|
WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: January 22, 2003 Sept. 11 Panel Faces Several Pressures -- "Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., and some of the victims' relatives say they doubt the commission can do a thorough job with only the $3 million authorized by Congress." (Comments: Huh? Only $3 million to do this investigation? Shit, it cost at least $4.4 million to investigate Clinton. This just doesn't smell right to me.)
Reader Comments...
Silly me, it cost $52 million to investigate Clinton. Posted by: John S. Rhodes on January 22, 2003 11:48 PM
Damn you, investigating the wonderful adventures of the First Penis is much more important than a few thousand ordinary citizens' lives! Posted by: MadMan on January 23, 2003 06:31 AM
The last thing the federal government wants is for the truth to be known. The last thing the American public wants to know is the truth.
Forget the investigation, it will only be a whitewash anyway. Why not save a few lives and stop this war before it starts. Posted by: Mac - Dont Attack Iraq on January 23, 2003 02:00 PM
(sing to the tune of "When you're happy and you know it") If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
Who wrote that song? It sounds like a Capitol Steps number. Posted by: Name that tune on January 23, 2003 05:16 PM
Nevermind. Google and ye shall receive. Common Dreams cites John Robbins as the author. Posted by: Name that tune on January 23, 2003 05:18 PM
"I am not persuaded of the case for war. We have not had much evidence. I don't think Saddam is necessarily the right target." "Inspection is a better way of disarming than bombing. It has not been shown there is any near-term threat from Iraq to Europe or beyond. War may lead to a situation worse than the one we have now." "I would not want to lead my troops into battle unless I was totally convinced of its just cause. So far, this does not seem to be the case." "If we are talking about war, I think it is disproportionate. I don't think Saddam, though very nasty internally, is danger enough to be worth a war." "I've real concerns with any war. Since 9/11 there seems to be a link between Iraq and terrorism that politicians have allowed to grow despite there being no evidence. Will any conflict make the region safer? I don't think so." "We shouldn't go to war. Since troops returned home in 1991, 558 have died as a result of Gulf War syndrome. For the past ten years British and American planes have been using uranium-coated bombs on the Iraqis. Now we want to send troops there?"
I see. We shouldn't attack Iraq, although Hussein has killed thousands of his own people, although people who've escaped (they do have to ESCAPE from Iraq, you know - they aren't free to leave on their own) have told about Hussein and his thugs imprisoning, torturing and killing Kurds and others with glee. Though he's killed his own brothers-in-law after enticing them to return back to Iraq. That's okay, you say, we shouldn't kill him. We shouldn't end his brutal reign. Just leave him be as long as he doesn't kill us. Of course, it was okay to invade Somalia, it was okay to invade Haiti, it was okay to invade Kosovo (although all the tyrants in each of those countries was a great pretender compared to Iraq). Oh, wait. During these invasions, we had a democratic president surrounded by his team of socialist-wanna-bes at the time. So, anything he did was okay since he was on YOUR team. Don't pretend that those of you who oppose attacking Iraq do so than for any other reason than because it would make our president politically weaker and more likely to lose to a democrat in 2004. No one spoke up when even Clinton in 1998 proposed attacking Iraq (of course, he never followed through with it - everyone knew at the time it was an empty threat.) Those of you who say "stop the war", how then do you propose dealing with Hussein? Just leave him alone? Diplomatically? Give me a break. You have no courage and you don't deserve to live in freedom if you are unwilling to fight for it. For some rebuttals to the typical leftist, vague implications that you post here, try these: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn26.html And this from a self-confessed former leftist, who finally saw the light of day; http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson012403.asp Posted by: Tom - Attack Iraq on January 26, 2003 01:53 PM
Of course, it was okay to invade Somalia, it was okay to invade Haiti, it was okay to invade Kosovo No, it wasn't OK. If you look at each of the US 'interventions' over the past decade you will see that they have a lot more to do with shoring up the American Empire than helping the people of those countries. Don't pretend that those of you who oppose attacking Iraq do so than for any other reason than because it would make our president politically weaker and more likely to lose to a democrat in 2004 Bush isn't my president. I don't have an opportunity to vote in the US presidential elections. If I disagree with his militaristic policies I have to show my displeasure in other ways. Those of you who say "stop the war", how then do you propose dealing with Hussein? Just leave him alone? Diplomatically? The US put Saddam into power. In the 1st Gulf War they refused to support the uprising against him and condemned many rebels to death. The sanctions imposed since the 1st Gulf War haven't hurt Saddam at all but have resulted in the deaths of half a million children, whilch the US think 'a price worth paying'. Give me a break. You have no courage and you don't deserve to live in freedom if you are unwilling to fight for it. Does Dan Lane deserve to live in freedom? DAN LANE IN JULY of 1965, I joined the Marine Corps. At that particular time, I actually lived in a boys' home. This was the way out for most of us--I would say 80 or 90 percent of the young men went into the service. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that there was a war going on or being brave or anything. It was just a natural progression of things for us coming out of that situation. But at the same time, I don’t think I can ignore the fact that growing up, especially in an almost military atmosphere, I remember seeing quite frequently the John Wayne movies about World War II and the Korean War and all the glamour and the heroism. I think that’s important to mention. That’s why people from George Bush’s staff went to Hollywood right after 9/11, and said, "This is what the agenda is." And if everybody checks out the movies or TV, there’s a very strong pro-government, pro-war mood. At the same time, the experience I went through was that it wasn’t only what I was seeing on Saturday afternoon, but what was also going into the classroom--how history was taught, and what wasn’t talked about, and that whole perspective you get as a young adult. Just like a lot of other people at 17 years old, you believe the government is doing the right thing, and you see the movies, and you listen to your history teachers, or just about anyone in power. So I went into the war believing that this was where I should be. Shortly after finishing basic camp, I ended up in Vietnam. I was in the infantry, part of the Rangers. I saw a lot of things. I was wounded a couple times. Some very dear friends of mine who were in my outfit got hit pretty bad. Anyway, I was evacuated, not because I was wounded physically. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I couldn’t deal with seeing people die, with seeing children die. But how fucked up they’ve got your mind! Less than 48 hours after leaving the hospital, I reported to Camp Lejeune and signed a waiver back to Vietnam, because I didn’t feel that I had completed what I needed to complete--that I hadn’t lived up to the expectations of being a Marine and a man. So I spent another year over there. The first seven months I somehow got through. This was during 1968 and the Tet offensive. I was at the battle of Khe Sanh and a couple other places. Before it was all over, during my last months, I was having a very difficult time. But instead of keeping it in, it came out. And the way it came out was I ignored the officers. I ended up being court-martialed before all was said and done. Thirty days in the brig, and I was busted from a sergeant down to a private. I ended up coming back to the United States. The bad thing is that what you see over there and what you feel over there, you can’t talk about. I expressed it in certain ways. And the only help at that time was to go into the VA system--and electrical shock treatment was how they dealt with people with post-traumatic stress. So I went into isolation--into myself. And the difficult thing about it was that people didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I literally had people that I ran into on the street occasionally who said, "I heard about what you guys did." That was the generalization. And there was basically no support system that I was aware of at the time--although I found out later about groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That was where it stayed, down inside of me. I had a very difficult time holding a job. Part of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it’s very difficult to stay anywhere very long. I went though probably 22 jobs in a matter four years. Anyway, that is where Vietnam took me. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on my activities around Staley, but I do want to mention a couple things. I was personally involved at Staley, and to me, it was like another war. It was like I was fighting for my life to survive. It’s tough being locked out for three or three-and-a-half years, trying to exist on $60 a week. And thank goodness there were a lot of people out there who helped financially, but it’s still is a very dramatic thing to go through. But it wasn’t just Staley. At the time that we were locked out, Caterpillar went out not too long after that, and not too long after that, Bridgestone went out. And this is just in the community of Decatur. I remember coming up to a meeting up here with folks in the ISO and some other organizations, and we were talking about the "war zone." And the "war zone" at that time was not only Decatur. If you went south, the miners were on strike. And if you went north, there were other Caterpillar plants that were on strike. There were 25,000 people who were on strike--25,000 people who worked for corporations that were doing quite well, but that had decided: "Hey, we can make more money." And it didn’t matter what people went through. In the last three decades, there has been a horrible shift in workers’ jobs--jobs that have been eliminated in this country and taken somewhere overseas or turned over to technology. And for those who remain with jobs, it’s just like at Staley, where the big offer was that they had 800 people there, and there was going to be 300 when all was said and done, and the 500 they’d replace with scabs. That’s what people deal with every day when they go into negotiations now. It isn’t about negotiations. It is about them trying to dictate to you what you’re going to have. And the unfortunate thing about this is that all too often, we hear about the Staleys, the Caterpillars, the mineworkers and those struggles, but those are just a few. What we don’t hear about is the situations where workers basically accept it and go on. I guess the message behind that is that this is about all workers. It doesn’t matter if you drive a school bus, it doesn’t matter if you’re out in the fields picking cherries or vegetables, or if you’re working in the service sector. We all suffer. We’re all being dragged down. And it’s important to say that this didn’t just happen yesterday. It’s all too easy to say that Bush did it. I’m not asking you to vote for Bush. But what I’m saying is that this is the way of life in this country and has been for a long time. The fact is that there’s a war that is continually waged against workers. And it’s not only against those who are actively at a job. It’s being waged against the elderly, it’s being waged against those who are on fixed incomes, against people who are poor. It’s a war where not everything happens when people come out on strike. It’s also a war where some politician signs off on a piece of legislation, like they did under the Clinton administration, and they tear up the welfare system. I remember reading about how in New York, they would lay off one group of people and send in another group who had formerly been on welfare to do the work for less. And when it was all said and done, they were making less money than they were on welfare, because they didn’t have insurance anymore, and they weren’t getting help with food. In this new era of global capitalism, you have the president of the United States say not only that we’re the superpower, but don’t even try to resist in any shape or form. The fact is that what they’re saying to the people of the United States and the world is that they have the right to make a decision about what piece of the pie that everybody’s going to get. And if you disagree with that, we’ll take any measures to stop you. That’s the era that I think that we’re in right now. It’s nothing new--it’s just much more arrogant and out front. It’s very clear what George’s intentions are. And they’re no different from anybody in the past. But they have gotten to a place where they don’t have to use the cloak and daggers and the smokescreens. The other thing that just amazes me is that the media has bought into this completely. Not that the media isn’t bought and paid for, but there’s no questioning at any level from the major media. And that’s what people are buying--not everybody, but people are buying it. I think that the biggest thing I would underline tonight, more than anything else, is the importance of connecting the dots--connecting them for yourselves and connecting them for other people. It’s important to take that message out and go beyond just simply passing a resolution. Resolutions are a first step, but it needs to go further than that. One of the things that we saw at Staley is that when we shut the company down during the in-plant strategy, it wasn’t because somebody sent a paper out, but because we went out and talked to people and organized them. There’s one impression that I have a hard time getting out of my mind--one of the most horrific things since I returned from Vietnam. It was when I turned on CNN back in 1991, and I watched Baghdad being hit by bomb after bomb after bomb. And as horrible as that looks, I saw that happen in Vietnam. I saw what those kind of bombs can do. I could feel the ground vibrating, I could hear the explosions. But what was more horrifying is that in a matter of less than 100 hours, 40,000 people were killed immediately as a result of those bombings. Not to minimize what happened at the World Trade Center, but that’s over 10 times as many people killed. And that doesn’t count the people after that--who died over the next weeks or months. And it doesn’t talk about the devastation that’s been done since 1991 with sanctions and boycotts. That’s what’s horrifying when you put all this in perspective. And what did George say? When he was giving all his speeches, especially early on, he said you have to be ready to go. This is not something that we’re going to back down on, and it may take generations. In other words, it will be your children as well as you that have to commit to this battle against terrorism. That’s scary. Because that says that there’s been a declaration of war on the world for an indefinite period of time. Recently, in Britain, two men who were supposed to drive a locomotive with military supplies refused to. And I have to believe that they knew when they did that, there was the potential that they were going to lose their jobs. But what they didn’t want to be involved with was taking that train down there, loading up munitions and driving it somewhere else, because those munitions were going to be used to bomb Baghdad. We should recognize the courage that it took for those people to do that. And we also have to look at that and say that we need to take those steps. Sometimes, those are not steps that we look forward to. Nobody appreciates spending time in jail because of a sit-in. But the fact is that direct action in the plants and the federal buildings and in the streets--that is what’s going to happen. I don’t know if it’s going to stop the bombs from being dropped--the airplanes may be on their way right now. And I don’t want that to happen. But I also know that this is just the beginning of this new era. We have to get that message out, and we have to be prepared to take whatever steps are necessary. We need to get out there, get in front of the capitalists and show them that workers do control this country and they do control the world. Posted by: Mac - Dont Attack Iraq on January 27, 2003 04:05 AM
Er, this is a USABILITY forum, not a political one, folks. Let's stay on-topic. Posted by: MadMan on January 27, 2003 04:03 PM
Don't pretend that those of you who oppose attacking Iraq do so than for any other reason than because it would make our president politically weaker and more likely to lose to a democrat in 2004. Um. Okay. In exchange, you acknowledge the reasons Bush II seeks war: profit, revenge, and the 2004 election. Posted by: Jason Osgood on February 1, 2003 05:06 AM
Home | Moving WebWord | Cool Books | Hot Web Sites
URL: http://webword.com/weblog/ ©1998-2005 by WebWord.com. All rights reserved. |
