Above the fray: Congress ignores victims

(600 words)

by Tom H Hastings

Visit Washington DC sometime; lobby your elected officials. It is a lesson is how our elite manage to avoid being touched by our problems, by the problems of those who are hurt by their policies, and by reality as experienced by regular folks.

Oh, they sound like regular folks. They cultivate that persona and get elected on the basis of it.

But most of them are above it all.

Few of them have prostheses from service in war; the wars are permitted by these chickenhawks.

...(for the full text, please contact PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com)

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Tom H Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland, Oregon.

Destroying democracy whilst sprucing up Saddam

(464 words)

by Tom H Hastings

When I was an inmate in Wisconsin’s prison system I noted that not many of the inmates felt all that positive about society, the economy, or the government. This is hardly surprising. The Wisconsin prison system, like most of America’s prison systems from the Bureau of Prisons to states to counties and towns are based on retributive justice, not restorative justice. This helps account for high rates of recidivism. Why try to fit in if you’ve deepened your hatred of the system during your time sequestered?

The American military now reports that it has “detained” some 24,500 in Iraq as insurgents (no figures for those detained by Iraqi troops or police), up some 50 percent in the past few months, a manifestation of the surge. They also report, says a 25 August New York Times story, that the “detention system itself often serves as a breeding ground for the insurgency and a training opportunity for those who, after they are released, may attack Iraqi or American-led forces.”

...(for exclusive view of the unpublished full text, contact PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com)

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Tom H Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

"Senator Snivel and the Pity Vote" by Prof. Tom Hastings

"Senator Snivel and the Pity Vote" by Prof. Tom Hastings (word count: 527)

"Listen! Gordon Smith is running. Can you hear the flip-flops? Gordon Smith is running for reelection in 2008. He began running with his December 2006 speech in which he, for the first time, publicly acknowledged his deep concern about the war in Iraq . By odd chance, this was just a month after the voters rejected the war in November, handing his party—the Republicans—their first major defeat at the polls in a decade. Cynics claimed that Smith's apparently heartfelt speech was a ploy to make the increasingly antiwar voters in Oregon feel sorry for him and cast a pity vote for him in 2008."...

Reply to: peacevoice.thais@gmail.com

Tom H Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland , Oregon.