Pope Advocates Rich Pay Poor

Pope Francis calls for 'legitimate redistribution' of Wealth

The pope is known for promoting economic equality. He himself chooses to live simply in a modest apartment in the Vatican, without the adornments offered to popes.

VATICAN CITY, May 9 (UPI) --In a speech to the United Nations on Friday, Pope Francis called for countries to redistribute wealth to the poor and end the "economy of exclusion."

The Pope, who has frequently slammed capitalism as an unfair system, said governments can achieve more economic equality with "the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society."

The words were said to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other top UN officials, who met in Rome this week.

Pope Francis encouraged the UN to challenge countries to attack the roots of poverty and guarantee dignified labor for all people.

"Specifically, this involves challenging all forms of injustices and resisting the economy of exclusion, the throwaway culture and the culture of death which nowadays sadly risk becoming passively accepted," he said.

Pope Francis been outspoken about the issues of inequality and poverty, and even chose the name "Francis" from Francis of Assisi, who dedicated his life to helping the poor.

The Pope spoke to U.S. President Barack Obama as well about these issues during the president's visit to the Vatican.  "Well we spent a bulk of our conversation around issues of poverty and inequality, themes that he has been talking about quite a bit," Obama told 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley. "And obviously issues that I care about deeply. The very poor finding fewer and fewer ladders to get into the middle class."  (thanks to you, President)

Ban invited the Pope to speak to the General Assembly in New York. The Church has not confirmed any trip, but it is widely expected that the pope will travel to the U.S. in September 2015 to participate in a church meeting on families in Philadelphia.

NATO & US Threatening World War

Break the Silence: A World War Is Beckoning

  By John Pilger, Truthout 

(Photo Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? 

Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? 

The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis," as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening."

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy," which shows that since 1945 the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons, and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the West, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally freest journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - "our" terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following NATO's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven."

The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of Western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory. 

The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered, like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. All are subjected to a Western media campaign of caricature andvilification - think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and now Vladimir Putin.

Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to War.  

With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of NATO, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia is being torn apart. We in the West are backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the West for almost a century.

But NATO's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a NATO-run guerrilla War that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the War party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people - a third of Ukraine's population - have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park - run by CIA Director John Brennan in Kiev, with "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eyewitness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by. A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate ... I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defense secretary - a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party - boasted that the attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the West has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation," according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" following the Odessa massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the junta is described by Obama as "duly elected." What matters is not truth, Henry Kissinger once said, but "but what is perceived to be true."

In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says." Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For Germans, it is an invidious irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" - secret wars - in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and hemorrhaging liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question begs: Why do we tolerate this?

Shut Down the War Slush Fund

Let's shut down the Pentagon (War) slush fund

A bipartisan group of representatives is circulating a letter demanding accountability and transparency for war funding.

Tell your Representative to sign the letter to rein in wasteful Pentagon spending.

When we enter the 14th year of war in Afghanistan in October, how much will we spending to keep our troops there? We don’t know, and neither does Congress.

The House is voting on the Pentagon budget next week and the administration still hasn’t decided how much the war is going to cost or how many troops will be there. But they’re not worried because for years, war money has been a separate pot outside of the regular Pentagon budget. 
There are no caps and no real accountability.

It’s time for that to change.

Please tell your representative to demand accountability on war spending.

In these tight budget times, both the Pentagon and Congress have taken advantage of the lack of transparency and constraints on war spending. The war budget has become a slush fund for pet projects that aren’t really related to war spending but can’t fit in the capped (but still huge)base Pentagon budget. The military has indicated that they want to keep using this irresponsible practice for years to come, even though we’re supposed to believing our decade of war behind.

 A bipartisan group of representatives is working to shine a light on this practice. They are circulating a letter to the President calling for an end to limitless war spending outside the budget and strict standards for what counts as war spending. If we’re going to rein in this reckless spending, we need to show Congress that we’re paying attention and push as many of them as possible to speak out.

Let’s shut this slush fund down. Tell your Representative to sign the letter to end limitless war spending.

Thank you.
Rebecca Griffin
Political Director
Peace Action West • 2201 Broadway, Ste 321 Oakland, CA 94612 • 800.949.9020
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