Mike Ferner -

In Praise of Senator Max Baucus

Mike Ferner — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:49:38 +0000

Subtitle

A bill without a fig leaf

Home Page Excerpt

September 19, 2009

“It ain’t brain surgery, folks!” Get mad. I mean really mad. As in banging-pots-and-pans-on-Capitol-Hill-for-as-many-days-as-it-takes mad.

Full Article

September 19, 2009

by Mike Ferner

We may not yet comprehend how big a favor Senator Baucus just did for his 330 million fellow citizens. But from today on, it is my personal crusade to insure that he gets at least a footnote in the history books.

To be sure, I think Sen. Baucus’ legislation is a load of crap, but the good Senator and his colleagues, while doing the insurance industry’s bidding, saved us from the chance that Obama’s “public option” version – itself not quite half a load of crap – would become law. The decks are now cleared for a real battle over real health care: the AmericaPlan.

What is the AmericaPlan? Rest easy, dear friends, it’s not another 40 pounds of draft legislation. It’s already been introduced and has a respectable number of co-sponsors.

The problem is, it goes by a variety of names – none of which are memorable in the least.

Here’s what I mean. The Colgate-Palmolive Corp. marketing staff sits down with their high-paid consultants and brainstorms something like this.

“I’ve got it! Let’s call it the ‘Expanded and Improved Teeth Cleansing Paste.’”

“No, that’s horrible. I say go with the ‘National Save-Your-Teeth-From-Rotting Gel.”

“You’re both crazy. The American people want something short and crisp, like ‘TC 67.’”

Stupid? Well, not a whole lot stupider than the names somebody dreamed up for the only health care legislation that actually does what’s needed: the “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act,” the “United States National Health Insurance Act,” “HR 676,” or the remarkably incomprehensible, “Single-Payer.”

I’m not kidding you. Except for the last one, those are the various official names the legislation goes by. “Single-Payer” was somebody’s idea of a real snappy volksmoniker I guess.

It finally dawned on me how inept “Single-Payer” was, when I was marching in a local demonstration demanding health care for all recently. “Nobody out! Everybody in!” You know, the AmericaPlan.

“What do we want?” The guy behind the bullhorn asked.

“Single-Payer.”

“When do we want it?”

“NOW!”

“What do we want?”

“Single-P…” WtF?!!?

OK. Back to the AmericaPlan.

President Obama was State Legislator Obama the last time he recommended the AmericaPlan and Sen. Baucus had 13 doctors and nurses arrested in his hearing room for trying to get it discussed even briefly, so you may not have heard much about the AmericaPlan.

Suffice it to say there is indeed a single payer – the federal government – which replaces the health insurance companies and their morbidly obese salaries, bloated bonuses, private jets to private Caribbean islands and a totally unacceptable 30+% overhead.

That is the key.

Medicare – that socialistic program teabaggers can’t wait to take advantage of when they hit 65 – has an overhead one-tenth of the private insurance companies! That savings nearly pays for an entire program which brings everybody in; leaves nobody out. But to get there, our political leaders have to take on the very same insurance companies that make those big, fat, irresistible campaign contributions.

That’s where you and I come in.

Thanks once again to Sen. Baucus’ brilliant bill which, without the public option fig leaf, is more likely to die a well-deserved death, we have one more chance to pass the AmericaPlan, HR 676. To do it, we only have to do two things:

1) Start thinking of health care as a right, not a privilege.

2) Get mad. I mean really mad. As in banging-pots-and-pans-on-Capitol-Hill-for-as-many-days-as-it-takes mad. To keep our spirits up we can run Michael Moore’s “Sicko” for the first few days. When we get sick of that, it will be easy enough to organize an unending line of people to tell us their tragic stories of ruined families, foreclosed homes, pain and suffering as a way of life.

Or, we can do what we do really well most of the time:

1) Let our brains turn to mush while the Baucuses, the Obamas and the corporate news outlets make the AmericaPlan, HR 676, seem just too complicated for our little heads to deal with.

2) Throw up our hands and let the insurance companies continue to bury us in paperwork, ration our care, tell us which doctor we can see, decide who lives and who dies – which sounds pretty poor in the home of the brave and land of the free, if you ask me.

That’s pretty much the choice. As the wise sage once said: “It ain’t brain surgery, folks!” The information is all there. You won’t hear word one about it on the corporate news, but it’s completely accessible for anybody who wants to take control of a very important part of their life.

Bring on the pots and pans!

Published On

Counterpunch

Published Address

http://www.counterpunch.com/ferner09182009.html

Strother Martin Nailed It: We Gotta Get Our Minds Right!

Mike Ferner — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:54:09 +0000

Subtitle

The bars of our cages are in our own minds

Home Page Excerpt

August 6, 2009

In Paul Newman’s 1967 classic, “Cool Hand Luke,” the prison boss in the white suit, played memorably by Strother Martin, repeatedly tells Luke to “get your mind right.” What turned out to be literally a grave warning for Luke happens to be exactly what we need to hear today.

Full Article

September 6, 2009

by Mike Ferner

We open our 24th annual convention against a backdrop of a crippled economy, sweeping foreclosures, widespread unemployment, millions without medical benefits, wars that now exceed a trillion dollars and have killed over a million people.

It’s a fair question to ask, that with a name like Veterans For Peace, should we be concerned with issues that go so far beyond opposing war? I believe the answer is “yes,” because war and our economic calamities are not only connected, one is the dominant cause of all the others, and VFP is well positioned to make this argument.

As we open our convention I’d like to open a discussion on something even more fundamental than war and economic calamity. As is true so many times when talking about fundamentals, we can refer to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The same year “Cool Hand Luke,” played in theaters, Dr. King spoke at Riverside Church in New York, giving what many believe was his greatest speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” In it, he called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

“Time” magazine called King’s speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”

But every word in King’s speech was true – and timeless. Here are a couple gems.

“…what we are submitting our troops to is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war…We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for (our soldiers) must know after a short period there, that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.

Americans, who calculate so carefully…military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat.”

Then, 42 years ago, he spoke words that could’ve been addressed to us here today:

“This war is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this…reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and-laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala…Cambodia… South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life…”

My daughter brought this home to me right after the invasion of Iraq, when she said, “This is my generation’s war, just like Vietnam was yours, isn’t it?”

So here we are, organizing another generation of anti-war committees, attending rallies without end. It’s still necessary, We’ll keep doing it, but I’m sick of it. I’m tired of being that Vet for Peace guy who makes history dance at another rally by revealing what Smedley Butler had to say. I long for the time when Veterans For Peace can build its membership on a reputation for creating a peaceful world and its practical nonviolence skills, not just because we lept to the front ranks against yet another war.

Chris Hedges wrote “war is a force that gives us meaning.” Could it also be true that anti-war is a force that gives us meaning? If we are content to be an anti-war movement or peace movement in name only, we’ll have work that will give us plenty of meaning for this generation, our children’s generation, and the one after that if the planet is still breathing.

No, what we need is a peace movement that is true to our chant in the streets: “No justice, no peace!” Peace with justice means stopping the few from making policy for the many; from robbing us blind; denying our right to health care; destroying Earth’s life support systems; as well as sending us to war.

Peace with justice needs a foundation. That foundation is democracy. Not democracy “as advertised on TV,” or bandied about during elections, but the real thing. We must govern ourselves, for we have seen what happens when we don’t.

Imagine a peace movement that is part of a larger democracy movement. We talk about “outreach” to other groups. We talk about defunding the war to fund human needs. But brothers and sisters, what is our vision? Stopping the F-22 or trading an aircraft carrier for a housing program? It has to be more than that! What we need is to govern ourselves so we can create the kind of life we have an indisputable, inalienable right to.

But we aren’t going to gain the power needed to govern ourselves if we expend our precious time toiling in an isolated peace movement that merely wants to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, just as we won’t become self-governing with an environmental movement that aims only for more solar panels and cars with better mileage.

We need to get our minds right so we can see ourselves not as mere workers and consumers but as human beings with an absolute right to define what kind of life we need – and then take it!

We need to create a culture of democracy from the bottom-up, to replace our culture of death. We need to change our government from what it is today – a huge roadblock, guarded round the clock by greed and private interests, into a vehicle that nourishes the public interest; that helps us express our love for each other and our planet.

I believe there is a hunger for self-governance and democracy in America and that hunger is the fundamental link between the peace movement and every other movement working to address human needs.

I don’t need to remind this audience of war’s real cost. We can’t even identify all the categories into which we pour war’s staggering sums. Less than 5% of what we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would pay the tuition of every student attending public university this year in the U.S. Beyond dollars, we know war’s human toll on individuals, families and whole communities is as impossible to quantify as the heartache of a single loved one; as impossible to calculate as the multiples of misery endured by those under our bombs.

If we experienced casualties in our country comparable to those just in Iraq it would mean – listen for where you live – that every person in Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle would be dead. Every. Single. Person. Everyone in Delaware, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Oregon: wounded. Every. Single. Person. The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey: homeless. Everyone in Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky: refugees in Canada or Mexico.

What’s astounding is that so many insist this kind of madness is practical, is realistic…..and yet would look at VFP’s bottom line, “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy” and say “now, that’s crazy!”

How can this be? Well, think how much we pay this system every year to produce this culture of death, and then define it as normal. The silver lining is – when we realize what a constant, herculean effort the system must make to construct such a massive delusion and maintain it in the face of everything rational, we can sense how fragile the empire really is. If you doubt that, recall the statues of Lenin toppling all across Russia in 1990, when just two years before such a thing was unthinkable.

And so we’ve come full circle, back to Strother Martin’s demand to get your mind right! We can either do that, or stand dumbfounded on the side of the road, waiting in awe for the Imperial Oz to give us direction.

Well, we’re here to tell the nation that Veterans For Peace knows what we see today is not the only way forward. War is not an unavoidable absolutes. Human beings decide to create injustice, to promote empire, to whip up public fears. But veterans know human beings can make different decisions. We can create better outcomes. We can build a just society. We can create a culture of democracy. We can abolish war. We can, and we are!

But remember this other passage from that great speech of King’s.

“We may cry out desperately for time to pause…but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘too late.’”

Sisters and brothers, let us begin!

Published On

Black Agenda Report

Published Address

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/%E2%80%9Cyou-gotta-get-your-mind-right%E2%80%9D-veterans-peace

WFHB Bloomington, Indiana: Interchange -- Mike Ferner: "Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan"

admin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:11:53 +0000

PLAY:

WFHB - Bloomington Community Radio

Host Dave Stewart interviews Mike Ferner, president of Veterans For Peace. Mike discusses his experience as a corpsman in a Navy hospital during the Vietnam war, how seeing the human cost of war caused him to be separated from the Navy as a conscientious objector, and what he has learned from a lifetime in the peace movement.

We Don't Need the General Motors Corporation

Mike Ferner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:10:06 +0000

Subtitle

Home Page Excerpt

June 8, 2009

The corporation called General Motors is by NO means needed to provide transportation…GMC was never in the business of providing transportation. It was in the business of making money.

Full Article

June 8, 2009

by Mike Ferner

Times are understandably fearful in car country right now, but staring us in the face is a rare opportunity – to replace a terminally ill transportation system with something we can literally live with.

To take advantage of this uncommon opportunity we will have to do something far more profound, yet less costly, than a government bailout or an act of Congress. We will have to, as Paul Newman said in Cool Hand Luke, “get our minds right” on one simple fact: we need reliable, sustainable transportation—but not the General Motors Corporation. Contemplate the freedom implied in that statement for just a moment: we do not need General Motors Corporation.

Truth be known, the kingpin of the highway lobby has been by far the biggest roadblock to reliable, sustainable transportation for one basic reason we seem to forget: GMC was never in the business of providing transportation. It was in the business of making money.

That means that 90 years ago when GMC officials realized their market share had stalled out with less than 20 percent of the population owning automobiles, they had to do something. They had to get the car-less 80 percent of the population out of streetcars and trains and into autos.

Had the company really been in the business of providing transportation, it could have started manufacturing and maintaining streetcars and rail-related equipment, but that was never going to be as profitable as selling a General Motors car to every family in the nation (or at least come as close to it as Henry Ford would allow). So GMC, as would any for-profit company, put shareholders ahead of citizens and decided the trains and streetcars had to go.

That whole, sad story is told in painstaking detail in the documentary, ‘Taken for a Ride,’ a lively, engaging film released in 1996 that has never been more timely than now. I’m not going to tell you how GMC did it. You can read about that here, you can watch a low-quality YouTube version of it here or get it from your library (put your tax dollars to work and ask them to order it if they don’t have it already).

The point is, we have an abundance of everything it takes to provide reliable, sustainable transportation, raw materials, skilled labor and now, if we decide to exercise our 60% ownership of GMC courtesy of a $50 billion taxpayer bailout, we have the capital.

The entity known as General Motors Corporation is a legal fiction, a device most adept at concentrating economic and political power, buying off elected officials, opposing seat belts, pollution controls and higher mileage, while handing out executive lifestyles to make a pharaoh blush. But the corporation called General Motors is by NO means needed to provide transportation.

Cooperatives are just one of the humane models available for organizing finance and production. The U.S. has a rich cooperative history but since most people view them as arcane and since in modern times we have not provided optimal conditions for their growth, let’s consider an example from a country that takes them seriously.

The Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa (MCC), a finance, manufacturing and distribution cooperative based in the Basque region of Spain, has 85,000 employees and operations on five continents. Can you say, “Goodbye, GMC?”

Michael Moore, native of Flint, Michigan, one of the communities most devastated by the deindustrialization campaign our government allowed GMC to wage, puts it a little more bluntly.

“Please, please, please don’t save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs Let’s be clear about this. The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?”

Equally important, Moore displays better insight into this problem than 90% of the “expert” talking heads when he describes hybrid cars as merely a temporary fix, a bridge technology. If that sounds like heresy, remember that we are heirs to a generation of automobile advertising designed to sell cars plus three more generations of advertising designed to make us feel beautiful, sexy, in control and uncommonly smart if we bought the right kind of car – along with a not-so-delicate head bashing in recent years geared to make us believe our very lives depend on letting the auto industry govern our work and our economy.

It is indeed true that times of crisis are times of enormous opportunity. We just have to listen to Cool Hand Luke.

Published On

NewJerseyNewsroom.com

Published Address

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/commentary/we-dont-need-the-general-motors-corporation

Worth 1,000 Words After Memorial Day

Mike Ferner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:32:34 +0000

Subtitle

Kurt Vonnegut summed it up best: "And so it goes."

Home Page Excerpt

May 27, 2009

Alaska Army National Guard SSgt Michael Manson helps kids climb on a HumVee and handle a M249 Saw gun. Juneau Empire 5-24-09

“Sadly though, it probably doesn’t occur to Staff Sergeant Manson that he might well be grooming potential poster kids for the back door draft and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, if they’re lucky enough to come home.”

Gene Marx
Naval Flight Officer 1969-76, Gulf of Tonkin 1971-72

Full Article

May 27, 2009

by Mike Ferner

On Memorial Day this year, many veterans marched in local parades and remembered what it was like to be in the military. A number of Veterans For Peace members saw this picture in the May 24 edition of the Juneau Empire and made the comments that follow it.

Alaska Army National Guard Staff Sergeant Michael Manson helps kids climb on a HumVee and handle a M249 Saw gun. Juneau Empire 5-24-09

Dear Editor:

On Sunday morning (May 24, the day before Memorial Day), the Empire did a great service to our community by publishing a photograph of a National Guardsman, a Humvee, an M249 machine gun, and a group of children, converging at the so-called “Outdoor Safety Expo” sponsored by the Juneau Rotary on Saturday, May 23.

A cynical attempt to manipulate and militarize children is the only conceivable purpose for the National Guard to show up to display fancy killing machines, and to encourage little kids to play with them. The M249 is a “light” machine gun; its only purpose is to maim and kill human beings. What in God’s name did that display have to do with outdoor safety?

Shame on the National Guard, and shame on the Juneau Rotary for sponsoring this dishonorable atrocity.

Phil Smith, President
Veterans for Peace, Chapter 100
Juneau, Alaska

Sadly though, it probably doesn’t occur to Staff Sergeant Manson that he might well be grooming potential poster kids for the back door draft and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, if they’re lucky enough to come home

Gene Marx
Naval Flight Officer 1969-76, Gulf of Tonkin 1971-72

The disconnect of that National Guard guy from the fundamentals of simple humanity is apparent. That a grown man would expose what appear to be four and five-year-olds to the workings of a lethal weapon and think it fun and cute is sad. It speaks to the pervasive militarism that produced that young man and his distorted notions of what is and is not appropriate play for very young children.

Woody Powell
USAF Korea 1952-53, K9 Corps.

What an amazing photograph. Those kids are now marked by some infantile fantasy that shooting this gun would be fun and that if they join the Army they will get to do that. They have no concept of death, or that this gun deals death, or that they and their victims will pay a terrible price for their desires.

Paul Cox
USMC Infantry 1968-1972, Vietnam 1969-70

I’d like to see Sergeant Michael Manson sitting behind the machine gun instead of helping children sit there… and then I’d like to shoot a few hundred rounds from another machine gun at his bullet screen, while the kids watch safely from someplace nearby.

Maybe then he would think twice before glorifying the act of sitting behind a machine gun to kids, without teaching the true ramifications of being an army gunner. The children wouldn’t EVER want to be there again. Shame on the National Guard for allowing this activity with our children.

And this was at a “Safety Expo”?

Ward Reilly
U.S. Army Infantry and ex-gunner 1971-74

I have worked in schools for the last 27 years, and have witnessed an ever-increasing military presence, and acceptance of it by public school officials.

“The thorns that I have reap’d

Are of the tree I planted,

They have torn me, and I bleed.

I should have known what fruit

would spring from such a seed.”

—Lord Byron

Budda said something to the effect: The world is made up of our thoughts.
What thoughts will the children leave with after seeing, touching, and being told about this article of death - except not being told of its true purpose?

Jerry Steele
Army, Vietnam 1971-72. 101st Airborne, and 1st Cav. Division.

These young children look at most to be 4 year olds, the NG’s are doing what their bosses told them just like in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo.

George McAnanama
US Army (MPC) 1966-68 Korea

“Training for U.S. military imperialists of the 21st century starts early.”

John C. Reiger
U.S. Army Security Agency (ASA) 1959-62

Kids this age still play with their friends, sometimes with toy guns, but seeing children look in awe at the real thing…makes something designed only to kill appear common, almost friendly, like a favorite toy.

Joe Attamante
USMC 1966-68 (drafted)

So many opportunities for “personal growth.” Like a job in a depression — now, that’s a great opportunity. Can’t get work, hey, join the imperial centurions and go hunt down and kill kids out there on the fringes of empire in some place like Afghanistan where kids just like you can’t find a job either and have the opportunity for “personal growth” offered to them by some mullah & madrassa that does the work of our Army Experience Center or your local festival featuring cool Humvees and SAWs. Seems the world is full of opportunities for personal growth these days. Kurt Vonnegut summed it up best: And so it goes.

John Grant
Army Security Agency 1965-69, Vietnam 1966-67

That a national guardsman would attempt to “seduce” children this young is symptomatic of a society in deterioration.

Robert Poteat
USN, 1950-53

Some actions, which can occur even during times of peace, could easily be considered war crimes. Perpetuating the culture of war is one of them. War is a sickness of our society that will not be cured until we stop glorifying it, until we stop sanitizing it, until we stop pretending it’s a game, and until we stop indoctrinating impressionable young people.

Kim Carlyle, President
Veterans For Peace Chapter 099
Western North Carolina

U.S. Army. 1966-69. Served in Alabama and Germany

Published On

CommonDreams.org

Published Address

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/05/27-6

When Will It Be Enough, Mr. President?

Mike Ferner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:14:21 +0000

Subtitle

Home Page Excerpt

May 12, 2009

This really is the question upon which everything else will turn — how many bodies are too many?

Full Article

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

May 12, 2009

Dear President Obama,

We write to you again, this time to say we are saddened to see that you now clearly believe in the tired, inhumane and unworkable assumption that violence will somehow work; that might makes right. But that is not the only thing we need to tell you.

We are not just saddened. We are angry. We are outraged by these actions, this practice of “death from above” you are ordering, causing the killing and wounding of hundreds of innocent people, as exemplified by the recent horrific attacks in Afghanistan.

When will it be enough, Mr. President? What is the number of dead and injured at which you will say “this can’t go on,” the number at which you will decide it’s time to turn away from violence and find another way? This really is the question upon which everything else will turn — how many bodies are too many? You know it is impossible to kill our way to a resolution, if for no other reason than every death and injury creates even more people willing to fight and die to remove us from their land.

We’ve been through this before, Mr. President, and I don’t mean that in a rhetorical way. We have indeed been through this all before — unlike most of the people in our country or in your administration. We have seen and heard and smelled and felt what “death from above” actually means, not in a briefing report but right there in our hands and before our eyes. We’ve seen the look in the eyes of the people we occupied. We felt their anger and their humiliation. We remember these things well, Mr. President, because they will not go away no matter how many years pass.

Veterans For Peace will continue to speak out against such crimes. We will do so along with the growing numbers of people who are telling you that by going down this road you are making a tragic mistake. We no longer face the old question of “guns or butter?” Now the question is: will we completely destroy our economy with all that means, or will we step back from the brink and do what our humanity demands of us before the slide into moral and economic ruin is irreversible?

At some point, Mr. President, you will decide to turn away from violence, to end these occupations. As we wrote before, we stand ready to assist you in any effort to find another way. Until then you will find us in the streets.

Most Sincerely,

Mike Ferner National President Veterans For Peace

cc: Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
Steny H. Hoyer, Majority Leader of the House
John Boehner, Republican Leader of the House
James E. Clyburn, House Majority Whip
Eric Cantor, Republican Whip
John B. Larson, Chairman of the Democratic Caucus
Joseph R. Biden, Jr., U.S. Vice President
Robert C. Byrd, Senate President Pro Tempore
Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate
Richard Durbin, Assistant Majority Leader of the Senate
Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the Senate
Jon Kyl, Assistant Minority Leader of the Senate

Published On

MRZine

Published Address

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/ferner150509.html

Leaving 50,000 Troops in Iraq Is No "Withdrawal"

Mike Ferner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:00:50 +0000

Subtitle

Ghost of LBJ drags Obama into the swamp

Home Page Excerpt

February 27, 2009

“…if President Obama continues on the course he’s charted, his hopes are guaranteed to founder on the shoals of war. This way lies disaster.”

Full Article

February 27, 2009

by Mike Ferner

St. Louis — A national veterans’ organization today objected to calling President Obama’s announcement on Iraq a “withdrawal,” adding that keeping troops there and Afghanistan will “put the nail in the coffin of America’s economy.”

Veterans For Peace, referring to several published reports that the Obama plan will leave 50,000 or more troops in Iraq, and pointing to the buildup already underway in Afghanistan, warned that such policies will have the same effect on the new President as the Vietnam War did on Lyndon Johnson’s plans for the Great Society.

“I really believe President Obama wants to do good things for the country,” said VFP president, Mike Ferner, “but if he continues on the course he’s charted, his hopes are guaranteed to founder on the shoals of war. This way lies disaster. For all our sakes, I hope he reconsiders.”

The 58 year-old former Navy Hospital Corpsman added, “Besides the suffering and death caused by prolonging these wars, America simply can no longer afford the cost of empire. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what these policies do. Their purpose is to control an entire region of the world and its resources. If you look at history, it’s clear the longterm outlook for empires is not very pleasant.”

Ferner concluded that “Barack Obama became president in part because millions of voters were sick of these wars and wanted them stopped, period. Saying that only ‘non-combat’ troops will be left after 19 months is just sleight of hand so we can keep tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq and send thousands more to Afghanistan.”

Published On

Veterans For Peace website

Published Address

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Veterans_response_to_Iraq_troop_withdrawal.vp.html

Statement on Crisis in Gaza

Mike Ferner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:31:27 +0000

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Home Page Excerpt

January 7, 2009

We note with great sadness the unspeakable suffering which builds by the hour in Gaza. We support the call for an end to the violence while noting that the Security Council’s inability to take effective actions to uphold the UN Charter, its own previously adopted resolutions and international law is due in great part due to the objections of the U.S.

Full Article

January 7, 2009

by Mike Ferner

St. Louis — Veterans For Peace does not take the side of any government, but rather takes the side of all people in the region who are victims of the most recent outbreak of violence raging between Palestine and Israel.

As U.S. military veterans all too familiar with the horrors of war, we must shout “HALT” to the violence, restating our position that attacks on civilians are never warranted. Neither Israel nor Hamas is justified in attacking the civilian population of the other. Bombings, rocket attacks, blockading medical supplies and military invasions will not lead to peace and security but will perpetuate the cycle of death, destruction, fear and insecurity among the people of all countries, including the U.S.

As citizens of the United States, VFP also recognizes that tens of billions of our tax dollars provide Israel the military means to wage a vastly disproportionate attack on Gaza , a district with particularly dense population. That attack, plainly condemned by nearly all of the world’s nations, has killed many hundreds of civilians, injured hundreds more and set off a humanitarian crisis where the wounded are dying from lack of transport to aid centers and many more face death from lack of water.

Therefore we call upon our 7,000 members in over 100 chapters across the United States to join the millions of our brothers and sisters across the Earth who have taken to the streets to protest, to stand in the way of business as usual, until this violence is stopped.

Published On

Veterans For Peace website

Published Address

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/National_vfp_statement_crisis_in_gaza.vp.html

A Few Days in Hyde Park, a Lifetime in the Empire

Mike Ferner — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:06:42 +0000

Subtitle

Home Page Excerpt

January 5, 2009

Standing three blocks from the home of the next president of the United States the day he leaves for a new home in Washington, D.C., well you can’t help but observe certain things.

Full Article

January 5, 2009

by Mike Ferner

Chicago — Standing outside for five days at Camp Hope in the Windy City, under skies of lead and the thermometer below freezing, provides an opportunity to make certain observations. Standing three blocks from the home of the next president of the United States the day he leaves for a new home in Washington, D.C., well you can’t help but observe certain things.

Hyde Park, where the Obama family lives(d) on Chicago’s south side, is a study in contrasts. Victorian and turn-of-the-century estates, broad tree-lined boulevards and the University of Chicago occupy one end of the spectrum; vacant commercial lots and takeaway restaurants that don’t sell coffee to better discourage the homeless from hanging out, occupy the other. More women wore fur coats — some pristine and some clearly threadbare — than I’ve ever seen.

Maybe Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha weren’t regular customers at the caffeine-free food joints, but they were familiar with them. They may not have camped out in the bushes of Drexel Park, but they could see where others had. They no doubt went to the markets and restaurants along the margins where the two worlds intermingle. As one Hyde Park Good Samaritan put it as she gave me a ride to the library in her Jeep Grand Cherokee, “It’s good to have a President who knows about and experienced my world.”

Yet, as a military helicopter hovered over the motorcade rushing the soon-to-be-president to a waiting jetliner, you could sense the immense transition taking place. To be sure, Barack Obama is a Harvard-educated attorney and he spent a few years in the nation’s Most Exclusive Club, the U.S. Senate. Still, how many presidents-elect have lived anywhere near a neighborhood where the waitress at Shark’s Seafood and Chicken talks to you through bulletproof glass and where poverty limps by in the cold, with rotten, chattering teeth?

Before our eyes, a mere mortal is whisked away to America’s version of royalty, surrounded by multiple layers of bodyguards, advisors and staff, to where waitresses do not talk through bulletproof glass; where fragrant, hot coffee, perhaps served with organic cream in real china, will flow at any hour; where motion sensors replace used diapers and broken bottles under the bushes; where the slightest sniffle concerns the house physician; where it will be considered normal for a nod of the head to rain hellfire missiles on brown people half a world away, but where a Herculean effort is required to rebuild bombed-out water purification plants or healthcare for their siblings in this country. And these shivering, heroic people keeping an 18-day vigil in Camp Hope will no longer be just a stone’s throw from the President-elect but half a continent and political light years away from the President of the United States.

How will they bridge such political distance when it’s considered success to get a motorist to roll down their window at a red light to take a flyer and a “thumbs up” elicits a round of applause or a dozen students coming by for the day is to date the pinnacle of involvement? How will holding signs here under the overcast skies of Hyde Park, urging “Yes We Can: Bring the Troops Home,” “Provide Healthcare for All,” “Stop Global Warming” or “Save Our Homes from Foreclosure” bring any of those goals closer to reality? What can possibly shake enough Americans out of their nation’s collective sleepwalk to make a difference? What can give these vigilers the determination needed to continue? What will it matter if they don’t and how many of their fellow citizens will have to interrupt their somnabulance before the motorcades, the helicopters, the advisors, the trillions of dollars will change direction?

There never seem to be good answers to those questions, but never have they appeared so starkly illuminated than here in Hyde Park yesterday.

Today I’m writing this from the office of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, the group that organized Camp Hope, the group that violated U.S. law and defied sanctions for seven years by taking medicine and school supplies to Iraq, and where, as I type these words, all else is being set aside to see how they can focus the nation’s attention on the slaughter in Gaza.

Published On

MichaelMoore.com

Published Address

http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=1091

Camp Hope: For the Health of All

Mike Ferner — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:55:10 +0000

Subtitle

Home Page Excerpt

January 3, 2009

The white-haired physician paused for a moment and added, “Well I can tell you as someone who has practiced medicine for decades, Americans may have experience with employment-related health benefits but it’s been far from a happy experience.”

Full Article

January 3, 2009

by Mike Ferner

A steady stream of reporters from corporate news media outlets warmed things up at a frigid Camp Hope in Chicago yesterday, when CNN and the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS all called at Drexel Park on day two of the 18-day vigil urging President-elect Obama to make good on his campaign pledges.

Universal, publicly funded health care was the theme yesterday, highlighted by a presentation from one of the nation’s top authorities on the subject, Dr. Quentin Young, MD.

For decades, Dr. Young has promoted the benefits of a Canadian-type, “single-payer” system like most of the world’s industrialized nations. Young’s office is in Hyde Park, the same venerable neighborhood where Camp Hope is pitched, a few short blocks from Barack Obama’s home. His partner in the practice has been Barack Obama’s personal physician since the Senator moved into the historic district a few years ago.

Young related that in Obama’s early years in politics, he used to say he was all for single-payer. Then in 2006, the Senator started to say he was still for it, but that it would never happen without a solid Democrat majority in Congress. Then during the presidential campaign, he said that because of America’s rich experience with employment-based insurance that option would be included in the mix of plans he supported.

Even though health insurance costs in the U.S. add $1200 or more to the price of a car produced here Young said, big employers like General Motors Corp., along with the Chambers of Commerce are opposed to single-payer insurance because “they’re trapped in ideological blinders and unable to see the issues clearly.” However, in Canada, he said, the Big Three automakers and the Canadian Auto Workers Union both say they like the system they have, even admitting when pressed that it gives Canadian industry an advantage.

“The power of corporations is incredibly strong. Take a look at the number of registered lobbyists Big Pharma (the pharmaceutical industry) employs to sell its message to the U.S. House of Representatives: it has 675 registered lobbyists, plus staff, and there are 435 members of the House. ‘Hope and change.’ I like it,” Dr. Young said, “but I’d rather hear us talking about solidarity.”

Discussing some of the health care proposals under discussion, Dr. Young offered, “The ‘incremental’ plans put forth by some activists are idiotic. Every year companies try to off-load more of the cost of health benefits onto workers. I just hope that when Obama gets into office he quickly says ‘The situation is much worse than I thought. We need single-payer insurance now.’ What’s more likely, though,” Dr. Young observed, “is we will start hearing some baloney like, ‘Don’t worry, the public plan is so much better that it will eventually win out over the private one.’”

Referring to past proposals that maintained the central role of insurance companies, Dr. Young pointed to Hillary Clinton’s plan early in her husband’s first term and charged, “The only thing worse than the crushing defeat it got would have been if it was enacted.”

“You know, we hear so much about the wonders of the free market — that invisible hand with the extended finger…” Young mused, and then took the next question.

Health care costs a total of $2.5 trillion dollars in the U.S., or 1/6 of the country’s entire Gross Domestic Product, Dr. Young said. He briefly described two of the reasons for the high cost: overspecialization and high administrative overhead.

Regarding the rate of doctors going into specialty practices, Dr. Young said the ratio of primary care doctors to specialists is recommended to be about 70-30. “That might be considered just a little high by some, but it should be at least 60-40. In the U.S. right now it’s 50-50 and the percentage of general practitioners is still dropping.”

He used his own Hyde Park office as a good example of high administrative costs, which nationally account for nearly a third of all health care outlays. “We have five doctors and the equivalent of 14 full time employees. Five of those employees do nothing but shuffle paper,” he added ruefully.

Nick Skala, a law school student and intern with Healthcare Illinois who accompanied Dr. Young to the presentation told the 50 attendees that, “People sometimes ask me ‘Can’t we have serious health care reform without taking on the private insurance companies? Obama says his plan will compete with private insurers.’ The thing is, it’s not just insurance companies that people will be competing with, but drug companies, right-wing think tanks, and a massive, ongoing public relations campaign.”

One way to judge the level of dissatisfaction with the current private, for profit system, Skala said, is that 12 to 14 states now have proposed either legislation or citizen initiatives to get a single payer program. “The California legislature twice voted in favor of a single payer plan, only to have it vetoed both times by Governor Schwarzenegger.”

Asked about Obama’s cabinet nominees, Dr. Young said, “One or two of them have souls, but most of them don’t.” He added that one of his partners recently told him what one of his patients said about the President-elect, “So far all he’s given us is hope.”

Camp Hope continues in Drexel Park until January 18.

Published On

The Neil Rogers Show

Published Address

http://news.neilrogers.com/news/articles/2009010607.html