Wednesdays, Lincoln
Wednesdays, Omaha
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town.
Impeachment is on the table.
By Paul Olson, NFP President
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Omaha NFP Newsletter
An Injury to One is an Injury to All…
The World Will End in Fire
On Liars that Figure
It’s the War, Stupid
Forty & Counting
The Wind from Somewhere
Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog
Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA
Downwind from Nuclear
Holocaust and WackoAn Ethic of Life
An Ethic of DeathRed State: Blue State
The Burning Of Earth
Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy
On Bullying
War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft
Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free
How to Win in a Gilded Age
On Fear
Holy Lands, Unholy Wars
On Sacrifice
Education & Tax Justice
On Liars that Figure
Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus
In August of 2007, Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel introduced Senate Bill 1977 — the Nuclear Weapons Threat Reduction Act of 2007 — to control nuclear proliferation across the world. An ambitious piece of legislation, it calls upon the U.S. to lead a cooperative global effort to prevent nuclear terrorism, reduce global nuclear arsenals, stop the spread of nuclear weapons and related material and technology, and support the responsible and peaceful use of nuclear technology. The objective, pure and simple, is to try to start putting the nuclear genie, which is now running utterly amok, back in the bottle. S1977 not only seeks to contain the threat of nuclear terrorism by limiting access to fissile material, but to get the nuclear states themselves to get serious about reducing their own dangerous stockpiles.
The Obama-Hagel bill is the only game in town seeking to derail our will to nuclear self-destruction. But you will have to look long and hard to find a serious analysis, pro or con, of the bill in our state’s major papers. We do not discuss such matters publicly. What require space are Jenna Bush’s wedding, the latest case of a schoolteacher’s sexual misdeeds with students and the Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders meeting. The scant coverage and analysis we do get of foreign policy issues far too often take the fawning tone we saw so often in the run-up to the Iraq War. Like proud parents cooing and aahing over a newborn, our local media shamelessly parroted the White House’s claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. By the time the WMD allegations were found to be phony, the damage had been done, and the media had moved on.
The effect of this lack of serious local and national discussion of the errors of the Iraq venture is that in 2004, the last year for which we have complete data, the U.S. blithely spent $620 billion on the military while our closest rival, China, spent $65 billion. The entire rest of the world spent $500 billion. We must think they really hate us if we have to spend more on ‘defense’ than the whole world put together. Or perhaps we bought the ‘guns’ while the rest of the world that was not at war spent its money on ‘butter.’ Already in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, warned, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Today, similar military theft spends the mortgages of our unhoused, the quality of our levees, the fabric of our roads and bridges and the sanity of our post-traumatic stress-suffering veterans.
Lying that produces the fear of nuclear holocaust and leads to increased military spending is, as Richard Rhodes observes in his book Arsenals of Folly, an old game. Paul Nitze, who served in the Defense and State Departments during and after World War II, inflated the figures on Soviet nuclear weapons (while underestimating ours) to create Washington’s will to escalate our nukes to 20,000 by 1960. Departing Washington, Nitze went to the University of Chicago where he trained Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle in the arts of military prevarication, and the Chicagoans, in turn, handed the fake adding machine over, during Father Bush’s CIA stint, to Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the CIA’s “Team B” experts to continue misrepresenting what the Soviets had. When President Jimmy Carter fired “Team B,” they transmogrified into the “Committee on the Present Danger” and added William Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Edward Teller, who would all find a welcome home in the Reagan Administration.
The apostolic succession of mythmakers continued into the present administration with the substitution, for the Soviet bogey, of Jihadist radicals — and, for the balance of power, the “doctrine of preemption.” Young Bush returned Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Perle to major policy roles, and Cheney gave neo-con new kid, Douglas Feith, the task of making up data in a whole new special branch of the CIA.
Now we have a three-trillion-dollar war to get rid of nuclear terrorists where none existed before. Aside from S1977, we have no serious U.S. effort to aid in the control of nukes or nuclear materials worldwide. We have a catastrophic economy, a broken-down infrastructure, and an educational system that has few resources to spend where real problems exist. We have endless poverty in rural areas, reservations, inner cities and among immigrant Hispanics. We are no longer a country, but a jigsaw of gated communities and siren-sounding ghettoes. If patriotism was once the last refuge of the scoundrel, it is now the first appeal of the military-industrial-complex profiteer. He — yes, he — has it all.
Peace activists should be asking our national candidates what they think of S1977. How will they act to remedy the war economy? How will they take care of the war debt each of us faces? What will each do to show care for the ‘least of these, our U.S. brothers and sisters’ located in the run-down areas and neighborhoods of our country? What will they do about poverty, health care, a GI bill and rural reconstruction? America’s ‘wretched of the earth’ are being burned out more slowly than our brothers and sisters in Baghdad and in the millions-strong Iraqi refugee camps. But they are being burned out as surely. If ever there was a time for us, as patriots, to rouse ourselves, this election campaign is it.
