New Clear Vision

Investing in Nonviolence, Not Dictatorships

by David Swanson

(Editor’s Note: This coming week, we will be running a thematic series of articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues. This essay helps to establish a framework for U.S. engagement in the region.)

I recently flew from California to Washington, D.C., and when the plane landed, the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing prominent individuals whom we’ve previously supported has never resolved anything. (more…)

Why Aren’t We ‘Raising Hell’ for Sustainability, Peace, and Prosperity?

by David Swanson

Yes, yes, poverty exists, just as war does, and the two feed off each other.  When I titled a book War Is A Lie I meant that the justifications offered for wars were false and that the idea that we must always have wars is false.  Our government doesn’t market new poverty campaigns in the same way it does wars.  It markets campaigns to dismantle healthcare and pension systems or to eliminate foreign aid or to restrict organizing rights.  But our culture pushes the false notion that poverty must always be with us.

The fact is that our nation and our world are capable of environmental sustainability, peace, and the eradication of poverty.  We’ve spent a decade racing headlong away from these goals in response to dramatic crimes that killed 3,000 people.  The fact that 10,000 people have died from perfectly preventable causes in Africa alone every single day for those 10 years somehow gets lost in our self-obsessed, short-sighted, fear-driven, greed-excusing, corporate communications system. (more…)

Resisting Militarism in Our Schools

by Harry Targ

I have been thinking a lot lately about “ideological hegemony” — how and why we think about the political world in the ways we do. I do so not to add another layer of theory to an already complex set of arguments about economics and politics. Nor am I interested in immobilizing political activists. Rather, I think progressives need to think about how to challenge the ideas that most of us are supposed to accept and believe.

Of course, the primary public institutions that transmit ideas and ways of thinking to people, from the start to the end of their educational careers, are schools. Our friends on the Right know how important it is to shape schools at all levels. Early in this century I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh say on one of his radio programs that “the only institutions we do not yet control are the schools.” With this as a goal, just the other day we read stories about Koch brothers’ money financing faculty positions at Florida State University in economics (presumably Marxist or structural economists need not apply). (more…)

What Celebrating bin Laden’s Death Reveals About Ourselves

by Caty Gordon

In the wake of the announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed by US forces, his life and death (both saturated in controversy) merit reflection.  He proudly laid claim to killing nearly 3000 people in a single day, and openly touted his financial and military support for numerous other attacks on humankind. The man lived with the intent to oust any person or regime that threatened his goals of a dogmatic Islamic government and a Middle East free of American-sponsored dictators and military occupations. He even penned a fatwa in which he prescribed the killing of Americans as a duty of all Muslims. Bin Laden has also come to exemplify all that is evil about Arabs and Muslims in the corporate American media.  So it is understandable that Americans would react strongly to the news of his death. (more…)

But Will It Bring Peace, or More War?

by Randall Amster

President Obama’s shocking May Day announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed and his body captured promises to usher in a new era of U.S. foreign and domestic policies alike. But what will this portend in actual practice? The implications for the future are potentially staggering in their full import, and they turn initially on how this seminal event will undoubtedly be used to justify U.S. policies that have defined the recent past.

In his announcement, President Obama demonstrated how different he is in temperament (if not policy making) from his predecessor, George W. Bush. Coming eight years to the day after the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech — and, coincidentally, falling on the 66th anniversary of the announcement of Hitler’s death — Obama’s rendering contained none of the misplaced bravado (“Bring It On”) or glorification of misery (“We Got Him!”) that defined the previous administration. Instead, the President spoke in measured terms about justice, courage, and American resolve in the face of grave challenges. (more…)

From the Poverty of War to the Prosperity of Peace

by Michael True

“If voting made any difference, it would be illegal,” according to the late Philip Berrigan. This satirical comment seems especially relevant during our present military and economic crises.

President Obama proposes reasonable remedies, but fails to follow through on them, while Republicans issue counter proposals that are bound to make things worse.

“If it was not clear before, it is obvious now,” according to a New York Times editorial (April 19), that the Republican party “is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to liberate business and the rich from the inconveniences of oversight and taxes.”

Why do we refuse to recognize the economic consequences of our failed policies, or to halt the Bush/Obama war on Afghanistan? According to a U.S. Army lieutenant, “no one benefits from this war…. Only the CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find satisfactory returns on their investments.” (more…)

And the Rise of a New American Radicalism?

by Matt Meyer

If “democracy” is understood to mean a process of inclusion, equalizing diverse peoples such that power and resources are distributed fairly, then democratic movements have a potentially positive role to play in furthering revolution, liberation, justice and peace. By any definition, though, the experiment known as democracy in the USA today is in dire trouble. Nowhere is that trouble more strikingly evident than in the national campaign to do away with public schools. After little more than 150 years of federally-mandated and coordinated schooling-for-all, the US commitment to publicly supported teachers and students is quickly coming to an abrupt end. The global corporate penchant for the privatization, commoditization, and enclosure of practically everything is having particularly chilling effects in policies that Henry Giroux suggests “seek nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.” (more…)