Tag: Civilian Response Corps

Clean Up We Can Believe In

From the desk of the Scriptorium

May I see a show of hands…..How many recall  the early days of the Obama presidency and he called for a Civilian Response Corps?…..volunteers in service to America, if you will….if you recall then you will also recall that some on the Right were calling this the attempt to take over the US by organizing an army that is indoctrinated in “socialism” or Fascism or whatever other pipe dream they had at the time…..any way, the CRC was a group of volunteers that would be first responders to problems across the world, the volunteers would come from many different agencies and would provide “expert” assistance.  It was a big deal on Right nutcase radio for awhile, Limbaugh, Beck, Bachmann and the rest of the pea brains…..

And then nothing…it has  gone silent…..

Before Obama’s CRC there was Clinton’s AmeriCorps which was put together to assist in education to environmental clean up…..GW Bush even went along for the ride and the program was expanding by 50%.

Okay, enough of the history lesson…where are you going with this, Professor?

Why have not the “volunteers” been used in the clean up?  Presidents have called on Americans to volunteer in service to the country, but yet NOTHING concerning the spill.  Why?  We are asked to donate to every situation that crosses the wire…it is Summer…school is out….why not ask Americans to do their part and volunteer in the Coast region?

What happened to the “Case for National Service”?

Obama’s position has considerable support. Last year Time magazine profiled the calls of a number of prominent Democrats in a cover story, “The Case for National Service,” supporting a plan to mandate universal service and establishing a cabinet-level Department of National Service. The plan envisioned 419,000 jobs annually for young people between the ages of 18-25 doing one year of “national or military service.”

What happened to this “plan”?  It is like all other ideas that come out at election time….once said, soon forgotten…..and you wonder why I have little use for today’s politicians?

The pundits want jobs…then use the “volunteers” to assist in the clean-up in the Gulf….granted it would be temp jobs but at least people could feed their families….

BTW, there is a phone scam going on asking for donations to assist in the oil spill clean-up…..sick bastards!

Yet Another Delusional Attempt

There has been a wealth of opinions, including myself, on how to end the conflict in Afghanistan and bring the troops home…..some have been hideous and others just plain stupid….but as always there are those that think it can be done by throwing money at it……

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday unveiled a long-term, non-military strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan that calls for sending more civilian experts to the region.More than a month after the Obama administration announced a military surge for Afghanistan, the new civilian strategy outlines plans to rebuild the Afghan farm sector, improve governance, and reintegrate extremists into society.

It also calls for boosting Pakistan’s capabilities to fight a growing Islamist insurgency and to enhance the US partnership with Islamabad partly through supporting political and economic reforms.

They want to improve governance and farming…okay, let us look at those two specifically…… Opium production accounts for $2.8 billion of Afghanistan’s GDP that is about 25% of the total economy and $2.5 billion is spent on bribes to keep the wheels of government turning, which is about 23% of GDP….there you have it about 50% of the country’s economy is from illegal activity….now I ask how will we improve on that?

Wait!  I am not finished yet!  There is more…Karzai has a new plan to counter the Taliban…..

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Friday he plans to offer money and jobs to insurgents to draw them back to civilian life and away from their Taliban masters.Karzai told the BBC the major powers, including the United States, would fund the scheme to tempt Taliban fighters to lay their weapons aside and head home to their communities.

Hardline Taliban supporters, who were members of Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, would not be accepted, the president stressed.

The Taliban gives its volunteers higher salaries than the Afghan government can afford to pay its forces, and the president said his project would have international backing to provide the necessary funds.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Friday described the Taliban as part of the “political fabric” of Afghanistan, but said any future role would depend on insurgents laying down their weapons. Related article: Taliban part of ‘political fabric’ in Afghanistan.

The US will fund the project?  Is it just me or does all this sunshine and puppies sound a bit whimsical?  BTW, this has all been tried before and it did not work so well in Vietnam….what is that old saying?  “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome……”

An Obama Dictatorship?

Ever notice the dumbest sh!t comes from the South?  This is a good one.  The Civilian Response Corps that has been talked about by both Obama and McCain, in my opinion, is not a good idea, but my writings are of a different tact than this yo-yo.

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado in which he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service.

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

The Obama transition team declined to comment on Broun’s remarks. But spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama was referring in the speech to a proposal for a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure — an idea endorsed by the Bush administration.

Broun said he believes Obama would move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national security force.

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.”

If you would like another opinion, one that is at least more sane, then please go to my search and type in “civilian response corps”.

National Service, Not Lip Service

Back in August I wrote a three part series on the “Civilian Response Corps” and posted it here.  The following is exerpts from a story run in the Boston Globe.

ONE THING Barack Obama and John McCain agree on is that each would make a new call for citizen service central to his presidency. Indeed, last night the two contenders were scheduled to appear (separately) at a televised forum to promote greater civic engagement as part of a Sept. 11 remembrance called the ServiceNation Summit. Done correctly, national service slices across partisan lines, appealing both to the self-reliant “thousand points of light” volunteerism favored by conservatives and the communitarian “it takes a village” ideals that animate liberals.

Today, Washington’s favorite bipartisan couple, Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, will file legislation to dramtically increase opportunities for Americans to volunteer, making it as integral a part of citizenship as voting. Using the model of AmeriCorps, the bill establishes five new “corps” for volunteers, including areas such as international service, disaster relief, and a green energy corps, as well as the traditional focus on education and poverty.

The bill creates tax breaks for businesses that give workers paid time off for service, and sets up “encore fellowships” for baby boomers seeking alternative retirements. In all, the goal is to expand the number of Americans who do regular service work to 100 million from the current 61 million.

Vast majorities of Americans say they want to volunteer but don’t know where to start. It is this social infrastructure that national legislation can fund and support – even though some may feel government involvement in volunteerism is a contradiction in terms. Someone needs to train and coordinate volunteers, and get them linked to projects that match their interests and skills. And the bill would provide grants to volunteer start-ups, encouraging the kind of social entrepreneurship that created City Year, and measuring their performance.

Back inj August I did not like the idea, and that feeling has not changed.

Civilian Response Corps–Conclusion

In case there is any doubt, I do not think that this is a good idea. A call for volunteers is an admission that the social contract between the people and society is a failure. That contract is one entered into by the people with the state to provided stability and security and the state provides these things in return for the support of the people. The problem is the state has degraded into a sort of “dictatorship”, where it defines the terms on its own terms and disregards the concerns of the people.

Volunteerism is used to make up for the shortfall in the services provided by the state. This scheme is forcing the individual to take responsibility for the services of the state. While the individual is doing “his” part to help those less fortunate, they are inadvertently assuming the responsibilities of the state, and thus allowing the state to gut all domestic programs.

I say–it is time for the state and its “elected” leaders to be forced to honor the terms of the contract that they have with the people of the US. It is time for the people to become the most important factor in the social contract that they have with the state.  It is time for the domestic policies to become the priority of the politicians and the country, then volunteers would not be needed.

Civilian Response Corps–Part 3

III:

The Peace Corps, inaugurated during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, played a role in this process. This initiative was useful both in attempting to refurbish America’s image abroad, supposedly combating poverty, and in engaging young people who were appalled at conditions in “Third World” countries. The Peace Corps was prompted primarily by fears of revolution in countries where the US had very little credible presence and where it feared growing Soviet influence.

Kennedy’s emphasis on the universal rights of man and the need to “abolish all forms of human poverty” nevertheless had a different ring than current US policies. The US government committed limited resources to social reform. It turned out to be the last gasp of social reform both in foreign and domestic policy.

The volunteer crusade served several political purposes. It helped supply free labor to cover up the elimination of government programs. From health care to child care to education, essential services were cut, made “volunteer” (preferably “faith-based”), and drastically reduced. Volunteer agencies were made institutionalized subcontractors.

Additionally, volunteerism was part of an ideological campaign to undermine social consciousness by transferring responsibility for alleviating poverty from the government to the individual. In this mindset, poverty is not an official outrage, but an unpleasant (but unavoidable) circumstance and even a personal choice. Americans were being conditioned to understand that they were no longer “entitled” to jobs, housing and a decent standard of living. This was the repudiation of even the limited programs of the Great Society, and the ruling elite made no effort to disguise this.

In 2002 President Bush called for 4,000 hours of volunteer service by all Americans and created USA Freedom Corps, a White House office. Proposed in the president’s State of the Union address, USA Freedom Corps was to include Operation TIPS—the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—“a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letters carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.”

This attempt to turn volunteerism into a direct tool for spying on citizens was followed up by the decision to give the Department of Homeland Security a granting agency for “citizen involvement [volunteerism] in public health, public safety and disaster relief.”

Barack Obama has now called for universal voluntary public service and has pointedly included military service under this rubric. In fact, his plan for the increasing the military is contained in his “service” policy statement, alongside the expansion of AmeriCorps and the creation of a Classroom Corps, a Health Corps, a Clean Energy Corps and a Veterans Corps.

Obama’s position has considerable support. Last year Time magazine profiled the calls of a number of prominent Democrats in a cover story, “The Case for National Service,” supporting a plan to mandate universal service and establishing a cabinet-level Department of National Service. The plan envisioned 419,000 jobs annually for young people between the ages of 18-25 doing one year of “national or military service.”

The reactionary content of “volunteerism” is more and more transparent. Today, however, the decades in which the ruling class has tried to pass it off as being a matter of the majority of Americans helping the “disadvantaged” minority are rapidly drawing to a close. As millions lose their homes to foreclosure and the vast majority of workers struggle to meet the rising costs of basic necessities as unemployment climbs, the fraud of capitalist charity has become clear to many.

Civilian Response Corps–Part 2

First of all, this sounds like something that VISTA should be involved with. I mean why start something new that is already in operation? Between VISTA and Peace Corps I think the CRC is pretty much already been done. But no—let us start yet another program to suck money away from much needed domestic programs. Sorry, I digress.

In this part we will explore the nature of charity and the call for volunteers.

Americans live in increasingly troubled times. Hunger, foreclosures and poverty are all around. Begging on city streets, a phenomenon that became much less common in the 1990s, is again becoming ubiquitous in urban centers. Not since the Great Depression has the gap between the rich and the poor been so visible and extreme.

Social and political stability requires that the political establishment at least feign concern with these social problems, however. The mass media, schools and other institutions have campaigned for increased charitable giving and volunteer efforts to help the growing number of “disadvantaged.”

There is of course a vast difference between the sincere desire, especially of working people and youth, to seek to help those suffering from poverty or homelessness, and the cynical political calculations of those who have benefited from the huge transfer of wealth from the working population to the corporate and financial elite. The elder George Bush became a symbol of these hypocrites when, after having served as the two-term vice president under Ronald Reagan’s decimation of social programs, he discovered “compassionate conservatism” and delivered his 1988 Republican Convention speech as the presidential candidate, calling for a “thousand points of light” to deal with the devastation for which he and the plutocrats he represented were responsible.

Americans are constantly asked to “volunteer” either their time or their money to help those less fortunate than themselves. Americans have always given as much as they can to help their society and to some extent the world.

Charity has always played the role of a safety valve in modern class society, a way to cover up the most festering sores of class oppression and an attempt to staunch revolt. While it is not possible to provide an exhaustive history here, a few highlights demonstrate its long and reactionary history, especially since the rise of modern capitalism.

Part 3 will be tomorrow.

Civilian Response Corps–Part 1

An Info Ink Analysis

Recently I have been asked by some what I thought of the proposal of a Civilian Response Corps, a group of volunteers to be used to help wherever help is needed, overseas, states, etc. I did not know as much about the subject as I thought I did and so I went about educating myself on the CRC.

This will be a multi-part analysis as there is more to this subject than meets the eye. This Part 1 is the fact sheet released by the US State Dept.

The Civilian Response Corps is a group of civilian federal employees and, eventually, volunteers from the private sector and state and local governments, who will be trained and equipped to deploy rapidly to countries in crisis or emerging from conflict, in order to provide reconstruction and stabilization assistance.

· They are diplomats, development specialists, public health officials, law enforcement and corrections officers, engineers, economists, lawyers, public administrators, agronomists and others – offering the full range of skills needed to help fragile states restore stability and the rule of law, and achieve economic recovery and sustainable growth as quickly as possible.

· Because no single government entity has all of the relevant expertise, the Civilian Response Corps is a partnership of eight departments and agencies: the Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Department of the Treasury.

· Already, the pilot Active and Standby components of the Civilian Response Corps within the Department of State have deployed members to Sudan, Chad, Haiti, Lebanon, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to assist with conflict prevention and mitigation.

America’s federal civilian workforce has a long and distinguished history of service in difficult environments abroad. Yet the challenges of the 21st century require a significant increase in our capacity to respond quickly and effectively to emerging threats to the security of the United States and our friends and allies. The Civilian Response Corps is intended to provide this capability.

The President has empowered the Secretary of State to coordinate and lead integrated U.S. Government efforts to prepare, plan for, and conduct stabilization and reconstruction activities, and to coordinate with the Secretary of Defense to harmonize civilian and military activities.

President Bush has requested $248.6 million in the Fiscal Year 2009 budget for the Civilian Stabilization Initiative (CSI), which includes the Civilian Response Corps. If fully funded, CSI will:

· Create 250 full-time positions for members of the Active component of the Civilian Response Corps across the eight participating U.S. departments and agencies. These “first responders” are experts who can deploy to a crisis with as little as 48 hours’ notice.

· Train 2,000 “Standby” members of the Civilian Response Corps in the same eight departments and agencies. These are current federal employees who volunteer to undertake additional training and to be available to serve in stabilization missions in case of need. Standby Members are deployable within 30 days for up to 180 days.

· Recruit and train 2,000 “Reserve” members of the Civilian Response Corps: volunteers from the private sector and state and local governments who will bring additional skills and capabilities that do not exist in sufficient quantities in the federal government, such as police officers, city administrators, and port operators.

In the Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008 (PL 110-252) Congress provided up to $75 million in initial funding for the Active and Standby components of the Civilian Response Corps. By launching the Civilian Response Corps as an interagency capability, the funding provided by Congress this year will strengthen our ability to conduct integrated operations advancing America’s interests by helping states avoid or recover from conflict.