Peace

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-2 on Oct. 16 to tell President Bush “to immediately commence a rapid, humane, and complete withdrawal” of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Tensions over U.S. killings of civilians in Iraq received another jolt with reports that American forces killed 17 civilians and wounded several dozen others, including old people and children, in Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City neighborhood Oct. 21.

Unidos por la Paz y Justicia (UFPJ), la coalición antiguerra más grande en Estados Unidos, anunció que planean protestas masivas en 11 ciudades del país el 27 de octubre.

Last week I read a report that U.S. guards employed by a private security company fired into a car carrying four Iraqi people in Baghdad. The driver and a woman in the front seat were killed, while another woman and a child in the back seat survived this unprovoked shooting. This latest incident is sure to raise to a higher pitch the public outcry in the US as well as Iraq against these unconscionable atrocities and private security firms.

NEW YORK CITY — The mobilization for the Oct. 27 peace demonstration here is now in full swing. A significant number of New York-area labor unions have endorsed the action.

United for Peace and Justice, the largest antiwar coalition in America, has announced plans for 11 peace marches to take place around the nation on Oct. 27.

The Iraqi Communist Party has firmly rejected the non-binding resolution presented by Senator and U.S. presidential candidate Joseph Biden, and adopted by the U.S. Senate on Sept. 26, and said that the resolution violates the sovereignty of Iraq and the rights of the Iraqi people.

Last week Illinois Sen. Barack Obama announced that as president he would set a goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. In doing so, he joined another Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, who called earlier this year for a nuclear-weapons-free world.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Peace activists held a historic march and demonstration Sept. 29 here. Nearly 3,000 people participated in the protest called by the Fort Drum chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and hosted by the Syracuse Peace Council, Student Peace Action Network at Syracuse University and the 1199 health care workers union.

On the surface, Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater” is a reflection of the visage of military privatization and its grounding in the Bush administration. Below the surface is the well-documented panoply of mechanisms and methods used to maintain class rule through disaster capitalism and government by surprise.