Beyond Vietnam: an excerpt

Below is in an excerpt from a speech made by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exactly one day to the year before he was killed.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech "Beyond Vietnam" was delivered exactly one year to the day before he was gunned down.

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. 

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war."

Listen to the whole speech here.

H.R. 6523 -- the Greatest Little Defense Authorization Act you never heard of

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was right, "numbers almost are distracting."

Perhaps that's why the few press reports that bothered to cover the passage of H.R.6523 Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 largely omitted just how much this bill is for -- $725 Billion. This is reported to be the largest single request for military funds ever, and yet the overwhelming majority of American tax payers not only do not know about this, they aren't asking and, perhaps, they don't care.

We've become so conditioned to hearing references to such unfathomably large sums of money for war spending that most of us hardly pay any attention. Five hundred billion, a trillion, five trillion -- what does it matter? Even the miserly sum of one million dollars sounds like peanuts. Today, "a million" is the new "thousand" it seems, and when it is reported that it costs one million dollars per soldier per year in our ongoing war in Afghanistan, nobody seems to bat an eye.

So is it blatant omission that reporting by CNN, the New York Times, McClatchy and others, like the White House website itself, don't even mention the amount of money Congress and Obama have committed for war spending in FY2011? (At least NPR alludes to the sum total in the second paragraph of their short blog entry).

In this instance it appears that "don't ask, don't tell" is alive and well. Americans are not asking and the government and press aren't telling. 

But if you can pry yourself away from the sensational coverage of the gun tragedy in Arizona, you might find that a quick look at the actual text of H.R. 6523 sheds some light on a much more horrific spectacle of American violence and how it is being funded:

-- $37.1 million for 71 units of family housing at Guantanamo Bay ("kids, guess what-- we're moving!")

-- $101.5 million for military construction at Bagram, Afghanistan

-- $277. 4 million for military construction at five military bases in Germany

-- $20 million (and change) for military construction in Honduras

-- $19.5 million for military construction at Camp Walker in South Korea

 -- $45 million for Air Force construction in Bahrain

-- $50.3 million for Air Force construction in Guam

-- $29.2 million for Air Force construction in Italy

-- $62.3 million for Air Force construction in Qatar

-- $15 million for Air Force construction in the United Kingdom

-- $99.1 million for military construction in Brussels, Belgium

-- $213.1 million for Naval facility construction in Bahrain

-- $11.1 million for Naval facility construction in Djibouti

-- $6.9 million for Naval facility construction in Japan

-- $23.1 million for Naval facility construction in Spain

-- $66.7 million for Naval facility construction in Guam (including some rather unpopular coral reef dredging to make way for a couple of large aircraft carriers -- sorry plankton!!)

...And so on and so forth. I didn't even mention the military building projects in the fifty states, but there are plenty.

Then there is my favorite (page 313) simply labeled "Worldwide Unspecified Range Facility" which requests $68.5 million. When trying to maintain a global military empire, it is always a good idea to set aside an extra $68 million or so for those unforeseen moments when you need to do a little unexpected construction somewhere around the world (good foresight Pentagon!!).

The text of H.R. 6523 goes on for 383 pages. It's hard to imagine when members of Congress or a busy fellow like President Obama had time to read, digest and analyze all of this. They probably get up really early and do it over donuts and coffee.

There are plenty of other requests for things like maintaining airborne signals for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, lightweight body armor solutions, imaging satellite capacities, aircraft, missiles, combat vehicles, ammunition, torpedoes and plenty of "other procurements." The list is very long and very exhaustive, but you get the point: 

"numbers almost are distracting."

The message to the public, I suppose, is "just don't ask. We have everything under control so just fork over the $725 Billion and let us take care of it."

Now, if you don't mind, get back to your under-heated, under-maintained, unpaid for homes, go back to your low-paying jobs, send your children off to their under-funded schools (if there are teachers available today) and keep yourselves busy thinking about Liberty, Democracy and all the good things we are bringing to the world and, by extension, ourselves.

Don't worry about the economy (we're pulling out of it), don't worry about the gun violence (that's just part of living in the Freest Nation on Earth) and for heaven's sake, do not worry about that corporate myth climate change-- if the earth is really heating up, why are we having such intense blizzards all around the world?

Everything will be just fine. God bless the troops, God bless H.R. 6523, and most of all, God Bless the American people...  We couldn't do it with out you!

Filling in the blank

Back in the final days of December while you were busy scrambling to buy presents for everyone on your list and trying to figure out how you were going to pay for it all, Congress was busy too.

On December 15^th H.R. 6523 Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 was introduced to the House of Representatives. This legislation, reported to be the largest single military spending bill ever, commits $725 billion for war spending this year alone.

The bill includes $158.7 billion (declared) for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as up to $75 million for training and equipping counter-terrorism forces in Yemen, $205 million for Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense system and $11.6 billion and $1.5 billion for security force development in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively.

The bill also ensures that, despite Obama’s earlier pledge, Guantanamo Bay will not be closed any time soon.

After agonizing over this legislation for all of two days, the House overwhelmingly passed the bill (see vote roll call here) 341 to 48 with 44 Congressmen and women not casting a vote.

Then, two days before Christmas Eve, the Senate passed the bill unanimously, sending this massive war spending legislation on to the desk of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama for his signature (pending at the time of this writing).

So as Americans were busy spending money they didn’t have on useless toys they didn’t need, Congress was doing the same. This all took place during the media orgy of faux tolerance when suddenly gay men and women were told that they could now openly serve in the military without fear of being threatened or ridiculed (until at least January 2, 2011).

"During these final days of 2010, Americans didn't ask and Congress didn't tell."

Ditto for the media. Little attention was paid to the rubber stamping of this remarkable amount of money with media outlets (like this FOX News report) emphasizing the restrictions the bill places on closing GITMO, choosing to add a reference to “nearly $160 billion for wars” in the third paragraph, with the overall $725 billion mentioned only in the eighth paragraph down.

There was however some serious discussion of this in RT News, a global multi-lingual Russia-based news outlet,  here and here, but how many Americans caught that?

When I discovered that my supposedly “far left Democrat” Congresswoman Rep. Mazie Hirono (HI- Dist. 1) voted in favor of this bill, I came to fully realize that, as it has been stated before, the left wing and right wing of our government, a perennial hawk, beat in unison, assuring an uninterrupted flight towards permanent militarism at the expense of its own citizens. I searched her website for some indication or explanation that Rep. Hirono had voted for this bill for some good reason, but I could find no reference to the bill whatsoever, not even under “recent votes.”

Then yesterday I came home and found a nice tri-color three-fold mailer from Rep. Hirono in my post box. In it, she writes about “working with you” (me??), traveling the District, creating a clean energy economy, creating education opportunities, getting Hawaii back to work and supporting “sustainable island-grown and Hawaii-made products.” Yet something —  something rather important — was missing.

You guessed it! Mazie Hirono’s lovely flier, so full of good news about “preparing our children to qualify and compete for the jobs of the future” (as a guard outside Kabul’s yet-to-be-built Camp Forever) and “creating (camouflage?) green jobs,” lacks any reference to war, military or defense spending.

What the brochure does have is lots of pictures of Mazie wearing hard hats and leis, small business owners and high school students smiling and being “sustainable,” but no absolutely zero mention of GITMO, Yemen anti-terror funding, Israeli air defense, or the hundreds of billions of dollars she voted in favor of spending on wars and militarism.

Gee, how curious…

Perhaps she was busy. Perhaps her PR people managed to squeeze “Education,” “Energy,” “Agriculture,” “Infrastructure,” and “Environment” onto the mailer, but when it came to long, space-eating words like “WAR,” they simply ran out of room.

But I’ve found that with just a few minor adjustments, the same flier can be modified to include this important topic without disturbing the flow or aesthetic charm of Mazie Hirono’s mail-out piece.

In fact, I’ve found that it can be done in a way that leaves a nice open space where she can outline and explain just what H.R. 6523 Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 is.

I’m guessing that a lot of Hawaii voters have never heard of this bill or how she and her colleagues voted and how that money, which might otherwise have been spent here at home, will instead be used.

Here, I have provided a space for the good Congresswoman to fill in the blank.

This reproduction of Rep. Hirono's recent mailer includes popular priorities like "education, energy, agriculture, infrastructure and environment, yet it neglects to mention the $725 Billion military authorization bill she recently voted in favor of.