Keep them Poor: Agri-Corp USA Extinguishing Peoples, Ways of life, Environment

Development’s creation of global crisis: India and beyond

From Colin Todhunter’s “…Development and the Globalization of Servitude”

Edited excerpt by Carolyn Bennett

Masses’ Complicity in Cruelty

“Consumerism’s conspicuous purchasing and consumption draws on and manipulates the preexisting tendency to buy favor…. Now icons of capitalism, whether renowned brand products, labels or product-endorsing celebrities, have also taken their place in the pantheon of Indian deities to be listened to, worshiped and acquiesced to. The corporations behind it all achieve hegemony by altering mindsets via advertising, clever PR or by sponsoring (hijacking) major events, by funding research in public institutes and thus slanting findings and the knowledge paradigm in their favor or by securing key positions in international trade negotiations in an attempt to structurally readjust retail, food production and agriculture.…

“If you are looking for extremism and dogma… look toward those whose unimaginable wealth feeds off and fuels a system of exploitation and conflict designed to benefit the few. That is the nature of the [current] model of development” being pushed on the world.

“If anyone perceives the type of ‘development’ being sold to the masses as actually possible, they should note that ‘developing’ nations account for more than 80 percent of world population but consume only about a third of the world’s energy.

USA Way
Starve them
Rob them of independence
Throw them Charity

“Citizens of the United States constitute 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 24 percent of the world’s energy.

“On average, a single (one) American consumes as much energy as:

2 Japanese,
6 Mexicans,
13 Chinese,
31 Indians,
128 Bangladeshis,
307 Tanzanians and
370 Ethiopians

US Policy Complicity in Cruelty

US killer drones

“The bedrock of any society is its agriculture: Without food, there can be no life. Without food security, there can be no genuine independence …” and US foreign policy has usually been based on control of poorer countries’ agriculture. “US foreign policy is about power and control – the power to control food, states, and entire populations.

US killer drones

“In many respects, the subjugation of India by the US rests on the likes of Monsanto eventually controlling agriculture and hijacking food sovereignty and the nation’s food security. The sanctioning of open field trails of GM crops in the country is the thin end of a very broad wedge that would not only boost the profits of global seed and agritech companies but would also serve US geopolitical interests.…

“…. It is by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. …‘The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.’”

Focus India

Farmer
India

Across the globe, “The highest levels of inequality are in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries and in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.”

“Powerful corporations are shaping the ‘development’ agenda in India and have signed secretive ‘Memorandums of Understanding’ with the government. The full military backing of the state is on hand to forcibly evict people from their land in order to hand over land to mineral-hungry extractive and processing industries to fuel a wholly unsustainable model of development.

“Around the world, this oil-dependent, urban-centric, high energy, high consumption model is stripping the environment bare and negatively affecting the climate and ecology.

“The links between the Monsanto/Syngenta/Walmart-backed Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the US sanctioning and backing of opening up India’s nuclear sector to foreign interests have already shown what the models of ‘development’ being pushed onto people really entail – not least being benefits to powerful corporate interests and losses to ordinary people.”

Farmer
Africa

“Global agritech companies have been granted license to influence key aspects of agriculture by controlling seeds and chemical inputs and by funding and thus distorting the biotech research agenda and aspects of overall development policy. Monsanto already controls the cotton industry in India and is increasingly shaping agri-policy and the knowledge paradigm by funding agricultural research in public universities and institutes….”

“If unfair trade policies, the colonization of official bodies … and other practices do not result in displacing farmers, it is achieved by repression and violence …”

Forced Migration
Displaced People

Since 1997, nearly “300,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives… and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops, and economic liberalization.”

Dire Global Consequences

“The corporate-controlled type of agriculture that is being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to bad food, bad soil and bad or no water, bad health, poor or falling yields and an impending agrarian crisis. …

Forced Migration
Displaced People 

“Seeds, mountains, water, forests and biodiversity are being sold off. Farmers and tribes are being sold out; the more that gets sold off, the more who get sold out, the greater the amount of cash that changes hands, the easier it is for the misinformed to swallow the lie of Wall Street’s bogus notion of ‘growth’ – GDP.”

Forced Migration
Displaced People 

The prevailing agricultural model has created a “global crisis.” Factoring into the dire image of global act and impact are “‘Repression and displacement,’” often violence, foreign or domestic, against remaining rural populations together with illness and falling local food production. “‘Indigenous communities have been displaced and reduced to living on the capital’s rubbish dumps’” – a set of crimes “‘rightly call(ed) genocide – the extinguishment of entire Peoples, their culture, their way of life and their environment.’”

Sources and notes

“Menace on the Menu: Development and the Globalization of Servitude,” Colin Todhunter, Global Research, November 27, 2014, http://www.globalresearch.ca/menace-on-the-menu-development-and-the-globalization-of-servitude/5416488

India and UK-based prolific writer Colin Todhunter originally of the UK has spent many years in India; and has done social policy research, his writing published in a wide range of newspapers, peer and non-peer reviewed journals and books as well as on numerous websites (source London Progressive Journal) http://londonprogressivejournal.com/user/view/860

_______________________________________________________________

A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

_______________________________________________________________

50 million declare no more human fodder in crossfire of armed groups, armed governments: Dr Hakim

As US re-reneges, ramps up atrocities against Afghans

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

Lies, compounded terror

Common Dreams and other sources reporting from the weekend show US government's terrorizing of Afghans sees no end in sight.

US President Barack Obama’s “secret decision” to increase hostilities in Afghanistan as he has done in Iraq “will keep American troops on the ground and fighting for at least another year.”

 

In his latest change that isn’t, the US president – as if laughing at fools – has given this endless ending a new name. His government calls it “‘Operation Resolute Support.’” However, Common Dreams explains, the United States will continue terrorizing Afghanistan’s people with “F-16 fighter jets, Predator and Reaper drones, and B-1 bombers.”

Endless suffering

 

In Democracy Now interviews today, Dr. Hakim, a physician associated with Afghan Peace Volunteers who have collected many stories from people suffering on the ground, said, “Security in Afghanistan has been deteriorating over the past few years in the face of the ongoing U.S.-NATO military strategy.”

Referencing existing data sources available in the United States, he said, “A global terrorism database done by the U.S. government and the University of Maryland has shown that since the beginning of the ‘war against terror’ in 2001, the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and in the rest of the world, in Iraq, etc., have increased.”

 

In view of that graph showing the increase of terrorism, Hakim said, one has to view the war against terrorism as “a cancer that needs to be treated.” And as a physician, he said this is how he views the “war against terror in Afghanistan.” It is a cancer that needs to be treated, not by increasing violence; but treated as a physician would treat sickness.

 

I

n an August 13, 2014, Countercurrents article, he declared, “We are human fodder caught in the crossfire of armed groups and armed governments. The elite 1 percent of armed groups and armed governments are waging economic, environmental and military wars against the people! They, and perhaps we ourselves, too, have lost our imagination and empathy.”

An estimated 50 million human beings worldwide have become refugees.

 

“50 million,” Hakim emphasizes, have been driven from their homes, displaced, forced to migrate “for the self-interests of fighting groups and governments.” These people “have become human beings seeking refuge from fellow human beings.” He continues:

…Whether they are Iraqi Christians, Iraqi Yazidis, Iraqi Muslims, Ukrainian free thinkers, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians and Catholics, Ukrainian Muslims, Palestinian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Syrian Muslims, Syrian Christians, Guatemalan Catholics etc., they are all refugees, and share the risks and crises all refugees face.

…Palestinians, including children who [had taken] refuge in UN schools in Gaza, were nonetheless bombed and killed by the Israeli military [(IDF) in a massacre characterized by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon] as ‘a moral outrage and a criminal act.’

We wish to live differently

Whether war, violence, terror, intervention is perpetrated against Afghanistan, or any country, Hakim says, “If there are 50 million refugees – there ought to at least be 50 million of us working together to divest and boycott, to stop military mobilization and conscription, to take the guilty elite to court, to participate in non-violent direct actions and protests and to provide all kinds of humanitarian assistance.

“There ought to be at least 50 million of us

 working together to restore human dignity and freedom – including the building of small, self-governing, non-violent egalitarian communities, as practical alternatives to the status quo of a large, 1 percent-dominated, violent, unequal world.”

Our response, he said, should be:

‘No to Afghanistan in Ukraine.’

‘No to Ukraine in Afghanistan.’

‘No to wars in the world!’

“We wish to live differently. We no longer want anyone anywhere to be human fodder caught in the crossfire of armed groups and armed governments.”

Sources and notes

“After Vowing to End Combat Mission in Afghanistan, Obama Secretly Extends America’s Longest War,” Monday, November 24, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/24/after_vowing_to_end_combat_mission

“We’re Human Fodder Caught In The Crossfire Of Armed Groups And Armed Governments: The elite 1% of armed groups and armed governments are waging economic, environmental and military wars against the people! They and perhaps we ourselves too have lost our imagination and empathy.” By Dr. Teck Young, August 13, 2014, http://www.mintpressnews.com/author/dr-teck-young/

Article printed from MintPress News: http://www.mintpressnews.com

URL to article: http://www.mintpressnews.com/human-fodder-caught-crossfire-armed-groups-armed-governments/195248/

“International Day of Nonviolence in Afghanistan,” Dr Hakim, October 4, 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/hakim051014.htm

Countercurrents.org

“Endless War: Obama Secretly Extends US War on Afghanistan: Obama allowed the military to dictate the terms of the endgame in Afghanistan,” Common Dreams staff, November 22, 2014,

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/22/endless-war-obama-secretly-extends-us-war-afghanistan

Dr Hakim, (aka Dr. Teck Young, Wee) “is a medical doctor from Singapore who has done humanitarian and social enterprise work in Afghanistan for the past nine years.” He has been “a friend and mentor to the ‘Afghan Peace Volunteers,’ an inter-ethnic group of young Afghans dedicated to building non-violent alternatives to war.” In 2012, Dr. Hakim received an International Pfeffer Peace Prize. [http://www.mintpressnews.com/author/dr-teck-young/]

The International Pfeffer Peace Prize was established in 1989 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s (FOR) Leo and Freda Pfeffer. Its espoused purpose: to honor people around the world “who are working for peace and justice.” Leo Pfeffer was a US “theoretician on religious liberty and separation of church and state, who had argued these constitutional issues before the US Supreme Court.” He was “a founding member of the Jewish Peace Fellowship.” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/International_Pfeffer_Peace_Prize

_________________________________________________

A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

_________________________________________________

US implicated in endless Middle East atrocities

Palestine, change in the air  

Excerpt, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

Today on “Democracy Now!”, … as conflict again heightens and hits headlines, Palestinian-Lebanese American Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi and Israeli Defense Forces veteran turned researcher and “anti-occupation activist” Eran Efrati

Violence persists

Serious talks nonexistent

“In a lot of ways,” Eran Efrati said, “the United States completely controls the political situation in Israel. … The political atmosphere is extremely violent and fascist and the United States not only enabled that; it is backing it up with money and with support.”

Efrati said, large sums of money are being transferred into Israel, money that comes mostly but not only from “evangelicals.” The incessant violence, conflict and nonexistent substantive talks to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli issues are the consequence of incitement by “right-wing Zionist movements” together with “the settlement movement in East Jerusalem, all over the West Bank, and to the right-wing parties in Israel”; and the ever-present weapons industry and their lobbyists.

The principal enabler

USA

of violence, conflict and nonexistent substantive talks, Rashid Khalidi said, is the United States of America. “By its diplomatic support,” Khalidi said, the United States “prevents any real pressure on Israel to stop it from occupation, settlement and repression.”

Palestine

The United States is “running interference for Israel,” Khalidi said. “Whenever anybody tries to do anything—British Parliament, the Spanish Parliament, the Irish Parliament, the Swedish government—the United States objects. 

“Whenever anybody tries to do anything diplomatically or in a nonviolent manner, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions,” they (these actions and those who carry them out) are labeled “anti-Semitic.” In the meantime, “the Palestinians are supposed to lie down and let the bulldozers and the settlement enterprise and the repression run over them and return to negotiations, which Netanyahu has already told us can never lead to an end to occupation.”

Gaza Strip

The current state of affairs is, “to a very large extent” the “doing of the United States” – rhetoric of the US president notwithstanding. “As long as American money is used to support the repression of Palestinians,” as long as the US Department of Justice Department and US Treasury permit “US 501(c)(3), supposedly ‘charitable,’ organizations to funnel tens, hundreds of millions of dollars to settlement activities, to the repression of Palestinians,” presidential rhetoric, the president’s public words are “meaningless.”

East Jerusalem

We are complicit in repression. “This is an American-Israeli enterprise,” he says. “The money is largely from the U

nited States” and “the weapons are from the United States.”

U

sing the authorities, police and military, the former Israeli soldier says, “the goal is to make people’s life miserable.” Eran Efrati said soldiers were told they were preventing “terror attacks” so they needed “to make their (Palestinians') life miserable so they will be afraid all the time and they will not have time to plan terror attacks."

In reality, Efrati said, "The end goal” is “to make them want to leave,” also to make them “want to do crazy things like attacks on Jews and on Israelis.”

Middle East

Rashid Khalidi reflected on the fact that "you do not control a region by oppressing the people and turning them into your enemies, what Israel has been doing for 47 years.” And the international mood is changing. 

Change in the air

"Among younger people,” people on campuses, people who do not consume mainstream media, Khalidi observes, “there is an awakening…, an enormous change in public opinion below the level of the mainstream media. 

"In Europe, there is an enormous shift: four major European countries have had parliaments or governments actually take a stand.” While that has not yet been translated into “effective pressure to stop the acts of oppression,” he says, “…we are getting there.

“Everybody in Europe knows what’s going on. What the American media does not tell the Americans, the European media does tell Europeans”; so “at least from Europe and the rest of the world, you’re going to see increasing pressure on Israel. The problem is here,” Rashid Khalidi concludes,…in this country,” the United States of America.

Sources and notes

DEMOCRACY NOW! today

“‘Palestinians Always Live in Fear’: Jerusalem Killings Follow Months of Tensions, Settlement Growth,”  November 19, 2014,

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/19/palestinians_always_live_in_fear_jerusalem

RASHID KHALIDI

Author and academic Rashid Ismail Khalidi’s most recent books include Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (2009): Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013). Khalidi’s research focuses on the history of the modern Middle East, on countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. His work also covers the effect of the press in forming sense of community; the role of education in construction of political identity; developing narratives in the region in the past centuries. This Palestinian-Lebanese American and Middle East historian served in 1994 as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America; in later years editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashi

ERAN EFRATI

Former member of the Israeli Defense Forces (combat soldier to “anti-occupation activist”), Eran Efrati is an investigative researcher into the Israeli military; and formerly chief researcher of “Breaking the Silence,” an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the reality in the Occupied Territories. Efrati has “collected testimonies from IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers, guided political tours to the West Bank, lectured before Israeli and international audiences. The collected testimonies appear in the booklet ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and their most recent release ‘Our Harsh Logic.’”  His current research focuses on “international military and police partnerships, and the global arms trade.” http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/eran-efrati

______________________________________

A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

_____________________________________

US political system faces “crisis of legitimacy” – Kishore on civic participation, inequality

Tough to summon energy necessary to take part in a system you don't believe in, one comprised of entrenched, corrupt public officials who deliberately fail to serve the public good -- and whom you hold in contempt

Excerpt, minor edits by Carolyn Bennett

“T

Joseph Kishore 

he character of the American political system is an expression of underlying social relations,” Joseph Kishore writes. And the waning state of “the state and its agents is, above all, a product of” a pervasive, deepening “social inequality presided over by a parasitic oligarchy intent on war abroad and plunder at home.”

People

“Tens of millions of people in the United States have drawn the conclusion that the electoral process is a sham and no amount of participation will [correct or undo] the stranglehold of the financial aristocracy.” In the most recent mid-term election less than one-third of eligible voters – in 13 US states – went to the polls. Among these low-voting states were the three largest US states:

California (31.8 percent), Texas (28.5 percent) and New York (28.8 percent)—along with Indiana, Utah, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, West Virginia, Nevada, and Missouri.

US youth participation or lack of participation in the process was particularly illustrative of “the widespread alienation” among the citizenry: Among eligible voters aged 18-29, “only 21.3 percent voted” in the 2014 election.

 

Regime

Media organizations, trade unions and pseudo-left supporters of the Democratic Party in 2008 pushed for a Barack Obama presidency “as an agent of ‘change’ and a ‘transformative’ candidate.” Candidate Obama “made a series of promises signaling a sharp departure from the policies of the immediately preceding president, George W. Bush, who had left office the most hated president in American history.”

However, not only were none of these promises fulfilled “but there was never any intention of doing so.”

T

he “change” candidate’s performance was a “campaign of lies, reflecting the arrogant belief within the American ruling class that it can simply fool the American people through a combination of chicanery and slick marketing.” And the president in six years “has … presided over the most rapid growth of social inequality in American history, a systematic assault on jobs, wages and social programs, endless and expanding wars, and the strengthening of a police-state apparatus of spying and repression.”

Result

The low turnout figures mean that many—perhaps the majority—of those elected received the votes of less than one fifth of eligible voters. And a cumulative effect of all data pertaining to the recent elections show “a political system facing a crisis of legitimacy.”  

Those who populate the White House, Capitol Hill and the various Governor’s mansions and state capitols have all the trappings of power, but any broad support for this power has eroded beneath their feet.

Approval rating of the combined bodies of the federal legislature (House and Senate) stays around “13 percent,” yet “more than 95 percent of all incumbents were reelected” in 2014. This means, Joseph Kishore concludes, that “despite the nearly universal contempt for the supposed representatives of the people, there is, in practice, no mechanism within the system for getting rid of them.”

Forward

“A qualitative turning point has been reached,” he says. “Millions of workers and youth unable to find any solutions within the established system will —and have already begun to—seek other means to defend their interests, e.g., with strikes, demonstrations, other forms of social struggle. They will increasingly search for political alternatives outside bourgeois politics.”

And “the responsibility of socialists,” he says, “is to actively intervene, prior to and in the midst of these struggles; to develop within the working class an understanding of the inextricable connection between the character of American politics and the nature of capitalism.

“T

he seething discontent that is building up in the United States in relation to both domestic and foreign policy must be given an ever-more conscious anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, socialist, and revolutionary orientation.”

Sources and notes

“The illegitimate US election,” Joseph Kishore, World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org,

November 13, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/11/13/pers-n13.html

Writer Joseph Kishore is National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (United States) and contributor to World Socialist Website (WSWS)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kishore

_______________________________________________

A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

_______________________________________________

“Support the Troops”? End bloodshed, body bags, wars

US
OVER HERE

Abby Martin’s Compelling Veterans Day essay

Excerpt, editing, brief comments interspersed by Carolyn Bennett

“T

he rhetoric that those in uniform are protecting freedom is hammered into the psyche of Americans at every turn” – yellow ribbon magnets, patriotic anthems at sports games, and corporate marketing campaigns – “but no war fought by the US military has ever been about freedom.”

Year after year, “the Establishment hijacks Veterans Day – not only to audaciously commemorate the war criminals that send our brothers and sisters off to needlessly die – but to justify decades of bloodshed and militarism while paving the way for decades more.…” 

Neither Communism then nor Terrorism now is a threat to the United States of America. “The only reason Empire has ever fought wars is to maintain empire.”

Sons, daughters continue dying for lies.

People do not “join the military to be called heroes or because they think they are fighting evil incarnate … [and] calling all soldiers heroes, undermines those who actually are.” People who “throw themselves into the line of fire to save their battalions should not be generalized alongside those who pillage, rape and murder.” Contrary to any motive of heroism, “most people join the military because there are no jobs and no hope….” And they fall while trying to better themselves and support their relations.

W

ars in Afghanistan and Iraq have left “more than 6,800” US soldiers dead and Washington keeps sending men and women to die for a lie. Wars over there were the leading cause of soldier deaths up to 2011. Then soldiers started killing themselves at a rate of 22 a day.  “In 2012 and 2013,” soldiers were committing suicide “faster than they were dying [over there].” That means, Martin explains, “a veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes -- or twenty-two every single day.”

Care less Character: Use, abuse, discard

Thousands of US soldiers wounded mentally and physically are simply “thrown back into society” to sink or swim, to fend for themselves, set adrift homeless under bridges, in homes where they seem no longer to fit in. A local Rochester, New York, merchant insultingly offers veterans “free haircuts” on Veterans Day. Thanks for your service, your sacrifice; we don’t need you any longer.

US
OVER THERE

After that comment of mine, Martin continues laying out the evidence of America’s (the Washington elite’s) carelessness: 

·         Back in March, the backlog of Veterans benefits was a staggering 400,000 cases with an average wait time of 125 days to process the claims, according to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

·         At least one million servicemen and women have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to 300 thousand during the Vietnam War, despite the lack of a draft.

·         The number could be even higher, but the VA abruptly stopped publishing the number of injured troops, citing national security reasons for the censorship.

‘The disgraceful way veterans are treated in this country exemplifies how little this government actually values life.

US
OVER THERE

“A

midst all the ritualistic pageantry immortalizing fallen soldiers, we lose sight of the military mind, one that dominates policy and breeds new generations of sadists who are taught that other human beings are of lesser value than they (the sadists). This toxic mindset seeps into every facet of American society, teaching every citizen that force is the answer to every problem.…”

Real heroes, Martin says, are those who resist war. Wars will cease when soldiers refuse to fight them. Hope begins in the minds of men and women when peace (nonviolence) is chosen over violence. All of us can contribute to this.

Martin suggests that the next time you hear people reciting the “Support the Troops” mantra, “Ask what they are doing to ensure that there will be no more senseless bloodshed. No more body bags. No more war.”

Sources and notes

“The Order to “Support the Troops” is Killing Veterans,” Abby Martin at Media Roots and RTs Breaking the Set, broadcast, November 12, 2014, http://www.mediaroots.org/how-supporting-the-troops-is-killing-veterans/

Abby Martin | @abbymartin

Abby Martin

Oakland, California, native Abigail Suzanne (Abby) Martin is a US journalist, artist and activist, and host of “Breaking the Set” on RT America network, working at the bureau in Washington, DC; earlier she was a correspondent for RT America. Martin is joint founder of the citizen journalism website, Media Roots; and a member of the Board of Directors for the Media Freedom Foundation, which manages Project Censored. She was co-director of “99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film.” Martin took her academic credentials at San Diego State University (concentrations Political Science and Spanish) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin

_______________________________________________


A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

_______________________________________________