Military community criticizes White House

By Andrew Gumbel

Sept. 20— George W. Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore’s. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.

From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons’ safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.

“I once believed that I served for a cause: ‘To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ Now I no longer believe that,” Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. “I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.”

The dissenters — many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans’ benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase “bring ‘em on.”

And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food — many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers — and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.

“It is time to speak out because our troops are still dying and our government is still lying,” Candace Robison, a 27-year-old mother of two from Krum, Texas, and a politically active serviceman’s wife, told a recent protest outside President Bush’s Texas ranch. “Morale is at an all-time low and our heroes feel like they’ve been forgotten.”

How deep the anti-Bush sentiment runs is not yet clear, but there is no doubt about its breadth. Charlie Richardson, co-founder of a group called Military Families Speak Out, said: “Our supporters range from pacifists to people from long military traditions who have supported every war this country has ever fought — until this one.

“Many people supported this war at the beginning because they believed the threat from weapons of mass destruction and accepted the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida ... Now they realize their beliefs were built on quicksand. They are very angry with the administration and feel they’ve been duped.”

Most of the disgruntlement expressed in the field has of necessity been anonymous, so Tim Predmore’s counterblast in the Peoria Journal Star felt particularly powerful. Having been in the army for five years, he is just finishing his tour of duty in Iraq. He wrote that he now believes the Iraq war was about oil, not freedom, “an act not of justice but of hypocrisy.

“We have all faced death in Iraq without reason or justification,” he added. “How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the men and women whose job it is to protect them rather than their leader’s interest?”

Less visible, but no less passionate, has been the ongoing voicing of grievances over the internet. A prominent military affairs specialist, David Hackworth, keeps a website filled with angry reflections on conditions in Iraq for both the military and the local civilian population, and the government that put the troops there. “Imagine this bastard getting away with such crap if we had a draftee army,” runs one typically scabrous anti-Bush line from Hackworth.

More considered analysis is also available online, such as this reflection from a 23-year-old serving in the US Air Force, who wonders what the Iraq mess is going to do to the future of the US military: “The powers that be are destroying our military from the inside, especially our Army.

“How many of these people that are ‘stranded’ (for lack of a better term) in Iraq are going to re-enlist? How many that haven’t deployed are going to re-enlist ... how many families are going to be destroyed?” he asked.

One big rallying point for the critics is the Pentagon’s budget plan, which proposes cutting $1.8 billion from veterans’ health benefits and reducing combat pay from the current $225 a month to $150, which is where it stood until the Iraq war began in the spring. The budget will not be finalized until later this month, and the White House — embarrassed by editorials in the Army Times and by news stories in the mainstream press throughout America — says it won’t insist on the combat pay cutback.

Another rallying point is the lack of official explanation for more than 100 cases of respiratory illness in the Middle East. According to the Pentagon, 19 soldiers have required mechanical ventilation and two have died, but according to service members and civilian doctors the number of ill and dead is much higher. Military personnel believe the use of depleted uranium or anthrax vaccinations may have played a part in this mystery illness.

Source: lndependent (UK)

Anti-racists protest the Klan in SC

By John Lapp

AGR (Sept. 23)— As the march of about 45 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members and supporters passed down a small street in Blacksburg South Carolina on September 20, they were confronted by a small but rowdy contingent of the newly formed Asheville chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA). The protesters were armed with colorful banners saying such things as “Save our land smash the Klan” and “Klan out of the Carolinas”, a tiny boom box that assaulted the racists ears with hip hop, the chaotic sound of drum sticks hitting the side walk and a mix of angry chants and an array of profanities. The Klan, donned in their traditional robes and hoods and responded to the ARA group with such remarks as “communists” and “race traitors.”

The Klan was supposedly holding a rally that Saturday in order to “shed light on the crimes committed by the black community of Blacksburg that were being covered up by the Jewish media.” A small bloc of probably 5 to 6 neo-nazis marched in the rear of the march. the fascists carried large red flags that had the swastika in the center of them, this bloc drew exceptional loud taunting by the antiracists.

“I can’t even remember all the shit I said to those motherfuckers, it was just like the second I saw their hateful faces, I totally lost control over myself,” one ARA member said after the protest.

The Cherokee County sheriff’s department had told the antiracists that they could say what ever they liked to the Klan, but they had to follow the marchers along the side walks, and that if ARA caused any trouble, the police would not hesitate to arrest them all.

So, following what they thought to be the rules ARA continued to verbally assault the racists walking a few yards behind. A few minutes later the march passed by a parking lot where about 30 black and white local youth had gathered to demand that the Klan “get the hell out of our town.” The locals soon joined in with the group from Asheville on their slow march behind the racists. At this point two police officers stopped the counter demonstrators and told them that Blacksburg had a city ordinance against profanity and that the next time they heard a bad word “someone was going to go to jail.”

One elderly white woman began to shout “Black Power!” as she raised a clenched fist into the air.

The march culminated with a 20 minute rally in a near by park that saw Klansman after Klansman incoheriantly ramble about preserving the white race and so on. Just before ARA entered the park, the police stopped them and informed them that they were not allowed to go into the park and cause trouble. The cops said that if they wanted to yell and make speeches against the Klan they must first obtain a permit.

“It’s shit what those cops said about getting permits, like the city would really give us a permit to march the same route and rally at the same place on the same day as them,” said one ARAer later that day.

Intent on causing some sort of ruckus an ARA activist hung the boom box from a post and blared the hip hop at the rally, until, once again the police ended the protesters fun by saying that the boom box was in fact a violation of the noise ordinance.

At one point a protester thought he recognized famous white supremacist Bob White and began to shout, “Hey Bob! Hey Bob!” at a man that was taking pictures of ARA.. The man said that he was an undercover cop, and then ran off when the ARAer continued to harass him.

Finally, frustrated by just sitting around while the Klan preached hate, the protesters made their way back to their cars and left the town. “I think it’s really weird how the cops will protect the rights of terrorists like the Klan and Nazis, yet they totally crush our free speech,” one protester commented on the way to their vehicles.

America’s rich get richer thanks to tax-cutting Bush

By Andrew Gumbel

Sept. 20— America’s richest people have seen a 10 percent increase in their net worth over the past year, the latest list of individual fortunes in Forbes magazine reveals.

The latest Forbes 400 list is further evidence that the affluent are thriving under President Bush even as unemployment continues to rise and the income of average workers remains stagnant.

The list, published Sept. 19, showed that Bill Gates of Microsoft remains the world’s richest man. He has spent ten years at the top and now has an estimated net worth of $46 billion, more than the GDP of most small or developing countries. The figure was up $3 billion on last year’s.

Number two was the superstar investor Warren Buffett, with $36 billion. Number three was Gates’ erstwhile founding partner at Microsoft, Paul Allen, with $22 billion.

Forbes ascribed the fattening portfolios of the super-rich to the recovery of internet and other tech stocks after the dot-com meltdown of 2000-2001.

Jeff Bezos of the online retailer Amazon.com had the biggest percentage gain. His fortune leapt more than $3 billion to $5.1 billion. This was the first year the Forbes 400 saw an increase in their wealth after two straight years of decline.

Collectively, the top 400 were worth $955 billion — a figure reached by computing the value of publicly traded stocks and estimating the value of private stocks by assessing a fair market value for them.

The improving fortunes of those on the list also reflected the largesse being shown to the richest Americans by the George W. Bush administration.

They are the main beneficiaries of tax cuts that will pump $100 billion into the economy — most of it into the pockets of the top one percent — this year alone. They have also benefited from measures such as the repeal of estate taxes and the lifting of various government regulations on industry and large businesses.

Such economic benefits are being enjoyed on a highly unequal basis, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank.

Unemployment stood at 6.2 percent in July, the most recent figure available, or 10.2 percent when broader indicators of under-employment and generally failing to make ends meet are factored in.

Real wages, which have grown about two percent per year for the past several years, stopped growing entirely in 2002.

The disparity is perhaps best illustrated by the heirs of Sam Walton of the WalMart discount store empire. The five Walton children were valued at $20.5 billion each in the Forbes list, making them the richest single family on Earth.

At the same time, WalMart is being lambasted — most notably in the California governor’s recall election — for paying its workers so poorly that personnel managers hand out information to new recruits on how to obtain government food stamps.

Source: Independent (UK)

US rich list

Bill Gates: $46 billion

Warren Buffett: $36 billion

Paul Allen: $22 billion

Walton heirs: $20.5 billion each

Larry Ellison: $18 billion

Michael Dell: $13 billion

Steve Ballmer: $12.2 billion

Cox heirs: $11 billion each

John Kluge: $10.5 billion

Mars heirs: $10.4 billion each

Sumner Redstone: $9.7 billion


Source: Forbes