militarist tide pushing for escalation and, even, his own rhetoric about stopping communism in Southeast Asia. Karnow writes that Kennedy “could not backtrack without jeopardizing the American government’s prestige — and in time that consideration would become the main motive for the US commitment in Vietnam.” 

I submit that 48-years-later President Obama finds himself in the very same bind Kennedy did — maybe even worse — unable to do what people like me would have liked him to do, which is to summon the courage to fashion a policy and speech that faced up to this tragic cycle. Instead, like Kennedy and Johnson, Obama chose to reinforce the American government’s prestige and that of its military leadership by throwing more young men and women into a war policy that was doomed from the moment the Bush/Cheney administration set it in motion from their White House inner sanctums. The Profile In Courage I would have liked to see from President Obama was one in which he recognized that the nation needed to take a hit on its prestige, that defending this kind of prestige is in fact against the best interests of the American people, especially now when our economy is on the ropes and we have so many un-addressed domestic problems. Such a policy and speech would have entailed a calculated and gradual extraction of our military forces from Afghanistan. 

Obama’s Special Ambassador to Southwest Asia Richard Holbrook recently spoke by phone with Stanley Karnow. He handed the phone to General Stanley McChrystal, who asked the Vietnam historian what wisdom he had concerning the war in Afghanistan. Karnow reportedly said: “We should not be there in the first place.”   

Maybe Stu is right when he says, on one hand, I’m a “radical” while on the other I’m a “realist.”  But what I clearly am not about — what Stu oddly labeled as “Grant’s plan” — is “maintaining the status quo” in Afghanistan. The fact is I’ve written against, and taken to the streets against, the status quo of that war and the one in Iraq before they were even launched. 

All this is in the spirit of dialogue. Again, I enjoyed my exchange of views with Stu Bykofsky and would be glad to engage in more of it in the future on the topic of Afghanistan and the War On Terror. Truth does not come in a single voice; it is reached in an open and honest dialogic process. 

Sincerely,
John Grant

Posted By John Grant

It was sad watching Barack Obama cave in to the militarists on the war in Afghanistan. One, he didn’t have to give his speech on the war at West Point, which was 100% Bush; he could have given it at some location symbolic of the dire need to invest in America’s many domestic problems. Where exactly did Obama go wrong? From a progressive vantage point, he seems to have made a classic pact with the devil in order to reinforce his political capital. A writer I knew wrote a book called The Liberal Dilemma in which he outlined the problem everyone on the left faces in this country. How adamantly does one stick to one’s progressive ideals (and remaining marginalized without power) versus how much does one compromise those ideals in order to obtain power (in order to actually accomplish much-needed reforms.) Last night, Obama went too far on the compromise end of this continuum and may have fallen off the continuum entirely. 

Garry Wills, below, expresses the betrayal well. The item, at bottom, about Dan Senor’s support of the speech shows just how far he went. I met Dan Senor in the Green Zone in Baghdad in December 2003, where he was a high-powered Bush flak supporting the Iraq War who sat in with several other Green Zone warriors on a meeting our veteran and military family group had with Paul Bremer’s assistant. Senor was interested in us, he said, because a visit by the parents of soldiers in a hot war zone was “unprecedented,” something reminiscent of Russian mothers taking buses to visit their sons in places like Chechnya. Senor is now co-author of a book in stores reveling in Israel as a modern free-enterprise miracle, an “exceptionalist” argument that totally dismisses Palestinian rights. That someone like Dan Senor is supportive of Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan only underlines that the decision was a bad one.

It will now take time to tell how really bad the decision is to send 30,000 more young American targets into a doomed war. John McCain said, “the worst thing we can do in Afghanistan is pursue half-measures.” To me, that means either heed the hard historic realities of counter-insurgency warfare and go all-out and send in 500,000 plus troops equipped with our most super-lethal weaponry and unburdened with moral concerns for killing civilians — or use our intelligence and diplomatic powers to remove our military forces and take a different tact. Trying to have it both ways like Obama has done is only doing exactly what we did in Vietnam — escalating the violence to avoid the really hard decisions and advance the crisis to a later date. As Stanley Karnow wrote about the war in Vietnam, our escalation decisions were about the “prestige of the American government” and not about “winning,” since McNamara and others knew early on that was impossible. That Obama chose West Point to give his speech only emphasizes how much “the prestige of the American government” — and especially the prestige of our post-Vietnam brotherhood of generals — played in his decision. He seems to have employed his well-known intellectual and analytic powers to bolster his political position in a war culture rather than using those powers and his bully pulpit to extricate the nation from the disastrous legacy of the Bush/Cheney period. He took the easy road. Tragically, it could have been different, and he could have given an altogether different speech outlining why, for our own good as a nation, we cannot afford this war any longer — and how we are going to honorably extricate our military without abandoning the Afghan people. He would have had to concede a hit on our “prestige,” but in the end it would have gone down in history as a “profile in courage” just like Kennedy’s when he stood up to Curtis LeMay in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We in the peace movement now have our work cut out for us to continue to speak truth about this doomed war and to hold the Obama’s feet to the fire on his declared July 2011 withdrawal.