Resurrecting the Port Huron Statement

[izzybeans]

It seems its worth revisiting given the present state of things.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html

[DBoon]

kick

[tridim]

1. Is this the compromised second draft?

The Dude abides.

Sorry, but any time a Big Lebowski reference exists, I tend to point it out. :)

[Peace Patriot]

2. 1962. I was 17 when this was written, and didn't hear of it until several

years later. Three things occur to me about it:

1. It was then, and is now, too wordy--and too polite.

2. It was pre-Vietnam. What would happen next is that upwards of TWO MILLION Vietnamese and Southeast Asians would be slaughtered, and over 55,000 US soldiers killed, and we could no more stop it then, than we can now.

3. In the immediate future, about a year after the Port Huron statement, JFK was assassinated--and, five years after that, in 1968, his brother was assassinated--in the midst of an antiwar campaign--and Martin Luther King was assassinated a few months earlier, who had spoken out publicly against the Vietnam War in 1967. JFK had refused to back an invasion of Cuba, had fended off nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and had signed executive orders to withdraw US "advisers" from Vietnam.

Perhaps the biggest failure of my generation is that we, after Vietnam, did not--and possibly could not--carry through on this analysis (the Port Huron statement) and dismantle and demobilize the humongous, OFFENSIVE war machine that was now simply manufacturing wars, in a corporate military contractor self-feeding process. Those nearly 2 million people died for nothing--for war profiteers.

Here are the relevant paragraphs in the Port Huron Statement's section "The Economy," subsection, "The Military-Industrial Complex":

"....Since our childhood these two trends -- the rise of the military and the installation of a defense-based economy -- have grown fantastically. The Department of Defense, ironically the world's largest single organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a war-induced boom immediately after 'our side' bombed Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military outlay -- from 1941 to 1959 America's Gross National Product of $5.25 trillion included $700 billion in goods and services purchased for the defense effort, about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 workers are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum and machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their work to the same cause.

"The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the 1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics said: 'The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or less permanent business.'"

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THAT was the problem then, as it is now. The notorious American "apathy" of the 1950s that the Port Huron Statement complains of--and spends thousands of words analyzing--was soon to be shattered by the Vietnam War and the assassination of THREE of the major hopes for peace and justice among the leadership of the country, in the space of five years. To my mind, it is no accident that the most powerful political figures in the country who wanted peace and who were attuned to the young and to new ideas were swept violently off the stage. By 1968, Robert Kennedy himself would have written a far more radical statement than that of Port Huron, brilliant and prescient as it was. That's why he was killed, and no one can convince me otherwise.

Today, we are faced with the RESULT of those assassinations--and the RESULT of my generation's failure to curtail the "military-industrial complex." What we have today is a full-on fascist junta, which has to rig elections with Bushite-controlled electronic voting machines, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY software, with virtually no audit/recount controls, and has to control imagery and illusion by means of war profiteering corporate news monopolies, in order to prevent the peace and justice loving American majority from gaining its rightful say in government policy. And they have now seized this huge military machine, and are using it as a private army for private gain, beyond even their war profiteering, to grab control of the last oil reserves on earth, by slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people, torturing many more, and trying to set up puppet governments in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

IF we are able to restore our right to vote, our two first priorities must be: 1) busting the corporate news monopolies, and 2) busting the military-industrial complex.

It has been 60 years since this "defense establishment" has actually "defended" us from any real menace. They couldn't even defend the Pentagon on 9/11! It is time to strip them out of our economy, reduce the military budget by about 90%, and entirely reconfigure it into a truly defensive posture.

The Port Huron Statement points out that we were the first generation to be raised under the threat of "the Bomb." It says, "Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living."

It is time for us to banish that nightmare, once and for all--to imagine a world without weapons, a world that is not an armed camp, and to make it real. It seemed impossible then. It seems impossible now. But that's what we must do, or else the madmen who have seized our government will kill us all.

And it is my conviction that the place we must start is with the election system, by restoring transparent elections. Back then, they took our leaders away. Today, they have stolen the very mechanism by which we exercise our sovereignty as a people: our vote. We MUST get it back! Without the right to vote, we cannot even maintain the status quo, let alone engage in serious reform. I repeat: We MUST retrieve our right to vote before it is too late.

Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!