Nobel Peace Prize winner to speak in KC on Sunday; we dare you to mess with him
Fri., Oct. 16 2009 @ 1:00PM
Over the summer, when the U.S. government said it would take a trillion dollars to cover 30 million people who don't have health insurance, lots of Americans complained loudly. Too much money!
We've heard a lot less noise about spending a trillion dollars to kill thousands of people -- including our own citizens -- in wars we didn't need to fight. The Washington Post has estimated the cost of the Iraq war at $3 trillion; a group called the National Priorities Project keeps a freaky running calculator (it moves so fast you can't really look at it or it'll give you a headache) that suggests we'll hit a trillion any day now.
On Sunday, 22 area organizations turn up the volume at a community forum called "Healthcare/Warfare: We Pay. Who Profits?"
Among the panelists is Amanda Cherry, an Army veteran who served in Bosnia and Kosovo and whose husband is Jim Haus. They're the courageous couple at the center of Pitch writer Carolyn Szczepanski's August 25 cover story about soldier suicides. Scheduled to deliver remarks on "The Human Cost of War," and she knows WTF she's talking about.
Also among the speakers is a celebrity in the international anti-war movement.
As one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Dr. Victor Sidel can lay claim to a sliver of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize (don't laugh, newly minted NPP mockers; we haven't had a nuclear war, have we?).
When I suggest that to him, he laughs heartily but humbly. "No, no, no. There was a large group of founders of IPPNW, but the Prize was actually accepted by Lown and Chazov [Professor Bernard Lown of the U.S. and Professor Eugueni Chazov of the USSR], so they're the ones who've actually got the Prize in their hands. I've got lots of pictures of the Prize, because I was in Oslow for the awards ceremony in 1985. But the material you write shouldn't call me a Nobel laureate. I was just president of the IPPNW at about the same time."
Whatever, Doc. Some of us remember the mid-'80s, when it felt like we might get nuked every time a plane flew across the sky. So that Prize for the organization of doctors from cold-warring countries gave a lot of us a bit of hope for a saner future.
Speaking by phone from his home in New York, Sidel says he plans to talk about what the U.S. could have bought with the money it's spent in Iraq in Afghanistan. "Useful things that could have been done in the U.S. and around the world with that money."
He cites recent estimates that 45,000 people die every year because they don't have health insurance. "This could easily have been resolved if some of this money had not been spent on war but instead on health care," Sidel says. "One of the main things in protecting health is making sure that people can earn a living; if the money we spent on war had been put into areas like education, transportation, construction -- it would have produced many more jobs than by putting it into military spending."
Why talk about all of this now?
"The health-care debate and analysis of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often failed to examine how profit motives influence public policy at the expense of citizens' interests," says Ira Harritt, one of the event's organizers.
According to the National Priorities Project's calculations, Missouri taxpayers have spent more than $2.5 billion and Kansas taxpayers are out more than $1.3 billion on the Afghanistan war. Organizers say that could have bought a year's worth of health insurance for almost a million Missourians and 400,000 Kansans.
Other speakers include familiar hometown thinkers Carole McArthur, a UMKC professor of medicine; Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies; and the Rev. Vern Barnett, one of the Star's Faith-section columnists.
The forum is Sunday, October 18, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Community Christian Church, 4601 Main. More info here.
We've heard a lot less noise about spending a trillion dollars to kill thousands of people -- including our own citizens -- in wars we didn't need to fight. The Washington Post has estimated the cost of the Iraq war at $3 trillion; a group called the National Priorities Project keeps a freaky running calculator (it moves so fast you can't really look at it or it'll give you a headache) that suggests we'll hit a trillion any day now.
 |
| Amanda Cherry |
On Sunday, 22 area organizations turn up the volume at a community forum called "Healthcare/Warfare: We Pay. Who Profits?"
Among the panelists is Amanda Cherry, an Army veteran who served in Bosnia and Kosovo and whose husband is Jim Haus. They're the courageous couple at the center of Pitch writer Carolyn Szczepanski's August 25 cover story about soldier suicides. Scheduled to deliver remarks on "The Human Cost of War," and she knows WTF she's talking about.
Also among the speakers is a celebrity in the international anti-war movement.
As one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Dr. Victor Sidel can lay claim to a sliver of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize (don't laugh, newly minted NPP mockers; we haven't had a nuclear war, have we?).
 |
| Victor Sidel |
Whatever, Doc. Some of us remember the mid-'80s, when it felt like we might get nuked every time a plane flew across the sky. So that Prize for the organization of doctors from cold-warring countries gave a lot of us a bit of hope for a saner future.
Speaking by phone from his home in New York, Sidel says he plans to talk about what the U.S. could have bought with the money it's spent in Iraq in Afghanistan. "Useful things that could have been done in the U.S. and around the world with that money."
He cites recent estimates that 45,000 people die every year because they don't have health insurance. "This could easily have been resolved if some of this money had not been spent on war but instead on health care," Sidel says. "One of the main things in protecting health is making sure that people can earn a living; if the money we spent on war had been put into areas like education, transportation, construction -- it would have produced many more jobs than by putting it into military spending."
Why talk about all of this now?
"The health-care debate and analysis of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often failed to examine how profit motives influence public policy at the expense of citizens' interests," says Ira Harritt, one of the event's organizers.
According to the National Priorities Project's calculations, Missouri taxpayers have spent more than $2.5 billion and Kansas taxpayers are out more than $1.3 billion on the Afghanistan war. Organizers say that could have bought a year's worth of health insurance for almost a million Missourians and 400,000 Kansans.
Other speakers include familiar hometown thinkers Carole McArthur, a UMKC professor of medicine; Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies; and the Rev. Vern Barnett, one of the Star's Faith-section columnists.
The forum is Sunday, October 18, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Community Christian Church, 4601 Main. More info here.
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