Tag: UMass Boston

But early morning (Occupy Boston, part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: This is Part 2 of our guest post from  John Hess of UMass/Boston, reporting on Occupy Boston.]

Occupy Boston signs of freedom and the movement
Photo by Twp. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported license.

When you hear chants like “How do you solve the deficit? End the wars and tax the rich!” and “They got bailed out, we got sold out,” you are in the company of people with a very good understanding of the current situation–neatly summed up in the chant “We are the 99%!”

Where all this will lead, we don’t yet know.  But there seems to be a growing wave of discontent that first showed itself in Wisconsin. I read that demonstrations of support for Occupy Wall Street have occurred in over 100 cities and that mini-occupations like Occupy Boston are spreading, even to Europe.

What drives this movement is clear to me:  it’s common sense based on the obvious fact that most of us are not being treated fairly by this economy, this social system.  We work when we can get a job, but are not properly rewarded.

Reports show that real incomes for most Americans have dropped significantly since the recession officially ended.  Education (coupled with hard work) has been the traditional path to a better life for most Americans, yet educational costs are now staggering.

My university, UMass Boston, has seen state funding drop from some 77% of the budget in 1985 to around 26% this year.  The shortfall has been made up by heavily increased student fees, which are now over $9,000 of the approximately $12,000 it costs in-state students to attend our commuter school.  Why?  In large part because we will not tax the rich or the corporations. (I have been told that the head of GE pays less income tax than his personal assistant.  Even if he doesn’t, I’ll bet he doesn’t pay much.)

There is much cause for optimism.  A generation, no, a nation, seems finally to be waking up, even though it is but early morning and we are still rubbing the sleep from our eyes.  Maybe another slap of cold water will bring us fully awake to seize the new day that is dawning.

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston

A theft from those who hunger

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  As Congress and the public debate issues regarding the U.S. budget, particularly the growing deficit and the status of the debt ceiling, we again welcome guest contributor John Hess, who writes about the financial and other consequences of war.]

Homeless veteran in Boston
Homeless veteran in Boston. Photo by Matthew Woitunski. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Both Congress and the American public continue to ignore the warnings from earlier lovers of this country–conservative as well as liberal, military as well as civilian.

In a earlier post, I quoted from the final speech of President Dwight Eisenhower, a conservative Republican, but now I want to include a reminder from his first term: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower’s warning was echoed in the Vietnam War years by Senator J. William Fulbright in his book The Arrogance of Power: “An excessive preoccupation with foreign relations over a long period of time is more than a manifestation of arrogance; it is a drain on the power that gave rise to it, because it diverts a nation from the sources of its strength, which are its domestic life….” (pp. 20-21).

Finally, the late Chalmers Johnson brought that warning up to date in an essay titled “Going Bankrupt,” collected in his final book Dismantling the Empire: “going into 2008, the United States found itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment” (p. 135).    The “time of reckoning,” he said, “is fast approaching,” unless we correct three major problems (p. 136):

“First, we are spending insane amounts of money on ‘defense’ projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States …. Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures … Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources) we are failing to invest in social infrastructures and other requirements for the long-term health of our country” (p. 136).

Saturday, May 21, is Armed Forces Day, a good day to reflect on the fact that perhaps nobody suffers more from our devotion to militarism than former members of the armed forces. Their return from battle is often greeted by a lack of jobs and health care; enduring physical and psychological problems pushing them into drug abuse, homelessness, assault on others, and ever-increasing rates of suicide.

Our returning warriors discover that this is a country that forgot their sacrifices once they returned home.

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“Disastrous rise of misplaced power”

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  Today, just before Tax Day in the U.S., we again welcome guest contributor John Hess, who writes about the financial consequences of war.]

In the mid-1960s, I saw the initiation of social programs that promised to transform and improve America, making it truly the land of opportunity and giving it the rough equality that we like to think it should have.

Graph of military spending by country, 2005
Military spending by country, 2005

Those social programs were far from perfect, but they were a promising start. Yet that promise was never achieved because of Vietnam, a war that sapped the country’s resources and took them away from social programs and into destruction.

The same is true today.  The U.S. has already spent some 1.1 trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with no end in sight.  Indeed, we are spending roughly $8 billion a month in Afghanistan alone, and it is estimated that we will spend at minimum another $125 billion if we do not withdraw until 2014 (if then).

You all know what that money could do if even half of it was spent here: public higher and k-12 education, infrastructure, Medicare and Medicaid, and on and on.

I am no great fan of President Eisenhower, for I know of his reluctance to honestly deal with segregation and integrating schools.  Nonetheless, Eisenhower was a warrior, one greatly sobered and humbled by the savagery and slaughter of WWII.  Though he did little to nothing to stop its growth during his tenure in office, he gave us a famous warning in his “Farewell Address”:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

That military-industrial complex weighs so heavily upon us today.  The Tea Party movement has shown how effective grass-roots efforts can be at cutting budgets, but has chosen to attack vitally important social programs, not the overbearing military-industrial complex.

What will it take to get tax-payers to preserve needed social programs while stopping the engines of destruction?

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Warning: Do not behave like our perpetrators

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie MM:  Today we welcome guest contributor John Hess, who has been an anti-war activist for 40 years, and worked for over 30 years in the construction business. He is currently a full-time faculty member in English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is a member of the executive committee for  the faculty-staff union.]

I found this video the other day and thought it well worth passing on. It is a fascinating comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel from Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

Meyer observes that Jews were “the pioneers of interhuman ethics” and that he “wants to wake the world” to speak out against the horrible treatment of the Palestinians by Israel.

One of the enduring strengths of Judaism is its strong moral tradition and it is in this tradition that Meyer urges Israelis “not to behave like our perpetrators” (the Nazis) toward the Palestinians and calls on the world to speak out against this behavior.

Watching the video led me to think about both the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine/Israel today.  It seems to me they are in some important ways linked, so I took a long look at a book I haven’t glanced in quite awhile, The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein.

The Holocaust, Rubenstein said, was “a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy” (p. 4).

Rubenstein provides a warning that it is well worth heeding today: “One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization” (p. 21).

In his view, “The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler” (p. 6).

What parallels do you see between the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine–or even other parts of the world?

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston