Category: gmoses

A Gringo’s Grito

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews

Call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for someone who would walk a frozen bridge from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Or call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for those who live under shadows of macroeconomic policy exclusion. And call them immigrantes, if you’re pointing to the cheapest of “cheap labor” who send their savings to loved ones far and wide.

Call us immigrantes, if that’s your word for us who swallow heartache and keep a dream or two hidden from your stabbing gaze. Or call us immigrantes, while you lie about your law-abiding nature and your love of state certification.

And call us immigrantes, even if we qualify under your all-American regime as so-called native born, because we don’t like the way you use the word like a wanted poster, as if in your high-and-mighty tradition anyone ever cared about who was actually native born or what rights exist on other people’s ground.

Call yourselves immigrantes when you sign up to work for some overseas company because that’s where the money is. Or call yourselves immigrantes when you never cease moving in search of the better way. And call yourselves immigrantes when you say, “live free or die.”

Call us all immigrantes who are set loose on this new world market. Or call us all immigrantes who would be free under any part of the sky. And call us all immigrantes, the people of this shrinking earth who would sometimes roll along some glorious open road, just to see what’s on the other side.

Go ahead and say it. We are immigrantes all.

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / Dissident Voice

Be careful what you say, the children are listening. For the past year, children of immigrants have been hearing the worst things about their parents. Finally, across the country from Los Angeles, California, to Bastop, Texas, teenagers agreed all at once that it was time to talk back.

“Another day, another walkout” said a recent headline. This time the news was from Tyler, Texas, where students marched from Tyler High to the Smith County Courthouse carrying Mexican flags. Across the country, similar stories played.

I was eating lunch in downtown Austin, cleaning up a tasty plate of enchiladas mole, thinking about a fantastic exhibit of Mexican art that I’d just visited, when students filled the restaurant window with bodies marching north to the capitol.

“We’re here to work, we’re not criminals,” said one sign written in black marker on white posterboard. The young woman held the sign at the main gate to the Texas state capitol, surrounded by excited students. They chanted “Me-xi-co, Me-xi-co, Me-xi-co” and then cheered themselves on. They shouted “Si, Se Puede” the famous slogan of Cesar Chavez. In English it means, “yes – we can!” On this day, Chavez would have turned 79.

“We Pay Taxes,” said a slogan written in black marker on the back of a white t-shirt. “Without us Mexicans, the US is Nothing,” said a poster-board sign. A few young women wore petite-sized flags tucked into the fronts of their shirts.

It was a warm afternoon with temperatures climbing to 84 degrees and a South wind blowing up from the Colorado River. Bottles of water, eagerly grabbed up by students who had walked miles to get here, were poured into mouths and onto heads, sometimes accompanied by those little sounds you make when a cold splash catches you by surprise.

From passing cars, the students were treated to honks of support, which they often answered with cheers. Some of the cars were themselves filled with students and more flags of Mexico rippling from the windows.

“Who made this country?” asked one student waving a good sized flag. He drew cheers talking about beans and tortillas. “We’re a whole new diverse group that this country needs,” he said. “And we’re not going anywhere. We built this country. Even if they stop us, we’re going to come back. They’re not going to stop us. We’ve been here too long.”

In the shade of the small trees, the tone was jubilant and lighthearted, like a pep rally, but there was a serious message. These teenagers were confident in their heritage of hard work, determination, and life that keeps growing.

Political consultants are saying it would be better if students would carry American flags, but these teenagers haven’t been given very good examples lately of how the American flag can be carried with their kind of pride. The red, white, and blue has been used against them this past year. Who can blame them for unfurling the red, white, and green?

I’ve seen stories that listen to these teenagers and I’ve seen stories that listen mostly to adults who think they have something more important to say. Things like: they should be more pro-American, or they should be punished for leaving school. But that’s just the problem these days, that pro-American pretty much means pro-punishment, along with the self-proclaimed entitlement to talk right over others as if they deserve to never come from places they call their own.

I’m no political consultant, but as I was standing in the South wind that blew through the capitol gates among the splashing voices and fresh water, I was feeling that this is what America is supposed to be like. And I haven’t felt that way in years.

The Next Time He’s Wrong
Will the President Push The Button?

Federation of American Scientists
Warns of Shift Toward Nuclear Preemption

By Greg Moses

Peacefile / CounterPunch / AfterDowningStreet /
UrukNet / Dissident Voice

As our ears prick to the drumbeat of Bush v. Iran, a highly respected researcher from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) warns that Washington is edging toward a policy of nuclear preemption, and Teheran knows it.

Although the post 9/11 doctrine of USA military strategy known as “Global Strike” is often promoted as a post nuclear plan, Hans M. Kristensen finds documentary evidence that a “nuclear option” is included.

In a timeline released by FAS on March 15, and so far reported only by long-time disarmament activist Sanford Gottlieb’s op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Kristensen concedes that the USA may be reducing the size of its huge nuclear-weapon stockpile.

However, writes Kristensen, “Global Strike is first and foremost offensive and preemptive in nature and deeply rooted in the expectation that deterrence “will” fail sooner or later. Rather than waiting for the mushroom cloud to appear, a phrase used several times by the Bush administration, the Global Strike mission is focused on defeating the threat before it is unleashed.”

So while the USA stockpile is down to about 5,000 or 10,000 nuclear warheads, Kristensen argues that planners of the new regime in military strategy, “simultaneously have created a new mission that reaffirms the importance and broadens the role of nuclear weapons further by changing or lowering the perceived threshold or timing for when nuclear weapons may be used in a conflict. That threshold must be different than in the past, otherwise why include a nuclear option in CONPLAN 8022?”

CONPLAN 8022 is the Pentagon’s contingency strike plan that Kristensen is tracking through freedom of information requests. He calls CONPLAN 8022, “a new strike plan developed by STRATCOM [the Pentagon’s Strategic Command, tasked with taking the lead in matters of weapons of mass destruction] in coordination with the Air Force and Navy to provide a prompt global strike options to the President with nuclear, conventional, space, and information warfare capabilities.”

Kristensen could have also mentioned that the language and logic of CONPLAN looks very much like the thing suggested in 1997 by a blue-ribbon National Defense Panel (NDP) that included top-level military brass and the now recently departed Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

“Rogue states and terrorists, perhaps armed with weapons of mass destruction, may attempt different kinds of attacks, not only on our forces abroad, but in our homeland, in urban areas and perhaps space,” warned the first paragraph of the NDP press release on Dec. 1, 1997. While the NDP report encouraged nuclear disarmament agreements such as SALT III, the framework of diplomacy was presented as a stratagem that would have to make do until the USA achieved technological superiority:

“Given the evolving threat and continued improvement of our missile defense technology, a hedging strategy, rather than immediate deployment of a missile defense system, is a sensible approach,” said the NDP report. “But, it is important that we proceed in a way that permits rapid deployment if threats should develop and our technologies mature.”

The NDP report encouraged the military to “experiment” with solutions to the “power projection challenge” that would be faced in tough cases of threat by missile, when the USA would not have, in the words of one panelist, “access to forward bases, ports, airfields, facilities.” Of course, that was years before 9/11.

Kristensen’s timeline marks June 2004 as the point where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld orders the implementation of CONPLAN 8022 so that the president of the USA could be enabled with, “a prompt, global strike capability.” Rumsfeld’s order was issued approximately one year before release of the Downing Street Memo alleges that the president of the USA has been fixing his facts to meet the needs of his trigger finger.

Six weeks after Rumsfeld gave the order, writes Kristensen, “on August 17, STRATCOM published Global Strike Interim Capability Operations Order (OPORD) which changed the nature of CONPLAN 8022 from a concept plan to a contingency plan. In response, selected bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and information warfare units were tasked against specific high-value targets in adversary countries. Finally, on November 18, 2005, Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike achieved Initial Operational capability after being thoroughly tested in the nuclear strike exercise Global Lightning 06.”

What this alphabet soup spells out is a process that brings “Global Strike” into operation through military exercises that confirm the readiness of nuclear missiles launched from land, sea, and air. The next “war game” in this series is scheduled for April.

The release of Kristensen’s timeline coincided with a scheduled hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. But the hearing was postponed at the last minute.

Says Kristensen, “Because the question of the scope of and assumptions about nuclear weapons use in the Global Strike mission has profound implications for U.S. military strategy and international affairs, it is vital that the Congress, the media, and the public in general get better answers.”

Thanks to the din of Bush v. Iran, however, Kristensen’s plea for sunlight has not yet been answered. Meanwhile, a contract to provide the infrastructure for CONPLAN 8022 is scheduled to be awarded in December.

Note: continuing to share the text of a book printed in 1822 by Philo Pacificus (Noah Worcester) here is a letter from Jefferson, published in The Friend of Peace No. IV:

Monticello
Jan. 29, 1816

Sir,

Your letter, bearing the date Oct. 18, 1815, came only to hand the day before yesterday, which is mentioned to explain the date of mine. I have to thank you for the pamphlets accompanying it, to wit, the Solemn Review, the Friend of Peace or Special Interview, and the Friend of Peace No. 2. The first of these I had received through another channel some months ago. I have not read the two last steadily through, because where one assents to propositions as soon as announced it is loss of time to read the arguments in support of them. These numbers discuss the first branch of the causes of war, that is to say, wars undertaken for the point of honor, which you aptly analogize with the act of duelling between individuals, and reason with justice from one to the other. Undoubtedly, this class of wars is in general what you state them to be, “needless, unjust, and inhuman, as well as antichristian.”

The second branch of this subject, to wit, wars undertaken on account of wrong done, and which may be likened to the act of robbery in private life, I presume will be treated of in your future numbers. I observe this class mentioned in the Soemn Review, p. 10, and the question asked, “Is it common for a nation to obtain a redress of wrongs by war?” The answer to this question you will of course draw from history; in the meantime reason will answer it on the grounds of probability, that where the wrong has been done by a weaker nation, the stronger one has generally been able to enforce redress; but where by a stronger nation, redress by war has been neither obtained nor expected by the weaker; on the contrary, the loss has been increased by the expenses of the war in blood and treasure: yet it may have obtained another object equally securing itself from future wrong. It may have retaliated on the aggressor losses of blood and treasure, far beyond the value to him, of the wrong he had committed, and thus have made the advantage of that too dear a purchase to leave him in a disposition to renew the wrong in future; in this way the loss by the war may have secured the weaker nation from loss by future wrong.

The case you state of two boxers, both of whom get a “terrible bruising,” is apposite to this; he of the two who committed the aggression on the other, although victor in the scuffle, yet probably finds his aggression not worth the bruising it has cost him. To explain this by numbers, it is alleged, that Great Britain took from us before the late war near 1000 vessels, and that during the war we took from them 1400; that before the war she seized, and made slaves of 6000 of our citizens, and that in the war we killed more than 6000 of her subjects, and caused her to expend such a sum as amounted to 4 or 5000 guineas a head for every slave she made. She might have purchased the vessels she took for less than the value of those she lost, and have used the 6000 of her men killed for purposes to which she applied ours, have saved the 4 or 5000 guineas a head, and obtained a character of justice, which is as valuable to a nation as to an individual. These conditions therefore leave her without inducement to plunder property, and take men in future on such dear terms.

I neither affirm nor deny the truth of these allegations, nor is their truth material to the question; they are possible and therefore present a case which will claim your consideration in a discussion of the general question: Whether any degree of injury can render a recourse to war expedient? Still less do I propose to draw to myself any part in this discussion. Age, and its effects both on body and mind, has weaned my attention from public subjects, and left me unequal to the labors of correspondence, beyond the limits of my personal concerns. I retire there from the question with a sincere wish, that your writings may have effect in lessening this greatest of human evils, and that you may retain life to enjoy the contemplation of this happy spectacle; and pray you to be assured of my great respect.

TH: JEFFERSON.

Note: only the first paragraph break is found in the original.