Fresh priorities

Great action by high school students from an Upward Bound team in Holyoke, Mass. making this video that says it all: $1 trillion wasted on war has left many children living in poverty and many schools under funded. Health care and jobs are other needs going unmet.

Pat Taub and I made an office visit to Sen. Olympia Snowe's staffer Brian Whitney in Augusta this week. Pat explained how women are not experiencing improved living conditions or rights under the ten year NATO occupation, and how Afghanistan is the worse place in the world to be born according to the UN. I explained how the Bring Our War $$ Campaign works in Maine at the local level, and how it is spreading nationally. Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Mike Michaud both have refused to vote for war supplemental funding bills, and both were just re-elected.  Mainers heading into the next state and local budget crunch know where 54% of federal spending is going. Does Sen. Snowe?

ACTION TO TAKE RIGHT NOW:

Click on the link to the text of a great online petition from Military Families Speak Out. Sign it and share it with your friends.

Petition to Obama & Congress: Bring Our Troops And Our Tax Dollars Home!

Online petition to President Obama and Congress – These Wars Are Costing Us Too Much!

Over the next several months we want to gather tens of thousands of signatures on the petition, which will also spread the word about the campaign and build participation.

• Sign the petition
• Send to your friends, family, and other groups you work with with this easy form
• Collect petition signatures at events in your community by downloading and printing the pdf version of the petition

(Text of the petition is below -- click here to sign).
 Dear President Obama and Members of Congress:

As of November 2010, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lead to:
• the deaths of over 5,787 American service members
• the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi civilians
• over 2,000 suicides of American veterans
• over 40,000 injuries to American service members

In financial costs:
• It costs $1 million to keep one soldier on the ground in Afghanistan for one year.
• The operational costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already surpassed $1 trillion.
• The total projected costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $4 trillion, including an estimated $1 trillion to provide care for returning veterans.

These wars are not making us safer. They are betraying the values that lead many of our young men and women to volunteer for their country and are ransoming the futures of this generation and the next. These funds should be used to take care of the troops when they come home, rebuild our economy, and protect our communities.

Enough is enough! Bring our troops and our tax dollars home NOW! 

If you haven't already done so, you can sign the CODEPINK petition to Congress to BOW$H here.