Image by The International People’s Tribunal on 1945 US Atomic Bombings.

On June 8th, 2024, in Hiroshima, Japan, The International People’s Tribunal On The 1945 Atomic Bombings met with the goal of holding the United States accountable for the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This People’s Tribunal focuses on the Korean bomb victims, 100,000 of whom were forcibly taken from their homeland by the Japanese to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the war and were subsequently exposed to the A-bomb blasts.

The recent Tribunal gathering in Hiroshima consisted of legal scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, discussing legal theories to hold the United States accountable for violating international law for the 1945 atomic bombings, and attempting to establish the illegality of current nuclear threats and nuclear weapon states.

The Tribunal and its Korean plaintiffs are also seeking an official apology from the United States to the Korean victims for the dropping of the two atomic bombs. First and second-generation victims of these bombings were present at the conference and gave powerful testimony as to the multigenerational effects from the bomb blasts.

The Tribunal itself will hold its opening gavel proceedings in New York City in May of 2026 to coincide with the United Nations meeting on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Participants in the June 8^th conference were given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Park and the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which solemnly exhibits the horrific events of August 6th, 1945. Throughout the museum are displays of the burnt and tattered remnants of children’s clothing, charred bicycles, panoramas of the city after detonation, and graphic pictures of atomic bomb victims staggering toward the rivers of Hiroshima in a futile effort to extinguish their pain.

In a single white flash, some 70,000 souls were extinguished at 8:15 in the morning on that August day. Black Rain followed, pouring down on the alive and the barely alive radioactive water. Charred bodies covered the ground and filled the rivers.

A stone step with the vague outline of a human shadow forever singed into it rests in the museum, allowing the viewer to ponder a person sitting there at the time of the blast, casting a shadow on the stone beneath them as the rest of the stone was bleached by radioactive light from the A-bomb blast. In the Peace Park on a grass hill is Memorial Mound, where the unclaimed ashes of tens of thousands of victims are stored.

Such images linger: A person incinerated and reduced to a shadow. A river so filled with charred corpses no one can enter its waters. Burnt skin falling from bodies like flaps of clothing. The bustling city turned to a hellscape of fire. A grass hill transformed to a charnel house. On an August morning, Hiroshima became Dante’s Inferno.

Cancers and keloids developed in the decades ahead continuing to inflict pain and again victimize the Koreans who had been forcibly removed there. Healthcare of the ongoing illnesses was not provided to the Koreans by the Japanese or the U.S. For the past 79 years, they suffered.

But now they seek redress and justice.

The Koreans seek an apology from the United States for what has happened to them over these last eight decades. With dignity and great strength, they stood together on this June weekend of 2024 stating their case and asking that their plight be recognized.

Why now? What would an apology mean to the Korean victims?

To apologize would be an expression of regret and an accepting of responsibility by the United States, an acknowledgement that the bombing of these two civilian sites was unlawful and inflicted multigenerational pain and suffering on the victims. An apology would be a step toward reconciliation and lasting peace.

And why a People’s Tribunal comprised of Korean, Japanese, American, European and other nationalities? What can its members hope to accomplish against powerful nation-states? Through the rule of law and the justice of international courts, they hope to gain legal remedy. And, equally important, they seek to stand with the victims. As legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan said, “Until we go into the breach with the victims, the victimization will not cease.”

During the conference, a memorial service to the Korean victims was held in the Peace Park. Japanese representatives spoke, Korean victims spoke, and in the audience were Americans invited to participate in the Tribunal. People from three countries connected by the atomic bombings and bearing unreconciled grievances were present at this memorial service. At Ground Zero of the blast, they attempted to heal and reconcile, to move forward into a world without nuclear weapons.

The people, the citizens, are ready. The governments of each country must now follow. This Tribunal seeks to make that happen.

“If the US, which bears the original sin, admits and apologizes for the responsibilities of the atomic bombings in 1945, then no country will ever contemplate using nuclear weapons. This is why I am participating as a plaintiff in The International People’s Tribunal to hold the U.S. accountable for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” — Kee-youl Lee, First Generation of Korean Victims.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Photo by The New York Public Library

Each year Americans forfeit a sizable slice of their income to the United States Treasury to fund the government. Tax Day is dreaded. No one likes surrendering their hard-earned cash. But rather than a resigned shrug, Americans should look closely at what they are getting for their money when it comes to government services and policy.

In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon received $858 billion for the preparation of war. This doesn’t include hidden costs for intelligence services, veterans’ benefits, Homeland Security, or the Department of Energy which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. All totaled, over $1 trillion a year is allotted for warmaking. By comparison, the 2023 budget for the U.S. Department of State, this nation’s department tasked with making peace across the globe, was a relatively miniscule $63 billion.

One way to register resistance to this profligate spending on warmaking is that of renowned peace activist and Catholic priest Philip Berrigan.  During the Vietnam war, Phil initiated the destruction of U.S. military draft files in Baltimore and Catonsville, Maryland to save the lives of both Vietnamese and Americans, actions for which he received lengthy prison sentences.

These draft file actions by Phil initiated a new form of resistance to the Vietnam War since no copies were kept of the draft files. Hundreds of similar actions followed at draft board offices across the country with hundreds of thousands of draft files destroyed, all stopping young men from being conscripted to kill or be killed.

In 1980, Phil initiated the Plowshares movement— which continues to this day— as he and others entered the General Electric Nuclear Weapons facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, pouring blood on weapons blueprints and symbolically hammering on the nosecones of missiles, “Beating swords into plowshares.” A Christian metaphor indeed, but a universal message. Since that first action, there have been over seventy Plowshares actions around the world.

Phil strongly objected to the notion that U.S. citizens should fund needless death and destruction abroad through their taxes, or possibly fund their own destruction by nuclear war. He repeated nonviolent actions time and again, serving a total of eleven years in prison to stop the slaughter of innocents and protest the use of U.S. tax dollars for arms proliferation, nuclear warmaking, and endless wars of choice.

For U.S. citizens, the well-known waste and fraud of the Pentagon should be one outrage. The Pentagon remains the only federal department to never pass a required federal audit. The Pentagon cannot account for 63% of the tax moneyit receives. That’s our money. Gone. Unaccounted. Lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers.

But the more pressing concern with these war dollars is their use to initiate wars of choice, often against impoverished countries, because those countries have natural resources beneath the soil which the U.S seems to think belongs to them. The cruel joke is, “How dare they put their country over our oil.” And so, we take it. With extreme violence and death.

The U.S. currently has soldiers in northern Syria where massive quantities of oil is extracted for western fossil fuel companies. The war in Iraq was for oil. We are building new bases in Somalia where oil fields have been found. These wars for corporate profit have gone on for over a century. As decorated war hero Smedley Butler said in the 1930s about his many years in the U.S. military, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”

Whether it be gold, fruit, rubber, or sugar in Latin America, oil in the Middle East, or rare earth minerals in Africa, the U.S. taxpayer has long funded the corporate theft of natural resources from indigenous lands for the benefit of U.S corporations and their wealthy shareholders. Innocents in foreign lands die as a result, while U.S. taxpayers struggle to pay mortgages, rent, healthcare bills and food costs.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the United States spent some $8 trillion in the last 23 years for the Wars on Terror. More than 4.7  million people in foreign lands died because of those wars, most of them innocent civilians. Mothers and fathers and children.

And so, as this Tax Day approaches, perhaps we can reflect on the life and work of Philip Berrigan and undertake our own ministry of risk for peace in whatever form that may take, to ease the suffering, to restore human dignity, to challenge our doomed policy of warmaking. Only in this way can we reconcile ourselves with justice and democracy. Only in this way can we save ourselves, our country, and perhaps the world.

As Phil said, “These blind leading the blind have done more than threaten us with doomsday scenarios. They have, with a devilish ingenuity, convinced us that we ought to pay, through taxes, for our own destruction.”

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

In one of the most violent cities in the Western hemisphere, we meet with immigrants in a shelter trying to make their way to safety in the United States. Reynosa, Mexico is just across the border from McAllen, Texas, and currently garners a Level 4 Travel Warning from the U.S. State Department: Do Not Travel. The same as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The drug cartels control Reynosa. The part we are in, the outskirts, the impoverished and desperate part, is not safe for anyone, especially immigrants trying to cross the border. To the drug cartels, immigrants are commodities. Money in human form. We witness scores of people who were trafficked, kidnapped and extorted, the children used as drug mules and the women and men gang raped.

No immigrant gets into Reynosa without likelihood of kidnapping. The Mexican military often works in tandem with the cartels, diverting the immigrants directly into the hands of kidnappers who strip them of all possessions, then torture and hold them for ransom. Families with no money are forced to pool resources to save a loved one.

While we speak with the shelter director, she gets a phone call. A family of five, kidnapped and tortured for 2 1/2 months, was just released after relatives scraped together a ransom. They will arrive shortly.

The director and her staff are overwhelmed, but work relentlessly, providing food, shelter, and dignity to people who experience none of these. She tells us almost every woman arriving was raped and as a result are often pregnant or test positive for HIV. Yet in the shelter, immigrants appear safe. High walls and heavy locks add protection.

As we are leaving, the family of five arrives. Like most of the immigrants we see in the shelters, they are too traumatized to speak. They disembark with a few small backpacks and make their way inside. They move slowly, bearing vacant stares. The children are quiet. Everyone appears numb.

At Casa del Migrante, another shelter in Reynosa, a teenage boy approaches me, perhaps 14-years old, holding a cell phone and pointing to the screen. He says something in broken English. Perhaps he wants to use Google translate, I think. To tell me something. The interpreter later says he was pleading for me to take him across the border. I’m an American, and he thinks I can save his life.

Senda de Vida has two shelters serving up to 3,000 immigrants. Pastor Hector Silva and his wife Marylou built a haven on what was once a garbage dump. They cleared the land, put up tents, built tiny sheds to provide shelter for families. Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Salvadorans, Haitians, Guatemalans, and Mexicans all cook and rest together in temporary safety. A place of dignity spanning cultures, languages, and brutal tales of escape.

Four hundred years of colonialism— the first 250 by European powers and the last 150 by the United States— left countries throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean broken, bereft of any form of democratic government. Oligarchs and corruption thrived with the support of the U.S. An astounding transfer of national wealth from indigenous lands to U.S. banks and corporations occurred.

When these corrupt puppet governments weakened and fractured, the drug cartels moved in. The result: Millions of people fleeing their homelands because of gang violence and economic despair. Traveling to the U.S. is their only hope.

In 1994, U.S. Border Patrol adopted a new policy called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” They increased enforcement where it seemed easier for immigrants to cross, forcing them into deadly stretches of desert where they were likely to die, and where the desert is an effective tool in disposing of their bodies. U.S. Immigration weaponized the desert. It is estimated over 10,000 immigrants died in the desert as a result.

If an immigrant is fortunate enough to make it to the border, they must then run the gauntlet of the United States immigration system, a process so cumbersome and broken that the immigrants are handed from federal agencies to state agencies to municipal agencies to NGOs to nonprofits and charities.

And yet the United States needs immigrants to offset the declining birth rate in this country. Their contribution to the labor force, as well as their payroll contributions to Social Security and Medicare, are essential to sustaining the country’s economy. In short, an expansive and orderly process of legal immigration makes sense for economic and humanitarian reasons.

But politics stymies any real debate on a solution. Demagoguery is easier, and it gets votes. It also fuels fear and xenophobia.

On May 7, 2023, near a shelter in Brownsville, Texas, a group of newly arrived Venezuelan immigrants waited at the bus stop. It was 8 o’clock on Sunday morning. An SUV passed with the driver allegedly yelling anti-immigrant slurs. He was traveling at a high rate of speed, apparently lost control, and plowed into the group.

Bodies were split apart, skulls crushed, limbs torn off. Eight people were killed, and ten others injured. The driver, George Alvarez, intoxicated at the time with drugs and alcohol, was initially only charged with reckless driving, but police later added eight counts of manslaughter. He is still awaiting trial.

Even American nonprofits seeking to help find themselves a target of political and legal persecution. On February 7, the Texas State Attorney General, Ken Paxton, sued Annunciation House in El Paso, a Catholic nonprofit providing food and shelter to immigrants. Paxton alleges they’re human traffickers, an allegation not uncommon in border towns.

The El Paso Catholic Bishop, Mark Seitz, responded to the lawsuit:

“For generations, El Paso worked to build a resilient and welcoming borderland community. Today, however, we find ourselves in an impossible position, hemmed in on all sides. On one hand, we are challenged by serious federal neglect to provide a safe, orderly, and humane response to migration at our southern border. On the other hand, we are now witnessing an escalating campaign of intimidation, fear and dehumanization in the state of Texas, one characterized by barbed-wire, harsh new laws penalizing the act of seeking safety at our border, and the targeting of those who would offer aid as a response to faith.”

And yet despite the legal and political threats, local citizens respond to the need.

In Alamo, Texas, we listen as Arise Adelante holds classes empowering immigrants to speak for themselves, to advocate for justice in their communities. These neighborhood communities, colonias, are located on the rural outskirts of town. Residents seek dignity and camaraderie as they try to navigate the hostile U.S. legal, economic, and political systems.

In the colonias, the land is mostly dry scrub not serviced by public sewer or stormwater systems. And so, when it rains, the streets and homes flood. The meager septic tanks spew raw sewage into the streets. Developers bought the land here cheaply and then charged exorbitant prices for small parcels to immigrants, who sometimes sign deeds lacking clear title preventing them from taking full possession. Missing a month’s payment can result in quick repossession.

A giant lake abuts one colonia we visit in Donna, Texas. What could be a water and food source instead has official “No Fishing” signs posted around it. We see other signs that cut to the quick: “Danger – Cancer.” The lake is filled with PCBs, carcinogenic chemicals. Birth defects and cancer rates are notoriously high here. Members of Arise attend municipal hearings with colonia residents and lawyers, challenging the city to remedy the problems.

Team Brownsville began with just a few people rushing bottled water and food to immigrants forced to sit for days in 110-degree heat on the concrete border bridge. The group now educates and orients those newly arrived about the U.S. immigration process at their Brownsville center. We travel to a storage center where they have seventeen units filled with clothing, sleeping bags, tents, pillows, and 250,000 pairs of socks donated by the clothing company Bombas.

In McAllen, Texas, Sister Norma runs Respite Humanitarian Center, a Catholic Charities organization responding to the needs of families in crisis by providing food, safety, and comfort. They’ve hosted up to 1,000 people at a time in the center. Facilitating shipments of supply trucks, handling government officials, knowing the right people, Sister Norma gets things done. When asked to sum up what they do at Respite, she replies, “We restore human dignity.”

And in Weslaco, Texas, human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury and the advocacy group The Angry Tias confront injustices perpetrated against immigrants by the American and Mexican governments. They harnessed their outrage to expose the Trump immigration policy of separating children from parents by releasing an audio tape of children screaming while torn from their parents inside a U.S. Customs and Border Facility. The tape made international news, revealing to the world the horrid conditions of children put in cages by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

“It’s an outrage,” Jennifer said. “All of it. The indignities, the politics, the cruelty to human beings. We were so mad we originally wanted to call ourselves The F**king Angry Tias.”

A country founded on democracy and respect for the individual now finds itself criminalizing the giving of food, water, and shelter to desperate families. “Human Trafficking” is the official response. And so, citizens work tirelessly on both sides of the border trying to meet the need, restoring human dignity when violence and poor policy have stripped it away.

The post Restoring Human Dignity on the U.S. Southern Border appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The post War for Profit: A Short History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

“The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oaths swearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

So screamed the character Howard Beale in the 1976 movie “Network,” a prescient commentary on the corporate capture and slow suffocation of America. Howard was a prime-time news anchor who’d had enough. To some of his viewers, he was having a mental breakdown on national television. To others, he saw the country as clearly as a prophet, saw it for exactly what it was: a fetid cabal of the rich obsessed with money at the expense of human life and dignity.

Howard wasn’t losing his mind, but his soul. And he knew it, so he screamed on national television. Millions of viewers followed him, flinging open their windows and screaming the same furious line: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

That film was made almost 50 years ago. The tragedy of Vietnam had just concluded, the disgrace of Watergate was barely behind us, congressional hearings revealed that the United States government had engaged in assassinations of foreign leaders, staged coups to overthrow foreign governments, funneled money to tyrants and terrorists, even worked with the mafia to achieve its political goals.

Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment skyrocketed at home, the nation’s infrastructure crumbled, crime soared, cities went bankrupt. Confidence in the country’s ability to provide a decent quality of life for its citizens hit rock bottom.

Today, in 2023, the Pentagon, that Beast of the Apocalypse epitomizing greed, gluttony, and eternal violence, has grown its annual budget to gargantuan proportions.  It fights wars wherever it wants without congressional approval or notice. It remains the only government institution awash in unlimited funding and shiny new technology while the rest of the country rusts and goes without.

 Our tax dollars are consumed fighting a proxy war with Russia, using Ukrainian people and land as a testing ground for a seemingly inevitable war with China. The use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. Countless civilians in Third World countries die beneath the weight of sanctions while our neoliberal economic policies suffocate the livelihoods of millions of others.

Climate Catastrophe bears down causing droughts, floods, fires, and typhoons. The poor initially bear the brunt of this, but soon Climate Catastrophe, this man-made monster, will come for us all. And plagues, world-wide plagues have struck, killing millions while our disease control centers flail haplessly about beneath a torrent of public and political outrage.

At home, wages erode, debt cripples college graduates, CEO salaries shoot through the stratosphere. Housing prices soar as real estate conglomerates gobble up the land. Our infrastructure collapses, healthcare grows scarce. Tent cities, school shootings, toxic spills, and oligarchs stain the land.

All the while, our elected congressional officials earn an average salary of $175,000 per year while dickering over “wokeism” and perverse ideas of patriotism and faith. In 2022, those same elected officials took in $2.4 billion in campaign contributions from bigtime donors seeking bigtime federal favors for their bribes.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But simply screaming out the window then slamming it shut isn’t enough. Not now. Not when it’s 90 seconds to midnight. We can’t just be viewers.

A death culture reigns in our country, in our politics, corporations, our entertainment and news, our churches, universities, and our workplace. It seeks to dehumanize, desensitize, divert. It asserts that acquiescence is survival, the best you can hope for in this broken world. Give up and play a video game, watch a cat video, take a pill.

In the movie, Howard Beale succumbs to pressure from the corporate conglomerate that owns the TV station and so begins spouting nightly nonsense on the holiness of big business. His viewers tune him out, his ratings take a nosedive, and his TV production team plots to get rid of him. They dare not go against their corporate chieftain who wants the pro-business narrative to continue, but they cannot abide low ratings. And so, poor Howard is caught in the middle and winds up being shot to death on live television. He becomes another storyline scripted by a TV production team.

Howard was one of those Americans who keenly felt the loss of their soul from corporate tyranny and endless war, who were astonished at the absurdity of their news screens, the direction of their country, the helplessness they felt in the face of it.

We are not TV viewers but live participants. Innocents across the globe are killed in our name, lands pillaged with our dollars while Americans suffer incalculable indignities here at home. Our souls hang in the balance. The corporate-military state seems intent on canceling this show we call life.

If we succumb to the corporate screed and spout its nonsense as Howard did, we will be morally and spiritually killed, shot full of holes. If we tune out as his viewers did, we surrender to stasis and lose our humanity, with the victims of our indifference strewn around us.

The only way to live authentically in a country of death is to resist, because it is in resisting that we retain our humanity, no matter the odds against us, no matter the outcome. Being fully human means resisting death in all its forms. It means peacemaking. We have hope because we have the power to resist, and that is a remarkable power. When exercised properly, it not only shivers the state, but affirms all of life.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using U.S. tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

War is a language of lies. Cold and callous, it emanates from dull, technocratic minds, draining life of color. It is an institutional offense to the human spirit.

The Pentagon speaks the language of war. The President and the Congress speak the language of war. Corporations speak the language of war. They sap us of outrage and courage and the appreciation of beauty. They commit carnage of the soul.

Take for example the recent report issued by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) entitled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” This think tank conducted 24 iterations of wargames whereby China invades Taiwan. The U.S. and its allies respond. The result each time: No one wins. Not really.

The report states,

“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years. While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services. China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war.”

Degraded. A damaged economy. Losses. The report is referring to enormous numbers of men, women, and children slaughtered by bombs and bullets, of economies and livelihoods catastrophically ruined, countries devastated for years. It does not even address the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Its words are void of the sharp pain and grief of such reality, lifeless, soulless. These zombie-technocrats do not just make war on people, but on reason, on human emotion.

A poet is needed to tell the truth. Poetry recognizes not the ideal but the real. It cuts to the bone. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t look away.

They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded.

So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.

And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?

The dead aren’t like us.

How can the fields continue as simple fields?

Language can free our minds or imprison them. What we say matters. The hard, bare, truthful words of reckoning. Utter the words of truth about war and the military can no longer continue its somnambulant recital of death.

A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife

to peel the face from a dead man

and hang it from the branch of a tree

flowering with such faces.

War utilizes a philology emptied of humanity. It speaks in an intentionally mind-numbing manner to glaze over the horrid, murderous acts contemplated. The omnicidal wargames report by CSIS continues, “There is no rigorous, open-source analysis of the operational dynamics and outcomes of an invasion despite its critical nature.” It sounds antiseptic, boring, but in reality, it is, well, . . .

It is worse than memory, the open country of death.
We were meant to think and speak poetically. To lay bare the lie. Poetry detests the banal, combs through the detritus to give uncommon testimony. It is to think and speak realistically and transcendentally, to illuminate the works of the world, whether those works be baleful or beautiful. Poetry sees things as they are, looks at life not as an object to be exploited but contemplated, revered.

Why lie? Why not life, as you intended?

If we take our humanity seriously, our response to the warmakers must be rebellion. Peaceful and poetic, forceful and unrelenting. We need to raise the human condition as they seek to degrade it. The Merchants of Death cannot defeat a movement that speaks the language of poetry.

The Corporate State knows what they are doing. They seek to anesthetize our minds first so they can kill our bodies without resistance. They are good at it. They know how to divert us, deplete us. And should we muster enough violent rage, they know how to respond to our violence. But not poetic protest. Their neural pathways do not lead to poetry, to nonviolent potential, to visions of lovingkindness. Their language, their words, and their power, wither before the truthful expression of their deeds.

That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

Non-violent revolutionaries speaking the language of poetry can win. It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state. And despite our rights, we live in a repressive Corporate-Totalitarian State which imprisons truth-tellers and kills widely and indiscriminately across the globe. Are there 11 million among us in these here United States willing to speak and hear the honest language of poetry?

And so, don’t look away. Speak with unflinching courage and honesty. Words matter. Give witness to life, and to the dirty lie of war. Be a Poet Revolutionary. The truth will kill the Beast.

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

(Poetry by Carolyn Forche)

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The post How to Defeat an Army appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

War is a language of lies. Cold and callous, it emanates from dull, technocratic minds, draining life of color. It is an institutional offense to the human spirit.

The Pentagon speaks the language of war. The President and Congress speak the language of war. Corporations speak the language of war. They sap us of outrage and courage and the appreciation of beauty. They commit carnage of the soul.

Take for example, the recent report issued by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) entitled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” This think tank conducted 24 iterations of wargames whereby China invades Taiwan. The U.S. and its allies respond. The result each time: No one wins. Not really.

The report states,

“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years. While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services. China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war.”

Degraded. A damaged economy. Losses. The report is referring to enormous numbers of men, women, and children slaughtered by bombs and bullets, of economies and livelihoods catastrophically ruined, countries devastated for years. It does not even address the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Its words are void of the sharp pain and grief of such reality, lifeless, soulless. These zombie-technocrats do not just make war on people, but on reason, on human emotion.

A poet is needed to tell the truth. Poetry recognizes not the ideal but the real. It cuts to the bone. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t look away.

They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded.

So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.

And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?

The dead aren’t like us.

How can the fields continue as simple fields?

Language can free our minds or imprison them. What we say matters. The hard, bare, truthful words of reckoning. Utter the words of truth about war and the military can no longer continue its somnambulant recital of death.

A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife

to peel the face from a dead man

and hang it from the branch of a tree

flowering with such faces.

War utilizes a philology emptied of humanity. It speaks in an intentionally mind-numbing manner to glaze over the horrid, murderous acts contemplated. The omnicidal wargames report by CSIS continues, “There is no rigorous, open-source analysis of the operational dynamics and outcomes of an invasion despite its critical nature.” It sounds antiseptic, boring, but in reality, it is, well, . . .

It is worse than memory, the open country of death.

We were meant to think and speak poetically. To lay bare the lie. Poetry detests the banal, combs through the detritus to give uncommon testimony. It is to think and speak realistically and transcendentally, to illuminate the works of the world, whether those works be baleful or beautiful. Poetry sees things as they are, looks at life not as an object to be exploited but contemplated, revered.

Why lie? Why not life, as you intended?

If we take our humanity seriously, our response to the warmakers must be rebellion. Peaceful and poetic, forceful and unrelenting. We need to raise the human condition as they seek to degrade it. The Merchants of Death cannot defeat a movement that speaks the language of poetry.

The Corporate State knows what they are doing. They seek to anesthetize our minds first so they can kill our bodies without resistance. They are good at it. They know how to divert us, deplete us. And should we muster enough violent rage, they know how to respond to our violence. But not poetic protest. Their neural pathways do not lead to poetry, to nonviolent potential, to visions of lovingkindness. Their language, their words, and their power, wither before the truthful expression of their deeds.

That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

Non-violent revolutionaries speaking the language of poetry can win. It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state. And despite our rights, we live in a repressive Corporate-Totalitarian State which imprisons truth-tellers and kills widely and indiscriminately across the globe. Are there 11 million among us in these here United States willing to speak and hear the honest language of poetry?

And so, don’t look away. Speak with unflinching courage and honesty. Words matter. Give witness to life, and to the dirty lie of war. Be a Poet Revolutionary. The truth will kill the Beast.

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

(Poetry by Carolyn Forche)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Justice, it seems, is hard to find. Thousands of grassroots organizations across the country seek justice for their concerns. In the US, over 13,785 nonprofits work for civil rights and social justice. Organizations focused on international justice such as peace, refugees, and international aid number 23,532. Environmental groups number 27,402.

From peace to prison, the environment to economic inequality, many Americans fight for their cause, plead for justice. The dynamic is similar in other countries.

Who, or what, are the forces behind so much injustice and suffering? Is there a common culprit, a common thread or threat?

In 1971, Lewis Powell, soon to be placed on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was a high-powered corporate lawyer sitting on the boards of almost a dozen corporations when he penned the Powell Memo, a letter directed to the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell expressed his grave concern that American business and free enterprise were under full-scale attack from “leftists” and might altogether collapse unless drastic steps were taken.

Powell identified academia, the news media, television, artists, preachers, teachers, Ralph Nader specifically, and certain politicians as being the most articulate and attractive purveyors of this “chorus of criticism” designed to bring down all of American business. Action must be taken, and now.

Citizens were challenging big business, holding them accountable, demanding governmental oversight, exercising their democratic rights. To Powell, the corporate lawyer and perennial corporate board member, this was a bridge too far. The chorus must be killed, power returned to the kings.

The future Supreme Court Justice went on to outline in detail how the corporate world must retake control and influence over every aspect of American life.

Academia must be seeded with professors sympathetic to big business, textbooks reviewed and evaluated, guest speakers deployed on campuses to counter the narrative. Powell wrote that corporations provide lucrative contracts and benefits to colleges and universities, and these should be used to influence precisely what occurs on a college campus.

Powell made a similar argument about the media. News organizations are owned by corporations, and they too must be persuaded to realize that their corporate profits hang in the balance if they continue to publish stories unfavorable to American business. Stories about consumer rights and environmental rights must stop. The same for television, a medium Powell highlighted as perhaps the most effective source of information, or disinformation.

The political arena must not be neglected, said Powell, because “political power is necessary; such power must be assiduously cultivated; and when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” In other words, no holds barred. Lean on public servants in a way they have never experienced.

Paid advertisements, the courts, stockholders, lobbyists, writers, think tanks, and the Chamber of Commerce itself with its hundreds of chapters across the country must all be utilized, weaponized in this war against the chorus of critics.

To read the Powell Memo today is deeply disturbing, not just because it was written by a future Supreme Court Justice who was advocating a corporate takeover of American democracy, but also because the actions detailed were so successfully deployed and completed. Powell was prescient. His plan worked. And the average American pays the heavy price today.

In the United States, power no longer lies within the halls of Congress or the White House, but within the corporate temples.

Our foreign policy, our diplomacy, our war-fighting strategy, are all influenced and dependent upon corporate weapons manufacturers with their legions of lobbyists depositing $285 million into the campaign war chests of candidates across the country, spending a total of $2.5 billion in lobbying over the last twenty years. The US Supreme Court opened the doors to such unlimited corporate campaign spending in its Citizens United decision.

Fossil fuel companies turn up the heat on all of humanity such that we literally boil from climate catastrophe, all so they can rake in record profits. Working hand in glove with weapons manufactures and the media, they foster war and generate enormous revenue for each, using lawyers and lobbyists to implement their cancerous policies.

Many colleges no longer teach or even believe in a broad-based liberal arts education, but rather are technical training schools for investment banks, marketing firms, law firms, accounting firms, weapons manufacturers, and conservative or military think tanks. With the funding of buildings, research grants, and faculty chairs, the corporate takeover of our intellectual life is virtually complete. Students travel through four years of college without a course in American government, history, or literature, resulting in a woefully uninformed electorate.

Prisons are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing criminal justice reform. Schools are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing the development of young minds. Our media, and more importantly now, our social media, is owned by corporate oligarchs who influence the narrative fed to us each day, a narrative designed to keep people scared and pitted against each other.

Thanks to Powell and his colleagues, the planet now faces multiple crises, and perhaps extinction, by way of corporate hand. The danger is real, existential, measurable. The dead can be counted. The homeless, the hungry, the drought stricken, and the war-ravaged form a chorus of suffering. Corporate profits, CEO salaries, lobbying expenditures, and tax cuts reveal the why and how.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Vanguard, Blackrock, Northrop Grumman, CoreCivic, and all their kin have staged a hostile takeover of government and the daily life of its people. They hold the reigns. They are the common thread and threat. Until corporate monoliths are disassembled and defanged, justice will be hard to find.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Justice, it seems, is hard to find. Thousands of grassroots organizations across the country seek justice for their concerns. In the US, over 13,785 nonprofits work for civil rights and social justice. Organizations focused on international justice such as peace, refugees, and international aid number 23,532. Environmental groups number 27,402.

From peace to prison, the environment to economic inequality, many Americans fight for their cause, plead for justice. The dynamic is similar in other countries.

Who, or what, are the forces behind so much injustice and suffering? Is there a common culprit, a common thread or threat?

In 1971, Lewis Powell, soon to be placed on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was a high-powered corporate lawyer sitting on the boards of almost a dozen corporations when he penned the Powell Memo, a letter directed to the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell expressed his grave concern that American business and free enterprise were under full-scale attack from “leftists” and might altogether collapse unless drastic steps were taken.

Powell identified academia, the news media, television, artists, preachers, teachers, Ralph Nader specifically, and certain politicians as being the most articulate and attractive purveyors of this “chorus of criticism” designed to bring down all of American business. Action must be taken, and now.

Citizens were challenging big business, holding them accountable, demanding governmental oversight, exercising their democratic rights. To Powell, the corporate lawyer and perennial corporate board member, this was a bridge too far. The chorus must be killed, power returned to the kings.

The future Supreme Court Justice went on to outline in detail how the corporate world must retake control and influence over every aspect of American life.

Academia must be seeded with professors sympathetic to big business, textbooks reviewed and evaluated, guest speakers deployed on campuses to counter the narrative. Powell wrote that corporations provide lucrative contracts and benefits to colleges and universities, and these should be used to influence precisely what occurs on a college campus.

Powell made a similar argument about the media. News organizations are owned by corporations, and they too must be persuaded to realize that their corporate profits hang in the balance if they continue to publish stories unfavorable to American business. Stories about consumer rights and environmental rights must stop. The same for television, a medium Powell highlighted as perhaps the most effective source of information, or disinformation.

The political arena must not be neglected, said Powell, because “political power is necessary; such power must be assiduously cultivated; and when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” In other words, no holds barred. Lean on public servants in a way they have never experienced.

Paid advertisements, the courts, stockholders, lobbyists, writers, think tanks, and the Chamber of Commerce itself with its hundreds of chapters across the country must all be utilized, weaponized in this war against the chorus of critics.

To read the Powell Memo today is deeply disturbing, not just because it was written by a future Supreme Court Justice who was advocating a corporate takeover of American democracy, but also because the actions detailed were so successfully deployed and completed. Powell was prescient. His plan worked. And the average American pays the heavy price today.

In the United States, power no longer lies within the halls of Congress or the White House, but within the corporate temples.

Our foreign policy, our diplomacy, our war-fighting strategy, are all influenced and dependent upon corporate weapons manufacturers with their legions of lobbyists depositing $285 million into the campaign war chests of candidates across the country, spending a total of $2.5 billion in lobbying over the last twenty years. The US Supreme Court opened the doors to such unlimited corporate campaign spending in its Citizens United decision.

Fossil fuel companies turn up the heat on all of humanity such that we literally boil from climate catastrophe, all so they can rake in record profits. Working hand in glove with weapons manufactures and the media, they foster war and generate enormous revenue for each, using lawyers and lobbyists to implement their cancerous policies.

Many colleges no longer teach or even believe in a broad-based liberal arts education, but rather are technical training schools for investment banks, marketing firms, law firms, accounting firms, weapons manufacturers, and conservative or military think tanks. With the funding of buildings, research grants, and faculty chairs, the corporate takeover of our intellectual life is virtually complete. Students travel through four years of college without a course in American government, history, or literature, resulting in a woefully uninformed electorate.

Prisons are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing criminal justice reform. Schools are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing the development of young minds. Our media, and more importantly now, our social media, is owned by corporate oligarchs who influence the narrative fed to us each day, a narrative designed to keep people scared and pitted against each other.

Thanks to Powell and his colleagues, the planet now faces multiple crises, and perhaps extinction, by way of corporate hand. The danger is real, existential, measurable. The dead can be counted. The homeless, the hungry, the drought stricken, and the war-ravaged form a chorus of suffering. Corporate profits, CEO salaries, lobbying expenditures, and tax cuts reveal the why and how.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Vanguard, Blackrock, Northrop Grumman, CoreCivic, and all their kin have staged a hostile takeover of government and the daily life of its people. They hold the reigns. They are the common thread and threat. Until corporate monoliths are disassembled and defanged, justice will be hard to find.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Justice, it seems, is hard to find. Thousands of grassroots organizations across the country seek justice for their concerns. In the US, over 13,785 nonprofits work for civil rights and social justice. Organizations focused on international justice such as peace, refugees, and international aid number 23,532. Environmental groups number 27,402.

Until corporate monoliths are disassembled and defanged, justice will be hard to find.

From peace to prison, the environment to economic inequality, many Americans fight for their cause, plead for justice. The dynamic is similar in other countries. 

Who, or what, are the forces behind so much injustice and suffering? Is there a common culprit, a common thread or threat?

In 1971, Lewis Powell, soon to be placed on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was a high-powered corporate lawyer sitting on the boards of almost a dozen corporations when he penned the Powell Memo, a letter directed to the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell expressed his grave concern that American business and free enterprise were under full-scale attack from "leftists" and might altogether collapse unless drastic steps were taken.

Powell identified academia, the news media, television, artists, preachers, teachers, Ralph Nader specifically, and certain politicians as being the most articulate and attractive purveyors of this "chorus of criticism" designed to bring down all of American business. Action must be taken, and now. 

Citizens were challenging big business, holding them accountable, demanding governmental oversight, exercising their democratic rights. To Powell, the corporate lawyer and perennial corporate board member, this was a bridge too far. The chorus must be killed, power returned to the kings.

The future Supreme Court Justice went on to outline in detail how the corporate world must retake control and influence over every aspect of American life.

Academia must be seeded with professors sympathetic to big business, textbooks reviewed and evaluated, guest speakers deployed on campuses to counter the narrative. Powell wrote that corporations provide lucrative contracts and benefits to colleges and universities, and these should be used to influence precisely what occurs on a college campus.

Powell made a similar argument about the media. News organizations are owned by corporations, and they too must be persuaded to realize that their corporate profits hang in the balance if they continue to publish stories unfavorable to American business. Stories about consumer rights and environmental rights must stop. The same for television, a medium Powell highlighted as perhaps the most effective source of information, or disinformation.

The political arena must not be neglected, said Powell, because "political power is necessary; such power must be assiduously cultivated; and when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business." In other words, no holds barred. Lean on public servants in a way they have never experienced.

Paid advertisements, the courts, stockholders, lobbyists, writers, think tanks, and the Chamber of Commerce itself with its hundreds of chapters across the country must all be utilized, weaponized in this war against the chorus of critics.

To read the Powell Memo today is deeply disturbing, not just because it was written by a future Supreme Court Justice who was advocating a corporate takeover of American democracy, but also because the actions detailed were so successfully deployed and completed. Powell was prescient. His plan worked. And the average American pays the heavy price today.

In the United States, power no longer lies within the halls of Congress or the White House, but within the corporate temples.

Our foreign policy, our diplomacy, our war-fighting strategy, are all influenced and dependent upon corporate weapons manufacturers with their legions of lobbyists depositing $285 million into the campaign war chests of candidates across the country, spending a total of $2.5 billion in lobbying over the last twenty years. The US Supreme Court opened the doors to such unlimited corporate campaign spending in its Citizens United decision.

Fossil fuel companies turn up the heat on all of humanity such that we literally boil from climate catastrophe, all so they can rake in record profits. Working hand in glove with weapons manufactures and the media, they foster war and generate enormous revenue for each, using lawyers and lobbyists to implement their cancerous policies.

Many colleges no longer teach or even believe in a broad-based liberal arts education, but rather are technical training schools for investment banks, marketing firms, law firms, accounting firms, weapons manufacturers, and conservative or military think tanks. With the funding of buildings, research grants, and faculty chairs, the corporate takeover of our intellectual life is virtually complete. Students travel through four years of college without a course in American government, history, or literature, resulting in a woefully uninformed electorate.

Prisons are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing criminal justice reform. Schools are privatized and corporatized thereby influencing the development of young minds. Our media, and more importantly now, our social media, is owned by corporate oligarchs who influence the narrative fed to us each day, a narrative designed to keep people scared and pitted against each other.

Thanks to Powell and his colleagues, the planet now faces multiple crises, and perhaps extinction, by way of corporate hand. The danger is real, existential, measurable. The dead can be counted. The homeless, the hungry, the drought stricken, and the war-ravaged form a chorus of suffering. Corporate profits, CEO salaries, lobbying expenditures, and tax cuts reveal the why and how.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Vanguard, Blackrock, Northrop Grumman, CoreCivic, and all their kin have staged a hostile takeover of government and the daily life of its people. They hold the reigns. They are the common thread and threat. Until corporate monoliths are disassembled and defanged, justice will be hard to find.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

What is it like to be so ashamed of the company for whom you work that you cannot bring yourself to admit you work there? Ashamed of the products they manufacture, the innocent people those products kill, the hundreds of billions of dollars of public taxpayer money squandered in a gluttonous pursuit of profits?

This is life as seen on November 10^th, 2022, at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, VA. Members and supporters of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a public tribunal, served “subpoenas” on four United States weapons manufacturers charging them with War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Theft, and Bribery.

The other three corporations served that same day were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Atomics. These four corporations are representative of the modern-day piracy that is the U.S. war industry, a corporate capture of U.S. foreign policy, the Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, and the U.S. economic system.

Raytheon Technologies occupies a towering office building in Arlington, a stone’s throw from the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, two sites commemorating death and the utter failure of war. Though the Raytheon building has its corporate logo plastered in blood-red letters at the top, once inside no sign exists evidencing this corporate war profiteer. No name, no logo, no receptionist. A sad attempt to hide their dealings in the black art of war.

When asked, security guards refused to acknowledge Raytheon was in the building. Of the dozens of employees who passed, none would admit they worked at Raytheon, averting their eyes as they hurried away. When police arrived to escort the Tribunal members and supporters off premises, the police would not acknowledge Raytheon was headquartered there. Just like the employees, they had their orders. Keep quiet, admit nothing.

It was silent as a tomb except for the voices of the Tribunal members speaking the truth about the trail of suffering and death Raytheon and its corporate brethren have left across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and the Palestinian Occupied Territory. Meanwhile, these Merchants of Death have left the United States financially, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.

Raytheon Technologies has a market capitalization of $96 billion. According to Macrotrends, Raytheon Technologies revenue for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $16.951B, a 4.55% increase year-over-year. For 2021 it was $64.388B, a 13.79% increase from 2020, for 2020 was $56.587B, a 24.78% increase from 2019, and for 2019 was $45.349B, a 30.68% increase from 2018. In four years, they have garnered almost a 70% increase in revenue. Marketing death is good for profits if you can live with yourself. Apparently, given their silence, many Raytheon employees struggle with this very issue.

Raytheon builds some of the most destabilizing, destructive, and expensive weapons on earth. The Hypersonic Missile which travels in excess of five times the speed of sound — Mach 5 — covering vast distances in minutes. It is “hard to stop and flies nimbly to avoid detection and dodge defensive countermeasures.” All these are attributes which make the missile so destabilizing to a foreign leader who has only minutes to determine whether they are being attacked with a nuclear weapon.

Raytheon makes the Peregrine Air-to-Air Missile which they claim “increases firepower, penetrates bad weather, and goes the distance.” Add to that their plans to use “high power microwaves” in war and we see the epitome of a Merchant of Death.

Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin are the same. They too revel in blood money as they build for war and drain the U.S. economy. In fact, some $8 trillion in U.S. taxpayer money has been given to U.S. defense contractors over the last twenty years.

The U.S. War Industry plays a key role in fomenting war with their congressional lobbying, not just pushing for weapons contracts but influencing military strategy, thereby exacerbating and prolonging the anguish of civilians bearing the brunt of these wars of choice. On the issue of war in particular, Congress must be answerable to its citizens, not a handful of corporations.

With their silence on November 10, these weapons manufacturers revealed their shame. Their corporate mission statement is “War Begets Profit.”  For the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, the mission statement is “Come War Profiteers, Give Account.”  Stand before a Tribunal and be judged.

And so, what is it like to give your talents to a corporation which hides its very existence, to give all your efforts and education and experience in the creation of weapons which kill indiscriminately? Their loss of words, their averting eyes, the damning silence offered in their corporate crypt, is the devastating answer.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

What is it like to be so ashamed of the company for whom you work that you cannot bring yourself to admit you work there? Ashamed of the products they manufacture, the innocent people those products kill, the hundreds of billions of dollars of public taxpayer money squandered in a gluttonous pursuit of profits?

Raytheon Technologies occupies a towering office building in Arlington, a stone's throw from the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, two sites commemorating death and the utter failure of war.

This is life as seen on November 10th, 2022, at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, VA. Members and supporters of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a public tribunal, served "subpoenas" on four United States weapons manufacturers charging them with War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Theft, and Bribery.

The other three corporations served that same day were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Atomics. These four corporations are representative of the modern-day piracy that is the U.S. war industry, a corporate capture of U.S. foreign policy, the Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, and the U.S. economic system.

Raytheon Technologies occupies a towering office building in Arlington, a stone's throw from the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, two sites commemorating death and the utter failure of war. Though the Raytheon building has its corporate logo plastered in blood-red letters at the top, once inside no sign exists evidencing this corporate war profiteer. No name, no logo, no receptionist. A sad attempt to hide their dealings in the black art of war.

When asked, security guards refused to acknowledge Raytheon was in the building. Of the dozens of employees who passed, none would admit they worked at Raytheon, averting their eyes as they hurried away. When police arrived to escort the Tribunal members and supporters off premises, the police would not acknowledge Raytheon was headquartered there. Just like the employees, they had their orders. Keep quiet, admit nothing.

It was silent as a tomb except for the voices of the Tribunal members speaking the truth about the trail of suffering and death Raytheon and its corporate brethren have left across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and the Palestinian Occupied Territory. Meanwhile, these Merchants of Death have left the United States financially, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.

Raytheon Technologies has a market capitalization of $96 billion. According to Macrotrends, Raytheon Technologies revenue for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $16.951B, a 4.55% increase year-over-year. For 2021 it was $64.388B, a 13.79% increase from 2020, for 2020 was $56.587B, a 24.78% increase from 2019, and for 2019 was $45.349B, a 30.68% increase from 2018. In four years, they have garnered almost a 70% increase in revenue. Marketing death is good for profits if you can live with yourself. Apparently, given their silence, many Raytheon employees struggle with this very issue.

Raytheon builds some of the most destabilizing, destructive, and expensive weapons on earth. The Hypersonic Missile which travels in excess of five times the speed of sound — Mach 5 — covering vast distances in minutes. It is "hard to stop and flies nimbly to avoid detection and dodge defensive countermeasures." All these are attributes which make the missile so destabilizing to a foreign leader who has only minutes to determine whether they are being attacked with a nuclear weapon.

$8 trillion in U.S. taxpayer money has been given to U.S. defense contractors over the last twenty years.

Raytheon makes the Peregrine Air-to-Air Missile which they claim "increases firepower, penetrates bad weather, and goes the distance." Add to that their plans to use "high power microwaves" in war and we see the epitome of a Merchant of Death.

Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin are the same. They too revel in blood money as they build for war and drain the U.S. economy. In fact, some $8 trillion in U.S. taxpayer money has been given to U.S. defense contractors over the last twenty years.

The U.S. War Industry plays a key role in fomenting war with their congressional lobbying, not just pushing for weapons contracts but influencing military strategy, thereby exacerbating and prolonging the anguish of civilians bearing the brunt of these wars of choice. On the issue of war in particular, Congress must be answerable to its citizens, not a handful of corporations.

With their silence on November 10, these weapons manufacturers revealed their shame. Their corporate mission statement is "War Begets Profit." For the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, the mission statement is "Come War Profiteers, Give Account."  Stand before a Tribunal and be judged.

And so, what is it like to give your talents to a corporation which hides its very existence, to give all your efforts and education and experience in the creation of weapons which kill indiscriminately? Their loss of words, their averting eyes, the damning silence offered in their corporate crypt, is the devastating answer.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Music is not just the language of the gods but quite possibly the language of peace, healing, and reconciliation.

Combat veterans with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury are benefiting from music therapy. In recent years, the Veterans Administration has more than doubled the number of music therapists at its clinics. Music rebuilds damaged neural connections, engages neural networks, and triggers the parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” side) to relax patients.

Additional research demonstrates that pleasant music can reduce activity in the brain’s amygdala, which is responsible for regulating our negative emotions. Accordingly, music can open a safe path to remember, to talk, to engage and heal.

The American Music Therapy Association (formerly the National Association for Music Therapy) was founded in 1950 and ever since has been promoting the benefits of music therapy to help with the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals. According to Barbara Crowe, past president of the AMTA, “Music therapy can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort—between demoralization and dignity.”

At a VA clinic in New Jersey for Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD, a staff psychiatrist slides her bow across her viola playing a soft tune. She is known as the “Violin Doc.” One veteran in the group says, “I’m into classical music . . . to get through the night I listen to classical music.”

Music is not just representational, not just mimetic; it does more than simply imitate a thought or feeling or scene. Music conjures the deepest sources of our shared humanity. It is both a creation and a creator. Each musical piece is a unique expression of truth, telling us something we know without thinking. It speaks to our essence. And it is music that just might save us.

Bach’s “Prelude No. 1 in C Major,” from his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” is universally known by its seemingly simple, gentle rolling keys with each note attracting the other, linking chords, all connecting us to him, his music, and to fellow listeners. Bach’s modulating of keys mediates our conflicted emotions, his repeating notes take us to a non-thinking state, the subtle tension and resolution in the music captures, captivates, and then releases us, harmonized and healed. It is therapy without words.

Such music can transcend cultural, ethnic, and religious boundaries. It can cross continents and war zones. It speaks of a universal beauty, a shared appreciation. If we value beauty, we value life. Violence and war are anathema to beauty and life, inconsistent with our natural state. The result is disharmony, the cacophonous scream of humanity.

A prelude to peace means we must stop shouting, stop shooting, and listen, since only with our own silence can we hear the music. “Where words fail, music speaks,” wrote Hans Christian Andersen. War is not just a failure of words, but a failure of listening. Our universal notes are lost in the spew of outrage. Beauty is murdered with each bullet and bomb. Bach’s “Prelude” becomes a Requiem, a mass for the dead.

Should Russian and Ukrainian soldiers stop shooting and listen to “Prelude No. 1 in C Major”? Absolutely. It is the necessary prelude for peace, as humanity saw in the music-inspired Christmas Truce in World War I. For a few moments, if they truly listen, they will no longer be soldiers, no longer strangers one to the other. They will intuitively see commonality, community, harmony. For that brief time, they will reside together in beauty and peace, going from “demoralization to dignity.” And when the Prelude ends, they will realize they must overcome their subtly changed nature if they are to be killers again.

And so, can music save our species? Thousands of strangers can gather in a concert hall and have a collective, peaceful experience. Weapons and wars cannot do that. Accusations and insults, threats of hellfire, none of these have ever produced a lasting peace. Diplomacy as practiced today is simply a prelude to war. After all, the big money is in weapons, not words.

The resolution to endless war just might be found in the eternal mystery of music, its ability to attract, to rebuild, to connect. It calls to something deeper than reason, since too often we can reason ourselves into or out of anything we wish. It offers the chance to regain our fundamental nature, a trading of swords for symphonies. Why not Bach? Why not his “Prelude”? And after Bach, on to Liszt.

Once we quietly listen, we may come out the other side and remember who we truly are.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Image by Dan Meyers.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I recently joined a gathering of people highly concerned with a range of threats, from war to climate catastrophe and more.

One speaker presented on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine that has come under shelling. It has six reactors. Any one of them, if hit by artillery, would explode with more destructive force than ten Chernobyls. If they aren’t hit by shelling, the power grid keeping the nuclear rods cooled could be knocked offline by shelling in the area. This would cause a meltdown. Or the workers at the plant could flee the area because they are working in the middle of a deadly war zone, thereby leaving the plant without the necessary technicians to keep it running safely.

This was just one of the issues raised last week.

We also spoke of hypersonic missiles which fly at five times the speed of sound, are low flying and evasive and thus cannot be detected by radar, making them a highly destabilizing instrument of war; the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads to be used as part of a conventional attack under the absurd assumption that a limited nuclear war can be fought; and, the $1.5 trillion to be spent on “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear force, rebuilding every leg of the nuclear triad.

Is this not some form of planetary madness?

I looked around the room at our hard-working, well-informed, occasionally disorganized group from various backgrounds and asked myself, It’s up to us to save humanity? Groups like this are to pull us back from the brink? Shouldn’t there be some vast international organization of Nobel laureates with global support and authority doing this? Some world agency with endless resources working every day at this? After all, we had trouble arranging the picnic tables in an orderly fashion.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction. My mind reeled, spun. I eventually found footing in the reassuring fields of art, poetry, music, beauty. I thought of dance.

The dance of sympathy refers to the idea that our bodies feel compelled to move in response to the music we hear. Music evokes a sympathetic connection and our bodies, regardless of where we are from, move as a result. From a waltz to a samba to Afro Dance, we come together on the floor, unknown to each other a moment before but now sharing space, swaying to the tempo, rhyming without words.

The dance of sympathy says our emotions connect us, makes two strangers rise in a room and begin to dance in unison, both responding to the music they hear. Similarly, a poem, a painting, a sculpture can elicit comparable outbreaks of emotional bonding. We are all connected, sympathetic kin transcending borders, ethnicities, and religions. This group of peacemakers in the White Mountains knew that, lived it, worked to implement it. We did not all rise and dance, thank goodness, but our hearts and minds moved in unison.

Our world is perpetually at war, injustice rampant, suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Greed drives this malevolent chaos, corroding the spirit, emptying the heart, distorting the mind. Greed disdains beauty and art unless it can possess it privately. Avarice cannot reconcile itself to fellowship, its insatiable appetite inevitably consuming all those within its reach.

Art can create order out of such chaos, bring form and shape to pain, outrage, and injustice. It also affirms love, compassion, and a shared humanity. It says, you are not alone, whether in pain or joy we travel together.

Working for peace and justice is not only the moral and right thing to do, but is also a creative expression of what it is to be human, an effort to eliminate war by bringing order to chaos, replacing violence with harmony. It is to dance in sympathy with all people. Conversely, to be a warrior, to kill, or to ignore the deeds of warriors, requires an act against self, a contraction of spirit, a shutting down. It is an isolating act, self-immolating, burning up any connection to humanity.

One night during my stay in the mountains, a woman from outside our group read from a book of poetry she had recently published. The poems were about things she should have said to her son who lost his battle with drug addiction. The subject was difficult, the poems wrenching and beautiful. One of them had the refrain, “Why did I pour so much love into every bath?” Why, if this was to be the result? She used precise rhyming schemes, sonnets and villanelles, to help order her outrage, give form and shape to her suffering. Her artistry had led her to a personal peacemaking, with herself, with her son, and the world.

As a member of one these scattered, random groups of dissident peacemakers, I join others trying to do the same, practicing our nonviolent arts, writing our saving works, using hopeful creativity to bring order to chaos and lead us through these dark, looming apocalyptic days so that love lurches on, cleansing, healing, restoring. May we all rise, cross our invented borders, and meet in sympathetic connection. May we all be poets and peacemakers, ending this planetary madness.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I gathered last week with a group of antiwar activists where we talked of the grim issues confronting the globe. Nuclear war, conventional war, drone war, Climate Catastrophe, American Imperialism, our Culture of Militarism. The world is in a dire, cataclysmic state. We are, it seems, a hairsbreadth from annihilating ourselves.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction.

One speaker presented on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine that has come under shelling. It has six reactors. Any one of them, if hit by artillery, would explode with more destructive force than ten Chernobyls combined. If they aren’t hit by shelling, the power grid keeping the nuclear rods cooled could be knocked offline by shelling in the area. This would cause a meltdown. Or the workers at the plant could flee the area because they are working in the middle of a deadly war zone, thereby leaving the plant without the necessary technicians to keep it running safely.

This was just one of the issues raised last week.

We also spoke of hypersonic missiles which fly at five times the speed of sound, are low flying and evasive and thus cannot be detected by radar making it a highly destabilizing instrument of war; the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads to be used as part of a conventional attack under the absurd assumption that a limited nuclear war can be fought; and, the $1.5 trillion to be spent on modernizing the U.S. nuclear force rebuilding every leg of the nuclear triad. 

Is this not some form of planetary madness?

I looked around the room at our hard-working, well-informed, occasionally disorganized group from various backgrounds and asked myself, It’s up to us to save humanity? Groups like this are to pull us back from the brink? Shouldn’t there be some vast international organization of Nobel laureates with global support and authority doing this? Some world agency with endless resources working every day at this? After all, we had trouble arranging the picnic tables in an orderly fashion.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction. My mind reeled, spun. I eventually found footing in the reassuring fields of art, poetry, music, beauty. I thought of dance.

The dance of sympathy refers to the idea that our bodies feel compelled to move in response to the music we hear. Music evokes a sympathetic connection and our bodies, regardless of where we are from, move as a result. From a waltz to a samba to Afro Dance, we come together on the floor, unknown to each other a moment before but now sharing space, swaying to the tempo, rhyming without words.

The dance of sympathy says our emotions connect us, makes two strangers rise in a room and begin to dance in unison, both responding to the music they hear. Similarly, a poem, a painting, a sculpture causes comparable outbreaks of emotional bonding. Like it or not, we are all connected, sympathetic kin transcending borders, ethnicities, and religions. This group of peacemakers in the White Mountains knew that, lived it, worked to implement it. We did not all rise and dance, thank goodness, but our hearts and minds moved in unison.  

Our world is perpetually at war, injustice is rampant, and suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Greed drives this malevolent chaos, corroding the spirit, emptying the heart, distorting the mind. Greed disdains beauty and art, cannot reconcile itself to fellowship, its insatiable appetite inevitably consuming all those within its reach.

Art creates order out of such chaos, brings form and shape to pain, outrage, and injustice. It also affirms love, compassion, and a shared humanity. It says, you are not alone, whether in pain or joy we travel together.

Working for peace and justice is not only the moral and right thing to do, but is also a creative expression of what it is to be human, an effort to eliminate war by bringing order to chaos and replacing violence with harmony. It is to dance in sympathy with all people. Conversely, to be a warrior, to kill, or to ignore the deeds of warriors, requires an act against self, a contraction of spirit, a shutting down. It is an isolating act, self-immolating, burning up any connection to humanity.

One night during my stay in the mountains, a woman from outside our group read from a book of poetry she had recently published. The poems were about things she should have said to her son who lost his battle with drug addiction. The subject was difficult, the poems wrenching and beautiful. One of them had the refrain, “Why did I pour so much love into every bath?” Why, if this was to be the result? She used precise rhyming schemes, sonnets and villanelles, to help order her outrage, give form and shape to her suffering. Her artistry had led her to a personal peacemaking, with herself, with her son, and the world.

As a member of one these scattered, random groups of dissident peacemakers, we try to do the same, practicing our nonviolent art, writing our saving works, using hopeful artistry to bring order to chaos and lead us through these dark, cataclysmic days so that love lurches on, cleansing, healing, restoring. May we all rise, cross our invented borders and meet in sympathetic connection. May we all be poets and peacemakers, ending this planetary madness.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I gathered last week with a group of antiwar activists where we talked of the grim issues confronting the globe. Nuclear war, conventional war, drone war, Climate Catastrophe, American Imperialism, our Culture of Militarism. The world is in a dire, cataclysmic state. We are, it seems, a hairsbreadth from annihilating ourselves.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction.

One speaker presented on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine that has come under shelling. It has six reactors. Any one of them, if hit by artillery, would explode with more destructive force than ten Chernobyls combined. If they aren’t hit by shelling, the power grid keeping the nuclear rods cooled could be knocked offline by shelling in the area. This would cause a meltdown. Or the workers at the plant could flee the area because they are working in the middle of a deadly war zone, thereby leaving the plant without the necessary technicians to keep it running safely.

This was just one of the issues raised last week.

We also spoke of hypersonic missiles which fly at five times the speed of sound, are low flying and evasive and thus cannot be detected by radar making it a highly destabilizing instrument of war; the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads to be used as part of a conventional attack under the absurd assumption that a limited nuclear war can be fought; and, the $1.5 trillion to be spent on modernizing the U.S. nuclear force rebuilding every leg of the nuclear triad. 

Is this not some form of planetary madness?

I looked around the room at our hard-working, well-informed, occasionally disorganized group from various backgrounds and asked myself, It’s up to us to save humanity? Groups like this are to pull us back from the brink? Shouldn’t there be some vast international organization of Nobel laureates with global support and authority doing this? Some world agency with endless resources working every day at this? After all, we had trouble arranging the picnic tables in an orderly fashion.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction. My mind reeled, spun. I eventually found footing in the reassuring fields of art, poetry, music, beauty. I thought of dance.

The dance of sympathy refers to the idea that our bodies feel compelled to move in response to the music we hear. Music evokes a sympathetic connection and our bodies, regardless of where we are from, move as a result. From a waltz to a samba to Afro Dance, we come together on the floor, unknown to each other a moment before but now sharing space, swaying to the tempo, rhyming without words.

The dance of sympathy says our emotions connect us, makes two strangers rise in a room and begin to dance in unison, both responding to the music they hear. Similarly, a poem, a painting, a sculpture causes comparable outbreaks of emotional bonding. Like it or not, we are all connected, sympathetic kin transcending borders, ethnicities, and religions. This group of peacemakers in the White Mountains knew that, lived it, worked to implement it. We did not all rise and dance, thank goodness, but our hearts and minds moved in unison.  

Our world is perpetually at war, injustice is rampant, and suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Greed drives this malevolent chaos, corroding the spirit, emptying the heart, distorting the mind. Greed disdains beauty and art, cannot reconcile itself to fellowship, its insatiable appetite inevitably consuming all those within its reach.

Art creates order out of such chaos, brings form and shape to pain, outrage, and injustice. It also affirms love, compassion, and a shared humanity. It says, you are not alone, whether in pain or joy we travel together.

Working for peace and justice is not only the moral and right thing to do, but is also a creative expression of what it is to be human, an effort to eliminate war by bringing order to chaos and replacing violence with harmony. It is to dance in sympathy with all people. Conversely, to be a warrior, to kill, or to ignore the deeds of warriors, requires an act against self, a contraction of spirit, a shutting down. It is an isolating act, self-immolating, burning up any connection to humanity.

One night during my stay in the mountains, a woman from outside our group read from a book of poetry she had recently published. The poems were about things she should have said to her son who lost his battle with drug addiction. The subject was difficult, the poems wrenching and beautiful. One of them had the refrain, “Why did I pour so much love into every bath?” Why, if this was to be the result? She used precise rhyming schemes, sonnets and villanelles, to help order her outrage, give form and shape to her suffering. Her artistry had led her to a personal peacemaking, with herself, with her son, and the world.

As a member of one these scattered, random groups of dissident peacemakers, we try to do the same, practicing our nonviolent art, writing our saving works, using hopeful artistry to bring order to chaos and lead us through these dark, cataclysmic days so that love lurches on, cleansing, healing, restoring. May we all rise, cross our invented borders and meet in sympathetic connection. May we all be poets and peacemakers, ending this planetary madness.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I gathered last week with a group of antiwar activists where we talked of the grim issues confronting the globe. Nuclear war, conventional war, drone war, Climate Catastrophe, American Imperialism, our Culture of Militarism. The world is in a dire, cataclysmic state. We are, it seems, a hairsbreadth from annihilating ourselves.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction.

One speaker presented on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine that has come under shelling. It has six reactors. Any one of them, if hit by artillery, would explode with more destructive force than ten Chernobyls combined. If they aren’t hit by shelling, the power grid keeping the nuclear rods cooled could be knocked offline by shelling in the area. This would cause a meltdown. Or the workers at the plant could flee the area because they are working in the middle of a deadly war zone, thereby leaving the plant without the necessary technicians to keep it running safely.

This was just one of the issues raised last week.

We also spoke of hypersonic missiles which fly at five times the speed of sound, are low flying and evasive and thus cannot be detected by radar making it a highly destabilizing instrument of war; the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads to be used as part of a conventional attack under the absurd assumption that a limited nuclear war can be fought; and, the $1.5 trillion to be spent on modernizing the U.S. nuclear force rebuilding every leg of the nuclear triad. 

Is this not some form of planetary madness?

I looked around the room at our hard-working, well-informed, occasionally disorganized group from various backgrounds and asked myself, It’s up to us to save humanity? Groups like this are to pull us back from the brink? Shouldn’t there be some vast international organization of Nobel laureates with global support and authority doing this? Some world agency with endless resources working every day at this? After all, we had trouble arranging the picnic tables in an orderly fashion.

No, it’s just us, random groups of citizens around the world trying to save our species from extinction. My mind reeled, spun. I eventually found footing in the reassuring fields of art, poetry, music, beauty. I thought of dance.

The dance of sympathy refers to the idea that our bodies feel compelled to move in response to the music we hear. Music evokes a sympathetic connection and our bodies, regardless of where we are from, move as a result. From a waltz to a samba to Afro Dance, we come together on the floor, unknown to each other a moment before but now sharing space, swaying to the tempo, rhyming without words.

The dance of sympathy says our emotions connect us, makes two strangers rise in a room and begin to dance in unison, both responding to the music they hear. Similarly, a poem, a painting, a sculpture causes comparable outbreaks of emotional bonding. Like it or not, we are all connected, sympathetic kin transcending borders, ethnicities, and religions. This group of peacemakers in the White Mountains knew that, lived it, worked to implement it. We did not all rise and dance, thank goodness, but our hearts and minds moved in unison.  

Our world is perpetually at war, injustice is rampant, and suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Greed drives this malevolent chaos, corroding the spirit, emptying the heart, distorting the mind. Greed disdains beauty and art, cannot reconcile itself to fellowship, its insatiable appetite inevitably consuming all those within its reach.

Art creates order out of such chaos, brings form and shape to pain, outrage, and injustice. It also affirms love, compassion, and a shared humanity. It says, you are not alone, whether in pain or joy we travel together.

Working for peace and justice is not only the moral and right thing to do, but is also a creative expression of what it is to be human, an effort to eliminate war by bringing order to chaos and replacing violence with harmony. It is to dance in sympathy with all people. Conversely, to be a warrior, to kill, or to ignore the deeds of warriors, requires an act against self, a contraction of spirit, a shutting down. It is an isolating act, self-immolating, burning up any connection to humanity.

One night during my stay in the mountains, a woman from outside our group read from a book of poetry she had recently published. The poems were about things she should have said to her son who lost his battle with drug addiction. The subject was difficult, the poems wrenching and beautiful. One of them had the refrain, “Why did I pour so much love into every bath?” Why, if this was to be the result? She used precise rhyming schemes, sonnets and villanelles, to help order her outrage, give form and shape to her suffering. Her artistry had led her to a personal peacemaking, with herself, with her son, and the world.

As a member of one these scattered, random groups of dissident peacemakers, we try to do the same, practicing our nonviolent art, writing our saving works, using hopeful artistry to bring order to chaos and lead us through these dark, cataclysmic days so that love lurches on, cleansing, healing, restoring. May we all rise, cross our invented borders and meet in sympathetic connection. May we all be poets and peacemakers, ending this planetary madness.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Today I spoke with the foreign policy aide of a United States Senator in a scheduled lobbying call for our antiwar organization. Rather than use the standard lobbying points about wasteful Pentagon spending, I asked for a frank discussion regarding ways our organization might find a successful strategy to cut the Pentagon budget. I wanted the perspective of somebody working on the Hill for a conservative senator.

What if we deployed doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers as quickly as we deployed drones, bullets, and bombs?

The Senator's aide obliged me. The chances of any bill passing both chambers of Congress that would trim the Pentagon budget by 10%, according to the aide, were zero. When I asked if this was because the public perception was that we needed this amount to defend the country, the aide responded that it was not only the public perception but the reality. The Senator was convinced, as were most in Congress, that the Pentagon's threat assessments were accurate and reliable (this despite the Pentagon's history of failed forecasting).

As described to me, the military assesses threats across the globe including such countries as China and Russia, then designs a military strategy to counter those threats, works with weapons manufacturers to design weapons to integrate into that strategy, then produces a budget based on that strategy. Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, overwhelmingly approve the budget. After all, it's the military. They clearly know the business of war.

When a military begins with the notion that it must confront all problems arising from all locales across the globe, then it develops a global military strategy. This is not a defensive strategy, but a global policing strategy for every conceivable offense. When every conflict or area of instability is perceived as a threat, the world becomes the enemy. 

What if such conflicts or instabilities were seen as opportunities rather than threats? What if we deployed doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers as quickly as we deployed drones, bullets, and bombs? Doctors in mobile hospitals are far less expensive than the current F-35 fighter jet which is closing in on a $1.6 trillion price tag. And doctors don't mistakenly kill noncombatants in wedding parties or funerals thereby fueling anti-Americanism. In fact, they don't see combatants or noncombatants, they see people. They treat patients.

The chorus decrying such an idea as "naïve" is immediately heard, war drums providing the charging beat. And so, an assessment is in order. According to Merriam-Webster, naïve can mean "marked by unaffected simplicity," or "deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment," or "not previously subjected to experimentation or a particular experimental situation."

The above proposal of doctors over drones does indeed sound simple and unaffected. Feeding people who are hungry, caring for them when they are sick, housing them when they have no shelter, is a relatively straightforward approach. Often the unaffected, simple way is the best. Guilty as charged here.

As to "deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment," we have witnessed America perpetually at war, seen the wise, worldly, and informed proven disastrously wrong again and again at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. They brought no peace, no security. We are gladly guilty of being deficient in their particular brand of worldly wisdom and informed judgment. We, the naïve ones, have gathered our own wisdom and judgment from enduring their catastrophic mistakes, their hubris, their lies.

As to the last definition of naïve, "not previously subjected to experimentation," it is quite clear that a policy of healing rather than warfighting has never been seriously considered, articulated, or deployed in any manner by this country. Naïve again, as charged.  

If we had built 2,977 hospitals in Afghanistan in honor of every American who died on 9/11, we would have saved far more lives, created far less anti-Americanism and terrorism, and spent far less than the $6 trillion price tag of the unsuccessful War on Terror. Additionally, our act of magnanimity and compassion would have stirred the conscience of the world. But we wanted to shed blood, not break bread. We craved war, not peace. And war we got. Twenty years of it.

War is always a conflict over resources. Somebody wants what somebody else has. For a country that has no problem spending $6 trillion on a failed War on Terror, we can certainly provide the needed resources of food, shelter, and medicine to keep people from tearing each other apart, and in the process, save ourselves from opening yet another bleeding wound. We must do what is so often preached in our churches but rarely enacted. We must perform the works of mercy.

It comes down to this: Are we prouder of vanquishing a country with bombs, or saving it with bread? Which of these allows us to hold our heads higher as Americans? Which of these engenders hope and friendship with our "enemies"? I know the answer for myself and many of my friends, but what of the rest of us? How do we get the war out of America? I know of no other way than by being naïve and embracing the simple, unaffected works of mercy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The post How To Get the War Out of America appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Last September 21st, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the International Day of Peace, as U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, our local peace organization emphasized that we would be relentless in saying no to the calls for war, that those calls for war would come again, and soon.

Are we truly incapable of resolving these concerns without slaughtering each other? Is our intellect that limited, our patience that short, our humanity so curdled that we must repeatedly reach for the sword?

It did not take long.

The American military establishment and our domestic war culture must always have a villain, a cause, a war. Great sums of money must be spent, weapons quickly deployed, people killed, cities razed.

Now, Ukraine is the pawn.

Some shrug and say war is in our bones. While aggression may be part of our DNA, the systematic killing of organized warfare is not. That is learned behavior. Governments created it, perfected it to advance their empires, and could not perpetuate it without the support of its citizenry. 

And so, we the citizens must be duped, fed a story, a myth of rogues and righteous causes. A myth of warfare. We are the “good guys,” we do no wrong, killing is noble, evil must be stopped. The story is always the same. It is only the battlefield and the “evil ones” who change. Sometimes, as with the case of Russia, the “evil ones” are simply recycled and used again. America has bombed a sovereign country every day for the last twenty years, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Yet that is never part of the story we tell ourselves.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have used NATO to surround Russia. Our military and that of our NATO Allies—tanks and nuclear missiles and fighter jets—have moved up against the Russian border in a provocative and destabilizing way. Despite assurances NATO would not expand to include former Soviet bloc countries, we have done just that. We weaponized the Ukraine, minimized diplomatic solutions such as the Minsk Protocol, played a role in the 2014 coup that ousted the government there and installed a pro-Western one. 

How would we respond if the Russians were garrisoned in massive numbers along the Canadian border? If the Chinese conducted live-fire war drills off the coast of California? In 1962 when the Soviets installed missiles in Cuba, our outrage was so severe we took the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Our long history of assimilating other lands into our own, of meddling in foreign elections, of overthrowing governments, invading other countries, of torture, leaves us with little room to speak when others breach international law. But it does not seem to prevent our government, our news media, our own selves from repeating the war myth of Americans as the good guys and everyone else as evil. It has become our bedtime story, one that seeds a nightmare.

We have arrived at this point of peril in Eastern Europe because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. We see with the eyes of a soldier, an American soldier, not a citizen. We have allowed military behavior to define our human behavior, and so our outlook becomes hostile, our thinking belligerent, our worldview filled with enemies. But in a democracy, it is the citizens who are to rule, not the soldiers. 

And yet a relentless stream of propaganda, a perverse telling of our history, and the glorification of war, create a militaristic mentality in far too many of us. It thus becomes impossible to comprehend the behavior of other nations, to understand their fears, their concerns. We know only our own created story, our own myth, we care only for our own concerns, and so are forever at war. We become provocateurs rather than peacemakers.

Military aggression should be stopped, international lawlessness condemned, territorial boundaries respected, human rights violations prosecuted. To do that we must model the behavior we claim to esteem, do it in a way that it becomes learned in each one of us and in the rest of the world. Only then will transgressors be few and truly isolated, unable to function in the international arena, thereby prevented from fulfilling their unlawful aims. 

The Ukraine should not have to suffer invasion by Russia. And Russia should not have had its safety and security threatened by NATO expansion and weaponry. Are we truly incapable of resolving these concerns without slaughtering each other? Is our intellect that limited, our patience that short, our humanity so curdled that we must repeatedly reach for the sword? War is not genetically set in our bones, and these problems are not divinely created. We made them, and the myths surrounding them, and so we can unmake them. We must believe this if we are to survive.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brad Wolf.