America owes a debt of gratitude to the activists who opposed the Iraq war from the start, and who kept the pressure on.
By Tom Hayden
Los Angeles Times
December 15, 2011
As the United States completes its withdrawal from Iraq, it is worth pausing to remember the determined peace activists who opposed the war from the start, including one who took up their cause and became president.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
by Paul Olson
NFP President Emeritus
Understanding Washington would appear to require only understanding how money, bribery, political elites and pure meanness work. But understanding Washington, in these mean days, also requires understanding where people live and what they live for intellectually.
Read morePosted In: Speaking Our Peace
Annual Peace Conference Speaker Urges
Cuts in Military Spending to Fund Domestic Needs
Peace Action Executive Director Kevin Martin was the featured speaker at the 2011 Annual Peace Conference this past October 15 in Lincoln. Martin, who has headed up Peace Action’s Washington, D.C.-based national office since 2001, made this visit to Nebraska in part to personally welcome NFP as an affiliate member to what is the largest peace organization in the U.S. with 100,000 members nationwide.
The following article, written by Martin specifically for the Nebraska Report, touches on the main points of his annual conference address, and Peace Action’s timely new campaign during the federal deficit debate to “Move the Money!”
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
by Bruce Johansen
A friend, Professor Henry D'Souza (who is well-known around Nebraskans for Peace), told me that he had watched parts of the Unicameral hearings on the Keystone XL Pipeline. He remarked at how limited the focus of the hearings seemed to be, as if we are dealing mainly with a routing issue for the pipeline, not the larger issue, the introduction of a whole new (and very large) pool of fossil fuels, by way of Alberta’s tar sands.
Read morePosted In: What's HOT in Global Warming
(and our Nebraska federal officials)
To Cut Military Spending —
Not Funding for Domestic ProgramsWith just one week to go, Congress’s ‘supercommittee’ is racing to come up with a bipartisan plan to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
On the table for discussion are cuts in military spending and domestic programs like Medicare, Social Security and education, as well as higher taxes for the wealthy.
Congressional failure to adopt a plan yet this year will trigger automatic cuts of $500 billion to the Pentagon and an equal amount on domestic spending.
The Pentagon is wailing that it’s already agreed to cut its budget by $450 billion over the next ten years — and that another $500 billion in cuts would leave America militarily weak and defenseless.
But as NFP has repeatedly argued this past year, Congress could easily cut our national security budget in half — by $500 billion A YEAR! — and America would still be the greatest military power on earth. Between the unnecessary weapons systems, our superfluous military bases in Germany and Japan, and the Pentagon’s chronic inability to account for literally trillions in appropriations, we’re just throwing money at the military nowadays.
As Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, just stated in the New York Times November 9, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
grossly exaggerates when he says it would be disastrous if projected levels of defense spending are reduced by an additional $500 billion if the bipartisan ‘supercommittee’ deadlocks and automatic cuts go into effect. Adding $500 billion to the $450 billion already being cut would mean total reductions of $950 billion over the next decade, or about 15 percent…
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
