MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin of Media Roots discussed today the historic Occupy Oakland General Strike, rallies, and marches on KPFA’s “The Morning Mix with Project Censored.” This general strike, the first in 65 years, drew tens of thousands of supporters to shut down banks as well as the Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth largest port.
The Occupy Oakland segment begins at 31:00.
MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin, founder of Media Roots, speaks to students at San Francisco State University about the landscape of media censorship, the formation of her citizen journalism project Media Roots and why she is collaborating her efforts with Project Censored.
Abby Martin of Media Roots speaks with students at SFSU
Check out an hour interview with Abby for KZYX radio about the left/right paradigm and media censorship.
MEDIA ROOTS- Project Censored hosts a special tenth anniversary 9/11 commemoration show on KPFA radio. Abby Martin of Media Roots gives a special news report on 9/11 at 6:55 going over the costs of 9/11 wars, the neglect to the first responders and the true threat of terrorism. The show also features guests Dr. Anthony Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies and Kathy McGrade, Engineer and member of Architects and Engineers of 9/11 Truth.
MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin from Media Roots co-hosts Project Censored’s special three and a half hour KPFA program “Costs of War.” At the beginning of each hour, there is an MR report on the economic, human and environmental costs of US wars in the Middle East. During the program multiple, multiple experts in different fields of study are interviewed on the show about their research for the extensive Brown University study Costs of War. The show focuses on on the socio-economic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related subjects from scholars worldwide. Listen to the show here or below.
Interview Schedule:
12:00-12:20 Catherine Lutz, Professor Anthro, Brown University, Project Director, Solders and Contractors: Recommendations and Neta Crawford, Professor Political Science at Brown University, Cost of War Project Director,
12:30-12:50 Norah Niland: Former Director Human Rights: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, social change and women, and Matthew Evangelista, Professor of History and Political Science, Cornell University, Alternatives to War
1:00-1:20 Winslow Wheeler, of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information Washington DC. Department of Defense Budget, Military Cost of War
1:30-1:50 Dahr Jamail, Human Costs of War, Refugees, Life on the Ground and resistance in the military, Author: “The Will to Resist,”
2:00-2:20 John Tirman, MIT, Author of “The Deaths of Others” The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, Topic: Civilian Civilan Deaths In War—
2:30-2:50 Linda Bilmes, Professor Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School, Topic: Costs of Veteran Care
3:00-3:20 John Pilger, Journalist and Film Producer, covering his new documentary, “The War We Don’t See”
Catherine Lutz, Director of Costs of War: Catherine Lutz on Why We Can’t Turn the Page on America’s Wars {Costs of War} from Watson Institute on Vimeo.
Visit www.CostsOfWar.org for more information
KPFA– Abby Martin co-hosts this edition of Project Censored radio with Peter Phillips for KPFA’s nationally syndicated show. This episode covers updates in the peace community, the Bohemian Grove’s exclusion of women, and whistleblowers who have put everything on the line.
Listen to Media Roots’s in depth update on US wars and empire at 8:00 or read the transcription below:
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This is Abby Martin from Media Roots, reporting war and empire news & analysis for Project Censored.
A recent report from Global Research revealed that prisoners are making 23 cents an hour to manufacture weapons components for high tech missile systems for the US defense industry. The use of prison slave labor to increase profits for huge corporations, such as BP did in their clean-up efforts, is unfair to workers and is an egregious expansion of the corporate state.
In an article called The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within, John Whitehead writes:
“Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors and corrupt politicians, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe…In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.”
In his June 22nd speech, Obama cited the official cost of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars at 1 trillion dollars, but according to economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the US has spent well over $3 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq– and that assessment is three years old.
The Iraq war is still going strong, even though we don’t hear about it much through the corporate press. June marked the deadliest month for the US military in the region since 2009. And still, the corporate media touts the official death toll for Iraqi civilians at approximately 100,000, despite a comprehensive 2008 survey from Opinion Research Business that placed the number of dead Iraqis well over one million. Again, this toll is from 2008 and does not account for the last three years of combat.
In an article written for The Nation, Jeremy Scahill reports:
“Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.”
For Rebel Reports, Jeremy Scahill writes:
“According to recent Pentagon statistics, w/ Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the total military force, meaning there are a whopping 242,657 contractors left in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and there are negotiations to keep at least 10,000 troops there past the December 31st deadline. In protest to this inevitable expansion of the US occupation, 100 Iraqi lawmakers recently signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011 according to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
Earlier this year, the cost of the Afghanistan war started to outpace that of Iraq by ten billion dollars a month- 6.7 billion compared to Iraq’s 5.5 billion. Even though the rhetoric coming from the White House suggests that the Afghanistan war is getting scaled down- with reductions being carried out as planned- the amount of troops remaining in the country will actually still be more than there were before Obama’s 2009 military surge in the country and more than any time during Bush’s presidency.
On another front, the America’s secret war in Pakistan has drastically escalated under the Obama administration. Every month more innocent civilians are killed by drones, and there are US troops stationed in Pakistan performing covert CIA operations against alleged militants. On May 22, Seven thousand people in Karachi Pakistan protested America’s use of unmanned drones and demanded an immediate end to the missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Activists from the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) participated in a two-day sit-in pleading the government to end its cooperation with America’s “war on terror.”
We are now coming up on the fourth month anniversary of the US-NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya, which costs US taxpayers approximately $40 million every month. Every missile being dropped costs one million dollars alone! The US is paying more than 75% of the defense budget for the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya and by September the official cost of the Libyan invasion will total a whopping $844 million.
There are still covert wars and unmanned drone attacks happening in Yemen and Somalia too, which the empire rationalizes as mere police actions instead of aggressive acts of war. With all the talk about the federal deficit and the need to cut back on social programs and spending in this country, there is little discussed about cutting the Pentagon’s ever expanding annual military budget, which has more than doubled in the last decade. In 1995, when defense spending was a fraction of what it is now, a poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a majority of Americans were “convinced that defense spending has weakened the US economy.”
Before any more bombs are dropped in our name, we must voice our opposition to end these unconstitutional wars. The American taxpayers’ hard earned money needs to be applied here at home and not to the expansion of the military industrial complex– it’s the only way this country can be saved.
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots reporting for Project Censored News & Analysis
