Toward a nonviolent transformative federal budget

As Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry joust over who can propose the deepest cuts in the portions of the federal budget that serve human needs and who can propose the fewest cuts in the portions of the US government budget that serve ruling class greed, we will either ignore it all, be mere spectators, or be players.

If we ignore it, will it go away? Yes, the parts of our budget devoted to health, education, infrastructure, environmental protection and safe energy will indeed go away. The National Priorities Project, a public interest research group focused on federal budget implications for the lives of Americans, offers one recent and currently contentious example, the fate of the Pell grants for low-income students who qualify for enrollment in academic programs but who lack the resources to pay for our expensive higher education. This is up for grabs as Congress returns from their recess and takes up the annual fall budget appropriations.

Will Congress cut some of the fat out of the obese Pentagon budget that enables us to wage wars all over Earth, to keep hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground or drones in the air on or above so many countries? Will Congress cut budgets for overseas US military bases that intrude on the sovereign soil of other peoples' nations and irritate so many people from so many lands?

Or will they look at the vulnerable ones, the ones without lobbyists, the ones who represent bright minds trying to emerge from poverty? Will Congress take the cowardly bully road, cutting programs that benefit those who have no apparent power, or will they take the high moral and, frankly, truly enlightened national self-interest path that will require courage and high ethical standards?

I think we all know the answer, if left to their own devices, sad to say.

This is why any transition to nonviolence in our conflict management methods is tied to a transition in our participation or lack thereof in our political process. That power is on the table. Will we cede it once again to the greedy class or will we use nonviolence to move toward more nonviolence? Congress is coming to their decision point and it will depend entirely upon our reaction to our choice point, here and now.

Hi-tech dinosaurs heading for well armed extinction

The lessons of nonviolence are many, obvious, recurring--and counterintuitive to most people in war system cultures. Sadly, those cultures comprise a great deal of humanity, since we have a war culture history that has dominated for thousands of years. We see the results.

One attack on US soil by 19 suicide mass murderers that killed three thousand noncombatants has led us into a permawar, sacrificing our economy, killing at least two orders of magnitude more humans than the original attack, and wrecking the job market as well as the security of home ownership for millions.

 Meanwhile, nonviolence has quietly shown the alternative, succeeding far more often than does violence and at a tiny fraction of the cost. What are the lessons of September 11, 2001, and the response to it?

In a global sense, the primary lesson should be that a violent response is counterproductive and guaranteed to keep the spiral of tit-for-tat in play. Yes, you can take the fight to 'them' by overwhelming kinetic kill force that puts your military in the front lines, committing atrocities and eliciting a guerrilla fighter response, especially when you reduce civil liberties in the homeland (and eliminate them entirely for some who have been profiled) and commit the economy to war until it collapses. But when the economy does collapse--and it is slowly imploding now as a direct result of how we responded to 9.11.01--then what?

Then, perhaps, we can finally do the right thing, as long as we have exhausted all the other options. We can become global citizens committed to nonviolent justice for all, fair trade, human rights, democracy, safe energy and common security based on sustainability. Right now we are seen by much of humankind as a war machine willing to steal and kill, pollute and violate human rights and prop up warlords who are loyal to us. Is this actually the image Americans want the rest of the world to have of us?

I know it's not. No other country has provided more volunteers to civil society organizations around the world. My students are eager to help and to live fulfilling lives in service to others. The majority of Americans are ready to do the right thing. We need to take back our culture, our political system, and then we need to recraft our methods of conflict management so that we can collaborate with the vast majority of the seven billion of us alive on Earth instead of launching attacks from Fortress America.

There are literally thousands of detailed lessons from 9.11.01 and the alternatives that could have been employed. Those alternatives cannot bring back the dead nor retrieve the squandered resources, but they still await our consideration, ready to help us transition from a war system to a peace culture. Unlike the knowledge available to us 50 years ago, when President Eisenhower warned of the influence of the military industrial complex in his 1961 Farewell Address, we know far more about alternatives. Time to engage them.

No guts, no second term

The Tea Party could have been a tiny afterthought, ridiculed or ignored by the many Republicans who switched to supporting Barack Obama.

President Obama could have been riding high on approval ratings that virtually guaranteed his re-election in 2012.

These two things would have been logical sequelae to his brilliant first term if his first term had featured serious political courage instead of mere charismatic speechmaking. Barack Obama is a coward, unfortunately, and unfit to really lead. He might have made a fine president in an easy era of prosperity and fat surpluses, but he is a poor choice when it comes to choosing a champion, someone who will fight for the people instead of caving in to the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the other crackers. Indeed, Barack Obama could have shown the world how to eclipse the job growth rate of Texas under Rick Perry only by making the environment cleaner, not dirty like Perry, and by improving health care, not making it inaccessible like Perry, and by strengthening education rather than cutting it and dumbing it like Perry.

How? How could our first black president have possibly achieved all those things in the aftermath of a Bush warmaking spending spree that wasted so much of the gas from the tank?

Well, he would have needed to come in swinging, ready to fight, politically, for the people, instead of ready to compromise. I teach in the field of Conflict Resolution and the basic negotiating lesson here is that you always compromise on those items which can be shifted around until everyone gets a fair deal, but you never compromise on basic ethical principle. Barack Obama could have had the principle that the welfare of the people comes before the welfare of the owner class. He could have assembled a scrappy team that knew how to frame legislation that would be radical in its shifts toward benefiting average working people. There are historical precedents, of course, and he could have used them and improved them.

Barack Obama inherited a major economic mess, created for the most part by the Bush regime. When Franklin Roosevelt inherited a disastrous economy created by Republican lack of governmental regulation, he made bold new policy that put millions to work building infrastructure still enjoyed by all Americans and everyone who visits, from park lodges and trails to beautiful bridges. Roosevelt didn't do that by turning over $ trillions to the same financiers who had created the Great Depression. He created government programs that put people to work, making the most of the skills they already had and teaching skills to young ones.

The Civilian Conservation Corps operated from 1933-1942 and focused on providing work for some 2.5 million young unmarried men, on projects that conserved and developed natural resources on public lands. The Works Progress Administration operated from 1935-1943 and provided about eight million jobs, focusing on the goal of one job per family where they had been unemployed for a long period. Updating these sorts of programs to reflect our current gender mores, population growth, and infrastructure needs would be a hard sell to a Republican Congress. But Barack Obama is going to to have a harder sell to the vastly hurting and disappointed America electorate if he can't make those sorts of hard sells to other politicians.

Roosevelt gave folks what they needed. His base was so huge he couldn't lose, even though corporate officials dreamt of his ouster. His radical executive moves provide a blueprint and that blueprint has so far been ignored by Obama. His paradigm is closer to Rumsfeldian--privatize everything that the government does in order to massively enrich the owner class--than Rooseveltian, which angered the owner class and saved working families.

Can Obama grow a backbone and save anything at his late date? Stranger things have happened, but so far all his moves have been classic cave-ins to bullies. We usually elect people who will stand up to bullies. We thought he would and, so far, we have been wrong. We'll see how this plays, starting with his upcoming speech. It will either be a revolutionary departure from his corporate bailout model or it will fall flat in failure, and his fate will be sealed.

United $tate$ of A$$a$$ination

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the most massive terror attacks on the US, it is time to reflect on how we, as a nation, have changed in that decade. In many ways, it is hard to be sanguine about any of those changes.

• The military budget is mushroomed, eclipsing everything else and dragging the economy down.
• We are making more enemies in other lands than we have in a good long while and even creating domestic terrorists faster than we can kill Yemeni operatives or Pakistani children.
• Oil has polluted our atmosphere, oceans, rivers, groundwater and foreign policy.
• Thanks to corporate-designed and implemented trade laws and global agencies, jobs have fled to countries with no real enforcement of labor and environmental laws.
• Militarization is so profoundly saturating our culture now that we virtually worship the warships while we bow and scrape to soldiers, sailors and SEALS.
• A social safety net that was never close to complete is now unraveling and the politicians argue that it should shred even faster.

Now comes a book from Bill Arkin and Dana Priest, Top secret America: The rise of the new American security state. In a Washington Post piece adapted from one of the chapters, the authors describe the post-9.11.01 spectacular but cloaked growth of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, into a massively funded kill force with even more reach and less visibility than the CIA. 

It is an illegal operation, ordering and committing killings wherever deemed desirable. Arkin and Priest write:

Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

And coming soon to a homeland near you.

We are living in a rogue nation. If another country did this sort of thing we would be outraged. Instead, we fawn over each member of the military in 'service' to 'the country', ignore the routinely scandalous war profiteering by corporations who get away with gouging the wink-and-nod Pentagon, and re-elect the politicians who authorized all of it. We pay our federal taxes without a murmur (except to grouse about too much soft-headed liberalism that gives a comparatively tiny amount to those in need) and we remain quiet and willfully ignorant. The past 10 years have moved us in precisely the wrong direction in almost every way possible.

But what can we do?

Last night we watched Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a film about how the women of Liberia Just Said No to any more war. One social worker and one cop--a Christian woman and Muslim woman respectively--launched a campaign that ended one of the most brutal civil wars and regimes on Earth. They were poor. They were just folks. They were powerless until they decided they weren't. They changed their world. Hello? It's about unity and persistence, not about waiting for those in power, who profit fabulously, to change. We must do it if we want it done.

 

Extrajudicial nation

The United States Central Intelligence Agency is operating outside any law except its own. What it does is often in direct contradiction to US law, international law, and it is increasingly brazen about it.

What? The CIA breaking the law? Shocked. We are simply shocked. And who cares? It is the Central Intelligence Agency, not the military. They gather the information and in uncertain times, we need much more information.

But the laws that it violates are generally related to its increasing role as self-appointed judge and summary executioner of whomever it decides deserves to die, plus anyone unlucky enough to be in the target area. This seems to be a function of two related problems.

One, the increasing militarization of everything about US culture and government. The CIA is rapidly becoming a kinetic kill paramilitary organization that hides its activities about as well as the Israelis hide their nukes. In short, it's an open secret. In the past, the CIA has needed to manage its public image when it operated outside the law, such as its scandalous Iran-Contra operation in the Reagan years. Indeed, as analyst Marc Pilisuk (2008, p. 176) reminds us, the agency set up a special perception management office directed by Otto Reich, since it was aware of public opposition to violent interference in other countries' affairs, part of the legacy of the sordid and disastrous US slide into a massive war in Vietnam. The lessons of Vietnam are forgotten; all lessons now are derivatives of 9.11.01, and the decade of moral, ethical and enlightened self-interest slide into depravity is profound. We are now a nation understood by the rest of the world as the mirror image of the sick bin Laden we finally assassinated, willing to kill noncombatants as an acceptable concomitant to our agenda. It hearkens to the papal legate from the 13th century, deciding that it was too much problem to determine who the rebels were and who the loyal Catholics were, so, "Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His."

Two, a lack of public support for investigation and correction. Indeed, the CIA doesn't even acknowledge the drone program, which now routinely hunts and kills in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and is sharply increasing its killing capacity in Yemen.Yawn. Like we care.

So the global alienation from America continues and thus the growing support for attacks on our military and even acceptance of terror attacks on our civilians. This mutually reinforcing dynamic, however, is worsening just as the US is losing the financial capacity to continue. In the end, though we are causing pain and ill will and lots of damage in our death throes, we are still an empire coming to a bloody and broke end. It could have been different, but when we see the world's problems as only soluble by the application of violence, this is a natural devolution. It will accelerate until the US citizenry makes it stop or until we simply collapse as a global power and lump along in our new third-rate status in the world.



References

Miller, Greg, & Tate, Julie (2 September 2011).  CIA shifts focus to killing targets. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-shifts-focus-to-killing-targets/2011/08/30/gIQA7MZGvJ_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines

Pilisuk, Marc (2008). Who benefits from global violence and war: Uncovering a destructive system. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.

Hate the gun, love the cop

“Fraternization was an important part of the opposition’s strategy.” 

--Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan on the Iranian nonviolent revolution of 1978-79 (2011, p. 107).

 

In planning any campaign to change society, we must anticipate the role of armed agents of the state, whether we are violence interrupters on the streets in Chicago or Serbs trying to overthrow Milosevic. There will be a long line of interface with members of the movement and these cops or soldiers. It is best to make friends.

What!? Friends with sociopaths who commit murder and get away with it? That is like telling Jews to kiss up to Nazi SS.

No, it's not. The most functional strategic nonviolent movements insist on respect from these armed agents and they show that they give it too, but just as conditionally as ought to be expected.

Watch the film The Interrupters, a documentary about Ceasefire Chicago and their struggle to reduce violence in the combat zones of the South Side and West Side, gangland turf. They are masters of the art of relating to police, challenging them and dialoging with them, never giving up anyone to them but never disrespecting them. Like the Israeli negotiator who asked the Egyptian negotiator (during the 1978-79 peace process launched by Jimmy Carter), "What do you think my people will say if I tell them what you demand?" and the Egyptian official laughed and said, "They will dismiss you," so too the Ceasefire conflict workers have taught the Chicago police that the role of Ceasefire on the streets has earned and deserves respect. At the same time, Ceasefire is able to demonstrate to gang members and others that they are not snitches, but are only interested in reducing violence on all sides, including violence by the police. The War Resisters League offers a nice little 10-minute training for US activists as they are in the street in resistance to poor public policy covers many key principles and culturally appropriate tactics.

In 2000 in Serbia, the youth movement, Otpur ("Resistance") made a strategic decision even before they went public that they would never wear masks, taunt cops or soldiers, or call them names. At the same time, when police and soldiers did commit acts of violence or unwarranted arrest, Otpur activists would show up en masse to challenge the oppression, but with a unique synthesis of redirecting blame upward to Milosevic and protectiveness of each activist being persecuted.

Filipinas did this successfully in 1986, interposing with love and bravery between the army and a breakaway faction of the army, stopping a civil war.

As Chenoweth and Stephan point out, Iranians did this when deposing the Shah and his brutal regime, using mass nonviolence after the violent insurgency failed repeatedly. They even emulated US youth from the 1960s who put flowers in the gun barrels of soldiers.

The whole point is to prepare the security forces to defect. This is almost never something that generates much direct evidence until it occurs openly and massively. Approaching this as a matter of faith is adaptive, as the record shows it not only helps toward victory but it keeps casualties much lower in the process, plus it makes post victory rapprochement much easier and a changed society much more stable and secure.

References

Chenoweth, Erica, & Stephan, Maria J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.