Conservatives Cost a Lot of Money

White men produced the Constitution. Liberals assert that what they produced is primary, while conservatives assert that who they were is primary. Increasingly, conservatives seem ready to throw everything away in order to maintain dominance — the Constitution, the good opinion of the rest of the world, the lives and limbs and sanity of our soldiers, the health and habitability of the Earth, and their own claims to common sense and decency. Conservatives want to return us to a primitive conception of the world, even though we know better.

The case is frequently made that conservatives and liberals have different temperaments, and this is surely so. Cheney’s 1% Doctrine is the quintessential conservative idea — the world is so dangerous that if there is a 1% chance of an attack on America, then we have to go all out to stop it. There is a sort of surface bravery about this idea, but beyond that, it makes absolutely no sense tactically or strategically. It is like going to the track and betting the house on a 99 to 1 shot. Many conservatives refuse to be convinced that a subtler approach is safe enough or effective enough. But let’s put it this way: carpet bombing is much more costly in every way than good intelligence and loyal allies. It’s a pocketbook issue.

Jane Smiley | HuffingtonPost.com

March 23rd, 2007 || PermaLink

Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy

Smith’s core ideas — that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth –have indisputably worked. They’ve produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They’ve built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith’s ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It’s More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound — like climate change and peak oil — that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier.

Bill McKibben | Mother Jones

March 22nd, 2007 || PermaLink

Bush’s Shame

Over 35 percent of the veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom who have sought Veterans Administration healthcare have been diagnosed with mental disorders. The military has been returning troops to combat who have been diagnosed with PTSD, and repeated exposure to trauma worsens the symptoms. An alarming number of Iraq veterans are receiving less-than-honorable discharges for engaging in behavioral symptoms that appear to be PTSD as well as traumatic brain injury. They are shoved aside by claims that their PTSD is a “pre-existing” condition.

More often than not, it is family members who recognize the need and provide primary support for troops to recover from PTSD. Many of the younger soldiers entered the service as teenagers when they left their homes for the first time, which makes their transition back to civilian life all the more difficult; and many individuals were exposed to childhood risks, unstable households, and marginal family status before they joined the service. These personal factors, along with the multiple tours and extended deployments destroy families.

In Iraq, our troops face extremely hostile conditions; they are in constant 360-degree danger of drawing fire, coming under mortar attack, or falling prey to improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Their relentless exposure to urban guerrilla combat, car bombs, sectarian killings, and suicide attacks has made the current war perhaps the most psychologically taxing of any conflict in our nation’s history.

Over 1.1 million American troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the physical and psychological injuries they have suffered, the number of severe PTSD cases will easily run into the hundreds of thousands. The social costs of George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq cannot be summed up by the $500 or $600 billion price tag so far. We are going to be paying the costs of this war for decades after Bush becomes just a shameful footnote in the ashbin of history.

Joseph Palermo | CommonDreams

March 21st, 2007 || PermaLink

End the War (On Terror)

Concretely, Congress should be pushed to take legislative action to renounce the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” enunciated before he invaded Iraq. As The Nation warned in our “Open Letter to the Members of Congress” on the eve of the 2002 war resolution vote, “the decision to go to war has a significance that goes far beyond the war….It declares a policy of military supremacy over the entire earth–an objective never attained by any power. …The new policy [of preventive war] reverses a long American tradition of contempt for unprovoked attacks. It gives the United States the unrestricted right to attack nations even when it has not been attacked by them and is not about to be attacked by them…It accords the US the right to overthrow any regime–like the one in Iraq–it decided should be overthrown…It declares that the defense of the US and the world against nuclear proliferation is military force.” Declaring the Bush doctrine of endless war defunct will not solve the problems posed by Iraq, but it will reduce the likelihood that we will see more Iraqs in our future.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel |The Nation

March 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

Congress, End the War

Democrats should recognize that the time has come to use the full power accorded Congress in time of war: the power of the purse. As Senator Russ Feingold says, “Some will claim that cutting off funding for the war would endanger our brave troops on the ground. Not true. The safety of our servicemen and -women in Iraq is paramount, and we can and should end funding for the war without putting our troops in further danger.”

Instead of negotiating with Bush to give him another year of his war before facing consequences, Democrats should refuse to write another blank check. They should instead support Representative Barbara Lee’s proposal to fully fund the withdrawal of US soldiers and military contractors from Iraq. Lee would give military commanders the resources they need to withdraw all troops by the end of the year by mandating that emergency supplemental funding be used only for that purpose.

The Nation editorial

March 19th, 2007 || PermaLink

God’s Dupes

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin’s Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren’t sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

Sam Harris | Los Angeles Times

March 17th, 2007 || PermaLink

Iraqi Women Silenced

Rapes, bombings, death sentences, and a discriminatory legal system; it is one of the unspoken facts of militarism that women often become the spoils of war. The Iraq war has been a disaster in many ways, but none so extreme as what it’s done to Iraqi women.

Women not only suffer what everyone in Iraqi society suffers - the absence of security, collapse of the country’s infrastructure, a health care system in tatters, and high levels of poverty and unemployment. They also suffer gender-based violence and increased social conservatism. The constant violence - looting, assault, kidnapping, rape or death at the hands of suicide bombers, militias, foreign troops, Iraqi police, and local thugs - has trapped women and children in their homes. Many women who’d formerly worked outside the home or attended school now stay indoors.

Andrea Buffa | TomPaine.com 

March 16th, 2007 || PermaLink

Conservatives Cost a Lot of Money

White men produced the Constitution. Liberals assert that what they produced is primary, while conservatives assert that who they were is primary. Increasingly, conservatives seem ready to throw everything away in order to maintain dominance — the Constitution, the good opinion of the rest of the world, the lives and limbs and sanity of our soldiers, the health and habitability of the Earth, and their own claims to common sense and decency. Conservatives want to return us to a primitive conception of the world, even though we know better.

The case is frequently made that conservatives and liberals have different temperaments, and this is surely so. Cheney’s 1% Doctrine is the quintessential conservative idea — the world is so dangerous that if there is a 1% chance of an attack on America, then we have to go all out to stop it. There is a sort of surface bravery about this idea, but beyond that, it makes absolutely no sense tactically or strategically. It is like going to the track and betting the house on a 99 to 1 shot. Many conservatives refuse to be convinced that a subtler approach is safe enough or effective enough. But let’s put it this way: carpet bombing is much more costly in every way than good intelligence and loyal allies. It’s a pocketbook issue.

Jane Smiley | HuffingtonPost.com

March 23rd, 2007 || PermaLink

Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy

Smith’s core ideas — that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth –have indisputably worked. They’ve produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They’ve built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith’s ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It’s More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound — like climate change and peak oil — that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier.

Bill McKibben | Mother Jones

March 22nd, 2007 || PermaLink

Bush’s Shame

Over 35 percent of the veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom who have sought Veterans Administration healthcare have been diagnosed with mental disorders. The military has been returning troops to combat who have been diagnosed with PTSD, and repeated exposure to trauma worsens the symptoms. An alarming number of Iraq veterans are receiving less-than-honorable discharges for engaging in behavioral symptoms that appear to be PTSD as well as traumatic brain injury. They are shoved aside by claims that their PTSD is a “pre-existing” condition.

More often than not, it is family members who recognize the need and provide primary support for troops to recover from PTSD. Many of the younger soldiers entered the service as teenagers when they left their homes for the first time, which makes their transition back to civilian life all the more difficult; and many individuals were exposed to childhood risks, unstable households, and marginal family status before they joined the service. These personal factors, along with the multiple tours and extended deployments destroy families.

In Iraq, our troops face extremely hostile conditions; they are in constant 360-degree danger of drawing fire, coming under mortar attack, or falling prey to improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Their relentless exposure to urban guerrilla combat, car bombs, sectarian killings, and suicide attacks has made the current war perhaps the most psychologically taxing of any conflict in our nation’s history.

Over 1.1 million American troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the physical and psychological injuries they have suffered, the number of severe PTSD cases will easily run into the hundreds of thousands. The social costs of George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq cannot be summed up by the $500 or $600 billion price tag so far. We are going to be paying the costs of this war for decades after Bush becomes just a shameful footnote in the ashbin of history.

Joseph Palermo | CommonDreams

March 21st, 2007 || PermaLink

End the War (On Terror)

Concretely, Congress should be pushed to take legislative action to renounce the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” enunciated before he invaded Iraq. As The Nation warned in our “Open Letter to the Members of Congress” on the eve of the 2002 war resolution vote, “the decision to go to war has a significance that goes far beyond the war….It declares a policy of military supremacy over the entire earth–an objective never attained by any power. …The new policy [of preventive war] reverses a long American tradition of contempt for unprovoked attacks. It gives the United States the unrestricted right to attack nations even when it has not been attacked by them and is not about to be attacked by them…It accords the US the right to overthrow any regime–like the one in Iraq–it decided should be overthrown…It declares that the defense of the US and the world against nuclear proliferation is military force.” Declaring the Bush doctrine of endless war defunct will not solve the problems posed by Iraq, but it will reduce the likelihood that we will see more Iraqs in our future.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel |The Nation

March 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

Congress, End the War

Democrats should recognize that the time has come to use the full power accorded Congress in time of war: the power of the purse. As Senator Russ Feingold says, “Some will claim that cutting off funding for the war would endanger our brave troops on the ground. Not true. The safety of our servicemen and -women in Iraq is paramount, and we can and should end funding for the war without putting our troops in further danger.”

Instead of negotiating with Bush to give him another year of his war before facing consequences, Democrats should refuse to write another blank check. They should instead support Representative Barbara Lee’s proposal to fully fund the withdrawal of US soldiers and military contractors from Iraq. Lee would give military commanders the resources they need to withdraw all troops by the end of the year by mandating that emergency supplemental funding be used only for that purpose.

The Nation editorial

March 19th, 2007 || PermaLink

God’s Dupes

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin’s Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren’t sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

Sam Harris | Los Angeles Times

March 17th, 2007 || PermaLink

Iraqi Women Silenced

Rapes, bombings, death sentences, and a discriminatory legal system; it is one of the unspoken facts of militarism that women often become the spoils of war. The Iraq war has been a disaster in many ways, but none so extreme as what it’s done to Iraqi women.

Women not only suffer what everyone in Iraqi society suffers - the absence of security, collapse of the country’s infrastructure, a health care system in tatters, and high levels of poverty and unemployment. They also suffer gender-based violence and increased social conservatism. The constant violence - looting, assault, kidnapping, rape or death at the hands of suicide bombers, militias, foreign troops, Iraqi police, and local thugs - has trapped women and children in their homes. Many women who’d formerly worked outside the home or attended school now stay indoors.

Andrea Buffa | TomPaine.com 

March 16th, 2007 || PermaLink