Month: October 2012

The Plutocrat elites of “Fix the Debt” get down with the grassroots


by digby

As regular readers know, I have been writing about the latest Pete Peterson Propaganda campaign called “Fix the Debt” for many months. You’ll recall its the latest offshoot of the BS Deficit Scare tour, starring Ed Rendell and Judd Gregg and a whole boatload of CEOs rushing to rescue us from our overly indulgent lifestyles and hit us with a bracing splash of tough love.

Or, as they put it:

An organization founded by Erskine Bowles and Al Simpson announced Tuesday that it has raised more than $25 million to launch a national campaign to encourage policy makers to pass debt legislation in the coming months.

The Campaign to Fix the Debt has collected contributions from corporate CEOs and others for a national media campaign and advertising campaign to urge lawmakers reach a solution to the debt crisis.

Who are these knights in shining armor?

Some grown-ups who have been noticeably absent from this conversation have been the heads of the country’s major corporations, who talk a good game about deficit reduction but haven’t invested the time, money and political capital necessary to jolt the political system from its dysfunctional equilibrium.

That’s about to change. Last week, the first battalion of CEOs showed up in Washington, reporting for duty.
[…]
During the past year, there have been quiet meetings put together by chief executives such as Cote, Aetna’s Mark Bertolini and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Senators Mark Warner (D) and Saxby Chambliss (R), the ringleaders of the bipartisan Gang of Six. Nudging it along and pulling it all together has been Maya MacGuineas, who for a decade has been sounding the deficit alarm from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In addition to Cote, Dimon and Bertolini, the charter business members include Sandy Cutler of Eaton, Gregg Sherrill of Tenneco, Marty Flanagan of Invesco, Gary Loveman of Caesars, Thomas Quinlan of R.R. Donnelley & Sons and financiers Steven Rattner and Pete Peterson.

Well, they’re finally getting down with the grassroots. Bold Progressives has the dirt:

If you sign up as a volunteer for the group, you’ll be e-mailed a “toolkit” that you’re supposed to use to engage in pro-austerity activism on behalf of the billionaires who run the group.

One of the instructions in the tool kit is to “bird dog” campaign events and town halls that feature Members of Congress. Here’s the sample questions that the campaign is asking people to dog lawmakers with. Notice that they are designed to pressure legislators to agree to cuts to Social Security and enact other devastating spending cuts.

The took kit also instructs activists to “get to the event early to hold signs or pass out literature about the debt,” and to “have somebody ready to record the answer with video, if possible.” Finally, it reminds you to “raise your hand as quickly as possible when the candidate takes questions, speak clearly and confidently!”

Don’t you just love the fact that a 25 million dollar campaign financed by millionaire CEOs is telling average people to go to Townhalls and hold up signs? I guess they just don’t have any access to power to make their case …

No, they’re brainwashing the citizens, trying to persuade them to sell-out their on interests on behalf of these greedhead plutocrats. But you knew that.

Back in July I started writing about this latest scheme. Before it was called “Fix the Debt” it was called something else: The Moment of Truth Project (and before that something else again.) Bowles and Simpson and their allies have been working this relentlessly:

In researching the Simpson-Bowles fast track solution and came upon a group called the Moment of Truth project: the era of deficit denial is over. It turns out that this is Simpson and Bowles own group, which is out there preaching the gospel. That’s to be expected. I suppose it’s also to be expected that this is also a project of the New America Foundation, one of our most revered establishment think tanks. 

This is the heart of the Village, the studious centrism that also erroneously defines the leftward end of political power in our country. Certainly many people who are associated with the liberal side of the dial are involved, although it’s almost impossible to find any liberal policies among the group’s recommendations. 

And they are deadly serious about slashing “entitlements.” 

The key thing there is the fact that they are slashing across the board (except for defense, of course.) And then there’s the revenue portion of our program, which should be lots of fun to watch since it’s composed of magical thinking. (One would think that a debt crisis wouldn’t be the perfect moment to lower tax rates, but that’s what they’re proposing.) 

This is how they propose to fix the deficit. Slash spending and lower taxes. I don’t know how they are getting away with this sophistry, but they are. They feel this is their best opportunity to force the rubes to give up whatever small piece of financial security they have and they have no intention of stopping until they achieve this goal.

And as long as they adhere to the idea that low taxes equal more growth,which they explictly state above, they will always have the excuse they need to dispense favors to the “job creators.” In other words, for every loophole they close, two will be opened. If you doubt it, read about the machinations behind the scenes of the Dodd-Frank implementation. This is the full employment act for lobbyists and tax attorneys.

And keep in mind that this isn’t Pete Peterson, folks (although he is a major contributor.) This is one of the most staid, non-partisan DC institutions doing this. And they are rolling out new projects every few months with the same agenda. (Here’s the latest, announced by Simpson and Bowles just last week on CNBC — with Warren Buffet sitting by their side.)

I hope nobody is under the illusion that this fight is over. I’m not sure it ever will be. When the budget was balanced in the 90s (without radical slashing of “entitlements” much to the dismay of those who want to do it) these folks just laid low and let the government spend all the money in tax cuts and wars. They could have fought it, insisted that the surplus be spent to shore up social security and Medicare but they didn’t utter a peep. Then once the deficit returned, they cranked up the old “sacrifice” machine once more.

Thus they have proven over and over again that their real agenda is to degrade our already pitiful welfare state. Their “solutions” prove this — lower spending, lower taxes —which leads inexorably to drowning the poor safety net in the bathtub. They don’t say this. They say they just need to hold the baby’s head under the water a little bit and the baby won’t even mind it. (And anyway, it’s more important to keep the bathtub clean so they’ll be able to “bathe” even more babies.) But no matter how they dress it up as a debt problem, it’s austerity lite- soft Randism. 

And sadly, it isn’t just Pete Peterson and his billion dollar foundation doing this. It’s virtually the entire political establishment.

I don’t know anymore what to say about this. Ryan Grim wrote it up for Huffington Post last week, but I’m sure it got lost in all the shuffle.  But here is what all that money is buying:

MacGuineas said she has raised close to $30 million for the Campaign to Fix the Debt, but the goal is “bigger than that.” The largest contribution so far has been $5 million from a single donor, she said. (HuffPost guessed that donor was Peterson, and MacGuineas said, “You could go out on that limb.”) The rest of the money is being raised from corporate CEOs and other wealthy donors.

The operation has hired 25 to 30 staffers, with plans to potentially double. Along with a paid-media campaign, it looks to influence press coverage in some 40 states with locally focused teams.

The project is growing so rapidly that when HuffPost asked why it wasn’t in all 50 states, MacGuineas thought and decided that maybe it should be. “Maybe you just changed policy. Maybe we’ll be in all 50 states,” she said.

If the president does win a grand bargain — as he pledged to do during his convention speech — he will have betrayed voters, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued earlier this week. If Obama is reelected, “[n]ow is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole),” Krugman wrote. “And Mr. Obama should just say no.”

Yes, he should.

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Justice Scalia thinks it’s “absolutely easy” to channel the minds of dead people

by digby

He’s so sure of himself:

Antonin Scalia isn’t sweating it. At a book reading and lecture at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute this week, the 76-year-old associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and self-described “textualist” entertained the crowd by rattling off a litany of his top judicial no-brainers.

“The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion,” he said. “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.”

Slavery and Jim Crow used to be legal and women weren’t allowed to have their own money or vote. But in Nino’s world, America is suspended in amber in 1789 and that’s where it will stay forever more.

I cannot understand why this man is considered so brilliant. To me, this view is infantile. This simplistic deification of the founders as if the constitution was something other than a simple organizing document that can be changed and interpreted however the people of the United Stated choose to interpret it. It’s not a sacred document. If he wants to think such things exist, there are plenty of them out there. Obviously, he should have been a priest.

But even if you believe that everything must be guided by the “plain words” of the constitution, as Ian Millhiser at Think Progress points out, it’s complicated. For instance:

“…the death penalty. The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but it provides no other guidance on just how vicious a punishment must be to become “cruel” or how uncommon it must be to become “unusual.” Does the fact that the death penalty is increasingly rare in the United States meet the threshold of unconstitutionality? The Constitution doesn’t say.”

I have to say, it’s even more obscure than he says. I always assumed that “unusual” meant “bizarre” not uncommon. Shows what I know.

Antonin Scalia cannot know what was inside the founders heads. They weren’t Gods, they were a bunch of colonial farmers. And even they disagreed on what the “plain words” meant. Half the time they were the result of compromises that nobody particularly believed in. He must know that the founders weren’t all of one mind or that many of them might have not had a strong opinion about certain things one way or the other. You don’t have to be a historian or a Supreme Court Justice to know that. You just have to have been alive on planet earth for a time observing how human beings act — particularly powerful arrogant men with axes to grind. Like Antonin Scalia.

I assume that his view is held in great esteem by many in legal circles, but I think they are missing the forest for the trees. As a lowly layperson, I can easily say that it is simply absurd on its face that Americans in 2012 are bound by the mores and habits of the 18th Century. I’m sorry, it’s just stupid.

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What Taibbi said

by David Atkins

Matt Taibbi on the first presidential debate:

Romney told a series of outright lies – the bit about the pre-existing conditions was incredible – while Barack Obama seemed unaccountably disinterested in the intellectual challenge of the exercise, repeatedly leaving the gross absurdities hurled his way by Romney unchallenged.

Romney’s performance was better than Obama’s, but only if you throw out criteria like “wasn’t 100% full of shit from the opening bell” and “made an actual attempt to explain who he is and what his plans are.” Unfortunately, that is good enough for our news media, which drools over the gamesmanship aspects of these debates, because it loves candidates who sink their teeth into the horse-race nonsense that they think validates their professional lives.

Taibbi mentions a few examples of fact-free horserace “journalism” about the debate, and mentions the Kennedy-Nixon example of television appearance outweighing substance:

Journalists who cite that Nixon-Kennedy debate always forget that the lesson of that night is that the new broadcast media technology made superficiality and nonsense more important – that thanks to the press, it was now possible to get someone elected to the most powerful office on earth because he had a superior tan. Reporters love this story because it reminds everyone that the medium they work in has the power to overcome substance and decide elections all by itself. What’s amazing is that they don’t have the good sense to be ashamed of this.

I read the transcript of the debate and all I got from Romney was either outright factual lies, or total rhetorical dishonesty. He even tried out a version of the for-years-debunked death panel business…

And after taking down several of Romney’s various lies and evasions, finishes with this:

So the answer to the question, “What will you do to rein in the biggest budget deficit in history?” comes down to, “I’ll cut PBS, which is about one millionth of the federal budget, and some other stuff.”

For God’s sake – “I’ll take programs that could be run more efficiently at state and send them to state”? Is that a joke? That’s worse than a Bill Belichick answer: “What’s our plan against the Broncos? We’re going to watch the film and do what’s best for our football team.”

Reporters should have instantly pelted Romney with bags of dogshit for insulting the American people with this ridiculous non-answer, but he was instead praised for the canny “strategy” hidden in the response. Despite the fact that Romney is running as a budget hawk and yet has refused to name any actual programs (except Obamacare and PBS) he will cut, reporters gave him credit in the debate for being willing to be the bearer of bad budgetary news, because he essentially advance-fired Jim Lehrer on TV. Many also complimented the “humor” of the line about Big Bird.

Don’t blame the electorate for being bamboozled by this stuff. Just as we hire politicians to delve into public policy so we constituents can go about our lives, so too we pay media figures to tell us what is going on in the world, and to hold those who would lead us accountable.

The media has fallen down on the job in spectacular fashion.

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Ganja reprieve in La La land

by digby

I guess it’s kind of hard to look someone in the face and tell them it’s just tough luck, they can’t have their medicine:

In a faint and gravelly voice, Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl delivered an impassioned plea Tuesday asking his colleagues to lift the ban on pot dispensaries, asking them: “Where does anybody go, even a councilman go, to get his medical marijuana?”

Minutes before the council voted 11-2 to rescind its recently passed ban on storefront pot shops, Rosendahl said the council’s decision had created “a very emotional moment” for him. Rosendahl has been battling cancer for the past three months and relying on medical marijuana during that time.

“On the 20th of July, I had an MRI that was very, very serious. And the bottom line on that was, they didn’t give me much time to live. And I said, ‘No, no no no, I’m not ready to go. I certainly want to live a long time,’” said Rosendahl, who has been undergoing chemotherapy treatments and relying on a walker to move around in recent days.

Rosendahl, 67, said he began taking medical marijuana a decade ago to manage his neuropathy, a stinging pain in his feet, taking it “occasionally at night.” But on Tuesday, he put the issue in the context of his battle with cancer, which has made it difficult for him to speak above a whisper.

“If I can’t get marijuana, and it’s medically prescribed, what do I do?” he asked his colleagues.

Rosendahl criticized President Obama’s handling of the issue and spoke against some of the recent federal raids of dispensaries. And he said Los Angeles should work with state lawmakers to make California law regulating medical marijuana clearer.

But as moving as that was, it wasn’t the reason they rescinded the ban:

The Los Angeles City Council’s decision to repeal its ban on medical marijuana dispensaries underscores the political savvy of the increasingly organized and well-funded network of marijuana activists.

The activists sought to place a referendum overturning the ban on the March ballot, when the mayor and eight council seats will be up for grabs.

Tuesday’s repeal of the ban marked a major victory for the coalition. The effort was led by an advocacy group called Americans for Safe Access, a group of dispensaries called the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 which has organized workers at more than 50 dispensaries.

By collecting tens of thousands of signatures to qualify the referendum, the activists forced council members to decide whether to rescind the ordinance or put the matter on the March ballot.

That’s some savvy organizing. And see? It can be good for business to unionize. There’s a lesson in that.

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If you’re looking for a doctor steer clear of Paul Broun

by digby

Wow. This is one scary video:

Ed Kilgore writes:

Now as a practicing Christian, I’m more offended religiously than politically at Broun’s rant. The Bible, he says, is a “manufacturer’s handbook,” that shows “how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches…how to run all of public policy and everything in society.” What an astonishingly, depressingly unspiritual way to look at the Good Book; what an appallingly illiterate way of understanding it, particularly if you get that the only scriptures people like Broun want to use to control the lives of everyone in the world just happen to reinforce the kind of smug white conservative patriarchal world-view from a bygone era they consider ideal.

It’s saddening and maddening, worse yet because among the “amens” greeting Broun’s soul-deadening paen to religious and political authoritarianism there wasn’t one voice saying “Really?”

No kidding.

I’m not a religious person so I’ll take the political side and say that this represents the line of thought that makes me extremely leery of conservative Christian involvement in politics. These people have an authoritarian streak that makes my skin crawl and I feel that I must fight them. And I can’t help but resent the fact that creepy people like Sally Quinn extol this cretin’s belief system while dismissing people like me as some sort of freak:

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

An atheist could never get elected dog catcher, much less president. (Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California is a nontheist but doesn’t talk much about it).

But this lunatic, who Kilgore rightly points out has bastardized Christianity — and science — into some hideous, simple-minded freakshow, is just one of many elected members of the US congress who think this way. The rest of us are supposed to grant this nonsense extra respect because it’s a religious view and therefore cannot be challenged. It’s frustrating.

Oh, by the way, this man is allegedly a physician.

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Republicans are still trying to stifle democracy

by David Atkins

Lee Fang at The Nation reports:

This morning, ProgressNow New Mexico, a left-leaning advocacy organization, released a video showing the New Mexico Republican Party instructing its poll watchers to engage in what could be illegal voter suppression.

The poll watchers are told to request identification from voters, even though the law in New Mexico does not require voter ID. There are other troubling parts of the video and poll watcher instruction manual, including a call for poll watchers to instruct some voters to vote by provisional ballot even if they are registered correctly in their precinct. Poll watchers are told to deceive Spanish-speaking voters by telling them ballots that interpreters are not available, when in fact New Mexico law provides for language assistance for minorities and Spanish-language ballots.

At CPAC Colorado, a conservative conference today in Denver, I asked Congressman Steve Pearce, a Republican lawmaker who represents New Mexico, about the brewing controversy. Pearce appeared to be aware of the NM GOP’s poll watching efforts, and supported them.

“We’re simply saying that we’re going to start, we’re going to take it back it into our hands,” said Pearce. “We should check for ID since you have to show an ID to do anything in America.”

He did, however, admit that doing so would be against the law. “It’s against New Mexico law to check for ID,” the congressman conceded.

Yes, it is. And state supreme courts are blocking efforts to prevent early voting.

Here’s the video in question.

These people just hate the democratic process.

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It’s not lying if he doesn’t mean it

by digby

Just don’t call it lying:

Strong conservatives understand that Romney was lying about being a moderate in the debates and they’re perfectly comfortable with that. Gingrey has no doubt that he’ll govern to the right of center, but he’ll use his humility and knowledge to work across the aisle and make those sniveling left wing bitches do what they’re told. (No he didn’t really say that, but you know know that’s what he meant)

Keep in mind that this is coming from the people who destroyed the careers of Bob Bennett, Richard Lugar, Bob Inglis and a whole lot of other Republicans because they weren’t pure enough. Suddenly, none of that matters anymore and they love them some Mormon Mittster from Taxachusetts.

Somehow, I have a feeling they won’t be quite a s forgiving when their new BFF loses in November. I hope Soledad O’Brien has Gingrey back on the show after the election and asks him if he thinks Romney lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. I think I can guess the answer.

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Damn lies and statistics

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes, they can’t be serious. After making utter fools of themselves insisting the polls are all skewed in favor of Obama, today they’re insisting that the jobs numbers are corrupted too.

Some are even saying it’s a conspiracy of democratic voters all lying and saying they have jobs when they don’t. Seriously. And as we all know, the vote is in the process of being stolen as well. The left wing conspiracy is so massive at this point, including so many different people across the nation, that I’m afraid these people are going to have no choice but descend on Galt’s Gulch and form a big tent city on the outskirts of town. (No worries about handouts, for these folks, though. They’ll all be starting businesses just as soon as they cash their Social Security checks.)

This is yet another bit of proof that the right is incapable of believing that anything that doesn’t adhere to their worldview can possibly be legitimate. And frankly, I think it’s gotten worse with the right wing propaganda machine so closely mirroring itself in all media. From Jack Welch to Honey Boo Boos daddy, they’re all watching Fox and listening to Rush.

But that’s not the only problem. Check out how NPR reports the story:

Former GE CEO Jack Welch, for instance, through a tweet, questioned the timing of the September jobless rate falling to 7.8 percent:

“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

The “Chicago guys” would be Obama and his campaign team, which is based in the nation’s third largest city.

Coming to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ defense was Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

“It is simply outrageous to make such a claim, and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. … BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible.”

It was just the latest example of statistics being seen through a partisan lens.

Actually, no it isn’t. The statistic were accepted by all these same Republicans when they were down, and used as evidence that the economy was depressed and Obama should be ousted. The progressives weren’t claiming at the time that the numbers were wrong and that the economy was doing much better. Can we all see the difference there?

So, basically what we have in the media today are right wing outlets living in an alternate universe and mainstream outlets simply saying that there’s no way of knowing the truth.

It’s very fashionable to claim that nothing anyone says in politics has any affect that everyone is voting on some sub-conscious rationale based upon their personal economic status but I just have a sneaking suspicion that this disconnect from the truth is unhealthy for a democracy anyway. But what do I know?

Mishel’s full analysis is here in case you are wondering about those pesky old facts.
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Witchy Woman of Washington

by digby

This person is actually allowed to write columns for a major newspaper and is widely considered to be an arbiter of our nation’s capitol’s social network. And she’s nuts:

At a New York panel Monday on spirituality earlier this week, Quinn recalled how she used her psychic powers in the world of southern magic (emphasis added):

What we really believed in and practiced was voodoo, psychic phenomenon, Scottish mysticism, palm reading, astrology, seances, and ghosts. And I have many, many stories about those, real stories. And that—those things were my true religion, aside from dances. Aunt Ruth was psychic, my aunt Maggie was psychic, and I’m psychic. We actually put hexes on people and they really worked. It was actually really scary and I finally stopped when my brother who has a PhD in religion from the University of Chicago and is a theosophist and a practicing Buddhist told me I had to cut it out because it would come back at me three times. Anything that I did later that was troublesome I kept thinking, I brought this on myself, I should never have put a hex on her.

She writes a column on religion these days, which is fine. But I wonder if people know that her religion is Voodoo.

H/t to BD

Update: link fixed.

Update II: Here’s what the Voodoo Queen wrote yesterday:

Citing the Declaration of Independence, Romney said: “Second, is that line that says we are endowed by our Creator with our rights, I believe we must maintain our commitment to religious tolerance and freedom in this country. That statement also says that we are endowed by our creator with the right to pursue happiness as we choose. I interpret that as, one, making sure that those people who are less fortunate and can’t care for themselves are cared by — by one another.”

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

An atheist could never get elected dog catcher, much less president. (Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California is a nontheist but doesn’t talk much about it).

Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.

When the Republicans tried to take away the flag it took a long time for the Democrats to realize they had been hijacked. For years, Democrats were wary of wearing flag pins for fear of seeming to pander. They finallygot the message.

Now it’s God. The Republicans have claimed God as their own this entire campaign, each candidate trying to out-Christian the other. Even Obama, though 17 percent of registered voters think he is a Muslim, has talked about being a Christian as often as he can.

Oh shut up.

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Droney comes to visit

by digby

The strip above reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine the other day. We were talking about drones and he said, “I wonder how Americans would feel if those things were flying overhead appearing to sporadically and randomly strike houses, weddings and other gatherings killing a bunch of people in the vicinity. I casually replied, “well, they’d be terrified.” Of course.

I’m afraid that for all the excuses about how they really are “more humane” than all out warfare, they are really instruments of terror. It’s true they might be a replacement for “boots on the ground” (assuming that boots on the ground would even be possible)but while they may make it less dangerous for American soldiers it has much the same effect as those who use more conventional terror tactics. It’s just high tech “asymmetric warfare” also known as terrorism.

Now it’s entirely possible that the American public thinks it’s just fine to use terror tactics on civilian populations. But I don’t think we’ve had that discussion. Instead, to the extent we talk about it in anything but hushed tones and without any detail, we are talking about how “careful” we are to only kill the “bad guys” with our precise hi-tech weapons. But how different is it, really, from an Islamic extremist setting off a bomb in a shopping center where a politician might be present? Would the effect on the civilian population be any different here than the drone attacks in Pakistan?

This film by Brave New Films examines how they feel about it:

Brave New Foundation has the honor of releasing a video to accompany a seminal report by human rights law experts at Stanford and New York University law schools. The report, entitled Living Under Drones presents chilling first-hand testimony from Pakistani civilians on the humanitarian and security costs of escalating drone attacks by the United States. The report uncovers civilian deaths, and shocking psychological and social damage to whole families and communities – where people are literally scared to leave their homes because of drones flying overhead 24 hours a day.

This report continues to call into question the U.S. strategy of drone strikes, and presents evidence of profound humanitarian consequences as well as concerns that the strikes actually may have adverse security impacts by fomenting anger against the U.S.

The report is based on nine months of research, including two investigations in Pakistan. The Stanford-NYU research team interviewed over 130 individuals, including civilians who traveled out of the largely inaccessible region of North Waziristan to meet with the researchers. They also interviewed medical doctors who treated strike victims, and humanitarian and journalist professionals who worked in drone impacted areas.

Brave New Foundation is committed to shedding light on the true impact of U.S. drones, and with this video we hope to help share the voices – from the other side of the globe – of those most impacted by the policies of our government. Our campaign War Costs has a coming full-length film exposing the truth about drones, and additionally we are working on a number of shorter videos. We are traveling soon to Pakistan ourselves to collect more stories.

As U.S. citizens, we feel a responsibility to know the real impact of the policies of our government. We hope you will join us at www.WarCosts.com to be part of this fight for a more humane and just world.

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