New Clear Vision

I Just Found 29 Million Jobs!

by David Swanson

No, not 29 million job offers. I’m no better at applying for jobs than you are, and my town offers nothing but dead-end McJobs or positions in the military industrial complex, just like yours. I mean I just spotted an easy way to create 29 million jobs, one for every unemployed or underemployed U.S. worker.

No, I’m not about to say, “Just raise taxes on gazillionaires and hire people to build stuff.” I’m all in favor of that, for lots of reasons, including the political corruption created by a concentration of wealth. We might have to disempower gazillionaires before we can enact any sensible policies, including the one I’m about to propose, but it can itself be done without raising a dime in revenue. This means that the President, who has broad, albeit unconstitutional, powers to move funding around from one program to another could do this himself. Or Congress could. (more…)

Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Before They Abolish Us

by David Krieger

Recently, a friend sent me a copy of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s 1982 Morgenthau Memorial Lecture.  The lecture, given under the auspices of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, was entitled, “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose in Life.”  In the lecture, Rickover, who died in 1986 but remains widely respected for his role in building the US nuclear navy, spoke of “some basic principles of existence, propounded by thinkers through the ages….”  Among these, he focused on responsibility, perseverance, excellence, creativity and courage, and he called for these to be “wedded to intellectual growth and development.”

I agree with the admiral on his choice of principles to give purpose to one’s life.  If one can live by these principles, his or her life is likely to be purposeful.  Yet, I think that Admiral Rickover missed an important point, which is: what one does with one’s life matters.  Rickover chose to focus his professional activities on the development of a nuclear navy.  In the questions following his speech, he was asked: “How can we equate nuclear weapons and warfare with moral and ethical values?” (more…)

Let’s Agitate for Jobs — Not War and More Weapons

by Judith Le Blanc

Something is missing in the swirl of news reporting on the debt ceiling deal struck on August 2 by the Congress and the President for close to $1 trillion in cuts in discretionary programs over the next decade.

Will the 58% of discretionary spending that goes to the Pentagon take a hit in the name of deficit reduction?

The short answer is not necessarily, not unless we are ready to rumble.

Even the Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain have no idea what the deal does to the Pentagon budget.

The cruel irony is the debt ceiling deal exempts spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though war costs are one of the biggest factors driving up the national debt by over a trillion dollars. (more…)

It’s Getting Hot in Here…

by Winslow Myers

In the 1980s, to help awaken people to the danger of thermonuclear holocaust, the organization I volunteer for, Beyond War, used what is now a scientifically discredited metaphor: if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it would immediately leap out, but if you put the same frog in a pot of cold water and gradually heated it, it would sit passively in the pot and slowly boil to death — the point being that if citizens continued to sleep and nations to drift, we would all get overtaken by nuclear war.

Unfortunately a metaphor can remain apt even if its literal source is untrue. This came involuntarily to mind as we sweated through the latest heat wave in our third floor walkup in Boston. We’re right under the roof of the building; meaningful survival is not possible without at least one room with AC into which to retreat. Yet there’s something about air conditioning that comes around to bite us in the butt. (more…)