David Swanson's Blog, page 139
July 25, 2013
Dirty Wars Comes to Baltimore on July 26
I've been working, on behalf of the producers, with peace groups around the country to spread the word about this film, and the feedback has been incredibly encouraging. I've led discussions at the conclusion of the film in DC and Norfolk and Charlottesville.
July 24, 2013
What Slavery Cost
As I head off to a rally for Trayvon Martin, I notice a column by Bob Koehler in which he says the unpaid work of slaves in the United States is now estimated at $1.4 trillion. Oddly, that's not terribly far from the $1.2 trillion or so, possibly more now, that we spend each year preparing for and fighting wars. If we abolished war we could perhaps afford to compensate descendants of those victimized by slavery. If we abolished prisons, we'd have at least another $100 billion. And, of course, we'd have all those savings again the next year and the next year and the next year.
I wrote a review recently of a film called Copperhead, and I brought up the idea of compensated emancipation. Wouldn't it have been wiser, I asked, to have compensated the slave owners than to have fought the Civil War. Since then, a number of readers have been sending me information on the extent to which compensated emancipation was discussed, proposed, or attempted -- some of which I was unaware of.
I want to try to make this point clearly if I can. When I say that slave owners and everybody else would have been better off with compensated emancipation than with war, I don't mean that they agreed with this at the time. I don't even mean that they agreed in retrospect, after the war -- although many very well might have. I mean that they would have been better off as we see things -- obviously better off, with less dying and suffering and burning and looting and bitter resentment left behind for decades to come. That compensated emancipation was proposed in various ways and rejected doesn't contradict this point.
In Washington, D.C., compensated emancipation was enacted by the federal government, and it worked. It is the focus of an annual celebration on April 16th to this day in our nation's capital. Congressman Abraham Lincoln had introduced a bill for compensated emancipation in Washington, D.C., in 1849. Such a bill was not passed until 1862, when President Lincoln signed it. The terms were of course outrageous. Slave owners were not punished but rewarded with $300 per freed person. And those freed persons were given $100, but only if they agreed to leave the country. But this was an alternative to something far worse: five years of hellish war. And it was an alternative that had worked in British colonies, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, most of South America and the Caribbean, and would go on to work well in Brazil and Cuba.
President Lincoln seems to have made a big push for compensated emancipation only once the war had begun and the war fever long since taken hold. Racism and ignorance might have required that those freed leave the country -- an enormous injustice that would have had to be weighed against the injustice of war. But the governments of the border states and the rebel states rejected compensated emancipation, opting instead for ongoing war. The Delaware legislature came close to passage, but failed. Once again, my contention is not that they didn't do this, but that they shouldn't have -- and even more so that we shouldn't make a similar decision in the future. If we decide to abolish prisons or address global warming or make any other big change, we shouldn't kill each other in large numbers first. And if we do, we shouldn't claim that we had to.
If the North had made an all-out and timely effort for a compensated emancipation plan, and if the South had refused, the South could have been allowed to leave. There would have been no returning of fugitives escaped to the North. The global trend toward the abolition of slavery would have continued, and would have reached the South. So, the choices were not limited to emancipation or war. But, assuming that they were, President Lincoln wrote to California Senator James McDougall making a remarkable case for emancipation in financial terms, a comparison familiar to the opponents of all kinds of wars and military spending down through the ages, including those lobbying Congress this week against another gargantuan appropriations bill. Lincoln wrote:
"As to the expensiveness of the plan of gradual emancipation with compensation, proposed in the late Message, please allow me one or two brief suggestions.
"Less than one half-day's cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at four hundred dollars per head:
Thus, all the slaves in Delaware,
by the Census of 1860, are
1798
400
_________
Cost of the slaves,
$ 719,200.
One day's cost of the war......................
$ 2,000,000.
Again, less than eighty seven days cost of this war would, at the same price, pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Thus, slaves in Delaware......................
1798
" " Maryland......................
87,188
" " Dis. of Col......................
3,181
" " Kentucky......................
225,490
" " Missouri......................
114,965
________
432,622
400
Cost of the slaves......................
$173,048,800
Eightyseven days' cost of the war
$174,000,000
"Do you doubt that taking the initiatory steps on the part of those states and this District, would shorten the war more than eight-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expenses?
"A word as to the time and manner of incurring the expence. Suppose, for instance, a State devises and adopts a system by which the institution absolutely ceases therein by a named day – say January 1st. 1882. Then, let the sum to be paid to such state by the United States, be ascertained by taking from the Census of 1860, the number of slaves within the state, and multiplying that number by four hundred – the United States to pay such sum to the state in twenty equal annual instalments, in six per cent. bonds of the United States.
"The sum thus given, as to time and manner, I think would not be half as onerous, as would be an equal sum, raised now, for the indefinite prossecution [sic] of the war; but of this you can judge as well as I."
The proposed date of 1882 sounds very late. Surely, one might think, it was preferable to destroy the nation with war for five years and end slavery more quickly. Except that slavery ended only in name. Racism and poverty were compounded by bitterness and a new taste for violence. One must wonder whether racism would have ended more quickly if ended nonviolently. It may be that we're still dealing with slavery today because, unlike other countries, we ended it with war. I'm off to pay my respects to Trayvon Martin.
UPDATE: Now I'm hearing that compensation would have been too high, the government never could have paid it -- in fact as high as $2.7 billion. The U.S. government "couldn't afford" that. But here's what the Civil War cost the North: $9.5 billion. Or $7.8 billion. Or $3.2 billion. The estimates are all higher than the unaffordable cost of avoiding war. (And we're not adding in the other-than-financial costs, which were rather significant.) This was paid for with taxes and printing money. That would have been a crazy thing to do for mere liberty for the enslaved. For a war, on the other hand, for the stupid mass-slaughter of a giant pile of humanity, it was simply what had to be done. Here's an excerpt of a review I wrote of a book on taxes:
The North began an income tax in 1862, and the Confederacy in 1863. This was after the routine promises of a cheap and easy war had worn out their welcome. Both sides were forcing men to leave their homes to kill and risk death, but effectively excusing the wealthy from that duty. Thus arose popular pressure to compel the rich to "sacrifice" financially. Both sides enacted progressive, graduated income taxes, and other taxes as well. The North taxed everything in sight, including inheritances and especially corporations. The financial cost of the Civil War was astronomical, and the veterans' pension program was our first major social welfare program. It required massive funding.
But with the end of war came the end of support for taxes, and the income tax and the inheritance tax lapsed temporarily in 1872. Taxation returned to primarily regressive forms, taxing consumption rather than taxing incomes at various levels. Advocacy remained strong in the country, its newspapers, and in Congress in the following years to restore the income and inheritance taxes. Major change would not come, however, until World War I and its army of patriotic propagandists:
"The transition from an almost exclusive reliance on customs duties to a substantial reliance on internal revenues, such as the income tax, the estate tax, and excise taxes, could not have occurred without the demand for fiscal sacrifice that accompanied wartime politics."
What a bargain: we stop taxing foreign goods in order to tax ourselves, and we do that in order to go kill the people who make the foreign goods -- unless they kill us first. What's not to like?
Talk Nation Radio: Hunger Strikers and the Law vs. the Prison Industry
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-hunger
Diana Zuniga is statewide coordinator for CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget: CurbPrisonSpending.org She discusses the hunger strike in California prisons and the ongoing struggle to resist further expansion of mass incarceration, and to move our society in a healthier direction.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
July 22, 2013
Copperhead
Copperhead was a name for Northern Democrats opposed to the Civil War. Now it's also the name of a remarkable new film: CopperheadTheMovie.com. This is not the first film about a family opposed to the Civil War. Many will probably recall the 1965 film Shenandoah starring Jimmy Stewart. But Copperhead is the one to see.
July 21, 2013
TPP: Terrible Plutocratic Plan
Remarks July 21, 2013 at an Occupy Harrisonburg (Va.) Event.
Make your voice heard here
.
Thanks to Michael Feikema and Doug Hendren for inviting me. Like most of you I do not spend my life studying trade agreements, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is disturbing enough to make me devote a little time to it, and I hope you will do the same and get your neighbors to do the same and get them to get their friends to do the same -- as soon as possible.
July 19, 2013
Bradley Manning Wins Peace Prize
U.S. whistleblower and international hero Bradley Manning has just been awarded the 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Bureau, itself a former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Manning is a nominee this year.
A petition supporting Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize has gathered 88,000 signatures, many of them with comments, and is aiming for 100,000 before delivering it to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. Anyone can sign and add their comments at ManningNobel.org
The International Peace Bureau (IPB) represents 320 organizations in 70 countries. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910. Over the years, 13 of IPB's officers have been Nobel Peace laureates. See ipb.org
The Sean MacBride prize has been awarded each year since 1992 by the International Peace Bureau, founded in 1892. Previous winners include: Lina Ben Mhenni (Tunisian blogger) and Nawal El-Sadaawi (Egyptian author) - 2012, Jackie Cabasso (USA, 2008), Jayantha Dhanapala (Sri Lanka, 2007) and the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2006). It is named after Sean MacBride, a distinguished Irish statesman who shared the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize, and is given to individuals or organisations for their outstanding work for peace, disarmament and human rights.
The medal is made of "peace bronze," a material created out of disarmed and recycled nuclear weapons systems, by fromwartopeace.com The prize will be formally awarded on Sept. 14 in Stockholm, at a special evening on whistleblowing, which forms part of the triennial gathering of the International Peace Bureau. See brochure at: PDF.
IPB's Co-President Tomas Magnusson said, “IPB believes that among the very highest moral duties of a citizen is to make known war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is within the broad meaning of the Nuremberg Principles enunciated at the end of the Second World War. When Manning revealed to the world the crimes being committed by the U.S. military he did so as an act of obedience to this high moral duty. It is for this reason too that Manning has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In more general terms it is well known that war operations, and especially illegal ones, are frequently conducted under the cover of secrecy. To penetrate this wall of secrecy by revealing information that should be accessible to all is an important contribution to the struggle against war, and acts as a challenge to the military system which dominates both the economy and society in today’s world. IPB believes that whistleblowers are vital in upholding democracies - especially in the area of defense and security. A heavy sentence for Manning would not only be unjust but would also have very negative effects on the right to freedom of expression which the U.S. claims to uphold."
Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire recently wrote: "I have chosen to nominate U.S. Army Pfc Bradley Manning, for I can think of no one more deserving. His incredible disclosure of secret documents to Wikileaks helped end the Iraq War, and may have helped prevent further conflicts elsewhere."
Maguire explains how far-reaching Manning's impact has been: "While there is a legitimate and long-overdue movement for peace and non-violent reform in Syria, the worst acts of violence are being perpetrated by outside groups. Extremist groups from around the world have converged upon Syria, bent on turning this conflict into one of ideological hatred. In recent years this would have spelled an undeniable formula for United States intervention. However, the world has changed in the years since Manning's whistleblowing -- the Middle East especially. In Bahrain, Tunisia, Egypt, and now Turkey, advocates of democracy have joined together to fight against their own governments' control of information, and used the free-flowing data of social media to help build enormously successful non-violent movements. Some activists of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring have even directly credited Bradley Manning, and the information he disclosed, as an inspiration for their struggles.
". . . If not for whistleblower Bradley Manning, the world still might not know of how U.S. forces committed covert crimes in the name of spreading democracy in Iraq . . . Now, those who would support foreign intervention in the Middle East know that every action would be scrutinized under international human rights law. Clearly, this is for the best. International peacekeepers, as well as experts and civilians inside Syria, are nearly unanimous in their view that United States involvement would only worsen this conflict."
Won't you add your name to the petition now?
Mairead Maguire adds: "Around the world, Manning is hailed as a peacemaker and a hero. His nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is a reflection of this. Yet at his home in America, Manning stands trial for charges of espionage and 'aiding the enemy'. This should not be considered a refutation of his candidacy -- rather, he is in good company. Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi and Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo were each awarded the prize in recent years while imprisoned by their home countries."
July 17, 2013
Talk Nation Radio: John Whitehead on Our Government of Wolves
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-john
John Whitehead discusses a recent attack by Alcohol Beverage Control agents on college students purchasing water and the larger trends toward a police state in the United States. Learn more at http://Rutherford.org Whitehead's latest book is A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
July 14, 2013
Madison Wisconsin Forum August 7 With Buzz Davis, David Swanson, Coleen Rowley, Debra Sweet, Don McKeating
Free Town Hall Meeting August 7, 2013 Madison, WI 5:30-9PM
Location: Ingraham Hall, Rm. B10, 1155 Observatory Dr., top of Bascom Hill, W-Mad. Campus
Illegal Wars, Torture & Spying:
Millions Demanded Bush's Impeachment
Should Obama be Impeached for Continuing Bush's Crimes?
Speaker Buzz Davis, "America Needs a Revolution: Shall It be Bloody or Peaceful? Impeachment Process, Review of U.S. House Resolution to Impeach Bush & Why Not Obama?" Davis,from Stoughton, WI, is a member of Veterans for Peace & led the WI Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition. He's aformer VISTA Volunteer ('65-66), 1st Lt.US Army (trained in infantry & signal corps '67-70 (S. Korea '69-70) &has a masters in urban affairs UW-Milw.('72) & a masters in public administration Syracuse Univ. ('73). He's a retired planner with the state of WI, former elected official (city council & county board), union organizer & official, Democratic Party leader and is a senior activist & member of various boards. 608-239-5354 (cell), dbuzzdavis@aol.com
Speaker David Swanson, "The Imperial Presidency That Won't Go Away: Bush's Wars, Torture & Spying Become Obama's Accepted Policies." Swanson's books include: War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012). He is the host of Talk Nation Radio, has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator & helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011. He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of VA, has worked as a newspaper reporter & as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association & for three years as communications coordinator for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.) He blogs at http://davidswanson.org & http://warisacrime.org & works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org Swanson also works on the communications committee of Veterans For Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member & is Sec. of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet.
Speaker: Coleen Rowley, "Decreasing Personal Privacy and Civil Rights Coupled with Increasing Governmental Secrecy and Control is Unethical, Illegal and Counter-productive" Rowley is a former FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, leading to her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as a two year long Department of Justice Inspector General investigation. She was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002 which honored “whistleblowers.”
Speaker: Debra Sweet. Sweet is the Director of World Can’t Wait which began in 2005 to “drive out the Bush regime.” Based in New York City, she leads the organization’s work during the Obama administration’s repression of whistle-blowers and underlying war crimes, including the expansion of the unjust occupation of Afghanistan, the spreading secret drone wars, use of indefinite detention in Guantanamo and elsewhere, and vast surveillance on whole populations.
Speaker Don McKeating, "Economic, Social & Political Consequences of Our Double Standards." McKeating was in an Army artillery unit in Vietnam '68-69, a police officer in IL for 27 years, a police union organizer & representative, a founding member of the Madison Area Peace Coalition, drafted the Madison city council resolution to defend the Bill of Rights & civil liberties after passage of the Patriot Act, organized & was the first president of VFP Ch. 25 Madison, WI, is president of VFP Ch. 119 St. Petersburg, FL & was a contributing author to the book Long Shadows:Veterans' Paths to Peaceaward winner in France.
July 13, 2013
Blowing the Whistle on the TPP in Harrisonburg VA
Free Trade Pact or Corporate Coup?
Presentation & Discussion with Author & Activist David Swanson
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the most highly secret trade agreement in the history of the United States. It is massive in scope, and is being pushed by the U.S. government at the behest of transnational corporations. It is bad for jobs, bad for democracy, and bad for our national sovereignty. President Obama is expected to try to "fast-track" the TPP as soon as this month. Fast-tracking means that the TPP would be pushed through without adequate congressional and public examination and input. The TPP is being packaged as a “trade pact” when in reality it is all about establishing a system of global corporate governance.
The TPP will:
Prevent effective regulation of Wall Street
Trade good-paying careers for sweatshop labor
Destroy family farms
Accelerate global warming in the name of profits
Keep the public in the dark
Place corporate rights above our national sovereignty
Crush our ability to support local economies
Weaken and undermine democracy at home and abroad
Do any of these things matter to you? Please Join Us!
WHERE: Community Mennonite Church, 70 South High Street, Harrisonburg
WHEN: Sunday, July 21, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Sponsored by Occupy Harrisonburg
For more info: citizenstrade.org
July 11, 2013
Dirty Wars Comes to Charlottesville VA on July 19
The amazing anti-war film Dirty Wars is coming to Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville, Va.
I've been working, on behalf of the producers, with peace groups around the country to spread the word about this film, and the feedback has been incredibly encouraging. I've led discussions at the conclusion of the film in DC and Norfolk and will do so in Charlottesville following the 7 p.m. screening on Saturday August 10th Friday July 19. (Roughly 7 p.m., the schedule isn't posted yet.)
Get your tickets from Vinegar Hill or another ticket seller, but sign up here so I know you're coming and so you can invite your friends and ask them to invite their friends and so on.
Dirty Wars may be one of the best educational outreach opportunities the peace movement has had in a long time. The film is about secretive aspects of U.S. wars: imprisonment, torture, night raids, drone kills.
Dirty Wars won the Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2013 and the Grand Jury Prize at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Variety calls it "jaw-dropping ... [with] the power to pry open government lockboxes." The Sundance jury said it is "one of the most stunning looking documentaries [we've] ever seen."
Dirty Wars makes a powerful case that U.S. wars, aside from all of their known drawbacks, actually make the United States less safe. Dirty Wars also makes real the humanity of our wars' victims. A great deal of activism has been generated by this film. To learn about and take action on one outrage the film depicts, go here.
More importantly, bring people to see the movie who have not been actively engaged in trying to end warmaking. The discussion afterwards will be open to questions and comments from any and all points of view. You can post questions or comments ahead of time here.
SPONSORS:
WarIsACrime.org
Amnesty International - Charlottesville
