Women For Peace

Published on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 by Inter Press Service

Women's Anti-War Petition Circles the Globe by Haider Rizvi  

NEW YORK - Eminent female writers, artists, lawmakers and social activists in the United States are reaching out to women leaders across the world in an attempt to forge a global alliance against the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

A U.S.-based women's group has launched a global campaign to gather 100,000 signatures by March 8, International Women's Day, when they will be delivered to the White House and U.S. embassies around the world.


CODEPINK "We are unleashing a global chorus of women's voices shouting, 'Enough!" said Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a California-based rights advocacy group that has spearheaded the global women's campaign, called "Women Say No to War".

"The administration is trying to get away with it (the war), but we won't let that happen," Jodie Evans of CODEPINK told IPS. "This campaign is amazing. This is bringing thousands of women together from across the borders -- this is creating something that we can't even see."

Describing the initial response to the group's call for signatures as "overwhelming", Benjamin says that more than 200 high-profile women from various walks of life endorsed the campaign even before it was formally launched earlier this month.

The signatories include popular film stars like Susan Sarandon, the playwright Eve Ensler and comedian Margaret Cho, and award-winning authors such as Alice Walkers, Anne Lamott, Maxine Hong Kingston and Barbara Ehrenreich.

"We, the women of the United States, Iraq, and women worldwide, have had enough of the senseless war in Iraq and cruel attack on civilians worldwide," reads the call. "We have buried too many of our loved ones. We have seen too many lives crippled forever...."

"This is not the world we want for ourselves or for our children," it says. "With fire in our bellies and love in our hearts, we women are rising up -- across borders -- to unite and demand an end to the bloodshed and destruction."

Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed fighting in Iraq, and whose subsequent vigil near U.S. President George W. Bush's Texas ranch to demand -- unsuccessfully -- a face-to-face meeting garnered widespread media attention, was one of the first signatories to the campaign.

"The pain that this war has caused for people all over the world is unimaginable," she said in a statement. "I have met women who are ready to stand together to make our leaders end this madness."

Urging a shift in the U.S. strategy in Iraq "from a military model to a conflict resolution model", the organisers say they want to see a withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq, with full representation of women in the peacemaking process in that country.

"Iraqi women are devastated now. It will take us decades of struggle to regain a peaceful and civilised life," said Yanar Mohammed, a signatory to the campaign and president of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq.

"The U.S. occupation has planted the seeds of ethno-sectarian division, preparing Iraq for a civil war, and has blessed religious supremacy over and against human and women's rights," she added in a statement.

Since the invasion of Iraq by the U.S.-led coalition forces, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, have lost their lives. Despite criticism from influential human rights groups, such as the Britain-based Amnesty International and U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, the U.S. military continues to shrug off its responsibility to keep a record of civilian casualties, critics note.

However, an independent survey conducted by the British medical journal, the Lancet, last year concluded that the war has claimed at least 100,000 civilian lives in Iraq.

Some humanitarian groups that are closely working with the U.S. government have now started asking the Pentagon to compensate the families of civilian victims of the U.S. aerial bombing in Iraq.

"We have a responsibility to help the victimsand their loved ones," said Sarah Holewinsky, director of the Washington-based Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), a group founded by Maria Rouzicka, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq while helping civilian victims of war in that country.

But despite the administration's refusal to commit to a schedule for withdrawal, a majority of the U.S. public has turned against the war, and many former U.S. army generals and previously pro-war lawmakers are loudly demanding a concrete exit strategy.

Recent opinion polls also show a continuous decline in the popularity of Pres. Bush, who has sought to bolster his image as a "wartime president".

Meanwhile, the global women's campaign against the war is growing every day. By Monday, a week after the campaign's launch, the number of signatures on its website had already hit 21,326.

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by Molly Ivins  Released Thursday, 1/12/06

AUSTIN, Texas -- Boy, you really can't take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they're not screwing up one thing, then they're screwing up another -- busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they have created all by themselves: The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit is such a disaster area, four states took it over in less than a week just to make sure poor people received their drugs.

Some of the press is starting to get the drill. Give us something like the West Virginia coal mine disaster, and instead of standing around emoting like Geraldo Rivera, a few reporters have enough sense to ask the obvious question: What is this mine's safety record? And when it turns out to be abysmal, a few more reporters have enough sense to ask: Who's in charge of doing something after a mine gets 205 safety violations in one year? Where's the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Who runs it? What's their background -- are they professionals or mining industry stooges? Who's the Michael "Heckuvajob" Brown in this outfit? Why are so many jobs at MSHA just left completely unfilled? How much has MSHA's budget been cut since 2001 to pay for tax cuts for the rich?

The great irony is that this was supposed to be the CEO administration. Bush was supposed to put people in charge of government who had track records in private industry, who did infact know how to run a railroad. For just sheer incompetence, this administration sets new records daily. All those years the right wing sat around yammering about government incompetence, and it took this administration to make it true.

But while the press is busy sort of figuring out what government needs to do -- homeland security, anyone? -- other agencies are slipping quietly out of control, with almost no attention paid. In the case of the Internal Revenue Service, the problem appears to be more malice than incompetence.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists used to enjoy frightening themselves with the possibility that the IRS would somehow become politicized and be used as a tool by some nasty socialist like Jimmy Carter to go after their ill-gotten gains stashed illegally offshore. Always seemed like a good plan to me.   Unfortunately, the only people who ever tried to politicize the IRS were on the right -- first Richard Nixon and now George W. Bush.

Hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have had their tax refunds frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, according to the IRS's taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson. Testifying before Congress this week, Olson said the average income of these taxpayers is $13,000. Olson and her staff sampled the suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable.

The poor citizens are seeking refunds under the Earned Income Tax Credit, a Reagan program to help the working poor. The total possible tax fraud amount involved in these returns is $9 billion -- compared to the $100 billion problem with fraud by small businessmen who deal in cash. That's the kind of shrewd administration we've come to expect from the Bushies. Olson points out it is not only unfair, but also a waste of time. Meanwhile, mind-boggling sums in taxes are being evaded by those at the other end of the income scale.

David Cay Johnston, The New York Times' tax expert and author of "Perfectly Legal," reports the IRS is now involved in an effort to cover up these very kinds of incompetence that Olson demonstrated.   "Records showing how thoroughly the IRS audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure," Johnston writes. In an episode reminiscent of the three stooges, the IRS simply announced there was no court order.

This is, of course, part of a far wider and grimmer shutdown of information about our government. Despite cheerful burbling from the president ("The presumption ought to be that citizens ought to know as much as possible about the government decision-making," he said last year), this administration's love of secrecy is monumental. In fact, the cost of keeping what our government does secret from the public has gone up alarmingly: The classification system that cost $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2000 was up to $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004. That's a lot of Wite-Out.

Meanwhile, the IRS has also tracked the political affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states. Its explanation is that the information was "routinely collected by a vendor" and, of course, it made no use of it. And now the IRS is planning to "outsource" collecting overdue taxes to private firms around the country. Now, let's see, do we think any of those private firms will have Republican Party affiliations?