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LETTERS for the Sept. 2 issue

By Staff | Sep 3, 2021

Labor Day offers hope to animals

Labor Day offers a powerful reminder of the crucial gains experienced by American workers in the past century.

In 1894, when President Grover Cleveland proclaimed the first Monday in September as Labor Day, Americans worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks in abysmal conditions to eke out a living. They were treated as animals.

A century later, animals in factory farms still are.

Mother pigs suffer a lifetime in tight metal stalls. Their babies are torn away, mutilated without anesthesia, crammed into crowded pens for six months, then slaughtered in the dawn of their lives.

Dairy cows spend their lives chained on a concrete floor. Each year, they are artificially impregnated to keep the milk flowing. Their babies are torn from their grieving mothers at birth and slaughtered for veal, so we can drink their milk.

As it did for American workers, relief for these sentient beings is in sight.

Our supermarkets offer a rich variety of convenient, healthful, delicious plant-based burgers, veggie dogs and meat-free nuggets along with nut-based cheeses, ice creams and other dairy-free desserts.

This Labor Day, let’s all celebrate these plant-based options.

LEX NAKAHARA, Lahaina

Making democracy a priority

The American people have found themselves in a precarious position. Democrats, who have won a trifecta, seem powerless to enact much of their agenda. We ended up in this situation because our democracy was designed to give tremendous power to a small minority, and Republicans have spent decades exploiting that power to entrench their rule over the majority.

Voter suppression. Gerrymandering. Buying elections with the help of unaccountable dark money from unknown donors. Even now, following historic voter turnout by Black and Brown voters in states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona, Republican-led legislatures are adding additional barriers to accessing the ballot box.

That’s why our priority should be fixing our democracy and ensuring that structural reform rebalances power for the people — before it’s too late.

We need Congress to pass H.R.1, the For The People Act, to get money out of politics, expand voting rights, combat corruption, secure our elections and much more. These reforms to our democracy are pivotal to preventing future tyrants who wish to end our republic and establish autocratic rule.

The Democratic House passed the For The People Act last year, with every Democrat voting yes. It’s time for the new Democratic majority in the Senate to do the same.

Americans took the first step to heal our democracy by overwhelmingly voting Trump out of office. Now Congress must do its part to fix our badly broken democracy and pass H.R.1, the For the People Act.

HAROLD THOMAS, Lahaina

Let’s take the profit out of war

In the 21st century, many of us are used to the murderous mass violence of modern warfare.

After all, we grew up living it or hearing about it. The 20th century rates as the deadliest in human history — 75 million people died in World War II alone. Millions have died since, including a quarter-million during the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan.

But for our forebears, the incredible deadliness of modern warfare came as a shock.

The carnage of World War I — with its 40 million dead — left people scrambling to prevent another horror. In 1928, the world’s top nations even signed an agreement renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.

Still, by the mid-1930s, the world was swimming in weapons, and people wanted to know why. In the United States, peace-seekers followed the money to find out. Many of America’s moguls, they learned, were getting rich off prepping for war.

These “merchants of death” had a vested interest in the arms races that make wars more likely.

So a campaign was launched to take the profit out of war.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats set up a committee to investigate the munitions industry and named a progressive Republican, North Dakota’s Gerald Nye, to chair it. “War and preparation for war,” Nye noted in 1934, had precious little to do with “national defense.” Instead, war had become “a matter of profit for the few.”

The war in Afghanistan offers but the latest example.

We won’t know for some time the total corporate haul from the Afghan war’s 20 years. But Institute for Policy Studies analysts Brian Wakamo and Sarah Anderson have come up with some initial calculations for three of the top military contractors active in Afghanistan from 2016-20.

They found that total compensation for the CEOs alone at these three corporate giants — Fluor, Raytheon, and Boeing — amounted to $236 million.

A modern-day, high-profile panel on war profiteering might not be a bad idea. Members could start by reviewing the 1936 conclusions of the original committee. Munitions companies, it found, ignited and exacerbated arms races by constantly striving to “scare nations into a continued frantic expenditure for the latest improvements in devices of warfare.”

“Wars,” the Senate panel summed up, “rarely have one single cause,” but it runs “against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.”

Do these conclusions still hold water for us today? Yes — and in fact, today’s military-industrial complex dwarfs that of the early 20th century.

Military spending, Lindsay Koshgarian of the IPS National Priorities Project points out, currently “takes up more than half of the discretionary federal budget each year,” and over half that spending goes to military contractors — who use that largesse to lobby for more war spending.

In 2020, executives at the five biggest contractors spent $60 million on lobbying to keep their gravy train going. Over the past two decades, the defense industry has spent $2.5 billion on lobbying and directed another $285 million to political candidates.

How can we upset that business as usual? Reducing the size of the military budget can get us started. Reforming the contracting process will also be essential. And executive pay needs to be right at the heart of that reform. No executives dealing in military matters should have a huge personal stake in ballooning federal spending for war.

One good approach: Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s Patriotic Corporations Act.

Among other things, that proposed law would give extra points in contract bidding to firms that pay their top executives no more than 100 times what they pay their most typical workers. Few defense giants come anywhere close to that ratio.

War is complicated, but greed isn’t. Let’s take the profit out of war.

SAM PIZZIGATI, Otherwords.org