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"We need to mobilize to save our Republic!"
The following is the text of an address given by Rich Whitney, Green Party candidate for Governor, on the occasion of the third anniversary of the War in Iraq, March 18, 2006, in Carbondale, Illinois. Whitney began by asking for a moment of silence for Tom Fox, the member of the Christian Peacekeeper Team, and member of the Virginia Green Party, who was murdered by his kidnappers in Iraq earlier in the month.

War.

Lying to the American people about the reasons for war.

Torture.

Kidnaping and transferring people to other countries for purposes of torture.

Imprisoning people without charges or allowing a hearing.

No-bid contracts.

Stealing of elections with the use of corporate manufactured voting machines.

Spying on American citizens without any court oversight, in violation of the law and the Constitution.

The President breaking the law and saying he doesn't have to follow it.

A Senator meekly suggesting that the Senate discuss censuring the President for this - and he gets attacked for it.

A bill is introduced to make it a crime for the media to report the crimes of the administration.

New threats of yet another war.

What the hell is happening to our country?

I submit to you that what we are seeing, right in front of our eyes, is nothing less than the crumbling of our Republic. And unless we the people mobilize to stop it, the powers now controlling our government will continue on this path. Even now, although a plurality of 50 percent of the American people favor a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, 70 percent of our troops and at least 70 percent of the people in Iraq favor a rapid withdrawal, and 47 percent of the Iraqi people actually support the attacks on American forces; even though the War and occupation of Iraq has been a complete and unmitigated disaster that grows worse by the day, our government continues to stay on this disastrous course.

I propose to you that the peace movement today must not only be engaged in the fight to end this war. It must become engaged in a larger struggle against the forces of corporate America that brought us into this War, and that are now rapidly, undermining our civil liberties, expanding executive powers and threatening to undermine the Republic itself. We must be part of a broader struggle to save the Republic and restore genuine democracy.

Perhaps some of you think that I overstate the case, that things are bad, but not that bad. But consider the words of one of the architects of our Constitution, James Madison, who warned:

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare," and that "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." And he further warned, "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

It is no coincidence that this so-called war on terror is being used to systematically undermine our civil rights and liberties and strengthen the executive branch.

Now consider the words of Benito Mussolini, the architect of fascism, who said, "The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."

Who among us can deny that we are well into this first stage? Is there any thinking person who believes that the criminal misconduct of Jack Abramoff is anything more than just an extreme example of business as usual in the halls of Congress and the White House? Should anyone be surprised that the Bechtel Group got awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts after it contributed nearly a million dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates? Or that the more than 70 American companies awarded over $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan donated over half a million dollars to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush? What kind of democracy do we still have when 80 percent of all political contributions now come from less than 1 percent of the population?

We all know that Bush concocted false alarms about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war. But what was the real reason? Perhaps there were several reasons but I submit that the principal one is the economic drive of multinational corporations to control resources, markets and sources of cheap labor - which has always been the underlying motive for war in modern times.

Consider: In May 2003, Bush Executive Order 13303 indemnifies the corporate looters such as ExxonMobil and Halliburton from prosecution, as well as soldiers and private security guards committing crimes against Iraqis.

Consider: Before U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer left Iraq in June 2004, he imposed his '100 Orders' that were designed to transfer the Iraqi economy form a centrally planned economy to free market economy by U.S. fiat. The so-called Bremer reforms are similar to those imposed on underdeveloped nations strangled by the International Monetary Fund. For example, Order 39 pushed the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises; allowed 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; equal treatment of foreign firms with domestic firms; unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; and 40-year ownership licenses. In short, it allows U.S. corporations in Iraq to own every business, do all of the work, and send all their money home. Nothing needs to be reinvested locally to service the Iraqi economy, no Iraqi need be hired, and workers' rights can easily be ignored. Foreign corporations can withdraw their investments at any time. Order 81 is designed to destroy Iraq's traditional agriculture system in favor of U.S.-style corporate agribusiness. Today, Iraqi farmers are forbidden to save their own seeds; they are forced to purchase them from agribusiness corporations.

Consider: Auditors from the General Accounting Office and the Pentagon discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. Iraq oil is sold unmetered and more than $4 billion in oil export revenue was sold off illegally to U.S. cronies.

Consider: Labor unions in Iraq have been suppressed, and leaders killed, while Kellog Brown and Root, awarded a $12 billion contract, pays workers as little as 45 cents an hour.

Meanwhile, our so-called "reconstruction" efforts are a joke, mainly used to line the contractors' pockets, while many Iraqis continue to suffer without electricity, clean water and other basic infrastructure. The U.S. is destroying Iraq on a daily basis and hampering Iraq's economic recovery for the sole purpose of selling Iraq's public assets and resources on the cheap to U.S. corporations, without consulting the Iraqis.

And we the taxpayers are paying for all this. The cost of the Iraq War is now at $315 billion and counting. Between the escalated military budgets and Bush's tax cuts for the rich - further evidence of a "merger of State and corporate power" - we now have record deficits and a $7 trillion national debt. Every man, woman and child in America now owes about $30,000 apiece to the holders of that debt, much of it foreign interests. The cost of the war to us in Illinois alone comes to about $17 billion - more than enough to provide health care to every uninsured person in the State, more than enough to pay the salaries of 323,500 elementary school teachers; more than enough to outfit over 40 million homes with renewable electricity. And that's not counting the human cost of 91 Illinoisans killed and over 650 wounded.

Even our troops are getting screwed - the bulk of the money is going to the corporate profiteers, not them. Back in the Vietnam War, there was an apocryphal story about how a peace protester had spat upon a returning Vietnam Veteran. There is no real evidence that this actually occurred but the Right loves to repeat the story. Today, however, it is our own government that spits on our veterans - and it does so while they are fighting as well as when they get home. They are poorly outfitted, poorly protected; they are using Vietnam-era helicopters - and many get denied proper care when they come home.

Now the Bush administration has just issued a document that actually seeks to justify the Preemptive Strike Doctrine: Once again, it is asserting that what is illegal for the rest of the world is okay for our government to do. It is trotting this out because it is now seeking a justification to attack Iran.

That is why it is important for us to understand, as I have argued many times before, the war in Iraq was wrong, and illegal, not because there were no weapons of mass destruction. It was wrong and illegal because we attacked a nation that did not threaten to attack us.

After the horrors of World War II, the Allied forces convened an International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, at which it tried and convicted Nazi war criminals. At that time, the U.S. government was in the forefront of condemning wars of aggression - no matter what the "excuse." As the Tribunal stated: "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

As Robert L. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, stated:

We must make it clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to an aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

That is why, no matter what Iran may or may not plan to do to defend itself, there is no justification for our government to attack Iran. It would be another war crime.

That is why, in my own campaign for governor of this State, I have made the Iraq War a campaign issue, by promising to veto any further mobilization of our National Guardsmen and women for duty in Iraq, on the grounds that the war in Iraq is plainly illegal and immoral.

This, too, is but one part of the larger struggle. Whether you do it as a Green, or as a Democrat trying to make that party more progressive, or as a concerned Republican, or through your church, your peace organization, or some other organization, please get engaged in this struggle:

We need to not only mobilize against the war.

We need to mobilize to protect the integrity of our vote.

We need to mobilize to stop corporate influence over government.

We need to mobilize to defend our civil liberties.

We need to mobilize to save our Republic.

Thank you.

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