Join Nebraskans for Peace in calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan
President Obama’s announcement that he will withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year (with another 23,000 slated to come home by September 2012) will only lower the force numbers in that country to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s deployment levels — to where they were before the ordered troop 'surge' in 2009.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
The proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would carry about 830,000 barrels a day at full capacity, has been catching a lot of grief locally because it could spill oil that might ruin our underground water supply. That much is true. But the environmental cost of the pipeline does not stop there. The oil that will be transported is refined from tar sands, mainly from Alberta, which combine all the worst attributes of fossil fuels: spill potential, the carbon footprint of coal, and the environmental damage of coal strip mining. Tar sands are, briefly stated, a triple environmental atrocity—enough to send a thinking person to a bicycle.
Read morePosted In: What's HOT in Global Warming
Nebraskans for Peace member and 84 year old great-great grandmother Norma Fleisher is spending her summer touring Nebraska in hopes of ending the Death Penalty. Follow her journey. Join her when she drives through your area. She is an extraordinary woman and one everyone should meet.
She can tell you exactly how many Mondays she has stood at the Capital with her Abolish the Death Penalty signs. Twelve years of legislative session Mondays at noon. She has a nineteen year history of prison ministry. She’s attended hearings, NADP dinners, met Sister Helen Prejean, and visited death row. But her Monday vigils represent a personal, unflagging commitment to ending executions in Nebraska.
Read morePosted In: Turn Off the Violence
The writer is president emeritus of Nebraskans for Peace. He is a retired University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor.
The war in Afghanistan is 10 years old. Our longest war, it’s also one of our most futile.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
On April 8, the prestigious “Woodrow Wilson International Center” in Washington, D.C. quietly released an analysis by two senior special assistants to the Department of Defense’s “Joint Chiefs of Staff” on America’s strategic role in the 21st century.
Writing under the pseudonym of “Mr. Y” and claiming to speak for no one but themselves, Navy Captain Wayne Porter and Marine Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby outlined in “A National Strategic Narrative” what Foreign Policy magazine described as “the Pentagon’s secret plan to slash its own budget.”
As the preface to the 13-page “Y” article openly asserts, for the United States to become “the strongest competitor and most influential player in a deeply inter-connected global system,” we must “invest less in defense and more in sustainable prosperity and the tools of effective global engagement.” Our priorities must shift “from deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition.”
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
