You Can Win A Free WAR, INC DVD-- And Support The Election Of What The GOP Calls "The Most Liberal Candidate In America"

The first time I saw John Cusack's brilliant film, War, Inc., I immediately thought it would be a powerful statement for Democratic candidates to use in their campaigns. A none-too-subtle, albeit uproariously funny, exposé on the corporatization of war-- the ultimate in war profiteering-- my hope was that candidates would see it as a tool to engage in a discussion of the tragedy of Iraq. I asked John if Blue America could offer a screening to any of our candidates and he was as enthusiastic as I was. Most of the candidates I approached liked the idea but thought it would work best if John came along. John has been filming in China and he wasn't available to shuttle between congressional districts but the candidate who showed the most enthusiasm, predictably, was the one who has spent years and years fighting war profiteering in real life, Florida's Alan Grayson.

Alan would have loved to have put Cusack's celebrity to work for him as well as anyone, but he immediately understood the value of War, Inc as a powerful organizing tool. He took the screener, rented a movie theater in Orlando's Fashion Square Mall and held two standing room only "teach-ins"-- basically opportunities to see the otherwise unreleased movie followed by discussions of the war and of the corporatization of government functions. Cusack on Meet the Bloggers last week:



This morning Alan explained why War, Inc is such an important movie and why he was so happy to use it in his campaign:

A political campaign is all about mobilizing the support of people who feel the same way that you do. You can do it with a speech, a symbol, a policy statement, an ad, and now... a movie.
 
Because I've fought war profiteers for years now, I recognize that the war effort in Iraq has been mangled by corrupt government contractors who care only about making a buck. I can say that to people myself, but John Cusack has done something better than that-- he has shown it to people, in his movie War, Inc. It is the "Catch 22" of the 21st Century, showing how thoroughly perverted war becomes when it is "privatized."
 
John graciously allowed us to show this film in a movie theatre in Orlando, as part of our race for Congress. And it was a major event. Certainly, no one in Central Florida had ever had a campaign event like this before. It was promoted and reviewed by our daily newspaper, and in other media.  We packed the house. We raised money for the campaign. And most importantly, we brought together and mobilized people who are, shall we say, not too happy about the war in Iraq, and want to do something about it.
 
Political campaigns are constantly changing. Howard Dean introduced political campaigning to the Internet. Barack Obama showed how to fund a national campaign through small donations, without PAC money. And now John Cusack has shown how a film, a creative work of art, can be a means of recruitment, fundraising, solidarity, entertainment and learning in a campaign. Thank you, John.

Last week the movie was released as a DVD and DownWithTyranny has a dozen to give away to the first 12 donors who make a contribution of at least $30 to Alan Grayson's campaign at the Blue America ActBlue page.

LIVE BLOGGING WITH JOHN CUSACK AT C&L THIS AFTERNOON

A few weeks ago I mentioned how I had gone to see John Cusack's incredible new film, War, Inc.. John Amato and I persuaded John Cusack to join us over at Crooks and Liars for a live chat a little closer to the official release date. And today's the day. This week the film will start rolling out in the Toronto area and then in New York City. So at 3pm (PT) John is bringing two of his co-writers with him, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, and they'll be talking about the movie and answering questions for an hour or so.

The movie is hilarious but you never lose sight of an objective at least as important as entertainment: stark and compelling Truth. I'd say Cusack, who says he was inspired by Naomi Klein's 2004 article in Harper's Baghdad Year Zero, had Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 retirement speech in the back of his head, the one where the Supreme Allied Commander-turned-President points out that "We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations." Eisenhower goes on to issue a warning that has become his most memorable utterance as president:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-- economic, political, even spiritual-- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

John Cusack and his colleagues have taken Eisenhower's warning and updated it into a chilling movie set in the not too distant future, at a time when, unfortunately, no one remembers what Ike said or why. A couple of days after I watched the film, Cusack explained why he worked so hard to make this movie, not just as an actor and a writer but also as a producer, the guy who has to raise the money.

I'm deeply troubled about the radical transformation in this country. We filmed it in Bulgaria and we were about to do it for a relatively small budget. Everyone was into it because people know that corporate "ethics" of the new militarized "defense" economy are just hollowing out what it means to be a nation state. All the things that we equate with the core functions of government, from disaster relief, armies, interrogations, jails, border patrol, all these types of things are all for-profit businesses that are kind of a part of the government, but not really. They have no accountability. That's some scary stuff. Erik Prince from Blackwater said 'I want to do to the military what FedEx did to the post office. He didn't mean it as a joke.

The government's role is to basically create the ultimate environment for corporate profit, hollowing out the core of government and just giving it to these companies. They preach about free markets but it's really a protectionist market. They're all socialists and Keynesians on the way down... when the bills come in. It's not just Boeing and Bechtel, Parsons, Lockheed-Martin, Carlyle Group-- not just the gang always hanging around the Greed Zone and locked into the State Department. On Wall Street these cowboys go crazy and the government bails them out and then the bailout isn't big enough and they want it upped. In the meantime if you lost your housing due to the scam... well, that's the "free market." There's a hypocritical way they put out two sets of rules, one for the corporate aristocracy and then one for the rest of us who have to live and die by a "free market" that's not even free... The level of greed and hypocrisy and avarice is beyond anything you can imagine.

That was a lot to think about and to juxtapose with his film. But he wasn't done. He had a polemic from Arundhati Roy he wanted to recite for me. I settled back and got another layer of understanding about what drove him to make War, Inc.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness-- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they're selling-- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

McBUSH: THE SURGE IS WORKING, THE SURGE IS WORKING, THE SURGE IS WORKING

McBush strategy surging in Basra

The other day I gushed a bit about how artistic and hilarious John Cusack's new film, War, Inc. is. And it is. But I don't want to de-emphasize the seriousness of the subjects the movie tackles, one of which is the way war works-- or doesn't-- in the modern world. Since seeing the film, every report I hear out of Iraq enters my consciousness through a new filter. This morning I couldn't help juxtaposing a report from CNN's Barbara Starr with the sardonic irony from War, Inc: "The Iraqi military push into the southern city of Basra is not going as well as American officials had hoped, despite President Bush's high praise for the operation, several U.S. officials said Friday." Translation: U.S. warplanes are bombing Basra, the second-biggest city in Iraq, as well as Shi'a neighborhoods in Baghdad. The bombing-- like the devastating bombing in Turagistan that resulted in a whole dance team with prosthetic legs-- is strictly precision, of course. The precision bombing has resulted in hundreds of casualties among women and children and billions of dollars worth of damage to vital Iraqi infrastructure. (In Baghdad alone there have been close to a thousand deaths and serious casualties, more proof the surge is working-- just like the prosthetic dancer team in War, Inc proved the war there was a raging success.)

A secret U.S. intelligence report on the situation on the ground paints a very dire picture. There are mutinies in the Iraqi Army and in the police force-- and the Mahdi Army opened new fronts in Nasiriya, Karbala, Hilla, and Diwaniya. Meanwhile the government controls less than 25% of the city. What's left of the British Army in Basra is refusing to get involved.

Bush claimed the fighting is still more proof that the surge is working and that the battles threatening to consume the whole country is a fight against criminals. He credits the puppet Maliki government with taking the initiative and strutting its stuff. The stuff is apparently not ready for strutting, though Maliki and his brother-in-law are in Basra directing operations and calling his one-time Shi'a allies worse than al-Qaeda. Its a shame that Cheney, McCain and Lieberman-- who were in Iraq 2 weeks ago urging Maliki to get tough and get tough NOW-- aren't holed up with them in a bunker.

The Iraqi Parliament tried to meet to discuss the crisis but so many members are boycotting the government-- including the largest Shi'a bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, which includes Maliki's own Dawa party-- that they didn't come close to a quorum. Al-Jazeera is reporting that the government is offering bribes to any Madhi militiamen who lay down their arms.

Falah Shanshal, an MP from the Sadrist bloc, told Al Jazeera that al-Maliki's offer to reward fighters for turning over their weapons was "a cheap stunt."

"This is the approach of tyrants... they are not achieving anything in Basra and they are relying on the occupation's air power and those in Basra are collaborating with the occupations to kill their own people," he said.

Still consumed with his personal failings in Vietnam, a doddering and obsessed John McCain sees Iraq as an opportunity to prove something about himself. His unresolved psychosis threatens to drag America into a spiral of wars and there are some American voters foolish enough to buy it. Iraqi proxies for the occupation, which the entire McBush strategy is based on, are failing miserably. According to today's NY Times, "the need to call in the American-led forces raised questions about the Iraqi Army’s ability to wage a successful campaign on its own... [although] "Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said the United States had known of the Basra operation in advance, suggesting a good deal of coordination between the United States and Iraq."

Despite rising concern over the violence, one senior administration official suggested that the operation in Basra reflected a model of future operations. The official cited the strategy outlined by Gen. David H. Petraeus to reduce the American presence in Iraq, eventually, to a limited role supporting Iraqi forces without being involved in day-to-day operations to protect the Iraqi public. In testimony to Congress in September, General Petraeus called that phase of operations “overwatch.”

“This is what overwatch looks like,” the official said, referring to the American role in Basra so far.

Around Iraq, sectarian violence also erupted on Friday.

American forces shelled Asriyah in the Touz Khormato district, about 50 miles northeast of Baghdad, in Kirkuk Province, killing two civilians. In Diwaniya, in the southeast, Mahdi Army gunmen attacked the mayor’s office in the Gammas district, killing the mayor.
In Mahmudiya, fierce clashes broke out between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi and American forces in the city center. And in Nasiriya, northwest of Basra, violence erupted after two days of calm, as Mahdi Army gunmen attacked Iraqi Army tanks that patrolled the city, enforcing a curfew.

As the blood pooled on village streets and ran into city gutters, news arrived of older, though no less wrenching deaths. American military officials said that, “acting on a tip,” American soldiers and Iraqi police officers had stumbled upon a mass grave containing 37 bodies in Muqdadiya, an area of palm orchards northeast of Baquba.

Some of the bodies showed signs of torture, the American military said.

The American people are getting a preview of what a 3rd Bush term, personified by warmongers like McCain, Lieberman and Graham, would be like. It's up to use to make sure when Bush leaves the White House next January he takes his failed and disastrous policies and agenda with him.

BUSH AND ASSORTED NEOCONS DECLARE "NORMALCY" IN IRAQ AS CIVIL WAR BOILS OVER

Bush's idea of "normalcy?"

Last night I went to a screening of John Cusack's new film-- due out in late May-- War, Inc.. John, who wrote and produced as well as starred, says he was inspired to Naomi Klein's 2004 Harper's article, "Baghdad Year Zero." Except it's funny... well, it's satire. It's art imitating reality imitating art imitating... And, like most good satire, it's tragedy.

Today Glenn Greenwald presents some more tragi-comedy (mostly tragedy), Fred Kagan on Monday: "The civil war in Iraq is over." He introduced the pompous Iraq war cheerleaders Fred Kagan, Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack, the 3 most dependable contrary indicators Inside the Beltway lecturing the kind of war criminals and war criminal wanna-be's who would show up at an American Enterprise Institute event: "The first thing I want to say is that: The Civil War in Iraq is over. And until the American domestic political debate catches up with that fact, we are going to have a very hard time discussing Iraq on the basis of reality."

That would probably be especially true for anyone who was hooked into the grid today, just hours after Kagen's blooper du jour. That's because Iraq looked like a scene from War, Inc's Turagistan. Tomorrow's NY Times: "
American-trained Iraqi security forces failed for a third straight day to oust Shiite militias from the southern city of Basra on Thursday, even as President Bush hailed the operation as a sign of the growing strength of Iraq's federal government. The fighting in Basra against the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of the political movement led by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, set off clashes in cities throughout Iraq. Major demonstrations were staged in a number of Shiite areas of Baghdad, including Sadr City, the huge neighborhood that is Mr. Sadr’s base of power... The Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew in Baghdad until Sunday." Always count on Kagan; he is never right... not ever... about anything.

On Thursday, medical officials in Basra said the toll in the fighting there had risen to about 100 dead and 500 wounded, including civilians, militiamen and members of the security forces. An Iraqi employee of The New York Times, driving on the main road between Basra and Nasiriya, observed numerous civilian cars with coffins strapped to the roofs, apparently heading to Shiite cemeteries to the north.

Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week.

And it isn't just the librul NY Times that's changed its tune about Iraq. Murdoch's Times of London presents an even more dismal picture.

Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.

With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.

Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq's two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias-- who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade-- would not stop at mere insurrection.

In Baghdad, thick black smoke hung over the city centre tonight and gunfire echoed across the city.

Almost every report I've read that isn't sourced to Dana Perino claims that Iraqi soldiers are either running away or joining the Mahdi Army, adding to a host of problems that makes it unlikely that the Iraqi Army will succeed. The American occupation forces are being forced to take the lead in the battle to capture Basra and protect the rest of the country. I heard on CNN about an hour ago that American personnel in the Emerald City are being told not to leave their homes or shelters,

As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to "normalcy," administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

See if you can recognize a little of that in this two minute War, Inc trailer.