Democracy for New Mexico

Free Downloadable Book Discusses Why Millions of American Children at Risk

From Every Child Matters:
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the U.S. does not do well by millions of its children. In comparison to the other rich democracies, we have the poorest standing on:

• infant mortality
• teen birth rates
• health insurance coverage
• child abuse deaths
• child poverty

“Our children deserve better than this,” says Michael R. Petit, president of Every Child Matters and author of Homeland Insecurity … American Children at Risk, a newly published book that can be downloaded free at www.everychildmatters.org.

Drawing from mostly official federal data, Homeland Insecurity argues that the extreme conservative ideology that has dominated official Washington for two decades has failed to address the needs of millions of children. The book dispels the two principal myths upon which conservative ideology is based—that government itself is the enemy, and that taxes are evil. It compares state data on children and shows that the states which most strongly embrace anti-tax/anti-government ideology produce the worst outcomes for children. "The states with the best outcomes generally tax themselves at a higher level," said Petit, "and therefore are able to make greater investments in children."

Homeland Insecurity is just over 100 pages, but it’s jam-packed with straightforward charts and data, and ample photographs and anecdotes. Divided into seven chapters, it presents the latest data on health care, child abuse, imprisonment and child poverty. Petit says he wrote the book to help spark debate in the ’07-’08 presidential campaign about making major new investments in children, youth, and families.

Renowned pediatrician and author T. Berry Brazelton, M.D. writes on the book's jacket, “We do have solutions for the children’s problems the statistics in this book expose, but we need the national will to put them in action.” Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell writes, “Whatever their persuasion, most people who read Homeland Insecurity will find it makes compelling arguments for why new investments in children must be treated as a political priority. This is a must read for anyone seeking elective office—and everyone who cares about children.”

Homeland Insecurity is available free as a PDF downloadable document by visiting www.everychildmatters.org. The site also provides information on how citizens can help make children, youth and families a political priority.

Respite

Need an escape from holiday tensions or the day's news? Visit this cool make a snowflake site. The more snowflakes visitors make at the site through the New Year, the more they'll donate to the Salvation Army. Still have some time on your hands? Go see this collection of optical illusions, play with the musical painting toys at Visual Acoustics or play the Winterbells game.

Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006

There are a multitude of Top Ten lists being generated as 2006 rapidly comes to an end and a new year looms. One such list has been developed by Juan Cole, University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, at his blog Informed Comment. He makes sense.

Cole's conclusions?

• We can't "win" this war
• US military sweeps of neighborhoods can't drive guerillas out
• It's not a good idea for the US to throw all of its support behind the Iraqi Shiites
• Iraq is definitely in a civil war
• The Lancet study showing 600,000 excess deaths from political and criminal violence since the US invasion isn't flawed
• Most of the violent deaths aren't from bombings, but from shootings
• The death rate isn't lower outside Baghdad
• Iraq is not the central front on the war on terror
• The Sunni Arab guerrillas in places like Ramadi won't follow the US home to America and commit terrorism if we leave Iraq
• Setting a timetable for withdrawal is not a bad idea

Now all we have to do is get our delusional, recalcitrant President-in-Denial to open his eyes and accept the harsh realities that completely contradict his wishful thinking. I won't be holding my breath. But unless we keep pushing the Dems in Congress to treat the need for a prompt exit strategy like the emergency it is, you can bet that many more of our troops and thousands of Iraqi citizens won't have any breath left to hold. For starters, let's start calling Bush's plan what it really is: pouring up to 30,000 more troops into Iraq is an ESCALATION of the war, not a "surge."

Follow the numbers of . In addition, the UN reports that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country each month. Remember, these are the very kinds of people Iraq would need most to create a stable nation -- the professionals, the educated, the formerly middle class. Consider that the Pentagon will ask for $100 BILLION more in war spending when Congress convenes in January -- a number that does NOT include the costs of any escalation. And don't forget that the Pentagon wants $125 million for a Gitmo courthouse that will be used to try about 80 "terrorism detainees." The numbers game is incredibly depressing.

Despite Bush's growing isolation, and with even the Joint Chiefs and his field commanders critical of his escalation plans, he appears to be digging in his heels:

"He is now caught between admitting the war was a mistake and his policy has failed, or trying to tough it out," said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

"It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong."

Meanwhile, a recent LA Times - Bloomberg poll showed that only 12% of Americans back a troop increase, with 52% preferring a timetable for withdrawal. Let's hope the Dems stand their ground:

After years of playing a marginal role in the Iraq war, congressional Democrats plan to move quickly next month to assert more control and undercut any White House effort to increase troop levels.

As President Bush prepares to outline his plan for Iraq in a major speech in the next few weeks, Democratic leaders will counter with weeks of oversight hearings, summoning military officers, administration officials and foreign policy experts to Capitol Hill.

... With control of both chambers of Congress, the party will have the power to schedule hearings, subpoena documents and put conditions on how the administration spends money on the war in Iraq.

Clearly, we'll have to be very active in trying to hold the Dems' feet to the fire on this. It may truly be now or never.

A Tree With a Massive Knife On Top

Is it just me or is this one of the most profoundly disturbing statements to come out of the war zone of late? If this represents the mindset of a significant number of our troops in Iraq, where do we go from here? From an AP article:

At an Army outpost in Ramadi, the most-dangerous city in insurgent-dominated Anbar province west of Baghdad, soldiers decorated a full-size artificial Christmas tree with mines, smoke grenades and machine gun rounds and stuck a massive knife on the top.

"You can go anywhere in Iraq," grinned Staff Sgt. Jeremy Gann, a 24-year-old from Dallas, Georgia, who is part of the 1st Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment. "You won't find another Christmas tree like it."

Meanwhile, in the world outside The Decider's fake ranchette of denial, at least 2,978 members of the U.S. military have been killed in Iraq, at least 89 of them so far in December. And audits are revealing that Defense Department war contracting has resulted in tens of millions of dollars in fraud, abuse and waste and "routinely violated rules designed to protect U.S. Government interests." We all know this is just the tip of the iceberg and that the captain of today's version of the Titanic ship of state could care less. Full steam ahead.

Break the Silence on Plutonium Pit Production!

From Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group:
It’s an eerie moment in U.S. nuclear history. Policy teeters on a knife-edge between disarmament an rearmament, but silence largely reigns. The attention of policy-makers, the public, the nonprofit community, and the foundations that largely fund and direct them has not caught up with events, leaving the real policy decisions chiefly in the hands of autonomous, largely unconscious, nuclear bureaucracies.   

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) hopes to begin producing plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) next year at Los Alamos. If that happens, it will be the first time the U.S. has produced pits in 18 years. With new pits, the production of new warheads can also restart, lighting up all ten warhead factories, labs, and NNSA administrative centers with new work and a fresh sense of importance.

Of course these events will echo around the world, reinforcing those who say their nation too should have nuclear weapons. Security will decline for everyone.   

Without new pits and the new production that goes with them, the warhead enterprise faces serious internal crises related to an aging workforce, declining practical skills, poor morale, and a fading ideological commitment to nuclear weapons, among other problems. The apparent social consensus that once supported U.S. WMD in the face of bedrock moral values and sound safety, fiscal, and environmental practices has long evaporated. 

For at least the next 16 years only Los Alamos can make pits. Yet despite the expenditure of $2.5 billion (B) here so far on pit production numerous problems remain, including serious safety and infrastructure deficiencies. To review some of these problems, look under “LANL” at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) web site, www.dnfsb.gov. 

The DNFSB has no enforcement powers and relies on NNSA’s voluntary compliance, Congress, and knowledgeable public outcry to keep LANL and other sites safe. Unfortunately NNSA is in the process of implementing a contractor “self-monitoring” system at LANL which is virtually guaranteed, in our view, to produce accidents. One of NNSA’s stated goals is to overcome what it perceives as a “risk-averse” culture in order to “get the job done.” 

The situation is grotesque. The U.S. has almost 10,000 nuclear warheads and bombs.  Thousands are backups, part of a multi-tiered redundancy that puts the “assured” in “mutual assured destruction.” This is too many even for Mr. Bush, who wants to drop the arsenal to 6,000 by 2012.   

Behind the backups and the backups’ backups are extra pits, 13,000 or so of them stored at the Pantex warhead assembly plant near Amarillo. 

Pits last a long time. Results of long-awaited accelerated aging studies show that all the pits in the U.S. arsenal have at least six decades of “service” left.   

So why make them? Aside from the need to create “end-to-end” work so the enterprise can feed and sustain itself, the other reason for pit production is that even a small production line allows the prompt (“responsive”) production of “boutique” warheads that might be needed for special occasions. 

This is not solely a Bush Administration idea. In 1999, when Bill Richardson was Secretary of Energy, LANL gave Congress a detailed briefing on the idea. 

As pit production moves toward startup, some $2 B in new LANL plutonium-related facilities is also in the works. The flagship project is a $1 B pit production annex called the “Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement” facility, but several other projects are also involved. NNSA hopes these projects will increase LANL’s pit production capacity enough to build large numbers of new warheads over a multi-decade period, including “small builds of special weapons.” 

The CMRR, widely understood to commit NNSA to pit production at LANL indefinitely, is controversial in Congress. The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee wants to kill the project, calling it “irrational” and “stupid.” Republican Pete Domenici promotes it.

What’s eerie is the silence from the arms control community, the Democrats, and the public. Testimony at “Complex 2030” scoping hearings, however heartfelt, is irrelevant to policy decisions – and doubly irrelevant as regards pit production at LANL.   

Some arms controllers and Democrats actually want pit production at LANL; others simply don’t know what’s going on. Public debate is led away from these sensitive subjects by powerful foundations, by peer pressure within the nonprofit community, and by career concerns. Most churches fear losing members and contributions.

Practically speaking, the New Mexico congressional delegation holds veto power, should they choose to use it, over pit production at LANL and the new “CMRR” pit factory. They need to hear from us in clear, specific terms: stop pit production before it starts, and cut funding for the CMRR.

[This commentary was written as a guest editorial for a local newspaper.]

Editor's Note: Visit Congress.org for an easy way to contact our congressional delegation.

The Only Cartoon to be Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

MGM Cartoon 1939 Peace On Earth

Feliz Navidad!

We couldn't let the holiday pass without Jose Feliciano singing Feliz Navidad. Here he is in a 1973 concert in Denmark. And as an added treat, here's the superbly talented Feliciano in 1988 doing a knock-out version of Malaguena on acoustic guitar:

Also check out his recent free download called Killing's Not the Answer, which reflects on our reactions to the tragedy of 9-11 and beyond. His latest album, Jose Feliciano y Amigos, was released this month.

We Wish You a Rebellious Xmas

I uploaded Jackson Browne's Rebel Jesus last year and I'm doing it again this year. (Be patient as it may take a while to load.) This version was performed with the Irish - Celtic band The Chieftains on their "The Bells of Dublin" holiday album. Lyrics below the fold. Enjoy. Merry Xmas from another peaceful pagan....

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The Rebel Jesus, Jackson Browne

The streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants' windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
Will be gathering around the hearths and tales
Giving thanks for all God's graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus

They call him by the "Prince of Peace"
And they call him by "The Saviour"
And they pray to him upon the sea
And in every bold endeavor
As they fill his churches with their pride and gold
And their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worshipped in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus

We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why they are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

But pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus.

Yuletide 2006: War is Over (If You Want It)

You'd think this song, originally written and performed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, would go out of style, at least lyrically. Unfortunately war seems almost eternally with us, largely because certain power blocs have much to gain from it -- politically, financially and in terms of making some dysfunctional individuals feel mighty manly. So here we go again: Merry Xmas, War Is Over If We Want It. Let's think about that as we listen to Sarah McLachlan's new version of the song off her recently released album, Wintersong, while seeing so many innocent children's faces in this video. And as more long, dirty, unnecessary wars rage on in the Middle East and many other places around the Planet Earth. Only we can stop them. Ava at Peace Takes Courage agrees.

(Click on image for larger version.)

White Christmas (Feline Edition)

I know our birds won't like this one, but I hope you will. And when you're done watching the kitties, go ELF YOURSELF as Jim Baca and many others have. (Wait till end of elf dance and then make your own version.)