FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Tricia DeOme

Phone: 253-267-2114
Date:  November 4, 2011

Rally Against Wal-Mart at South 23rd Street and Union Avenue, Tacoma
Letting Wal-mart know they are not wanted in our community

Tacoma, WA –

If you have not heard, Walmart is planning to construct a Super Wal-mart (150,000 square feet, single story building with expansive parking lot) at the Elk’s property South 23rd Street and Union Avenue (near the Target and Top Foods).  The plans are here-  https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=292441330773648#!/photo.php?fbid=289417327735238&set=pu.272597816083856&type=1&theater

This area is part of our mixed use center, where more urban style development (multiple story with multiple uses) was envisioned in the Comprehensive Plan.  Unfortunately the zoning was never updated to match the vision and this area is zoned for this type of development.  The best way to prevent this suburban style development with traffic and economic impacts is to let Wal-mart and the Elks know the community does not want it there.

We are planning a rally to protest the proposed Walmart on November 6, from 10 to noon on the sidewalk near the intersection of South 23rd Street and Union Avenue.  The rally is during the Elk’s Sunday brunch.  We will be videotaping and sending the video to Wal-mart and the Elks.

Bring signs and be ready to have your voices heard.  Check out the event at https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=292441330773648

Yard signs will be passed out at the event.  Check out http://tacomaunitedagainstwalmart.com/yardsign a PDF of the sign for your house, office or car windows.

See you all there.

Tricia DeOme

253-267-2114

Central Neighborhood Council

Tacoma, awake!

A predator is in our midst.

On August 31, 2011, Wal-Mart confirmed their intention to buy and develop an 18 acre parcel where the current Tacoma Local Elks Lodge resides at S. 23^rd and Union.  Wal-Mart’s plans for the site include a 150,000 square foot (nearly 4 acres!) “supercenter”, with all the required parking adjacent, creating an 18 acre barren area of asphalt, an enormous amount of traffic, and destroying jobs and the unique culture of Tacoma as quickly as it can be built.

The Central Neighborhood Council quickly acted once the news was announced. In a press release CNC said “Tacoma Central Neighborhood Council in the Heart of Tacoma unanimously passed a resolution opposing large scale retail development at the Elks Lodge property located on the corner of S. 23^rd Street and Union Avenue”.  The CNC didn’t stop just with a motion to oppose; they are urging other community groups and individuals to take the same action.  “The Council encourages the other seven neighborhood councils in Tacoma, community groups, business district associations and neighbors to join them in this opposition.  (Download the CNC’s press release: Central Neighborhood Council Press Release, 20110902)

The Elks Club and JLO Washington Enterprises (the proposed developer of the site) clearly understood that there would be vociferous local opposition to such a project.  The secrecy surrounding the proposed development might have held up if it weren’t for a fat-fingered tactical error.

JLO Washington Enterprises, during a City Committee meeting, requested the City change a simple ordinance to allow U-turns at a particular intersection near the site.  This sparked questions by Tacoma City Councilmembers Jake Fey, Ryan Mello and David Boe.  Developers refused outright to respond to those questions, citing a “confidentiality agreement”.  These refusals to answer simple questions about the project sparked a public records request to the City of Tacoma by the Central Neighborhood Council.  When these records were released, they revealed a mixed use development plan for the site including a 125 foot bed mixed medical and dental office space, and retail space not to exceed 50,000 square feet.   This was nothing to be secretive about which made red flags go up by all and ultimately led the City Council to pass an emergency moratorium on big box retail over 65,0000 square feet.

This location sits in the middle of Tacoma’s Central Neighborhood Council (CNC) who are not happy about this news.   Prior to Walmart’s announcement several members of the volunteer group spent days requesting public records surrounding that site due to the lack of transparency by the developers.

“The Elk’s Lodge site is a great location to implement a mixed use center with residential and commercial elements.  A large single purpose retail store with surface parking will not benefit the neighborhood,” commented Tricia DeOme, Central Neighborhood Council Chair.

With a city of nearly 200,000 residents Tacoma as a city is no shrinking violet.  Besides the swift action by the CNC, The News Tribune also quickly editorialized against this development.  Community activities made Facebook groups, got on the radio and started working against the Wal-Mart assault on Tacoma’s culture and economy.

Tacoma, is a proud, scrappy resilient community and will stand up against Wal-Mart.  Whatever the eventual outcome, Wal-Mart can expect a long, bruising, expensive battle that will cost them tons of money and what little remains of their positive corporate brand in the Northwest.

Why does Tacoma oppose Wal-Mart?

• Wal-Mart passes on significant costs to many of the states and communities where it operates because so many of the company’s Associates and their families participate in publicly-funded health care and other public assistance programs because of lack of affordable health care from Walmart.
• Wal-Mart sends much of its revenue out of local communities, while local businesses keep more consumer dollars in the local economy.
• Wal-Mart has created a new kind of blight by destroying existing retail stores, leaving vacant, abandoned stores throughout the country.
• From small businesses to major chains, all grocery and retail establishments that compete with Wal-Mart are impacted by the company. Competitors are often forced to lower wages and standards. By using a model based on low-wages, high-efficiency transportation, and imported goods, Walmart has a history of destroying once thriving downtowns across America.
• Wal-Mart has a sophisticated and massive lobbying effort to influence policy makers at every level, corrupting local, county, regional, state and national politics.  Walmart and organizations directly affiliated with Walmart have sought to advance goals such as school vouchers, entering urban communities, restricting tariff protections, limiting port security, eliminating the estate tax, oppose strong worker protections, and obtaining lucrative subsidies.  All of the policies they advocate for negatively impact the living standards of the citizens in the area where Wal-Mart is operating.
• Wal-Mart’s benefits are often too expensive for Associates to take advantage of and are substandard to those offered in unionized grocery stores.  The company has recently cut two of its longstanding benefits: they have eliminated their profit sharing program and, as of 2011, no new employees will receive an extra dollar an hour for time worked on Sundays.
• Across the country, tens of thousands of Wal-MartAssociates qualify for state-run health care programs. In states which release such data, Walmart has more employees on public healthcare rolls than any other employer in almost all cases.  This results in an increase in taxes across the board as communities struggle to make up for the benefits that Wal-Mart denies to pad their already outrageously high profits.
• By offering what amounts to poverty jobs for most of its Associates, Wal-Mart aggressively uses its dominant market position to lower standards for American workers. Wal-Mart’s average sales Associate makes $8.81 per hour, according to IBISWorld, an independent market research group.  This translates to annual pay of $15,576, based upon Wal-Mart’s “full-time” status of 34 hours per week, which is well below the poverty line for a family of four.

Learn more about the negative impact Wal-Mart has on communities, jobs, health, wages, benefits and culture:  http://walmartwatch.org/get-the-facts/

Communities Successfully Beat Back Wal-Mart

Gig Harbor, WA:  http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/1996/08/26/editorial1.html

Nashua, NH:  http://blog.grain-of-salt.com/index.php?itemid=121

Santa Maria, CA:  http://sbpueblo.blogspot.com/2005/11/wal-mart-defeated-in-santa-maria.html

Mexico City and Cuernavaca, Mexico:  http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4245.html

Lihue, HI:  http://www.islandbreath.org/2007Year/04-planning/0704-06BigBoxKauai.html

Get Involved

Resources are being built to oppose this development.  Stay in touch and join the fight against Wal-Mart!

Central Neighborhood Council:

http://cnc-tacoma.com/elks-club-property

Equal Time Radio (Fridays at noon on KLAY Lakewood):

http://www.equaltimeradio.org/

Facebook pages opposed to the Wal-Mart development:

http://www.facebook.com/TacomaUnitedAgainstWalmart

http://www.facebook.com/nowalmartintacoma

http://www.facebook.com/equaltimeradio

]]> http://www.tahomaorganizer.org/2011/09/tacomas-central-neighborhood-council-prepares-for-war/feed/ 0 http://www.tahomaorganizer.org/2011/09/heart-of-tacoma-opposes-big-box-behemoths/ http://www.tahomaorganizer.org/2011/09/heart-of-tacoma-opposes-big-box-behemoths/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:40:17 +0000 Andrew Bacon http://www.tahomaorganizer.org/?p=510

Tacoma’s Central Neighborhood Council Opposes the development at the Elks Lodge Site

Tacoma, WA – Tacoma Central Neighborhood Council in the Heart of Tacoma unanimously passed during their September 1^st monthly meeting a resolution opposing large scale retail development at the Elks Lodge property located on the corner of S. 23^rd Street and Union Avenue.

The Council encourages the other seven neighborhood councils in Tacoma, community groups, business district associations and neighbors to join them in this opposition.

In their opposition the CNC members were disappointed in the lack of transparency and openness of Walmart’s pending plans to build a 150,000 square foot retail store in the center of their Central Neighborhood.   They feel the proposed development will harm their community. They expressed concerns about market saturation and massive traffic congestion in an area already facing capacity.  Council members outlined goals for the site, including buildings based on urban design, diversity in the marketplace, affordable housing, low impacts to traffic, and living wage jobs.

“This is about protecting the businesses already established who are struggling day in and day out to keep their doors open and adding this development will do nothing but drown the market diversity in our neighborhood” said Justin Leighton, CNC Secretary.

“The Elk’s Lodge site is a great location to implement a mixed use center with residential and commercial elements.  A large single purpose retail store with surface parking will not benefit the neighborhood,” commented Tricia DeOme, Central Neighborhood Council Chair.

The Central Neighborhood Council is one of eight neighborhood councils in Tacoma.  Created to 1992, the councils were formed to increase citizen involvement in the city’s planning process.   The Central Neighborhood Council helped lead the opposition against digital billboards in Tacoma which took place in the last few months.  For more information on the CNC and their opposition, visit their website at www.CNC-Tacoma.com.

For years and years, many concerned people tried to warn the Pierce County government that if they did not stop this terrible break-neck speed practice of covering every inch of land with shoddy, crowded housing development, it could become the Future Slums of America.  The deliberate plan was to build out the outer reaches first so no one could stop them later by reducing the over large UGA, then infill the areas still outside the cities later.  The cities did little development themselves but chose to let the county fill their UGA’s, that were outside their city limits, for them.  That resulted in a huge lack of public transportation and police services.

Blinded by the greed for $, they laughed at us behind their hands, called us “tree huggers”, said “thank you for your testimony – next”, then carried on finding ways to approve anything anywhere, even disregarding the few scant protective laws that were already in place and refusing to uphold any of the State and Federal laws.

Many of us tried in vain to get Pierce County to stop this insidious practice of rushing development applications through, ignoring all protective laws, and accepting false claims denying the actual existence of water resource lands on behalf of often-unscrupulous developers who cared nothing about the destructive impacts they were causing.  Like locusts, they swarmed in, cleared the land of every green thing, covered it in pavement then moved on.  Direct orders from the past executive office to the planning department to “do whatever it takes to help the developer achieve his goal” often resulted in misrepresentation and even outright lying on the reporting of pristine forest and wetlands, wildlife, flood plains and groundwater links to our Salmon bearing waterways.

Pierce County has refused, despite years of protests, to enforce any ecology law.  They have also steadfastly refused to write these laws into county code so that they could be enforced.  In July 2011, Pierce County decided not to update the codes allowing enforcement because “it would cost too much”, asking instead, “how much does a Salmon cost?”

Currently, the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s office states that since ecology violations (100% deforestation, filling creeks, flood plains, wetlands, diverting water supply from the creeks & rivers, etc) are not even considered civil infractions in Pierce County, they will defend the violator and the approving department (planning) against the people who sue for losses resulting from this debacle.

New resolutions and amendments were continually pushed through by our elected “leaders”, changing the wording of our already scant codes that resulted in increasing loss of our sustainability.  Pierce has dropped from 95% sustainable in 1990 to less than 5% today.  The implications are frightening to anyone who will take the time to think about it.  We have no resources to fall back on in the case of a disaster.

The only protection for our farmland was placed by the State, not voluntarily by this county.  Many of our prime farms are lost forever under pavement, housing and industrial warehousing that we did not need regardless that the Growth Management Act clearly forbade that.  The farmers had their land re-zoned out from under them, then were forced off their land when they could not afford the newly imposed residential tax rates.  Along with that loss went most of our fresh, affordable produce, fruit, eggs, dairy, meat, etc., which we used to have readily available to all.

We have lost most of our healthy quality of life and lifestyle that included good food, water quality, clean air, fish, creeks, wetlands, forests, and wildlife.  All lakes are posted as toxic.  Emergency vehicles cannot get through on crowded single lane country roads to the multitudes of out flung developments.  All the while, our elected officials were acutely aware of this – since the people kept trying in vain to get them to listen.  Millions spent in a fruitless effort to re-gain the water supply to the Salmon.  Even more millions wasted to try to fix the damage to our water resources after the fact of development where the developers got off Scott free every time.  Choking traffic resulting from no jobs for the thousands of people caught in the tidal wave of the housing bubble, now forced to drive for hours to get work outside our county.  Stick deciduous trees allowed to replace full grown evergreens in every development, creating filthy air in the winter months, solely because the developers complained about how much land was lost to these evergreen trees AKA nature’s lungs.

This has left us the legacy of a bill that we the taxpayers will be paying far into future generations for schools, police, roads and services that the developers were supposed to pay for, not us.  Pierce County also decided that the poor developers did not have to pay their full share for these either.  So now we must pay their share.

I call this growth mismanagement at its finest, and leadership that does not appear to be for the people’s benefit at all.

We have instead been lead down the path of destruction and despair.

Shameful!!!

The Gig Harbor Peninsula is just that, a peninsula; surrounded by Puget Sound seawater.  Puget Sound is not limited to the shorelines; it is intimately connected to a multitude of rivers and streams that extend away from the sound and even to the mountains.

The Eastern quarter of the Gig Harbor Peninsula is a watershed with dozens of “mini-estuaries” that flow onto the sandy, gravelly beach of the Tacoma Narrows, from Point Evans north to Point Fosdick south.

When these mini-estuaries reach The Narrows they fulfill the 4d rule of the Endangered Species Act that apply to Chinook salmon and the Southern Resident Killer Whales, now probably doomed to extinction.  These orcas are among the most contaminated marine mammals in the world, essentially from reckless industrial PCB effluent; like Boeing.

The Tacoma Narrows is an international navigable waterway that is also a key migration corridor for transiting juvenile and adult salmon.

Biologists, fishermen and SCUBA divers have witnessed the once teeming reefs of Puget Sound evolve into biological deserts—known as “biological hot spots” that are devoid of oxygen.  These hot spots have been progressively leapfrogging each other over the last several decades.  The Puget Sound dead zones are now apparently spreading into the Georgia Straite of British Columbia.

Puget Sound is a dying inland sea.  The principle culprit is contaminated fresh water runoff.  Our human development and corresponding damage to the land and the water, just like the Gig Harbor Peninsula, is cutting off healthy fresh water instream flows.  From Point Fosdick to the Narrows bridges, twenty-three mini-estuaries are dwindling into contaminated silt filled lesser streams.

Before “Galloping Gertie” was blown down in 1940 the Gig Harbor Peninsula was filled with forests and wildlife.  It was richly endowed with wetlands and aquifers left over from ancient glaciers.  Puget Sound has been a biological treasure for thousands of years.  Now salt-water intrusion is threatening the aquifers.  This environment is unsustainable.

Consider developer “cut and run” speculation like the Saratoga second addition clear-cut just north of the Tacoma Narrows Airport.  This case in point is still visible from Titlow Beach in Tacoma.  It was sheared to the dirt right to the edge of the 40° unstable cliff and resulted in landslides right onto the beach with several 4d rule mini-estuaries underneath.

Consider Kurt Wilson of SBI LLC of Puyallup.  This is a typical developer who has claimed that he “does not care” about the environmental, ecological consequences of his latest concept, “Eagles Ridge” to the resident eagles or to the surrounding communities.

Wilson’s engineering plans will cut down the eagle’s roosting trees right over the beach and Narrows Park while ruining the surviving heart and source wetland of Narrows Park and Doc Weathers Creek that runs through it.  He plans to clear-cut over thirty acres of surviving forest for apparently personal profit.  This will probably kill Narrows Park.  Already, Pierce County’s Scott Sissions has signed off on soil mitigation of the pond and contiguous wetlands that run through sub-surface horizons to the park and onto the beach.

The ASARCO plume footprint polluted all of the eastern Gig Harbor Peninsula when the prevailing wind rose shifted to out of the northeast.  There are local, state and federal concerns here.  This includes the Department of Ecology, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  They are watching.

Consider the gateway to Narrows Park, Weatherswood Vista that was platted in 1953 by Doc and Lucille Weathers.  Weatherswood Vista is separated from Narrows Park by only a county street; Lucille Parkway.   Until about twenty years ago, Weatherswood Vista was Narrows Park with houses in the forest.  But recently people have bought or inherited homes in their forest and opened up this former wildlife sanctuary to suburban sprawl.  This has been called “progress.”   Loggers have cut down trees over one hundred years old and threatened anyone to challenge their belief to do whatever they pleased.  Someone who wasn’t even the legal owner ordered one of the worst examples of this.  Ignorant owners and realtors alike have refused to acknowledge the intension of Doc Weathers’s covenant which states that Weatherswood Vista would remain in a “natural” state just like Narrows Park, the entrance of which used to be their dirt driveway.

I, for one, wish Democrats would admit there is a third (oh, wait…fourth?) American war going on.

Conservatives vs. Liberals.   Us versus Them.   Yes.  It is that black and white, my brainy, conscientious-objector friends.  Get the hell over it.  In fact, please embrace it with clenched fists.

As a Texas-Indiana-Idaho-North Carolina Democrat, I’ve taken more than my fair share of Red-tinged hits.  Transplanted, finally, to beautiful Blue Washington, I’ve been trying to explain to my nice make-love-not-war Dem compadres here that Red America really, honestly, and fiercely sees us as its mortal enemy.  Scarlet Red Americans, who literally think they have the ability to do so, literally pray for us to burn in hell.  That’s scary-times-three:  they hate you that much; they believe they can damn you; and they’re venomously and remorselessly trying to do so.   They’re not trying to see the light, you know.  Give it up.  They’re blind – but a blinded animal can still maul you.  (See the past decade.)

I applaud some Democrats’ unification and educate-the-Tea-Partier theories.    I am sure they are sincere and motivated by generosity.

But I ain’t them.  I’m tired of the majority-peaceable Dems trying to cajole “those ones” to reality instead of dragging them, kicking and screaming, as we beat them senseless with two-and-even-dreaded-three-syllable words.  The ferocious heat of Malcom X helped sear Martin Luther King Jr.’s message into our country’s consciousness.  Change may come through peace – but there has to be subconscious fear that peace is not the only match in the book.  That chemistry, that fire and ice, that light and dark, has to be there to permanently change the landscape.  Of course it does.  It’s that simple.  And the Dems, as a whole (and not surprisingly, since it is so simple), are missing it.   Big time.

Fine.  I’ll “flame-on,” but we need more of it.  Because guess what?  The high road alone doesn’t work against extremists.  To them, your earnest engagement and attempt at rational dialogue is a joke.  They’re the Taliban in this country, and I’m not kidding.  So we need some diplomacy, sure, but also boots on the ground – with flame-throwers.  These are people who refuse negotiations with their enemies.   And you will not – I guarantee you will not – convince them they’re NOT your enemy.  They speak a different language.  They have scorched earth mentalities and policies.  They see our attempts to “convince” them as a sign of weakness.  They want – hell, need – to be told what to think and do.   They’re conditioned to shut up and sit down when they’re told to.

So, cool.  Shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down, Red America.  I agree with you on one thing:   we ARE enemies.   And I will take you down dirty, every time I can, from now on.  I’ll leave the warm-hearted attempts to educate you idiots to those with more patience and weaker stomachs than me.  I’ll show you a goddamn hockey mom – with a high stick to your low forehead.

Red America, you have injured me and my family.  Your idiocy took (and takes) food off my table, money out of my kids’ college funds, sleep out of my bed.  I have not recovered.  I may not ever recover.  You would permanently put stupid, stingy, hateful people in charge of my life and my good country and I will not have it without a fight, and I mean a REAL fight – your  kind of fight.

You’re a patriot?  Patriots think this great nation, this land of opportunity and freedom and innovation, can only offer a measly two options – love it or leave it?!  You think it’s patriotic that rich people don’t invest in the United States by paying fair taxes, and/or hide their money in the market or the Bahamas, and/or move American jobs to other countries?!  You think it’s patriotic to deprive people of circumstances where they could earn valuable skills, and then punish them because they don’t have them?!

Shut your stupid mouths, you fakers, you gene-pool-losers.  Evolution will take care of you fucktards eventually, but not soon enough to please me.  In the meantime – fuck you.  You embarrass this country and you hurt its people by electing people who are as mistrustful, hateful, short-sighted, tight-fisted and blind as you.  I am done trying to educate your stupid Red asses.  I hate you right back, and the next time I hear you running your mouth, that is exactly what I’m going to tell you, and the room, and loudly, while I am in your face.   I will out-name-call you, out-shout you, and out-bully you, and the majority of the Red Americans who hear me are such warmongers that they will actually think I won that encounter.   And that’s fine with me, officially, now.  Whatever it takes, man.  Yes, you are my enemy.   Bring.  It.  On.

While watching the Pierce County EIDC meeting of 6/28, in discussion about our contaminated water and all the reasons for not cleaning it up,  I heard all the same rhetoric yet again, ad nauseam – no-one wants to actually enforce anything, it costs too much to enforce, too much to have enforcement officers, too much to set up a court to collect the fines, too much confusion is created when you bring the laws into anything.

Then to make the point, a councilman said that he has been asking this question to the people who are trying to get our nations’ waters cleaned up, and who are trying to warn people that the

Salmon are indeed our health indicators – if they die, so do we.  What kills them kills us.

They came up with the most clever way to shut up all those wanting clean habitats and environment….”We’ve been asking for years, “just what is the cost of a Salmon” and still can’t get an answer”.

So to them, I say,

What a clever question.  I bet you and your ilk were all smugly pleased with yourselves when you thought that one up, weren’t you?

I truly hope all of you have sat down with your children & grandchildren, looked them straight in the eye and from your heart told them just how much you love them – as long as it doesn’t cost too much.

Well, just what is the cost of your child or grandchild’s life or do you place any value on it at all?  No profit in that, is there?

What is the cost of your health?  Their health?  What is the cost of steadfastly and deliberately ignoring and denying the magnitude of our contaminated soil, water & air?

What is the cost of fighting against cleaning it up because you don’t want to spend that money?  What is the cost of refusing to employ and enforce the enacted laws to send the message that if you damage our water supply, you will pay?

The number 1 lame excuse  – Enforcement costs too much –

Poor developers who break the laws cry on your shoulder & you say, there, there, I won’t let them hurt you.  I’ll just keep saying that it costs too much to enforce, too much to set up a court, too much to make you do it right, too much in lost “economic profits”, regardless of what it costs my family and all the citizens of this county to keep losing our health and our lives to filthy water, contamination and disease.

What is the cost of cancer?  Autism?  Down’s Syndrome? Blood diseases?  Sorry, we can’t treat you – it costs too much.

Do you feel really proud of yourselves that you found yet another way to argue that it costs too much to make our water and environment clean?  God forbid that we would take any interest in doing the right thing for the first time in this county’s history!  Too expensive to do the right thing, so let’s just keep doing the wrong thing – it’s cheaper that way.

What is the cost of a Salmon?

That mind set is why we are in such a state of disaster now.  Tell that to your kids – better yet, go to the hospices and tell that to all of the dying people who can’t afford their treatment – it costs too much!

Clever indeed – and good for you for coming up with that one.  There ought to be an award for this kind of cleverness – only that would cost too much.

How much does respect cost?  You can’t buy it.  You have to earn it, and the road is very long indeed when you start out placing profit over caring about the health of this county & it’s people.

All you earn is shame!

Cindy Beckett

Master Watershed Steward

no water – no life

Pierce County Parks and Recreation is accepting applications to fill two vacancies on its Citizens Advisory Board. Terms are four years. Serving on the board is a great volunteer opportunity for residents concerned about the future of our parks and recreation programs.

The nine-member board meets monthly on the third Tuesday to advise the department on programs, maintenance operations and capital projects. Applicants must reside in Pierce County.

Applications are available online at http://www.co.pierce.wa.us/pc/abtus/ourorg/parks/CAB-parks.htm or in the Pierce County Parks and Recreation administration office at 9112 Lakewood Dr. S.W. in Lakewood, WA 98499.

Applications should be submitted by 5 p.m. on Feb. 18.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Jeanette Peters, Office Assistant
253-798-4067
jpeter@co.pierce.wa.us

Paula Felkins, public information officer
253-798-4017
pfelkin@co.pierce.wa.us

Find more Pierce County news at www.piercecountywa.org or follow us at twitter.com/pierceco.

Although more women are joining the military than ever before and some are seeing combat, women’s primary role, as far as the military is concerned, is patriotic. Not just any kind of patriotism is expected of women; they are expected to eagerly send their sons and husbands and lovers and partners and fathers off to combat.

Then women are to turn away and not see what actually occurs in combat. Under cover of sacrificing their lives for the United States of America, their loved ones are killing randomly, without remorse, otherwise known as murder. That is how they are trained, actually brainwashed.

“Collateral Murder,” the WikiLeaks video, allegedly leaked by Private First Class Bradley Manning, is what remorseless killing looks like. As civilians are mowed down from a hovering helicopter, the soldiers are joking and cheering. In research for Unmaking War, Remaking Men, I found that random killing is everyday life for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a feminist, it is not difficult to see how the military exploits masculinity for war. Regardless of the gender of the soldier dropping the bomb or pulling the trigger, violent, aggressive masculinity underpins the military’s amorality of remorseless killing, institutionalizes it and rewards it.

Nevertheless, in writing about combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to understand the wars we have to unmake, I found myself confronted with conflicting “values,” using the term loosely for a moment. Most blatant is how the value of patriotism in war time elevates sacrifice for one’s country over the value of human life. The military, claiming to defend its country, teaches soldiers to value the lives of their buddies over their own, which keeps them fighting, as it would be unmanly to not protect your buddy. Meanwhile, they treat anyone who is not their military buddy in a combat zone as an enemy whose life has no value, who the soldiers are trained to think of as not even having a life.

Yet, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assures all human beings of their right to live, and to live in dignity and peace. This is where I began in constructing the feminist human rights paradigm that shaped the book I was writing. Refusing to allow this study of masculinity and war to be driven by beliefs — in patriotism, in religion with all of their patriarchal trappings — I consider the value of human beings’ lives to be sacrosanct, beyond debate, and like universal human rights, unconditional.

Likewise, for me, being human is being interconnected with each other, that is, to be very clear, each with all others. Soldiers’ revulsion to killing other human beings is but one evidence of how deep that interconnection goes. It is driven by our life force (or spirit) that propels human beings to save others whose lives are at risk. That is why the military must train them intensively if they are to get them to kill without remorse.

The issue of feminist values then is not what one believes but how we frame the knowledge upon which we act. In the case of masculinity and war, even the Geneva Conventions — which accepts war as inevitable — was of no use to me in establishing the values from which my book would be written.

Finally, I defined the values underpinning my study of war in this way:

“This new framework of understanding is a human rights paradigm because it places the dignity of human beings and their rights above all other considerations. It is a feminist paradigm because it confronts the power of masculinity as it is socialized and constructed for war as well as female complicity in that power. And yet because shared human consciousness transcends nationalities (nationalism), races, ethnicities, classes and gender, this feminist human rights paradigm is global, encompassing all human beings.”

Feminists, bless our hearts, are everywhere, including in war zones, where clarity of values is a matter of life or death. I see it in Afghan women who reject “fundamentalist warlords and misogynist terrorists,” as Malalai Joya identifies the enemies of women in her homeland. I see it in Code Pink activism. And I see it in men in combat who are refusing to fight and kill. Our activism in concert with universal human rights becomes a feminist human rights paradigm that reaches many.

Kathleen Barry holds two doctorates – in sociology and in education – from the University of California, Berkeley. A university professor for twenty years, she was on the faculty of Brandeis University and is Professor Emerita of Penn State University.  A Distinguished Visiting Professor at several universities, she was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland and an invited scholar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris. The author of five books and an internationally recognized feminist-human rights activist, she lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad.

For more about Kathleen, please visit her website at http://www.unmakingwar.net/.

Reprinted by permission.

 

Jim McDermott: Traitor

McDermott’s hatred of America and America’s God surfaced once again as he led the Pledge of Allegiance on the floor of Congress minus the words “under God.” … McDermott himself is not an atheist. He claims attendance at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, hardly a Christian church. St. Mark’s is currently promoting a “Statement of Faith-based support for Same-sex marriage” and preaches almost exclusively about “social justice,” “peace,” and “diversity” while nary a mention is made of sin and salvation. … It is convenient to think that Jim McDermott is a harmlessly unique product of liberal Seattle, but the truth is McDermott hates America, he despises our Godly heritage, and he sits in the way of the cause of liberty.

Editor’s Note:  World Net Daily has removed the original post, possibly at the request of the successful Hans Zeiger campaign for Washington State Representative.  Is it possible that his campaign came to the conclusion that if citizens ever became aware of how radical his views actually are, that he would be unelectable?  You decide.

Let’s be clear about this: according to Hans Zeiger, anyone who refuses to “pledge allegiance” to America and to Zeiger’s God alongside is a traitor who hates America. It doesn’t matter if someone says the rest of the Pledge as McDermott does – not believing in or pledging allegiance to Zeiger’s God means that you can’t really be pledging allegiance to or have any reliable loyalty to America. Indeed, if you don’t follow Zeiger’s God, it is doubtful that you even qualify as a “real” Christian.

Zeiger has in the past made it clear that it is unacceptable for anyone to question whether God is on the side of America and, therefore, the enemy of anyone who oppose America. Zeiger has also made it clear that no one has a right to escape his God. Zeiger has also made it clear that colleges should be in the business of indoctrinating religious beliefs and has suggested that maybe it shouldn’t be considered OK for a person to be an atheist or an agnostic.

That last bit alone was sufficient to justify classifying Hans Zeiger as a type of fascist, but he only digs himself into a deeper hole here when he argues that a person who doesn’t accept his conception of a righteous, religious, Christian America must be a traitor who hates America and who hates his God. Treason is the “violation of allegiance towards one’s country,” therefore McDermott and others can only be guilty of treason if they owed some prior allegiance to Hans Zeiger’s God. That, in turn, assumes some mystical connection between this God and America which is so fundamental that American can’t exist without it.

Such an attitude is precisely what has characterized fascism in the past. In Germany it was the belief in a mystical connection between the nation and “das Volk” which defined what it meant to be a true German. In Italy, it was a belief in a mystical connection between ancient Rome and modern Italy. For people like Hans Zeiger, fascism involves a mystical connection between a specific God/religion and the nation – without it, there is no nation to even defend. Those who reject it are traitors. In Germany we would have been race-traitors. In Zeiger’s America, were are traitors to God and Homeland.

You know, that’s something I think I could be proud of. I’d much rather be a traitor to Hans Zeiger’s America than be a loyal citizen in any sort of state that met with his approval.

The original post for this article can be found at: http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/05/05/jim-mcdermott-traitor.htm  The date of the original article is Wednesday May 5, 2004.