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| Child poverty USA |
Editing, re-reporting, comment by
Carolyn Bennett
Courage addresses underlying issues
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| Homeless in the USA |
Cathy Cohen, Kathy Kelly and Bob Herbert participated yesterday
in a post-State of the Union discussion and took some of the gloss off the
presidential performance and got to some tough domestic and foreign issues. Violence
has roots, core, and consequences at home and abroad.
“We all continue to mourn Hadiya’s death,” Cathy Cohen said.
Hadiya Pendleton was the young girl who was shot dead in a Chicago South Side
park a week after having performed with her high school band at President
Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
“We continue to mourn the deaths of all of our young people
who are being killed by gun violence,” Professor Cohen said, “but we are still
waiting for a comprehensive discussion from the president, a comprehensive
speech to talk about all the underlying factors that contribute to gun
violence.
“We are still waiting for him [the president is scheduled to
visit Chicago tomorrow] … to talk about the ─
Unemployment that young people face
Inadequate schooling that they face
Problematic policies around
incarceration
Trauma [young people] face from violence and unemployment in their neighborhoods
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| Dr. Cathy Cohen |
“The truth is,” she said, “without that type of discussion,
we are never going to move forward in really trying to deal with and stem the
violence in the lives of these young people.”
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D
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r. Cathy J. Cohen (b.1962) is an American author, feminist,
social activist, and David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science
at the University of Chicago. Before going to the University of Chicago, she
was on the faculty at Yale University. Her doctorate was taken at the
University of Michigan. She has served as secretary of the American Political
Science Association (APSA); and, as an academic activist, she frequently writes
and speaks about gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and their
interrelatedness and connection to power.
Professor Cohen is one of the founding board members of the
Audre Lorde Project and is active in a number of organizations working on
social justice issues. In 2010, she moderated the plenary sessions of the
Applied Research Center’s conference “Popularizing Racial Justice.” She is the
principal researcher on the www.blackyouthproject.com and author of Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the
future of American politics and boundaries of Blackness; AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.
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“W
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e keep watching young people die in our city,” Dr. Cohen
said, “and it seems that somehow the country does not understand … the worth of
their lives.…
“We had heard elites and leaders talk about the president
coming home, but we felt there needed to be … the added voice of thousands of
people telling the president that he needed to come to Chicago. He needed to
come home and he needed to talk about gun violence in a comprehensive way.”
Cohen was talking about a petition launched by the Black
Youth Project to bring the president home to his hometown, Chicago, and address
underlying issues. “We thought it would be critical to have someone who had
gone through that loss,” the loss of someone by gun violence in Chicago, she
said, “asking the president to come home and speak about gun violence … [and]
about 10 days after Hadiya Pendleton’s death, there were more than 47,000
signatures.”
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| War and poverty |
POVERTY and
failure to care
In his turn in the Democracy Now discussion, Bob Herbert
said, “The big problem—the biggest problem facing the country still is
employment:
Too many people out of work
Too many people underemployed
Poverty is expanding
Median income has decreased since
the recession ended
Median income has decreased in the
recovery period
50 million (est.) people who are
officially poor in the United States
Another 50 million are near poor ─ close
to one third of the entire U.S. population
Yet we are in a period of
austerity.
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A
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glaring absence in
the president’s State of the Union speech, Professor Cohen joined Herbert, “is
a real discussion, a serious discussion of poverty.
“We talk about aspiring to the middle class, expanding the
middle class, and these are all good things for us to focus on; but there are,
as Bob said, almost a third of the country impoverished or close to poverty.”
What to do
“We have to have a clearer sense about what we are going to
do for those communities, for those individuals, to really change their lives
and provide them with real opportunities for mobility,” Cohen said.
“There is no way to address challenges as enormous as these without
making enormous investments,” Herbert added. “I don’t know how we make headway
if we’re not going to make investments in those things that ultimately will put
people back to work.… We need to rebuild infrastructure, invest in research and
development.”
Weatherizing buildings from coast to coast, which would put
lower-income people to work; all of those things cost money, yet the president emphasized
in his speech that nothing he was proposing
will add even a dime to the budget deficits ─ so one part of the speech is fighting another.”
Another way of putting it is to say the president was
talking out of both sides of his mouth. There’s also another way of putting it that
I will leave to others to put.
 R |
obert (Bob) Herbert (b. 1945) is an American
journalist/op-ed columnist who writes frequently on poverty, the Iraq war,
racism and American political apathy toward issues of race. Until 2011, he
wrote a syndicated column for The New York Times and other sources. In June
2011, Herbert joined the national think-tank Demos as a Distinguished Senior
Fellow. He writes for the Demos blog PolicyShop; and The American Prospect
magazine, which merged with Demos in 2010. Herbert is author of Promises Betrayed: Waking up from the
American Dream (2005).
If we were to address climate change the way we addressed challenges
earlier in history, Herbert said, “We would do something about this.
Put people to work.
Do research and development.
Do conservation.
Weatherize buildings from coast to
coast.
We would begin to develop new
products, new automobiles, new forms of energy … which become the driving force
for industry … another way to revitalize the economy, and put people back to
work
COWARDS, the corrupt find tough choices taboo, untouchable
Rebuilding, investing, and taboo of all, exacting fair-share
taxes, but Herbert says, “We should be raising taxes.” Although this might be “heresy”
─ not an issue that has political resonance in Washington ─ “we should be
raising taxes on everyone because we must raise revenue to make investments, required
long-term investments.
“The taxes on those near the top,” he said, “ought to be
raised much more than on middle-income and lower-income people.”
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS ARE
FOREIGN AFFAIRS, and foreign domestic
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D
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wight David Eisenhower, America’s 34th president, said in “The
Chance for Peace,” a speech he gave in 1953:
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.
This world in arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children.
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| U.S. post-war Occupied Iraq's birth-defect children |
The cost of one modern heavy bomber
is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power
plants, each serving a town of 60,000-population. It is two fine, fully
equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane
with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with
new homes that could have housed [thousands].
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| U.S. post war Occupied Iraq's wounded children |
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,”
President Eisenhower said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity
hanging from a cross of iron.”
60 years on at home
and abroad
ENDLESS WAR,
poverty, abuses of human rights, liberty
It is untrue, as is often touted by government and other
sources, that the war in Afghanistan is a “humanitarian war; that we are there
to protect widows and orphans and women and children,” Kathy Kelly said in her
turn on yesterday’s Democracy Now post-State of the Union special.
The fact is that “conditions for people in Afghanistan are
deplorable. … Over a million children under the age of five are suffering acute
malnutrition.
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| U.S. at war Afghanistan's civilians |
“Expenditures made by United States development groups are
now approaching $100 billion; yet Afghanistan is still considered one of the
worst places in the world in which a person can live—
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| U.S. at war Yemen's children |
35 percent unemployment among men
Education system completely corrupt
Corruption closely linked to ways
the United States puts money in the pockets of corrupt warlords all across
Afghanistan.
And the president’s claim that the United States is going to
be able to effectively train the many different militarized forces in
Afghanistan, Kelly says, “is very hard to believe because so many of the people
who are drafted into Afghanistan’s military are illiterate.” Many people “are
there because they are desperate for money.”
Now and into the future, “civilians are at high risk;
antagonism toward the United States continues to rise; the Taliban have said
that until all [foreign] troops are out, they will continue to fight,” Kelly
reports. Afghans continue to be saddled with ongoing war.
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K
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athy Kelly (b. 1952, Chicago) is an American peace activist,
pacifist, author, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign
to end U.S. military and economic warfare; and a founding member of Voices in
the Wilderness. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has
traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the
early days of both U.S.-Iraq wars. She has been arrested more than sixty times
at home and abroad, and has written of her experiences among targets of U.S.
military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons.
She has reported on her time on peace teams and in prison in
numerous articles for peace and religious journals, and for websites such as
CounterPunch and CommonDreams.org. Several of her essays have appeared in books
on the Iraq War. She spends much of her time traveling in the United States and
speaking for schools, churches, festivals, and activist groups from whom she
accepts but does not require a stipend. On the Democracy Now February 13, she
had recently returned from Afghanistan.
Kelly is author of Other
Lands Have Dreams: from Baghdad to Pekin Prison (2005), collecting and
expanding on her letters from Iraq and from prison; co-author of Prisoners on Purpose: a Peacemakers Guide to
Jails and Prison (1989), and co-editor of War and Peace in the Gulf (2001). Her latest articles have focused
on the experiences of Afghan and Pakistani people facing consequences of U.S.
military action.
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“P
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resident Obama,” Kathy Kelly said yesterday, “is a hawkish
president who likes to appear dovish.
“The reality is that the Pentagon has said [U.S.] troops
will be in Afghanistan until 2024 and beyond [not withdrawn next year as the
President said]. And in the ‘21st century military’ that the president and the
Pentagon want to create, they don’t necessarily need big, huge military bases
all across Afghanistan. What they want to have are ─
Special operations troops working
in coordination with the capacity for drone strikes,
Weaponized drone strikes,
Drone surveillance.
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| Kathy Kelly |
What to do
Instead of money, resources, and the ingenuity constantly
being poured into military solutions, Kelly said, there are “other kinds of
security that are crucial, absolutely essential in Afghanistan.” These include
“food security, healthcare delivery security, security so that people can get
an education for their children.”
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| Bob Herbert |
And not only this, she said, “The United States and every
other country that has invaded and wrecked Afghanistan should pay reparations
for suffering caused and help to rebuild an infrastructure appropriate for [Afghanistan].”
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T
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here is a ring of similarity, an echo, between, a theme, a
paradigm running through America’s internal and foreign relations policies,
practices and problems.
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| Cathy Cohen |
Approaches in both sectors are brutally wrong, inhumane. And
the only way to begin to rid the United States, and indeed other countries, of
bad U.S. leadership is for the people of America to act ─ without regard to
party or ideology or personal characteristics, vote out of office, recall or
impeach all entrenched office holders. Correct systems and processes and reseat
all branches of government with better, cleaner, more able and socially,
ethically and morally progressive leaders. This is serious business and the
time is long past for cleaning house in Washington.
We must be strong at home and abroad, President Eisenhower
said in 1956. “We want to be strong at home in our morale or in our spirit. We
want to be strong intellectually, in our education, in our economy; and, where
necessary, militarily.”
Progressive thought and politics to me is nonpartisan and it
means clearheadedly and with an impartial reading of history taking the best
and bettering it.
Sources and notes
“Beyond Gun Control, Obama Urged to Tackle Joblessness,
Incarceration and U.S. ‘Culture of Violence,’” February 13, 2013,
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/13/beyond_gun_control_obama_urged_to
“Obama’s SOTU Address Calls for Middle-Class Revival, But
Poverty & Inequality Still Get Short Shrift,” February 13, 2013,
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/13/obamas_sotu_address_calls_for_middle
President Obama has announced plans to withdraw another
34,000 troops from Afghanistan; longtime peace activist Kathy Kelly warns the
war shows no end. Just returned from Afghanistan, she says the company formally
known as Blackwater is now running a base just outside of Kabul used by the
Special Operations Joint Task Force. Kelly, warns Afghan civilians continue to
suffer from longest-running war in U.S. history.
“On Monday, a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan killed 10
civilians. The strike hit what the NATO occupation force called a suspected
Taliban hideout in the province of Kunar.” [Democracy Now]
COHEN
Dr. Cathy J. Cohen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_J._Cohen
KELLY
Kathy Kelly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Kelly
HERBERT
Robert (Bob) Herbert, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Herbert
President Dwight David Eisenhower
Address “The Chance for Peace” Delivered Before the American
Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53; Radio and Television Broadcast: “The
Women Ask the President,” 10/24/56
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html
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