Weekly Reading List From Common Dreams

You can’t go wrong with any of these:

• Tim DeChristopher: I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me
• Jeff Cohen: Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests
• Paul Buchheit: The Question Conservatives Can’t Answer
• Paul Krugman: ‘Centrism’: The Cult That Is Destroying America
• Christopher Brauchli: The Tax Burden of the Very Rich
• Robert Reich: Why Washington is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
• Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security
• Holly Sklar: CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You
• Glenn Greenwald: On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to Oslo
• Tom Tresser: None Dare Call it Privatization

Blackwater, The Privatization of War And Public Enemy Number One

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation’s wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.
The dark truth about Blackwater

The idea of privatization of American public and governmental functions has been at the center of the neo conservative movement and over the last decade has been presented as the cure for everything that ails us from Social Security to Medicare, prison administration to public education, law enforcement and even the waging of war.

Privatization, Human Sacrifice And The Architects Of War

Appeasing The Gods Of The Shareholders

There was a time when, as a matter of policy, America went to war only as a response to an attack by an aggressor. In 1962 John Kennedy had every reason to make war with Cuba and Russia when Kruschev talked Fidel into parking several dozen Soviet nuclear missiles ten minutes from Washington and 90 miles from spring break.

Most of the Joint Chiefs, especially Curtis Lemay,(General Bat Guano?) along with a sizable faction of Kennedy’s closest advisers urged the President to invade. Lemay wanted to send his B52s, (presumably not to drop leaflets) while others preferred a massive land invasion, perhaps to restore the Cosa Nostra to control of Cuban Casinos, the way God intended.

There is an apocryphal story told that Marine Commandant David Shoup (under whom I served at the time) presented the assemblage of top level civilian and military advisers with an easel containing a map of Cuba, over which he had placed an acetate overlay of a tiny Pacific atoll named Tarawa. Tarawa, which the Marines had invaded early in WW2 was shown graphically as a small speck against the background of Castro’s Caribbean worker’s paradise.

He then proceeded to inform the gathering that the insignificant speck had not been at all pacific, having cost the lives of over 1000 Marines and the wounding of 2200 others, creating a great storm of protest at home over what was seen as a needless squandering of lives to gain a tiny piece of real estate. Tarawa, he is reported to have explained, was defended by 4500 Japanese while Castro would field 150,000, and perhaps as many more.