It is possible that the creation of an all-professional American army was the most dangerous decision ever taken by Congress. The nation now confronts a political crisis in which the issue has become an undeclared contest between Pentagon power and that of a newly elected president.
Thirty-four years ago this month the young James Fallows published (in the Washington Monthly) what still remains a definitive article about the class divide in times of war—“What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” I still have a yellowed original copy somewhere. Fallows was writing about the sickening reality that as a Harvard student he, like so many other Ivy Leaguers, could quite easily avoid fighting in Vietnam. They had the ways and means to avoid military service: exemptions, deferments, lawyers, connections.
Violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is wrong. So is violence against people in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the bizarre culture of identity politics, there are no alliances among the oppressed. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.
It was only a matter of time
before the nation’s skyrocketing unemployment translated into new
recruits for the most powerful military force in the world.
With the official US unemployment
rate at 10 percent and climbing (that’s more than 15 million people
struggling to put food on the table) and nearly double that number if
you include part-time wage-earners who need full-time jobs, never mind
all of those ‘discouraged workers,’ it’s little wonder that so
many of the nation’s jobless are flocking into its military recruitment
offices.
When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S.
So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
Forget about the butter. It's bad for you anyway. And sheer military power, as well as the money behind it, assures the country of a thick waistline without the cholesterol. So, let's sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it's our future.
Lt. Dan Choi doesn’t want to lie. Choi, an Iraq war veteran and a graduate of West Point, declared last March 19 on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “I am gay.” Under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regulations, those three words are enough to get Choi kicked out of the military. Choi has become a vocal advocate for repealing the policy, having spoken before tens of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and their allies at last Sunday’s National Equality March in Washington, D.C.
Yesterday, by a 68-30 vote, the U.S. Senate passed Senator Al Franken’s amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill (Amendment 2588) that, according to
Stop Family Violence, prevents the Defense Department from using contractors that require, “mandatory employment arbitration of employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault claims”.
World leaders can't seem to hold an economic summit without security forces at the level of an occupying army running roughshod over the host city. This is both a symptom of what's wrong with our global economy — predicated on war, domination and scarcity — and a metaphor for how it works.
When Arne Duncan stepped down as the head of the Chicago Public Schools to become the secretary of education in January, the school district he left behind had little to brag about. While Duncan served as its chief executive officer, CPS received mostly average or below average rankings in "The Nation's Report Card," a Department of Education assessment of the country's largest urban school districts.
