MIC
at 50, Charlottesville – FEDERAL BUDGET ACTIVITY REMARKS
Lisa
Savage 9/17/11
Donald
Rumsfeld said in an interview last week: "The Department
of Defense is not what's causing the debt and the deficit. It's the
entitlement programs. If we make that mistake, we're doomed to suffer
another attack of some kind, and our intelligence will be less strong
and less effective."
And
when I met with Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, an ostensibly very
progressive Democrat early in her freshman term of office, I told her
that her constituents wanted her to cut military spending and bring
the war dollars home. But she said it wasn't that easy. Once she got
to Washington “they” asked her, “What do you want to do, put
3,000 people out of work your first term in office?” This made
reference to the largest employer in the state, Bath Iron Works,
which has contracts to build the Aegis destroyers that the Navy hopes
will be docked on little Jeju Island off the coast of China that Ann
Wright spoke of last night.
And
of course I told the Congresswoman that studies showed more jobs
would be generated by investment in nearly any sector of the economy
than “defense” contracting. And she said that is why it's so
important to pass an energy bill, which would have to happen before
we could start on conversion of BIW. And as a member of the House
Armed Services Committee, has voted “ought to pass” on every
Defense Authorization bill since our conversation.
So
this is what we're up against.
But
the tide is turning as the economic standing of the average family in
the U.S. Continues its steady downward slide. This week also saw the
announcement of census data showing 1 in 6 people in the empire of
the militaryindustrial-congressional-media complex live in poverty. 1
in 5 children do. And this metric sets the bar very low when defining
what poverty: a family of four living on less than $22k per year. The
actual levels of people barely scraping to get by are even higher.
A
mobile VA clinic closing in our neck of the woods afforded a good
opportunity for my husband, Mark Roman, to talk to people about the
misplaced priorities of our federal budget. The VA announced they
would close the remote rural clinic, causing hundreds of elderly vets
to travel another 5 hours or so to receive routine health care in
Augusta, in order to save between $100 and $200,000. In other words,
four minutes of the war in Afghanistan would fund the clinic for a
year.
Good
news, we won that round: the VA reversed its decision after a heated
public meeting widely covered by even the mainstream press.
And
there have been other wins: the US Conference of Mayors, as Clare
Hanrahan mentioned yesterday at the podium, passed the first anti-war
resolution since 1971 last summer, largely through the efforts of CODEPINK and allies.
Various
surveys bolster our claim that the people – not the war profiteers,
but the people, the ones who are supposed to be represented in
Washington DC -- don't agree with the current priorities of the
Congress. The People's Budget was one such effort. In Maine we
conducted a Penny Poll among 1500+ people in all sixteen counties. We
set up outside supermarkets and post offices and asked people passing
by to put ten pennies in various containers representing how they
would spend the federal discretionary budget i.e. income taxes. These
surveys produced similar results: the people desired primarily
spending on education, health care, and veterans benefits (which
includes a lot of education and health care, too), with military
spending at or near last place.
And
each new federal budget proposal out of the White House and spending
bill out of Congress moves the U.S. further from these priorities. We
are now at 57% of the discretionary federal budget going toward the
military, and that does not count the Veterans' Administration.
Thank
goodness for our friends who crunch the numbers and offer us the
tools to make a compelling case accurately. Many groups have good
resources on this including the WILPF and the AFSC which makes a
handy bar chart brochure that folds out and that we used at the Penny
Poll after people had spent their ten cents. The
National Priorities Project has a website with Trade Offs for many
areas of the federal budget, including Pentagon spending, and their
linked page with the ever up ticking counters of the cost of war in
Iraq and Afghanistan now offers new tools developed in time for the
tenth anniversary of the endless war on terror.
Another
good resource for data is the The U.S.
Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities by
Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier at
the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute
University of Massachusetts, Amherst first published in 2007 and
revised in 2009. It
uses an economic model to project the number of jobs generated by
investment in various sectors of the economy. The model showed that
$1 billion invested in any other sector produced more jobs than the
same investment in defense. Simply giving tax cuts that people would
then spend on good and services produced 26% more jobs, while
building in the mass transit sector – specifically, construction of
light rail components – produced 131% more jobs. And these are
real, full time jobs with benefits.
I
used those figures to develop the War $$ Home Conversion
Charlottesville activity we're going to do today. A template for the
game will be available online for you to modify it and use it in your
community as a way to get people to really take a look at our
misplaced national priorities so that they, too, can join in the
demand to bring our war dollars home.
##
RESOURCES:
Bombs
& Budgets Curriculum Teaching Guide (by War Resisters' League et
al.):
 |
Ann Wright, Ray McGovern & me in Charlottesville.
|
MIC at 50, Charlottesville -
ACTIVISM PANEL REMARKS
Lisa Savage 9/18/11
Following on Ray McGovern's call to
action for October 6 in Washington DC, the website for info is
October2011.org.
Thank you conference organizers, and to
everyone for taking time to be here today.
When I reflect on activism and the
military-industrial complex (MIC) I think of a video made by a
friend, Pete Sirois, of Bruce Gagnon in front of Bath Iron Works
speaking about conversion. Bath Iron Works is where they build the
Aegis destroyers that are to be docked on South Korea's Jeju Island
that Ann Wright spoke about last night. Bruce's speech mentions the
Pollin & Garrett-Peltier study about relative number of jobs
generated by investment in various sectors of the economy, which
sounded interesting. So I contacted Bruce and got a link to the
study, done at UMass Amherst in 2007. This led to my husband Mark and
I starting to organize with Bruce and Mary Beth Sullivan in Bath.
Which led eventually to joining others in a statewide, and now a
national campaign, to Bring Our War $$ Home.
Pete at the time was an amateur
videographer, with a local access tv cable show. He grasped early
what potential this communication channel offers at a very low cost.
His willingness to challenge himself and take risks to do the work
has really helped get the word out, and been a catalyst for all kinds
of activism.
My Maine grandmother told me things
that have stuck with me, and two of them are: “Fools' names and
fools' faces are often seen in public places,” and “Pretty is as
pretty does.” I had to overcome that first admonition in order to
do the activism that I do. And I have come to a deeper understand of
the second one.
Bruce has told how as a young “true
believer” serving in the Air Force and stationed in California, he
and the others would see protesters at the gate of the air base. This
led the people inside the base to have long debates over whether the
signs were right or wrong. These conversations changed Bruce's
understanding and brought him over to the side of demanding military
cuts to fund domestic needs.
So don't ever think, just because you
don't get to see their effects, that your messages don't matter. They
matter a lot. People today lack good information and you are helping
to address that problem with well thought out messaging.
Using the power of branding is also
effective and this is one thing that I love about Codepink. Also
choosing a short phrase that conveys the essence of the message in a
way that most people are likely to understand. Bring Our War $$ Home
is all short, simple words that even a young kid can understand. I
wish I could take credit for penning the phrase, and its author
remains anonymous.
Then repeating the phrase in many ways
as you can think of while also thinking carefully about the
explanation that backs up the slogan. Knowing it's possible your
understanding of the phrase will evolve. When this “headline” has
clear meaning to your audience, it becomes the work horse of the
campaign.
The most important aspect of
communication is listening. We have to listen to the audience if we
are to know whether our message was received. And we communicate
effectively when we understand the needs of the listener. Then, as we
devise ways to address some of those needs, and build relationships,
we can keep using listening to get feedback in order to try new
things.
We've used many communication
strategies in our current campaign: radio ads by a well-known comic
personality are running now on right wing talk radio stations; we've
had signature ads and community event listings in newspapers; and
with the Union of Maine Visual Artists we've conducted Draw-a-thons
and Draw-ins at various places, including our state capital building,
where artists interact with the general public. These resulted in a
group of strong poster designs for war $$ home available on our
website, designs that are now on t-shirts. We have shirts here at
the conference, and gave two of them as participation prizes
yesterday during the federal budget activity at the conference. And
so the message goes forward.
Currently I'm seeking support for the
development of a digital game that offers the chance to convert war
spending in a community to other needs, because I think that could be
a powerful communication device. Imagining conversion as utopia could
be addicting if visually appealing and properly designed. Young
people with all that college debt and no real jobs are the audience I
want to reach.
I don't play such games but I do tweet,
facebook, and skype in the course of my activism. Most of you here
have stretched and learned new technology tools. I have been helped
immensely in learning these by younger members of Codepink who are
very patient with us oldsters. Blogging is something I've added
lately and I've had some good mentors who encouraged me as I was
getting started. I often learn and get ideas from other blogs.
Getting real information is almost a full time job in this day and
age. Thankful for the Internet while we still have it.
What else are we up against? I think
Americans – that is, people in the U.S., because America is a
continent, not a country – are scared. Maybe more scared than we
give them credit for a lot of the time. I'll tell two stories to
illustrate
The last time Social Security was on
the chopping block, back when George W. wanted to “privatize” it,
a woman who worked at my school as an ed tech told me in the hall
that she appreciated my letter to the editor about how families who
have a parent die depend on S.S. The woman told me that her mother
had used her father's S.S. to help feed them family after he died,
and had a hard enough time even with that income. I told my co-worker
that people needed to hear her story, and to please consider a letter
of her own. She reacted with alarm and said, “Oh I don't think Dr.
____ would appreciate that” referring to our superintendent. He had
never said anything negative to me about my letters, and I told her
so. “Oh but that's you,” she said as if perhaps her status as an
ed tech without a continuing contract was much different than mine as
a teacher.
Just this summer I was at a conference
and I needed a ride to Rockland at the end, in order to meet my
husband to stand with local organizers opposing an Islamophobic group
that was going to be protesting a speech by the Al Jazeera Bureau
Chief in Washington. When I briefly stated my reason for needing a
ride, the other teachers and librarians in the room froze like deer
in headlights. No one said a single word in response. I think I had
violated the unspoken dictum of life in our nation, that as long as
we don't rock the boat that nothing bad will happen around us. Bad
things are happening elsewhere, but not right where we are. And
hoping to keep it that way.
So people are frightened, and they are
bewildered by misinformation, and we offer them our message. The
Bring Our War $$ Home coalition in Maine has benefited from a good
faith approach of supporting one another tobring an accurate
explanation for budget cuts and funding shortfalls in our
communities, cooperating across what is a large if not very populous
state. The Care-a-Van began on Sep 10 at Unity College with WERU
Community Radio's Grassroots Media Conference as we silkscreened the
t-shirts we have here today. It continues to many venues including
five other college campuses in our state, with a teach-in at Bowdoin,
and a stop in support of on campus peace group P.A.inT for a concert
at the University of Maine, Farmington.
Because I am also deeply involved with
Codepink as a Local Coordinator two of the co-founders, Medea
Benjamin and Jodie Evans, picked up on the campaign and asked if they
could adopt it nationally. Adopt away, we said, with the result that
the campaign is now being waged in California, New York, and Texas
among other places, and that the US Conference of Mayors passed a
resolution to bring the war dollars home this summer.
If people stopped cooperating with and
supporting the MIC, it would grind to a halt tomorrow. People just
don't know it yet. Some do -- right now there are youth occupying
Wall St. in a show of nonviolent methods that remind me of the great
untapped power of human stubbornness. I was lucky enough to meet Gene
Sharp and Jamila Raqib of the
Albert Einstein Institution a couple of
years ago and Sharp said in response to my question that the antiwar
movement lacked an overall strategy. I can see several heads nodding
in the audience.
Now is the time in the program where we
will have some time for planning and I'm going to read you a list of
questions developed by the organizers of the confernce, questions
that can inform this part of our work today: Where is the MIC
vulnerable? What are the hidden strengths of the progressive
movement? How will moral energy be generated and harnessed? How do
you prepare the ground for change? What strategies for change are
inefficient or unproductive? What strategies will capture the
imagination of others and empower them? Are progressives willing to
pay the price?
Now we are going into self-selected
groups. Thank you.
##
Some rights reserved by Dan Nguyen @ New York City
All rights reserved by codepinkhq on flickr
