The unions in South Africa seem to have successfully turned back Chinese weapons headed for the Zimbabwe powder keg, and now U.S. longshoremen are taking what may well be the strongest protest action against the Iraq war since it was started five long years ago. Thanks to the always well-informed Juan Cole for the tip. I dare say this is cause for celebration–to be followed by nose-to-the-grindstone protests until the war is over… and then to be followed [...] read more >
Militarism
How it could have been done if the preachers of the free market had stuck to their principles instead of launching a moronic war
Posted by jtellerelsberg on April 25th, 2008[Originally posted here.]
In my post a moment ago I mentioned how I’d once heard that, for the money the US spent on the war in Vietnam, we could have paid for the installation of an in-ground swimming pool for each and every Vietnamese family instead. What a great way to win the hearts and minds of our enemies, eh? So I decided to try out the math for this stupid, awful, and infuriating Iraq war. What if we [...] read more >
Cheap justice (habeus corpus too expensive for GOP)
Posted by jtellerelsberg on September 23rd, 2007My wife and I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper yesterday. Out of respect for the paper’s request that submitted letters be otherwise unpublished, I won’t copy it here, but I will spell out some of what we were writing about.
So it started with an article about the recently successful filibuster by Senate Republicans, to prevent a vote on a bill that would allow Guantanamo Bay detainees, and other prisoners in the “war on terror,” to [...] read more >
Right-to-Know: No-Bid Federal Contracts and Other Federal Spending
Posted by mash on July 16th, 2007FedSpending.org is a new website sponsored by effective OMB watchdog organization and Right-to-Know enforcer OMBWatch.org, which keeps an eye on the deregulatory manias of recent administrations. The new FedSpending.org website allows visitors to track Federal grants and contracts using various search criteria, e.g., location of the recipient (how about “Halliburton”), place of performance (try “Iraq”), sponsoring agency (“Defense”), and whether or not the contract was open to competitive bidding.
The Federal government was supposed to produce [...] read more >
What good is the CIA?
Posted by jtellerelsberg on February 27th, 2007The fact that so much of what the “intelligence” community does is done in secret makes it a little hard to judge the worth of their efforts. But here are a few things to consider.
1) When they do accomplish things, it often turns out badly. Very, very badly.
2) When they don’t accomplish things, the bad results are avoided perhaps only by the grace of God (and the more cool-headed minds that stand between the U.S. intelligence [...] read more >
Mutually assured hypocrisy w/r/t Iran’s nuclear weapons
Posted by jtellerelsberg on February 1st, 2007This morning’s reports on French President Chirac’s statement that, according to the NYTimes,
“what is dangerous about this situation [Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb] is not the fact of having a nuclear bomb,” he said. “Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous.
“But what is very dangerous is proliferation. This means that if Iran continues in the direction it has taken and totally masters nuclear-generated electricity, the danger does not lie in the bomb it will have, and which will be of no use to it.”
Mr. Chirac said it would be an act of self-destruction for Iran to use a nuclear weapon against another country.
“Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” Mr. Chirac asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed.”
There’s no doubt that this represents lame politics on Chirac’s part, since, if this is his true belief, he shouldn’t have been suggesting otherwise before now (or after, with his bungled attempts at retraction).
Some thoughts on 2006
Posted by emilykawano on November 12th, 2006The 2006 Election(s)
By John J. Fitzgerald
The 2006 Election cycle has come and gone. Just like the 2006 Hurricane season it has not performed exactly as predicted, but it has left some changes in its wake. We might actually have experienced several different elections rather than just one. A lot of decision-making got formalized on the 7th of November.
Here are some of the highlights:
Congress Fails to Investigate or Punish War Profiteering
Posted by emilykawano on October 25th, 2006The following post is the text of a radio commentary I (Mike Meeropol) delivered over WAMC radio in early October.
Did you know that the US Congress has rejected efforts to punish, investigate and criminalize war profiteering?
Yes, that’s right. This past February, the House on a mostly party-line vote rejected an effort to forbid expenditures from going to any contractor, “”¦if the Defense contractor audit agency has determined that more than $100,000.000 of the contractor’s costs involving work in Iraq “¦ [...] read more >
Econ-Atrocity: Keynesian Militarism
Posted by emilykawano on August 19th, 2004By Jonathan Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist
A funny thing happened on the road to liberation. The U.S. military has discovered that high unemployment among Iraqis has a lot to do with the strength of resistance to the occupation. Those parts of Iraq that suffer from the worst unemployment are also the places where militant resistance to the U.S. and its allies is the fiercest. The U.S. military’s reaction is an overt, though painfully slow-going, policy by commanders in these battle-torn areas [...] read more >
