Effective October 16, 2002, the 107th Congress passed the Joint Resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. Signed by George W. Bush on that day the act has remained in force – pun intended – for the last eighteen years with Congress repeatedly updating and approving what has been called the Iraq Resolution.
An authorization of use of military force (AUMF) is meant to provide temporary, limited, ability to conduct war. This differs from a complete, or total war; the war is meant to limited in scope. Clearly, the length of a limited war (oops, authorization of force) differs; and article posted recently by Heather Brandon-Smith of the Friends’ Committee on National Legislation reminds us that since the U.S declared war on Romania in 1942 during WWII, “the wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq have all been authorized by AUMFs.”
There have been efforts to repeal the 2002 authorization of use of military force, including efforts during the present, 116th, Congress. And article by Tess Bridgeman of Just Security, coordinated by the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the NY School of Law, reports that an amendment by Barbara Lee to the Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would entirely repeal the AUMF.
The 2002 AUMF is not needed, Bridgeman says.
Unlike the 2001 AUMF, the United States is not solely relying on the 2002 AUMF for any ongoing military operations. While the Obama and Trump administrations have included the 2002 AUMF as an alternate or additional basis to support operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the executive branch is primarily relying on a different force authorization, the 2001 AUMF, to fight ISIS. And the 2001 AUMF would be sufficient to authorize those operations in the view of the executive branch.
Things just got complicated. There is in fact a 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force Act. Bridgeman of Just Security tells us “the 2001 AUMF has served as the source of domestic legal authority for an ever-expanding set of operations against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, their ‘associated forces’ (like AQAP in Yemen and al-Shabaab in Somalia), and most recently ISIS”. Or, as the article by Friends’ Committee on National Legislation puts it,
the 2001 AUMF authorized force against all who ‘planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.’ It is often referred to as the blank check‘ for endless war.
The purpose of the 2002 AUMF, again according to the Bridgeman at Reiss Center on Law and Security, was to remove Saddam Hussein. The AUMF has no longer has a purpose. She add that the 2002 AUMF was rarely invoked, and even when Obama invoked it in 2014, the administration said the 2002 AUMF should be later repealed. Nonetheless, the 2002 AUMF has been used by “to justify 41 operations in 19 countries by claiming that the 2001 AUMF applies to ‘associated forces’ of al Qaeda and the Taliban;” a term that appears “nowhere in the law” Brandon-Smith points out.
Although the 2002 AUMF “wasn’t intended to be, and shouldn’t be read as, a permanently available force authorization to address any threat that might relate to Iraq, recent events have given reason to fear the executive branch could use it that way,” Bridgeman added. Daesh, commonly known as ISIS, didn’t exist when the 2002 AUMF was approved, and although it goes beyond the scope of the bill the 2002 law has been used to fight ISIS, and some worry that the law could be invoked for a war against Iran.
Barbara Lee’s amendment to the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which called for the repeal of the 2002 AUMF has broad support. The Friends’ Committee on National Legislation says that “more than 130 members of Congress have cosponsored Rep. Lee’s stand-alone bill to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, H.R. 2456”. Further, a bill in the Senate, In the Senate, S.J. Res. 13 from Sens. Tim Kaine (VA) and Todd Young (IN) “would repeal both the 2002 Iraq AUMF and the 1991 Gulf War AUMF, passed to authorize a military response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”
I would go beyond an important amendment, which calls for the repeal of the use of force act of 2002, to the NDAA. There’s also no reason to have in force the 2001 AUMF, which was propelled into existence by September 11, 2001. The 2002 AUMF was inspired by the false claims that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. We can no longer remember or justify why we have a limited authorization of use of force in Iraq – which has been justified for other “limited” operations. The correct course of action is to repeal and end all authorization of use of force.
This is a story about a lack of justice that falls under the category of “on this day”. If it weren’t for being “on t his day” in history, I’m afraid, I would know nothing of this story.
This is a story about Alex Odeh, who was born in Jifna, Palestine, (not far north of Jerusalem and Ramallah) in 1944. For reasons that only tangentially impact the story, Alex immigrated to the U.S. in 1972.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which made me aware of Alex Odeh, says he joined the ADC in 1982. In 1985 Mr. Odeh was in Santa Fe, California on behalf of the ADC, here’s where “on this day” becomes another part of history.
Arriving to the ADC office on October 11, 1985, “Odeh was assassinated when a pipe bomb exploded as he opened the door” the ADC says. The ADC article remembering Odeh confirms that “the FBI classified the bombing as an act of domestic terrorism and designated the investigation as one of the highest national priority. However, despite solid leads, as well as advancements in technology and forensics that could aid in the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators, no arrest has been made.”
Why Odeh? Why was Odeh assassinated?
The ADC says that “the FBI identified members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL)” as suspects, although no arrests were made in the case. The JDL, in theory, killed Odeh because on the previous day a hijacking of a plane – which the JDL blamed on the Palestinian Liberation Front – involved the death of a Jewish American.
The short answer is that Odeh was killed for advocating for Palestinian rights.
Referring to an article by David Sheen in The Intercept, the ADC says that “two of the prime suspects currently live in settlements in the Occupied Territories in the West Bank. Another suspect is in American prison after being extradited from Israel on mail bombing charges, will likely have his parole end soon and escape justice for the death of Odeh by returning to Israel.
Although the an eye for an eye makes the world blind it’s amazingly disappointing that no one has been prosecuted for the the death of Odeh when the FBI know who the suspects are, and that the reason no one will ever face prosecution is because Odeh was advocating for Palestinian rights.
A planned motorway extension through the Dannenröder forest, north of Frankfurt in Germany, “pits the autobahn against 250-year-old oak trees” in the British words Phillip Oltermann of The Guardian. The Germany government, which has claimed to be a leading force in climate justice in Europe is looking to chop down the trees – a natural and essential defense against climate change – to expand “dual carriageway” A49.
Carola Rackete, a prominent activist and member of the German refugee rescue organization Sea-Watch, who has joined the protests, said on Twitter that the German government is in one breath promising biodiversity and in the next chopping down old-growth forests.
For the last year activists – that is, people who are acting because they believe that the environment is important – have occupied the forests and have built “barricades, treehouses and makeshift platforms,” which the police destroyed this week, as loggers began destroying the forest.
Although masked activists stated things such as ‘we have sadly failed to stop the clearing, because there were too few of us,’ Oltermann says that protests have increased since Friday – that is is, within about the last 72 hours – “with activists temporarily occupying the Hessian state representation’s offices in Berlin on Friday, and about 300 cyclists closing down a section of the south-bound lane of the A49 on Saturday.”
The expansion of A49, Oltermann continues, is not expected to begin until September 2021, and police are expecting ‘long-term resistance’ against the “infrastructure project”.
This is not the first “infrastructure project” that some of the same protesters have engaged in. Oltermann adds that “some of those protesting against the felling at Dannenröder were also involved in demonstrations two years ago at Hambach forest, a stretch of ancient woodland in North-Rhineland Westphalia that was due to make way for a coalmining project.”
Of course, the company in charge of the A49 “infrastructure project,” Deges, says its project is essential to relieve congested roads and does not pose an existential threat to the stretch of woodland. That’s right, chopping down more than 65 acres of old-growth trees poses no threat to woodland. Although Deges says it will replant the forest, there is no replacing old-growth trees.
While this reality is disheartening to anyone who admires trees and appreciates clean air and a healthy climate – even if they don’t connect the dots that trees help generate clean air and a healthy climate – the protests and activism itself is not disheartening.
The protest against A49 has been a long, sustained, protest going on for more than a year with no plans to let up over the next year in which Deges believes that it should carry on with its “infrastructure project”.
Hopefully everyone knows the basic story of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The United Nations describes him as the “leader of the Indian independence movement.” He was was also a “pioneer of the philosophy and strategy of non-violence.”
Born October 2, 1869, the Galtung Intitute for Peace Theory and Peace Practice says that Mahatma, as he became known, was born into a caste of privilege in India. After law school in Britain Mahatma found a job in South Africa in 1893, where he lived until 1916. He saw and experienced apartheid and the oppression of racial “Others”.
When he returned to India in 1916 “Gandhi developed his practice of non-violent civic disobedience still further, raising awareness of oppressive practices in Bihar, in 1918, which saw the local populace oppressed by their largely British masters,” the Galtung Institute says in its biography of Gandhi.
Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 after years of nonviolence resistance and advocating for freedom from foreign rule.
These are the basic facts we learn in K-12 education as well and college. What the educational system doesn’t tell us is at least as interesting as what it tells us.
At the end of the biography by the Galtung Institute it correctly says that
“Gandhi’s life and teachings have inspired many liberationists of the 20th Century, including Dr. Martin Luther King in the United States, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko in South Africa, and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.”
The Galtung Institute does introduce at the beginning of it’s biography that Gandhi’s idea are not original, but rather that “his mother’s religious devotion meant that his upbringing was infused with the Jain pacifist teachings of mutual tolerance, non-injury/killing of living beings (ahimsa), and vegetarianism.”
I’ll focus on the strong connection that the Civil Rights movement in the United States had with India and Gandhi’s practices of nonviolence. K-12 and college education managed to gloss over and skip the idea that movement are connected, and that MLK Jr. and and many civil rights leaders went to Inidea learn about nonviolence.
These same nonviolent tactics – which are much more successful than violent tactics – are used in current issues, ranging from Black Lives Matter, to Sunrise and other environmental movements, an If Not Now When‘s actions for Palestinian rights and human rights in general.
The news clips, which are just blips that happen every day and pass us by, tend to fail to mention that things are connected and that we are in fact in this together learning from one another across oceans.
Today, October 2, a hundred and one years after the birth of Gandhi, we celebrate International Day of Nonviolence in Gandhi’s honor and we learn from other struggles in order to to remember that we are in this together.
Happy International Day of Nonviolence!
As we approach the end of Climate Week (Sept. 21-27) it’s time to remember some of the climate news that has happened since mid-September.
On September 15, just a week before Climate Week began, ProPublica published a projected climate migration map of the United States suggesting that even with moderate carbon emission “much of the lower half of the U.S. [will] too hot or dry for the type of climate humans historically have lived in.”
Although “today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare” at our current emissions rate causing increase global warming, “
by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year. New projections for farm productivity also suggest that growing food will become difficult across large parts of the country, including the heart of the High Plains’ $35 billion agriculture industry. All the while, sea level rise will transform the coasts.
According to The Hill, the same analysis by the New York Times and ProPublica suggested that “approximately 28 million people across the country could face Manhattan-size megafires by 2070, with Northern California residents experiencing them annually. ”
In essence, “nearly 1 in 2 Americans ‘will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water,’ in the next 30 years, with changes being the most severe for 93 million people,” The Hill says, quoting parts of the study. Additionally, The Hill wrote, the analysis claims that by 2070, “four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.”
ProPublica began by talking about moderate climate emissions. On September 20th, Greta Thunberg provide an eye-opening statistic: Since 2005 “about one third of ALL the world’s fossil fuel CO2 emissions have occurred. Over half of our CO2 emissions have taken place since 1990.”
People, countries, and companies with platforms are making statements and setting goals, even if that goal isn’t sufficient. Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, called for ‘swift action’; South Korea set a goal of net goal of net zero emissions by 2050, following China’s pledge to be at net zero by 2060; Walmart has set a goal of zero emissions by 2040; California plans to ban the sale of combustion engines – the ones that consume gas, and emit pollution – by 2035.
Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist, points out that South Korea’s pledge is meaningless, and a goal of net zero thirty years from now – or, as China suggests, forty years from now – is basically climate denial. In that vein, Walmart’s pledge to act twenty years from now is also simply passing the buck, or kicking the can down the road. Swift action is needed.
As I pointed out in Climate Clock, if we act within seven years to counter irreparable climate catastrophe the planet might remain livable.
Climate change and concatenate climate justice has become an important issue in politics. Biden has set the net zero emissions goal for the U.S at the year 2050; as I pointed out in Climate Marker, his plan doesn’t include actions detrimental to climate change, like ending fracking. Howie Hawkins of the Green Party proposes net zero 2030. Frankly, I don’t think that Republicans or libertarians have a climate plan.
While there are several paths to ensure that we don’t reach a point of irreparable damage all of those paths lead to decarbonization. Decarbonization, according to Volkswagon, is “literally means the reduction of carbon. Precisely meant is the conversion to an economic system that sustainably reduces and compensates the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂). The long-term goal is to create a CO₂-free global economy.”
While long-term goals are important, short-term actions are essential to implementing long-term goals. The time for statements about long term-goals is over; it’s time to implement the long-term goals by acting now.
The clock gives us seven years to runaway catastrophe. Do you really want to wait that long? Look around you. This year the fires in Australia, the floods in India and Egypt and Sudan and in the Gulf States, the hurricanes, the monsoons, the fires in California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, the pandemic have all been made be worse because of climate change that human activity contributes to. We have the solutions to mitigate these disasters. Imagine seven (7) years from now if we don’t act.
This month the Democratic Party has successfully removed the Green Party from ballots in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The article by the WSWS (World Socialist Website) clarifies that
while the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party—which is running its own candidates Joseph Kishore for US President and Norissa Santa Cruz for US Vice President—have fundamental class and political differences with the Green Party, we defend their right to participate in the 2020 elections. We denounce the Democratic Party for its repeated and blatant abuse of ballot access procedural rules and the courts to have Hawkins and Walker kicked off the November ballot.
The WSWS recognizes, with obvious disapproval, that “the political purpose of the Pennsylvania ruling is to keep the Green Party from providing an alternative for voters who might otherwise cast ballots for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” and that this was also the motive behind removing the Green Party from the ballot in Wisconsin. Further, the Socialist Equality Party was denied access to being on the ballot in Michigan.
The reason Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin became particular targets of the Democrats, the WSWS says,
In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 in Wisconsin, and 44,000 in Pennsylvania. In each state, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein received more votes than Clinton’s margin of defeat.
This led the Democrats, and their media apologists, to blame the Greens for a defeat which Clinton brought on herself by running a right-wing, anti-working-class campaign…
WSWS adds that “one conclusion drawn by the Democrats from the experience of 2016 was that the basic democratic right of third parties to ballot access and of the public to vote for a candidate of their choosing must not be allowed to disrupt the two-party system.”
In essence, here, the Democratic Party has decided any threats to the votes that the Party hopes to accumulate must mean that the other Party threatening the votes should not be on the ballot at all.
The Democratic Party has long been comfortable with the relationship it has with the Republican Party where once simply “reaches across the isle” in an effort of bipartisanship. Any threat to that relationship – especially one where a third party, who could “take votes away” from the Democratic Party – would simply change the nature of bipartisanship.
There’s a an important point to make here about kicking a candidate off the ballot. That naturally implies that the candidate actually qualified to make the ballot – which is what Howie Hawkins and his running mate successfully did. They submitted more than the required amount of signatures required to make the ballot, and submitted all the necessary forms. They were simply removed over a technicality.
The Democratic Party has become exclusionary and set in their ways to the point of reactionary and repressive polices when the threat of the status quo is threatened.
The International Day of Democracy, which happens every year on September 15, “provides an opportunity to review the state of democracy in the world.” the UN says. While the UN continues recognizes that democracy is more of a process than a goal, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said in recognition of the day that democracy is an “aspiration of people all over the world because each of us yearns to be free.
While democracies can be found all around the world, let’s look at this from an American perspective. First, we need to remember that the UN says
the values of freedom, respect for human rights and the principle of holding periodic and genuine elections by universal suffrage are essential elements of democracy. In turn, democracy provides the natural environment for the protection and effective realization of human rights.
Democracy in America
Every commentary on democracy agrees that “periodic and genuine elections” are the cornerstone of democracy. There cannot be a democracy without fair and accepted voting. America is in a election season at the moment; like every other election this is the “most important election of our lifetime“.
Besides the impediments to free and fair elections like removing polling places that I mentioned in Modern Voter Disenfranchisement, the current election has also candidates removed from the ballots in some states. For instance, in Wisconsin Democrats successfully sued to keep Howie Hawkis, the Green Party nominee for president from being on the ballot. In fact, an article that ran a just a few weeks ago is titled “Democratic Party leads nationwide purge of Green Party candidates from November ballots,” and points out that part of the issue is that third-party candidates are being forced to collect signatures, during COVID-19, to be on the ballot.
This, of course, is the opposite of a genuine election, when a majority party gets to decide that a non-majority party can’t be on the ballot.
Further from the voting booth, but hopefully very much on people’s mind when they cast their vote, are human rights abuses perpetuated by the government and its agents. Protests against police killings, which only began to fade as smoke from human-induced climate disasters made the air unbreathable, have continued for months. ICE, the government agency tasked by the executive branch – and funded by Congress despite their protestations – of keeping migrants in inhuman conditions have been accused of performing indiscriminate hysterectomies. This is a racist, misogynistic, act that is another human rights violation against the captive migrants.
As the UN makes clear, as democracy increases the granting of and protecting of human rights increases. The opposite is true; as democracy declines human rights abuses increase.
Social media is amazingly useful, if you let it be. For instance, an organization I follow on Twitter follows another organization on Twitter (USCPR follows Haymarket Books), and for that reason I find out on this day in 1867 Das Kapital was first published.
Some people I know have read, by assignment or interest, nearly the entire Marx-Engel reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert Tucker ( (C) 1978 ). I confess I have merely read parts of it, despite plans to do otherwise.
I’m not going to take space on the internet reviewing Marx’s mathematical equations of produce plus capital. Before I get into a long quote I want to point out his M–C–M where “M” equals money and “C” equals a an exchange of money (selling or buying).
A capitalist, Marx said – and he remains correct – looks for the expansion of value.
The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M–C–M, becomes [the capitalists’] subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations. … The restless never-ending process of profit-making is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist.
(p 334, paperback edition of Marx-Engel Reader by Tucker)
While that is equally the aim of the miser, Marx says, the difference is that the miser saves his money, while the capitalist looks to throw more and more money into the system, so that (s)he can have more capital.
Marx moves on to many things, but let’s look at the labor process.
The labour process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to who his labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and the the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there are no unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements beyond what is necessarily caused by the work.
Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer. …
(p. 350
I’ll skip part of that paragraph that talks about horses and use value, and commerce. The paragraph, about the product belong to the capitalist and not the person who did the labor, says just as importantly that ” the labour- process is a process between things that the capitalist has already purchased” including the price of labor.
The capitalist is always looking to expand his capital and he looks to do this through the labor of other people, who works under the capitalist and who has no claim to the product of their labor under this system.
Along with the “constantly diminishing numbers of magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process” of the transformation of capitalism, Marx concluded, “grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class ; a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of of the process of capitalist production itself.” Then, in the end the “centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible” with the capitalist system. This layer of capitalism “is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.”
Say what you will about private property. Marx is not wrong that capitalism leads to an increasing number of members of the working, class, and the capitalism system, as it increases, leads to the growth of “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation”. We might also being seeing the “revolt of the working class” against the system based merely on capital. It is apparent that as the capitalist reaches for ever more capital, the level of oppression and exploitation increase, and therefore the level of revolt against the capital system increases in volume.
The United States has been at war with Afghanistan and Iraq for so long that the some soldiers fighting in the one-sided war weren’t born when the war started.
The one-sided war has largely been downgraded and the reason for fighting has largely been forgotten both by those who fight and those who stand at home and doing cheerleading for soldiers overseas, including those elected representatives that continue to provide the funding for the destruction.
At the beginning of this year it was estimated that the United States has spent over $2trillion for the unending the Iraq War. CNBC, last November concluded that the U.S. has spend $6.4trillion since 2001 on wars in the Middle East and Asia (I didn’t know we are at war in Asia). The key takeaways from the CNBC report were that
The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion since they began in 2001.
That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed fiscal year.
The report, from Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, also finds that more than 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting.
To break that down, CNBC says that in March 2019 “the Pentagon estimated that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have cost each taxpayer $7,623 through fiscal 2018.”
The costs are not merely related to the waging of war, of course. As the war drags on “more and more service members will ultimately claim veterans benefits and disability payments.” Some – perhaps many – of the soldiers and support units that have been in these endless, one-sided wars, have already left the military and claimed benefits from the government.
It is the role of the government to support its citizens. The issue becomes why the government and the people are fighting a one-sided war where no one remember why we’re there or what we’re fighting about.
The Dole Blog 