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| Hall of Flags rally to bring war dollars home to Maine, April 2011 |
The event is intended to remind citizens in Maine that our state's share of war spending since 2001 comes to $3.4 billion. Testimony from local government officials, educators, students and Occupy Mainers will be heard.
Mayor Karen Heck
of Waterville released a preview of remarks she plans to deliver on
March 20: “I see one of my jobs as mayor as connecting the dots for
the people of Waterville between what’s happening nationally and
the effects of those decisions on our lives locally and I believe
it’s past time to bring our military dollars home. We need that
money for our local schools, for our infrastructure improvements and
to support people are suffering from budget cuts to education, health
and welfare services.”
“Our
requests for General Assistance are increasing and local food banks
and soup kitchens are serving more people than ever before. We are
facing cuts to Head Start at a time when we are only able to serve
23% of those families who are eligible...we need to make our voices
heard that spending on the war must stop now,” wrote Mayor Heck.
Representatives
from Occupy Maine in Portland, Augusta and Bangor will testify as
well. Curtis Cole, a student at UMaine, Augusta who participated in
the encampment in Capitol Park until its eviction in December, will
speak on March 20 as follows: “The 1% would like us to believe it
is in our best interest to spend billions of dollars annually on a
defense budget. They would like students to believe that it is in
their best interest to maintain funding occupation soldiers’
salaries; they want us to believe that we can ‘suffice’ without
quality healthcare, teachers, firefighters, and decent
infrastructure. Yet, most of all, they would like society at large to
swallow the ultimate lie: that maintenance of the... Military
Industrial Complex, is needed for our safety.”
The Bring Our War
$$ Home campaign began two years ago in Maine with a rally inside the
Hall of Flags in Augusta, and has now spread nationally. Last summer
the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting passed a Bring Our War
$$ Home resolution, the first time they have taken a foreign policy
position since the Vietnam War. Bring Our War $$ Home resolutions
have passed in Maine by the Deer Isle Town Meeting, Solon School
Board and the Portland City Council. Similar resolutions have also
passed city councils in Hartford, Ct, Amherst and Northampton, MA,
Eugene, OR, and Los Angeles, CA.
Last fall the campaign held a series of 17 local events in 14 Maine communities, supported by a radio ad campaign featuring Maine's Humble Farmer, Robert Skoglund on five Maine stations from Portland to Presque Isle.
According to Bring Our War $$ Home co-coordinator Bruce Gagnon, "Recent national polls show that 70% of the American people want us out of Afghanistan and they want the $10 billion we waste on that war every single month to be brought back to our local communities and states to help solve our fiscal crisis. We are not going to have an economic recovery as long as we keeping flushing people's hard-earned tax dollars down the endless war hole. We are organizing this action in order to help people apply pressure on all of our elected officials to publicly say - Bring Our War $$ Home."
Last fall the campaign held a series of 17 local events in 14 Maine communities, supported by a radio ad campaign featuring Maine's Humble Farmer, Robert Skoglund on five Maine stations from Portland to Presque Isle.
According to Bring Our War $$ Home co-coordinator Bruce Gagnon, "Recent national polls show that 70% of the American people want us out of Afghanistan and they want the $10 billion we waste on that war every single month to be brought back to our local communities and states to help solve our fiscal crisis. We are not going to have an economic recovery as long as we keeping flushing people's hard-earned tax dollars down the endless war hole. We are organizing this action in order to help people apply pressure on all of our elected officials to publicly say - Bring Our War $$ Home."
The Bring Our War
$$ Home campaign is waged by a coalition of about twenty groups
including CODEPINK Maine, Global Network Against Weapons &
Nuclear Power in Space, Veterans for Peace, PeaceWorks of Greater
Brunswick, Peace Action Maine, the Peace & Justice Center of
Eastern Maine, and the Midcoast Peace and Justice Group.
Contact: Bruce Gagnon (207) 443-9502
Lisa Savage (207) 399-7623
1 comment:
Q. What is a "Hajji"?
A. A "Hajji" is what a US soldier typically calls an Iraqi or Afghan. My sergeant in Iraq, an African-American, told a captain (from Maine) that the term sounded to him like "nigger". The captain replied, "Oh, I'd never call them that to their face."
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