by Kevin Carson, c4ss.org, 3 May 2010

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink reports an informal survey she conducted of Tea Partiers at a Tax Day rally.  The survey included six questions on foreign policy, including ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, cutting the military budget, and closing overseas military bases.  Attendees split 70-30 in favor of an activist foreign policy.  Even asking the question got Code Pink called “communists, leftists and idiots.”

“One woman spat at me and shouted, ‘Don’t you know that Muslims are trying to take over the world? If it weren’t for our military fighting in Afghanistan you wouldn’t be standing here asking those stupid questions.’ Another woman got so hysterical about the question on aid to Israel that she tore up the survey.”

Jim Bovard, in a newspaper op-ed piece, threw out this gauntlet:  “Many ‘tea party’ activists staunchly oppose big government, except when it is warring, wiretapping, or waterboarding.  A movement that started out denouncing government power apparently has no beef with some of the worst abuses of modern times.”  Aside from support for wiretapping and waterboarding, common sentiments expressed by Tea Partiers included demands that Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions be thwarted and that the tide of “illegal aliens” be stemmed.  One woman carried a sign reading “Proud to be a Military SUPERPOWER.”

This last was apparently a riff on the Palin-Obama controversy over his statement that, “like it or not,” we are a military superpower.

[Read more]

Press release

– FIAN supports presentation of parallel report on ESC-Rights to UN Committee

– Malnutrition, health service deficiencies and the labour situation: three serious concerns in the Parallel Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Report to be launched in Geneva and Bogotá

– The Colombian state will also present its Fifth Report to the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Committee of United Nations on May 4

– Read online in English at http://www.fian.org/news/press-releases/colombia-rights-in-retreat-for-the-last-nine-years

– Read online in Spanish at http://www.fian.org/noticias/comunicados-de-prensa-1/derechos-humanos-retrocedieron-en-colombia-en-los-ultimos-nueve-anos

– Read online in French at http://www.fian.org/news/press-releases/les-droits-ont-recule-en-colombie-au-cours-des-neuf-dernieres-annees

Chris Hedges – War is a Force that gives us Meaning from toddboyle on Vimeo.

Chris Hedges spoke to the The 8th Annual Western Regional International Health Conference on War and Global Health, in Seattle April 23, 2010. In this powerful and significant talk, Chris gets across the message of his 2002 book by the same name, better than ever. Event cosponsored by the Department of Global Health in the UW School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility and others. wrihc.org/about/

Related:
Chris Hedges: No One Cares

A vineyard in Beit Ummar village flooded with sewage from a nearby Israeli settlement. (Palestine Solidarity Project)

Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 29 April 2010

Villagers standing near a completely destroyed 70,000 square-meter vineyard belonging to the Sabarneh family said they believe it was a deliberate act of sabotage and part of a concerted campaign by the settlers to harass their Palestinian neighbors and vandalize their property.

Beit Ummar has been the target of a number of Israeli military raids at night last month. Activists who have been organizing nonviolent protests against the expropriation of their land for the settlements have been arrested and the village blockaded.

In a similar incident last week the Palestinian village of Bruqin, in the northern West Bank, was flooded with sewage from the nearby Ariel settlement, causing contamination of underground water and springs and damaging crops.

[Read the report]

Anthony Gregory and Eric Garris, Antiwar.com, 29 April 2010

Justin Raimondo’s latest column, “South of the Border,” has stirred controversy with its apparent advocacy of stricter U.S. border controls as a response to the drug-related violence terrorizing the American Southwest. While Antiwar.com has traditionally stuck to issues of foreign policy, immigration is a more than tangentially related matter, and the severity of the recent gang warfare and its prominence in the press prompted Raimondo to present his analysis of the problem and his favored response.

But there is another view, one more in line with Antiwar.com’s commitment to non-interventionism and opposition to militarism. While Raimondo is correct about the intolerable barbarity and increasing urgency of the border crisis, he appears to have ignored the root cause of this calamity. This has led him to advance a political solution that neglects the underlying, endemic problem of U.S. meddling in Latin America.

Describing the drug cartels’ actions as “terrorism,” Raimondo fails to mention that as truly horrific as this violence is, it is a logical, inexorable consequence of U.S. government actions. Like 9/11, the border warfare is blowback – in this case, blowback from U.S. drug policy, particularly Washington’s relentless strong-arming of its southern neighbor to serve as a satellite in America’s War on Drugs.

[Read the article]